I hear about it all the time… Collaborate with people who share your values. Really? You know why they say this? Because it is pleasant and easy. When you are around people who share your values you can agree all the time, because you are using the same basis for your judgements. There isn’t much friction. Maybe people who like writing about collaboration find it easier to achieve flow states when they are not experiencing friction. Maybe.
Friction Friend
But friction can be your friend. And not just when you are applying the brakes. You want to make a spark or start a fire? Friction. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to be creative. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to start a business. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to spark dialogue with your community.
Let’s take business for example. I have seen startups where two partners may as well have shared one head they were of such like mind. And neither of those minds had much business sense. Both were visionary. They valued the exploration of ideas. They seemed to struggle to come up with a way to generate revenue to keep going and reach some lift. Neither had much talent or interest in operations. On the other hand, you can take a very profit-centric person and team them with someone who values customer and community and away they go. That is not to say they don’t experience conflict or even strong conflict. They do. But they learn how to balance it. They don’t confuse sharing values with being valuable.
Share
Sharing is great. Share something with your collaborators. Values is just one axis. You might share a goal: keeping your neighborhood clean. But you might have different values driving the goal. One neighbor, Samuel might value the number otherwise known as property value which they believe is impacted by how clean the neighborhood is. Another, Joan, believes that “broken windows” talk from Tipping Point and feels that a cleaner neighborhood breeds less crime. Joan values being safe. And a third, Sandeep, simply values tidyness. Fine. They all want it clean. Share the goal. From different values.
A friend of mine, Steve Crandall, worked at Bell Labs. In one of his delicious storytelling sessions Steve mentioned working with someone – for years – who had a polar opposite political perspective. And yet, in the creative innovation space, the two of created well together. They didn’t need to share values to be innovative together and enjoy the pleasure of that work together. They shared a practice of innovating.
Value Time
There are certainly times when you should connect on your values. It can help reinforce your identity and give you support that you need. But if you want innovation or you want to connect a neighborhood or you want to create dialogue across political boundaries, work with the friction of different values and connect on some other dimension.
As I learned from Valdis Krebs, “connect on sameness and profit from your differences.” Please be intentional about which dimensions of difference and which dimensions of sameness.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2013-04-24 04:24:052013-04-26 11:51:59Friction is Your Friend: Why Sharing Values isn’t always Valuable
Unlike metrics of simple systems, the metrics of complex adaptive systems have a life span. They grow in value over time. And then they decay in value as well.
Take twitter. At first it was follower count – and that still matters some. But over time, people found ways to gain followers that didn’t coincide to the value that they provided, so it started to lose usefulness as an indicator of value from the tweeter.
Jane McGonigal, @avantgame, just posted a series of tweets about how Amazon rating system is being gamed.
Interesting, my book seems to have been targeted last year by some conservative group, individuals encouraged to post negative reviews
a cluster of extremely negative reviews with a conservative POV posted at the same time with weird (untrue) criticism of my biography…
here’s a recent NYT article on partisan groups attempting to one-star bomb books on Amazonnytimes.com/2013/01/21/bus… …
“Then I search ‘conservative book’ and give 5-star, 5-star, 5-star.” From a tea-party Internet training meetup youtube.com/watch?v=tGB8Uu…
apparently one trick is to purchase book so your review appears “verified”, then cancel order before books ships
Note: I took out a few tweets in the series which were just about her work, rather than about the gaming the stars method she points to.
Knowing that people are giving a count of stars based on their ideology rather than the quality of the work, I am now less likely to put stock in the star count on a given project, especially when it is politically polemic material. Thus the usefulness of the stars decrease for me (and for others) and then for the whole system.
With twitter, we first looked at “follower” count, and then that was gamed. Then the metrics had to start considering other factors like RT count to demonstrate influence. Now we rely on twittergrader, kred, klout, etc to take a great number of factors into weighted consideration to produce an “influence” or reputation score. This amalgam of factors evolves over time.
You might think this is just the way of social media, since it is a fast feedback loop. But actually, I think that a lot of measures of complex adaptive systems work this way.
…It was during the crisis of 1857 that the previously ignored insights of a long-haired mathematician, abolitionist, and utopian socialist named Elizur Wright were finally recognized as critically valuable for economic stability.
In the 1840s and 1850s, Wright had tried to convince the state of Massachusetts that life insurance needed reform. As a mathematician, he had been asked calculate the present value of any given policy based on the premiums paid in, a calculation that British mathematicians had called impossible. He created a rule-of-thumb called “net present value” (NPV) to determine the value of a flow of resources in a single instant (present value) and then to subtract operating costs (net).
But the more Elizur calculated, the more troubled he became. Many companies by his calculations spent so much on advertising that they could never pay off their policies. Others profited by canceling policies for those who missed a single payment. The effect was often to end a policy a year before death, leaving families with nothing. Wright fumed, but in vain. In the go-go 1840s and early 1850s, no one would listen to his criticisms and only a few would accept his principle of valuation. But through the 1850s he returned to the Massachusetts legislature with a blueprint for reform. When the Panic of 1857 hit with the failure of a bank called Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, Elizur was prepared. This blockage of trade and transport, Wright declared, was a result of distrust. Insurance companies needed reliable accounting practices that would allow Massachusetts to calculate net present value, and internal rate of return. When trust returns, Wright assured them, the blockage will be over.
Unconvinced but without options, Massachusetts adopted Wright’s blueprint, preventing any company from selling insurance in Massachusetts that did not provide complete financial information. NPV offers transparency of obligations. The panic was short-lived, and Elizur Wright’s accounting principles became the basis of what we now call Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, adopted by millions of companies, states, and non-governmental organizations throughout the world. MBAs take credit for it, but a long-haired radical gave us cost accrual accounting.
Wright took advantage of blockage to identify its root cause – a distrust of opacity. Increased financial transparency was the solution; trust collapses without it. Blockage can let us make institutions open up and make them thrivable.
If the metrics we use in our economy are also being created (even at a very slow pace) they may also be declining in usefulness. Elizur’s methods didn’t anticipate the complex financial instruments to come over 100 years later that obscured the “trustworthiness” of the things our measures aim to reveal.
Consider how the measures you use can be gamed, where they may be in their lifespan of adoption and decay, and what other indicators might be emerging to reveal what matters – the territory and not the map.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2013-02-23 20:24:522013-03-13 15:02:10Lifespan of Social Metrics
I am working on a book about agency, and the power and requirements for transformational change. This comes out of about a decade of writing about philanthropy – both for effective donors and the sector as a whole. Today, Eugene Kim posted to Facebook a link to a groupaya post, How Can We Make Nonprofit Consulting Transformational? And this reminded me of Geoffrey West’s TED talk on The surprising math of cities and corporations.
My sense is that the larger the organization, the slower the heartbeat of the organization – AND the less it is capable of transformational change. This is all about efficiencies of scale. And you know from previous posts that I have an allergic reaction to scale as a lauded idea in and of itself. It always, to me, requires clarification. Mostly because people act as if scale operates as a power law – when I think it is a sigmoidal function. Probably because of that West TED talk, of course, since I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination.
Sigmoid Curve via Wikipedia
West makes clear is that companies grow on a sigmoidal curve – an S curve. You grow on an s curve too. And then you stop growing. These economies of scale are not infinite. At a certain point the energy required to transmit information throughout the organization and engage all the people in it exceeds the effectiveness gained by adding more people to it. [See also what West says about cities not being sigmoidal.]
Working with macroecologist James Brown and others, West explored the fact that living systems such as individual organisms show a shocking consistency of scalability. (The theory they elucidated has long been known in biology as Kleiber’s Law.) Animals, for example, range in size over ten orders of magnitude from a shrew to a blue whale. If you plot their metabolic rate against their mass on a log-log graph, you get an absolutely straight line. From mouse to human to elephant, each increase in size requires a proportional increase in energy to maintain it.
But the proportion is not linear. Quadrupling in size does not require a quadrupling in energy use. Only a tripling in energy use is needed. It’s sublinear; the ratio is 3/4 instead of 4/4. Humans enjoy an economy of scale over mice, as elephants do over us.
With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life. A shrew’s heart beats 1,000 times a minute, a human’s 70 times, and an elephant heart beats only 28 times a minute. The lifespans are proportional; shrew life is intense but brief, elephant life long and contemplative. Each animal, independent of size, gets about a billion heartbeats per life.
Picture a mouse trying to do a startup pivot. Now try to imagine your favorite large scale organizational gorilla trying to pivot. The larger the company, the more difficult it is to turn the entire company on a single point and do something related but quite different.
Startups often go through multiple transformations of what they do, how they do it, and who they do it for. Their organizational heartbeat is fast and their scale is small. (And some of them get successfully gobbled up by the larger organizational bodies, but we can talk about that another day.)
You can have nonprofits, whose social mission talks about transformational change, hiring consultants to help them do that as much as you want, but they won’t be very good at it. The kind of organizational heartbeat needed for transformational change – that leading edge early adopter game changing innovation in the social sector – well, it isn’t going to happen in the large organization. (We could talk about how big donors impede that, how organizational mission moves from “change” to “keeping the org alive” or how larger orgs attract stable-present-focused people who aren’t keen on transformational disruption, etc… but understanding the why doesn’t change that it happens. And we ought to just be honest about it and stop speaking transformational change in organizations that don’t do it.)
Do you think organizational scale relates to ability to be transformational? Or not? If not, why not?
ps. the antidote or innovation that can disrupt this exists – organizational slime molds… crowdfunding transformational change experiments, etc. I don’t have clear answers on how that all works, but I am deeply curious about how it is connecting.
It isn’t enough to repair the damage our progress has brought. The unintended consequences of our efforts to improve quality of life for humans has repercussions and requires action. Yes, and. It is also not enough to manage our risks and be more shock-resistant. Now is not only the time to course correct and be more resilient. It is a time to imagine what we can generate for the world. Not only can we work to minimize our footprint but we can also create positive handprints. It is time to strive for a world that thrives.
As I am wont to do, I had a gathering while in SF. This time it was a brunch filled with amazing people I wouldn’t have a chance to see one on one during my time there. I always enjoy seeing friends meet friends and discovering connection. A couple guests brought someone with them. And one guest took up my twitter invite and joined even though she didn’t know me yet. Everyone brought something to share. Yum. It felt warm and delightful.
Then we got in a debate about resilience and thrivability. Of course I appreciate the friends who not only stand by me but also stand behind thrivability. And, it was really exciting to have someone who wasn’t converted to the thrivability team challenge what it is we mean and to say she didn’t like the term. Juicy.
Where there is a bit of friction, you can get traction.
As a facilitator, you can always be sure I have paper and pens around, so I started sketching it out. Since then, I put together a chart, showed it to a few collaborators, and here it is narrowed down to key points for you. It isn’t enough to strive for resilience, and it won’t motivate enough of us. When we strive to thrive, we create a story of greatness that invites everyone to contribute their very best to making a world that not only works, it also produces joy, delight, and awe.
Thrivability transcends survival modes, sustainability, and resilience. Thrivability embraces flow as the sources of life and joy and meaning, adds to the flow and rides the waves, instead of trying to nullify the effects. Each layer includes and also transcends the previous layer, expanding both interconnections as well as expanding system awareness as each layer hits limits and discovers that more forces are at work than can be explained within their purview. Also, this is not a progression, where you need to move through one before beginning another. You can have aspects of yourself or your organization in multiple places in the chart and movement within the chart can be from any one area to any other. It is not a spectrum of progression. It is a spectrum of viewpoint. And most of us are like electrons, leaping about from point to point and sometimes seemingly nowhere at all… until you look and ask.
Please allow me to amend with gratitudes:
Thank you to attendees of the brunch that triggered action on the chart, especially: Sarah Brooks, Evonne Heyning, Scott Albritton (photos of chart from brunch), Thomas Kriese, David Evan Harris, Jeanie Kirk, Kimberly Olson, Mair Dundon, and Nicole Lazzaro.
Thank you to thrivability champions for assistance in development and refining: Michele Holliday, Irma Wilson, Joshua Foss, Herman Wagter, and Kathryn Bottrell.
In both for profit and social enterprise, people talk about creating a business that scales. And it is said as if there were no other way worth doing it. It is said as ifyou don’t have a successful business if it doesn’t expand in size. And you don’t have a successful social business if your impact isn’t scaling.
It makes me want to scream. Or inside I am already screaming.
There are organizations that are best at scale. And laudable well scaled social enterprises exist too. I am not denying that. I am saying the glorification of any of those without pointing to small business or local enterprises diminishes the power and results of an organization that is not scaling ever upward in our collective awareness. Where are the HBR or SSIR articles on local social business and impact?
When uniqueness is part of the experience you pay for…
Think about your favorite local family owned restaurant. Should it scale? Doesn’t a little part of you die if you hear they are scaling? As if the personality of the place has been turned into a factory like process with measured perfection and efficiencies that stop being unique and by hand. What about your local farmer? The local farmer’s market? Should those scale?
Big scale, no fail, organizational obesity in a fragile market…
Aren’t businesses that have scaled part of the problem in our current economy? Much like people have a dunbar number – the number of people you can know (and know who they know) which tends to be about 150, organiz
ations have a scale limit. When they exceed that limit, the costs of the necessary organizational bureaucracy to operate outstrip the efficiencies of being bigger. Think of an organization as a organism. You need food (income) to survive. And what is surviving without a purpose? Social organisms make sense. And we as a society want to see them fed, at least. But lots of organizations grow and grow until they bloat and become obese. And unhealthy. Additionally, at such massive scale, society becomes invested in the ongoing success of the obese organization, ruining the market mechanisms capitalism professes to use to make an organization healthy in the market. Too much concentrated power. Why are we glorifying movement in that direction without adequate critique and qualification? From the articles I read, it seems we do so without any question. And that makes me scream,”Wait, stop, think about this!”
Layers of impact, axis of scale…
Is it more important for the social business to scale or for there to be impact that goes to scale? Which is more important to you: 1 business (with 5 staff and a group of investors) that gives 1 million people access to water or 1 business model is replicated a thousand times locally, producing a living income for 1000 local entrepreneurs? If they both produce the same impact: 1 million people with access to water, but the first benefits a handful of people in a single organization and lines the pockets of investors OR the second gives living income to 1000 local people. In our current market and media, the first model is celebrated.
When social entrepreneurship looks at scale, we want it to mean scale of impact. What it really means is that investors think that enough transactions at a low margin of profit to the bottom of the pyramid, a profit can still be made. Or they mean, enough wealthy people in search of meaning will pay premiums for the latest moral crisis to be off their conscious. I am not saying that either of these are bad in and of themselves. I think it is good that we explore how to give people at the bottom of the pyramid a greater experience of agency – if that means buying products and services or creating their own small businesses. (You don’t see Kiva donors asking to see if their entrepreneur is taking a business to scale.) And I think it is good that socially conscious people can make more informed decisions and advocate those decisions through social cause purchases. What those two paths miss are the other axis by which social change can happen. What if 10,000 of us all start a MakerSpace in our town? None of our businesses will probably scale (some may merge over time). But if Make Media puts out a blueprint, and thousands of us run with it, enabling lots of innovation and tinkering in our towns, is that a social entrepreneurial effort worth celebration? Should you look at the impact of a single town or could you say the overall movement has touched how many lives, led to how many inventions or customizations, or created how many small businesses…. Sometimes scale comes through tight models that can be replicated. Barcamps. Jellys.
What about the revolving loan or cascading good efforts? Let’s say I start a project where 10 of my friends get together and help 10 people improve their lives, and each person donates $10 to that effort. Each “receiver” is then required to give 10 hours to helping someone else’s life. $2 are used as an administration fee for tracking the cascade forward. The receiver then gives forward their ten hours and $10 to 10 more people and on down the line. Does that count as a social entrepreneurship? Even if the main organization never has to grow beyond 1 or 2 staff? What if loans are passed forward instead of back – so as you prepare to pay your loan, instead of giving the money back to the bank, you have to find someone to give it to who will follow the same condition and mentor them so they can pay it forward to. That might have a lot of social impact over time, but it won’t look sexy at SOCAP. Not glorious or big enough for investor interest, which is what drives media interest and behavior at SOCAP.
Speaking of time…
What “they” also mean when “they” unquestionably glorify scale is that the timeline for scale needs to be rather short term – say 3-7 years. We are talking about cashing out investor money here, and they need to know they can get it. And yet, deep transformative social change happens over decades. So we end up with lots of hot, sexy, quick fixes that scale fast instead of deep and thorough long term social transformation efforts. And with all the glamorization of for profit investment into the social change space, the growing trend for philanthropic dollars to be tied to business like outcomes increases. Why fund long term social transformation when you can get quick neat little measures of incremental improvements as a social impact investor? Slow Money is a small counter effort to this, of course.
Please
Can we please be sure to qualify statements about scale – as a subset of all ideal business development options. Please. Can we stop glamorizing investment capital and start to celebrate slow evolution, iterative crowd-funded efforts that make a difference locally or have long term deep and transformative impact?
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2013-02-01 22:03:552013-02-02 15:37:48Scale Makes Me Scream
We had a series of aha moments. Herman was explaining a recent design choice. We connected it with a prior design choice, and this took us to a transcending moment of seeing how these patterns are at work. This unleashed a raw flurry of cascading aha moments, which are roughly captured here.
Designing Networks
Consider a group of businesses and organizations that are all connecting to each other. Very quickly, the amount of information being tracked about all the others in the network overwhelms the nodes. (Herman drew the actual network math, I drew a dense network cluster.) The orgs have information that they need to exchange in order to unlock value that they benefit from. So, how do they reorganize the network to enable the optimal information flow patterns in a network that has limited trust between selfish nodes? So often when asked to design these things, people think in terms of idealistic utopian design conditions. It is about how much functionality can be given so that any information can flow in any direction. However, all the nodes find this scary. Instead of designing for optimal participant conditions, design for “willing to cooperate, yet anxious” instead.
As a network solution, you create an intermediary to reduce the network connection count. If I know the right network members, I have 2 degree access to everyone while not having to know most of them. So, see my “count of nodes” divided by “count of hubs” which is a rough way of saying, in back of the napkin kind of math, that each intermediary is reducing the number of nodes you need to directly connect with.
Trust
The next problem is why would we trust this intermediary? Again, lots of design decisions are made for central control of these hubs. What Valdis calls the “queen in between” kind of model. Most of us are skeptical about the power that aggregates in these hubs. So we need ways to ensure they are reliable. Solution: a) limit what information does flow through – only a certain type or amount. b) make all the nodes equal in some way and c) make the flow of that information extremely transparent.
When we don’t have much trust in the health of the network, the other nodes in the network, or in intermediaries, we have to manage high amounts of information about all of them. We act paranoid. When we have significant trust in the health of the network and the nodes within it and the intermediaries, we act generously. We can handle more “hops” between members, since the trust is in the network as much as it is in the nodes of that network.
One of the aha’s here for me was actually a reminder more than an aha. It is not the FORM of the network that determines the way it needs to be governed. It is the evolution of that network that determines the governance. How did it mature? If trusting in the past has led to positive outcomes, more trust will continue, and less governance is needed. However, if trust has been broken, more rules might be created to qualify when and how to trust, and thus bureaucracy begins to flourish. But I will get back to that later.
Where you see the figure 8 on the side, I am explaining to Herman about polarity management. We are not just greedy and selfish nor are we just open generous cooperators. We exist in the tension between these extremes. And even the skeptics are willing to navigate the risks of cooperation when the benefits might be higher.
Incentives
Herman mentioned how the use of financial incentives can often be misleading. The amount of the financial incentive is not what allows the node to participate in the network. Instead it is the ability of that node to maintain identity with their peer group. Can they save face and have pride while taking the risk of cooperation? Yes if there is some token amount of money involved. Or it can be another kind of token.
We have another case where credits were used between players to negotiate their placement in a queue. I might let you pass me in line, if you give me your credit. I can still save face to my peers for letting you cut, because I got some benefit for it. This design may require an arbiter to view the transaction, but the arbiter isn’t needing to make judgements about whether it can happen or not. Tokens can make visible an exchange that allows both sides to save face to others and enable actions in cooperator networks.
Identity
We find the issue of identity to be a huge factor in the behavior of nodes in a network.
We talked about how a transaction between two people always seems to have at least a third party. I am not only negotiating with you for what the transaction is, I am also thinking about what my group or tribe will think of me for engaging in that transaction. In fact, I may have more anxiety about what they think than about whether you are making a good transaction with me or not. Most of us dedicate most of our time to identity formation, with everything we say and do designed, intentionally or not, to reinforce what we want to think of ourselves. We may not do a good job of it all the time, but that is a driving force.
Choices
I told Herman about a conversation I had with Benjamin Ellis about making choices. Benjamin was talking about a graphic designer that provided 3 choices. And we quickly riffed on why this works so well. We think that the selecting out of the bad option of the three builds the sense of confidence in decision making that enables the next choice between the remaining two to be faster and seem easier.
Rules, Rules, and more Rules
We also talked about how the centralized control design model has these negative side effects of generating bureaucracy because they tend to create rules to follow, and when those rules conflict, they create rules about the conflict, in an infinite cascade of rule making that ends up grinding cooperation to a halt. Thus we said they are limited in size by the ability to moderate the rules. This did help us transcend the 150 limit of community cooperation (limit to the ability to track the trustability of members of a network with each other). However, when you design for robustness (bookmark conversation on resilience, robustness, and anti-fragility)… when you design for robustness, you put the value and power at the edges of the network operating on principles instead of rules, and allow it to learn and grow from a simple structure, you get agility and adaptability in the network…and it can become scale-free? I think.
Optimize for what?
We moved to a meta-level discussion about how any group tends to design to optimize for one factor. When we succeed at that optimization, we also learn that there are negative side effects that may inhibit our achievement of another (possibly more important) goal. So we have to switch to design to optimize for something else. This can be long term human social evolution at work – when we exhaust the potential of something, we have to evolve to work around that. This often involves making distinctions between things that were previously hooked together in order to unlock value… but I digress. Will save that for another conversation…. back to the design at hand.
Rituals
In talking about Identity, we had taken a side track to talk about the power of ritual. I had shared a story about being uncomfortable – with a growing sense of dis-ease when I was in a group that had a series of actions that were meant to create bonding in the group culminating in a big ritual together. Rituals can help ease the anxiety of cooperation by bonding everyone into a peer group – we are all smart or stupid together, so I can work within that group easier. Everyone has crossed a threshold together. And you feel it in an embodied form. However, we need to take into account that humans have a spectrum of tolerance to peer influence. Some of us just don’t care what our peers think. And others can’t make a decision without being aligned with the group. It isn’t a stable known to design for.
There is that formula that Herman wrote. 🙂
Design to Evolve Cooperation
In pink at the bottom it says “It isn’t the form==> governance. It is TRUST==>governance.”
On the left in blue it says, “Design big” from the start and you get “bureaucracy, low trust, not agile, ultra specific and rule based.”
If you start small, simple, and mature through the growth of trust, you get evolving cooperation. What is the least that is needed? What is the smallest channel that enables a flow of information that benefits the network? Design for learning and self-evolution. Design to grow using minimal rituals for a foundation of trust to help mediate the anxiety of cooperation. When evolving cooperation against the will or inclination of players, manage their fear and sense of security. Sometimes tokens or credits can be used to mediate that trust.
I am very interested in how tokens are used to engender trust and enable flows. How does a token act as an object of trust transfer? Trust tends not to be transferable, whereas tokens can be. How do you route the trust into the token and the process, so that it can be transferred?
This is where we start really transcending that 150 limit.
Sorry this isn’t an essay yet. It is just notes from an extended conversation.
I am currently participating in the Illinois Task Force for Social Innovation. And working on ci2iglobal, and transitioning Inspired Legacies. Having worked in or around nonprofits and philanthropy for a decade, I have seen the field changing. I remember the first budding of Mission Related Investing, when there were basically 3 foundations championing it. Then I discovered people were doing Program Related Investing, and we started to see a broader spectrum of how money was being used in the philanthropic sector. We were collectively working to optimize how much money was creating purpose-filled value.
Last year I toyed around with some friends on mapping the financial spectrum. We are doing it again with the task force. It is exciting to see the hybridity between for-profit and for-purpose work and the financial innovation to support it.
However, concurrently there has been an increasing demand for nonprofits and social purpose organizations in general to quantify what they do. When I look at what I consider charity (aka bandaids on existing issues), these metrics really help tell the story about what an organization is doing to deliver that bandaid.
And… my struggle all along, even before I joined the social change effort, was to find the big levers that shifted how things are. What would it take to remove the need for these bandaids? I keep looking for the big levers.
But big levers don’t get funded until they pay off. Usually.
I never bothered to even look for foundation funding or grants for my work on shifting culture to be more thrivable. Who gives grants for core culture change? I think it ought to be funded. It may actually catalyze more transformation in the system, by aligning people and projects along a story. But how do you measure that? How would you even track the spread of the idea, all the people making hundreds of choices differently because they started to see the world differently? At the end of the journey, you can find your way back. But where is the end of the journey? Can you find where it ends and hear back? Do people even come back to you 2-5 years later and tell you a story of how “thrivability” led them to do something different. (Usually only when they know you.) If five years from now, scientists working on environmental science shift their view to look at the world from a thrivable perspective and it unlocks something that allows a cascade of action to follow that make the world more livable, can I claim that as my impact? Could I possible ask for money for the hope that this happens?
2. Be more like an investor and less like middle management
In startup land, this isn’t unreasonable. A startup can develop a product or an idea, pitch it to investors, get some funding…and if their idea works, the funder gets payback. If it doesn’t…well, losses all around. Investors know that most of what they fund will fail. It is an art of finding enough that succeeds with big enough returns to keep going. Where is this attitude in philanthropy? Both transformational change and startups live in complex adaptive systems… they can’t be predicted and causality is challenging if not impossible. And yet, there is a vital part of the startup world funded by people willing to put big dollars into unpredictable possibilities for the small opportunity of making a big return.
Philanthropy, in adopting more practices from the business world, took on a middle management mindset in far too many cases. Instead of optimizing for what might make the biggest change in the area to address, the optimization has tended toward who can show impact in the funding cycle. It tends toward projects that have strong “predictability” in them. I know how many people will be fed, clothed, housed, cared for if the project is funded.
Let’s be careful here. There are some foundations and philanthropists that are willing to be risky with their giving. They give to a collection of efforts knowing that some won’t turn out as hoped. They may even fund across the spectrum from highly predictable charity efforts to systemic change efforts. But the general vibe of the field is one of mitigating risk of money being used ineffectively by having the metrics to back it up.
3. I want to see a Venture Capital Philanthropy company.
adVenturePhilanthropy or something. They share the risk of some of the projects not achieving desired results…but have smart portfolios of giving capital. Think of it like a high end giving circle where you pay sophisticated philanthropic advisors to fund a portfolio of efforts on causes that you and others care about. The advisor or firm then shares with all the donors the report on value created through giving.
4. And, like a business, ROI can be based on value created instead of “impact” made.
Impact. Benchmark. Difference from before. What is the impact? I want to see what is the value. Can we switch from impact assessment to tracking the value created? By doing so we open up more options for tracking the transformational work we want to do in really evolutionary giving. (We are working on this in the book Christelle Van Ham and I are writing called, for now, Action Spectrum).
5. Power Adjustments
Additionally, as someone who has managed to avoid having any big donors to yank me around, we have got to get better as a collective about the co-creation of strategy. Grantees are so beholden by the power of the money a donor offers that they can’t say, “what you want me to do doesn’t work.” Instead they all too often feel like they must say whatever pleases the money master. This isn’t really their fault. Nor is it the fault of the givers of money. Both sides need to work on creating agency for everyone involved, which takes a lot of conscious practice and communication clarity.
Collectively, we need to truly and deeply believe that everyone at the table working on transformation has some value to contribute. That value may come in different forms: it may be time or ideas, or network or skill, and of course money or influence. When we cater to the one with the money we make small or even invalidate the other forms of capital at the table – the experience capital or intellectual capital etc. And that will undermine our shared goals. It gives us less assets to work with instead of more! We all have power. It can come in many forms. It doesn’t make us equal… it just allows us each to have something to offer. And thus everyone at the table of social transformation is valuable.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2012-11-19 15:46:052012-11-19 16:14:475 Changes I Want to See in Philanthopy
you work with others that you don’t have total control over to come up with new ideas or actions
you want to tap into the wisdom of a group and go beyond what any could do alone
the same old problems are present and you know you need to approach them differently to get better answers
My goal for the workshop is two-fold:
give people ways to redirect conversations to be more co-creative
offer several different approaches to achieving co-created solution design
Why Co-Created Solution Design?
Since January 2011, a small group of facilitators working on social entrepreneurship and international development have come together to find ways to impact the system of social innovation globally. We call ourselves ci2iglobal, which is short for Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. With a collective 100 years experience in the area, we pooled our experiences together to figure out where we can be most useful. We believe a crucial part of the difference we can make is spreading the work of co-created solution design.
Collaboration might be the hot word of today, but we believe co-creation gets closer to our intent to help solutions arise from group creation. Too often gatherings come together and the path or outcome has been pre-determined. And it limits the engagement of all stakeholders, which is vital to successful social innovation. Co-created solution design provides a method – a process – to create solutions, but it does not presume answers. It opens questions to be answered by the group.
While much of what we do is about getting something done together, what actually gets done depends heavily on the relationships between the participants and their commitment to action.
I remember very vividly learning first hand the difference between advice and self-generated solutions. On the second day of my coach training, we were asked to provide advice to our partners on how to achieve one of their goals. We talked at them for 30 minutes. Then we were asked to listen as they thought through another challenge. The difference startled me. I am a quick thinker and prided myself on my ability to offer useful advice. However, the solutions my partner came up with had deep understanding of all the forces at play. Most importantly, my partner hesitated in implementing my solution, whereas the partner eagerly looked forward to testing the self-generated solution. The difference in engagement and commitment was tangible for me. I have tried to listen more and advise less ever since.
Co-created solution design is just like that, except it is working with groups and even groups of groups on larger systemic issues.
Strategies
I will be highlighting three different strategies for doing co-created solution design:
Engaging Exploration – Use when there is not much of a time limit and a need to see and act within a large landscape of possibilities.
Flash – Use when there is very little time and a strong base of existing knowledge and awareness.
Creative – Use when you need a very well fit and very novel solution.
So, how do we do it?
Come to the Co-Created Solution Design workshop to find out! After the workshop, I will share some of the materials from the workshop here for those of you who can’t make it.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2012-10-28 20:46:422012-10-28 20:46:42Co-Created Solution Design Workshop at Chicago Bioneers
I get asked a lot to do many things for free. All the time. And I find I sit in a tension between advocacy for the content of the work – give that away to promote the work – AND that my work is a service process that I earn a living from.
So people ask for me to help put together events, curate things, or advise on their projects. But I also make a living facilitating events, curating and managing projects, and consulting. So when do I say yes to the free services they ask me for and when do I say, “yes, and that costs money.”
I can sense by gut when the opportunity doesn’t seem to be reciprocal. But describing that sense of reciprocal benefit in terms that can become principles for consistent action…that seems more tricky. How do you manage it?
A major conference in one of my fields has historically given me a free pass to be an energizing presence in the space. They aren’t asking me to run the event. I get to do my thing. And they get the benefit of my more subtle forms of facilitating – network weaving, curiosity infusions, etc.
That exchange seemed worth it to me. This year the benefits are not clear or pressing enough to them.
A conference in one of my fields – but directed more toward specialists – asks me to be on an organizing committee for 9 months. To even attend the event I will spend a thousand dollars on airfare – not to mention numerous hours of pre-event meetings. I might increase visibility of my work, but not to a broad audience. That didn’t seem worth it. They aren’t offering money and the visibility gained isn’t ideal. I might learn some, and I already have enough social contacts in that arena for my needs.
An innovation event raising money to do the event via crowdfunding asks me about curating some of the event. Hmmm, the right kind of audience. And, if this was not my content audience, I would be charging at least $3000 for design, coordination, and production. I will have to think about this. It would have to make my organization visible to the tune of a $4000 sponsorship in lieu of fees, I think. At least for my effort at this time and not living in the location of the event.
Consulting:
Someone designing a values-driven community asks to pick my brain for an hour. It actually takes about 3 hours between the email and follow up, the scanning of documents to offer useful feedback, and then the actual conversation. They are not likely to be paying for consulting later. Benefits: continue building reputation as someone who can think through the complexity of a social ecosystem and flow dynamics. Yes. Good. And costs: my time and energy aren’t being valued with anything but gratitude. I am not getting visibility, social contacts, nor learning. I have historically just done this sort of thing for the sector. Over and over. I am starting to feel like setting the limit at 1 hour is not enough. I should restrict these freebies to 30 minutes or just publish a guide of questions for a reasonable fee. Anything of my time over that needs to be an hourly rate through the Agency.
Someone calls needing to make a decision on a potential partnership or collaboration. We talk for 45 minutes. I ask questions. We clarify. A decision is made. We could call this social capital building. And you might say that if the person had to pay they would simply skip the counseling. However, I am failing to use the social capital I built with them before it starts depleting (passage of time – these things don’t hold value indefinitely). I need to start making it clear that I charge for this. That will show up over at the Agency in the next month too.
I am on the board for a project and the collaborators on that project have a massive meltdown. I mediate over the course of two weeks to get them to a clear outcome, agreed process, and personal development for all sides toward positive feelings and “ownership” aka responsibility all around. Of course this is free – I might not be on the board to serve that purpose expressly, but I am happy to give my time to them. However, I ought to also be more clear about providing this kind of mediation as a service. That is definitely invisible to the market. Again, that will be showing up in the Agency in the next month.
How do you decide what to give away? When is it worth it? How do you do your cross-capital forms accounting?
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Thriverhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngThriver2012-09-14 11:01:252012-09-14 11:01:25Give it away now!
It is that time of year when those of us who know burners get to watch our social media feed fill up with photos and anecdotes about this year’s burn.
I have never been. I hear it is transformative. And last year a friend who has been a burner gave the best advice, I thought. She said, “Jean, people go to Burning Man to see and be a part of something that they didn’t think was possible – so many people functioning together in gift economy and with agility.” (okay, something to that affect) And then, “But Jean, you already believe in that and you already live in the gift economy all the time.”
And I think this was fantastic insight. (And part of why I fear getting vastly disappointed if I went to the burn). It is not the thing itself that is all that phenomenal by itself. It is how it transforms and awakens those who come to have the experience.
I politely decline when friends invite me to this transformative retreat or that one. Not because I don’t think my friend was transformed by it. I believe that was their experience. But I don’t go because I have to find my own.
“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” – Zen saying
It is not the burning man experience… or going to an ashram in India… it is not about a jungle adventure in the Amazon or going to Africa, India, or somewhere else. It is not about a spiritual retreat or a personal development methodology. It is about you coming to your own awakening – through whatever portal is available at the time you are ready.
It is about getting out of your own sleep to see something you haven’t seen and do something you haven’t done to keep yourself awakened. To discover awe. To explore what is possible that you didn’t know was possible. Find what awakens you – and do that. And then find the next thing that awakens you…
At some point, you begin to build the muscles of the mind and spirit to be awakened by awe. And then – it is not burning man or Marrakech… it is the light in your window and the flower in the garden that brings you to new levels of awakening. Because you know how to awaken. To perceive anew. To refresh yourself.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean– the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down–
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.
Friction is Your Friend: Why Sharing Values isn’t always Valuable
by Jean RussellI hear about it all the time… Collaborate with people who share your values. Really? You know why they say this? Because it is pleasant and easy. When you are around people who share your values you can agree all the time, because you are using the same basis for your judgements. There isn’t much friction. Maybe people who like writing about collaboration find it easier to achieve flow states when they are not experiencing friction. Maybe.
But friction can be your friend. And not just when you are applying the brakes. You want to make a spark or start a fire? Friction. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to be creative. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to start a business. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to spark dialogue with your community.
Let’s take business for example. I have seen startups where two partners may as well have shared one head they were of such like mind. And neither of those minds had much business sense. Both were visionary. They valued the exploration of ideas. They seemed to struggle to come up with a way to generate revenue to keep going and reach some lift. Neither had much talent or interest in operations. On the other hand, you can take a very profit-centric person and team them with someone who values customer and community and away they go. That is not to say they don’t experience conflict or even strong conflict. They do. But they learn how to balance it. They don’t confuse sharing values with being valuable.
Share
Sharing is great. Share something with your collaborators. Values is just one axis. You might share a goal: keeping your neighborhood clean. But you might have different values driving the goal. One neighbor, Samuel might value the number otherwise known as property value which they believe is impacted by how clean the neighborhood is. Another, Joan, believes that “broken windows” talk from Tipping Point and feels that a cleaner neighborhood breeds less crime. Joan values being safe. And a third, Sandeep, simply values tidyness. Fine. They all want it clean. Share the goal. From different values.
A friend of mine, Steve Crandall, worked at Bell Labs. In one of his delicious storytelling sessions Steve mentioned working with someone – for years – who had a polar opposite political perspective. And yet, in the creative innovation space, the two of created well together. They didn’t need to share values to be innovative together and enjoy the pleasure of that work together. They shared a practice of innovating.
Value Time
There are certainly times when you should connect on your values. It can help reinforce your identity and give you support that you need. But if you want innovation or you want to connect a neighborhood or you want to create dialogue across political boundaries, work with the friction of different values and connect on some other dimension.
As I learned from Valdis Krebs, “connect on sameness and profit from your differences.” Please be intentional about which dimensions of difference and which dimensions of sameness.
Lifespan of Social Metrics
by Jean RussellUnlike metrics of simple systems, the metrics of complex adaptive systems have a life span. They grow in value over time. And then they decay in value as well.
Take twitter. At first it was follower count – and that still matters some. But over time, people found ways to gain followers that didn’t coincide to the value that they provided, so it started to lose usefulness as an indicator of value from the tweeter.
Jane McGonigal, @avantgame, just posted a series of tweets about how Amazon rating system is being gamed.
Note: I took out a few tweets in the series which were just about her work, rather than about the gaming the stars method she points to.
Knowing that people are giving a count of stars based on their ideology rather than the quality of the work, I am now less likely to put stock in the star count on a given project, especially when it is politically polemic material. Thus the usefulness of the stars decrease for me (and for others) and then for the whole system.
With twitter, we first looked at “follower” count, and then that was gamed. Then the metrics had to start considering other factors like RT count to demonstrate influence. Now we rely on twittergrader, kred, klout, etc to take a great number of factors into weighted consideration to produce an “influence” or reputation score. This amalgam of factors evolves over time.
You might think this is just the way of social media, since it is a fast feedback loop. But actually, I think that a lot of measures of complex adaptive systems work this way.
What comes to mind is Scott Nelson’s story from Blockage in the Thrivability Sketch.
If the metrics we use in our economy are also being created (even at a very slow pace) they may also be declining in usefulness. Elizur’s methods didn’t anticipate the complex financial instruments to come over 100 years later that obscured the “trustworthiness” of the things our measures aim to reveal.
Consider how the measures you use can be gamed, where they may be in their lifespan of adoption and decay, and what other indicators might be emerging to reveal what matters – the territory and not the map.
Organizational Heartbeat
by Jean RussellI am working on a book about agency, and the power and requirements for transformational change. This comes out of about a decade of writing about philanthropy – both for effective donors and the sector as a whole. Today, Eugene Kim posted to Facebook a link to a groupaya post, How Can We Make Nonprofit Consulting Transformational? And this reminded me of Geoffrey West’s TED talk on The surprising math of cities and corporations.
My sense is that the larger the organization, the slower the heartbeat of the organization – AND the less it is capable of transformational change. This is all about efficiencies of scale. And you know from previous posts that I have an allergic reaction to scale as a lauded idea in and of itself. It always, to me, requires clarification. Mostly because people act as if scale operates as a power law – when I think it is a sigmoidal function. Probably because of that West TED talk, of course, since I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination.
Sigmoid Curve via Wikipedia
West makes clear is that companies grow on a sigmoidal curve – an S curve. You grow on an s curve too. And then you stop growing. These economies of scale are not infinite. At a certain point the energy required to transmit information throughout the organization and engage all the people in it exceeds the effectiveness gained by adding more people to it. [See also what West says about cities not being sigmoidal.]
Let’s be a little more clear about this scaling thing. The Long Now has a lovely essay on West’s work, which I pulled this quote from:
Picture a mouse trying to do a startup pivot. Now try to imagine your favorite large scale organizational gorilla trying to pivot. The larger the company, the more difficult it is to turn the entire company on a single point and do something related but quite different.
Startups often go through multiple transformations of what they do, how they do it, and who they do it for. Their organizational heartbeat is fast and their scale is small. (And some of them get successfully gobbled up by the larger organizational bodies, but we can talk about that another day.)
You can have nonprofits, whose social mission talks about transformational change, hiring consultants to help them do that as much as you want, but they won’t be very good at it. The kind of organizational heartbeat needed for transformational change – that leading edge early adopter game changing innovation in the social sector – well, it isn’t going to happen in the large organization. (We could talk about how big donors impede that, how organizational mission moves from “change” to “keeping the org alive” or how larger orgs attract stable-present-focused people who aren’t keen on transformational disruption, etc… but understanding the why doesn’t change that it happens. And we ought to just be honest about it and stop speaking transformational change in organizations that don’t do it.)
Do you think organizational scale relates to ability to be transformational? Or not? If not, why not?
ps. the antidote or innovation that can disrupt this exists – organizational slime molds… crowdfunding transformational change experiments, etc. I don’t have clear answers on how that all works, but I am deeply curious about how it is connecting.
Resilience Ain’t Enough
by Jean RussellIt isn’t enough to repair the damage our progress has brought. The unintended consequences of our efforts to improve quality of life for humans has repercussions and requires action. Yes, and. It is also not enough to manage our risks and be more shock-resistant. Now is not only the time to course correct and be more resilient. It is a time to imagine what we can generate for the world. Not only can we work to minimize our footprint but we can also create positive handprints. It is time to strive for a world that thrives.
As I am wont to do, I had a gathering while in SF. This time it was a brunch filled with amazing people I wouldn’t have a chance to see one on one during my time there. I always enjoy seeing friends meet friends and discovering connection. A couple guests brought someone with them. And one guest took up my twitter invite and joined even though she didn’t know me yet. Everyone brought something to share. Yum. It felt warm and delightful.
Then we got in a debate about resilience and thrivability. Of course I appreciate the friends who not only stand by me but also stand behind thrivability. And, it was really exciting to have someone who wasn’t converted to the thrivability team challenge what it is we mean and to say she didn’t like the term. Juicy.
Where there is a bit of friction, you can get traction.
As a facilitator, you can always be sure I have paper and pens around, so I started sketching it out. Since then, I put together a chart, showed it to a few collaborators, and here it is narrowed down to key points for you. It isn’t enough to strive for resilience, and it won’t motivate enough of us. When we strive to thrive, we create a story of greatness that invites everyone to contribute their very best to making a world that not only works, it also produces joy, delight, and awe.
Thrivability transcends survival modes, sustainability, and resilience. Thrivability embraces flow as the sources of life and joy and meaning, adds to the flow and rides the waves, instead of trying to nullify the effects. Each layer includes and also transcends the previous layer, expanding both interconnections as well as expanding system awareness as each layer hits limits and discovers that more forces are at work than can be explained within their purview. Also, this is not a progression, where you need to move through one before beginning another. You can have aspects of yourself or your organization in multiple places in the chart and movement within the chart can be from any one area to any other. It is not a spectrum of progression. It is a spectrum of viewpoint. And most of us are like electrons, leaping about from point to point and sometimes seemingly nowhere at all… until you look and ask.
Please allow me to amend with gratitudes:
Thank you to attendees of the brunch that triggered action on the chart, especially: Sarah Brooks, Evonne Heyning, Scott Albritton (photos of chart from brunch), Thomas Kriese, David Evan Harris, Jeanie Kirk, Kimberly Olson, Mair Dundon, and Nicole Lazzaro.
Thank you to thrivability champions for assistance in development and refining: Michele Holliday, Irma Wilson, Joshua Foss, Herman Wagter, and Kathryn Bottrell.
Scale Makes Me Scream
by Jean RussellIn both for profit and social enterprise, people talk about creating a business that scales. And it is said as if there were no other way worth doing it. It is said as if you don’t have a successful business if it doesn’t expand in size. And you don’t have a successful social business if your impact isn’t scaling.
It makes me want to scream. Or inside I am already screaming.
There are organizations that are best at scale. And laudable well scaled social enterprises exist too. I am not denying that. I am saying the glorification of any of those without pointing to small business or local enterprises diminishes the power and results of an organization that is not scaling ever upward in our collective awareness. Where are the HBR or SSIR articles on local social business and impact?
When uniqueness is part of the experience you pay for…
Think about your favorite local family owned restaurant. Should it scale? Doesn’t a little part of you die if you hear they are scaling? As if the personality of the place has been turned into a factory like process with measured perfection and efficiencies that stop being unique and by hand. What about your local farmer? The local farmer’s market? Should those scale?
Big scale, no fail, organizational obesity in a fragile market…
Aren’t businesses that have scaled part of the problem in our current economy? Much like people have a dunbar number – the number of people you can know (and know who they know) which tends to be about 150, organiz
ations have a scale limit. When they exceed that limit, the costs of the necessary organizational bureaucracy to operate outstrip the efficiencies of being bigger. Think of an organization as a organism. You need food (income) to survive. And what is surviving without a purpose? Social organisms make sense. And we as a society want to see them fed, at least. But lots of organizations grow and grow until they bloat and become obese. And unhealthy. Additionally, at such massive scale, society becomes invested in the ongoing success of the obese organization, ruining the market mechanisms capitalism professes to use to make an organization healthy in the market. Too much concentrated power. Why are we glorifying movement in that direction without adequate critique and qualification? From the articles I read, it seems we do so without any question. And that makes me scream,”Wait, stop, think about this!”
Is it more important for the social business to scale or for there to be impact that goes to scale? Which is more important to you: 1 business (with 5 staff and a group of investors) that gives 1 million people access to water or 1 business model is replicated a thousand times locally, producing a living income for 1000 local entrepreneurs? If they both produce the same impact: 1 million people with access to water, but the first benefits a handful of people in a single organization and lines the pockets of investors OR the second gives living income to 1000 local people. In our current market and media, the first model is celebrated.
When social entrepreneurship looks at scale, we want it to mean scale of impact. What it really means is that investors think that enough transactions at a low margin of profit to the bottom of the pyramid, a profit can still be made. Or they mean, enough wealthy people in search of meaning will pay premiums for the latest moral crisis to be off their conscious. I am not saying that either of these are bad in and of themselves. I think it is good that we explore how to give people at the bottom of the pyramid a greater experience of agency – if that means buying products and services or creating their own small businesses. (You don’t see Kiva donors asking to see if their entrepreneur is taking a business to scale.) And I think it is good that socially conscious people can make more informed decisions and advocate those decisions through social cause purchases. What those two paths miss are the other axis by which social change can happen. What if 10,000 of us all start a MakerSpace in our town? None of our businesses will probably scale (some may merge over time). But if Make Media puts out a blueprint, and thousands of us run with it, enabling lots of innovation and tinkering in our towns, is that a social entrepreneurial effort worth celebration? Should you look at the impact of a single town or could you say the overall movement has touched how many lives, led to how many inventions or customizations, or created how many small businesses…. Sometimes scale comes through tight models that can be replicated. Barcamps. Jellys.
What about the revolving loan or cascading good efforts? Let’s say I start a project where 10 of my friends get together and help 10 people improve their lives, and each person donates $10 to that effort. Each “receiver” is then required to give 10 hours to helping someone else’s life. $2 are used as an administration fee for tracking the cascade forward. The receiver then gives forward their ten hours and $10 to 10 more people and on down the line. Does that count as a social entrepreneurship? Even if the main organization never has to grow beyond 1 or 2 staff? What if loans are passed forward instead of back – so as you prepare to pay your loan, instead of giving the money back to the bank, you have to find someone to give it to who will follow the same condition and mentor them so they can pay it forward to. That might have a lot of social impact over time, but it won’t look sexy at SOCAP. Not glorious or big enough for investor interest, which is what drives media interest and behavior at SOCAP.
Speaking of time…
What “they” also mean when “they” unquestionably glorify scale is that the timeline for scale needs to be rather short term – say 3-7 years. We are talking about cashing out investor money here, and they need to know they can get it. And yet, deep transformative social change happens over decades. So we end up with lots of hot, sexy, quick fixes that scale fast instead of deep and thorough long term social transformation efforts. And with all the glamorization of for profit investment into the social change space, the growing trend for philanthropic dollars to be tied to business like outcomes increases. Why fund long term social transformation when you can get quick neat little measures of incremental improvements as a social impact investor? Slow Money is a small counter effort to this, of course.
Please
Can we please be sure to qualify statements about scale – as a subset of all ideal business development options. Please. Can we stop glamorizing investment capital and start to celebrate slow evolution, iterative crowd-funded efforts that make a difference locally or have long term deep and transformative impact?
Strange Attractor Design
by Jean RussellWe had a series of aha moments. Herman was explaining a recent design choice. We connected it with a prior design choice, and this took us to a transcending moment of seeing how these patterns are at work. This unleashed a raw flurry of cascading aha moments, which are roughly captured here.
Designing Networks
Consider a group of businesses and organizations that are all connecting to each other. Very quickly, the amount of information being tracked about all the others in the network overwhelms the nodes. (Herman drew the actual network math, I drew a dense network cluster.) The orgs have information that they need to exchange in order to unlock value that they benefit from. So, how do they reorganize the network to enable the optimal information flow patterns in a network that has limited trust between selfish nodes? So often when asked to design these things, people think in terms of idealistic utopian design conditions. It is about how much functionality can be given so that any information can flow in any direction. However, all the nodes find this scary. Instead of designing for optimal participant conditions, design for “willing to cooperate, yet anxious” instead.
As a network solution, you create an intermediary to reduce the network connection count. If I know the right network members, I have 2 degree access to everyone while not having to know most of them. So, see my “count of nodes” divided by “count of hubs” which is a rough way of saying, in back of the napkin kind of math, that each intermediary is reducing the number of nodes you need to directly connect with.
Trust
The next problem is why would we trust this intermediary? Again, lots of design decisions are made for central control of these hubs. What Valdis calls the “queen in between” kind of model. Most of us are skeptical about the power that aggregates in these hubs. So we need ways to ensure they are reliable. Solution: a) limit what information does flow through – only a certain type or amount. b) make all the nodes equal in some way and c) make the flow of that information extremely transparent.
When we don’t have much trust in the health of the network, the other nodes in the network, or in intermediaries, we have to manage high amounts of information about all of them. We act paranoid. When we have significant trust in the health of the network and the nodes within it and the intermediaries, we act generously. We can handle more “hops” between members, since the trust is in the network as much as it is in the nodes of that network.
One of the aha’s here for me was actually a reminder more than an aha. It is not the FORM of the network that determines the way it needs to be governed. It is the evolution of that network that determines the governance. How did it mature? If trusting in the past has led to positive outcomes, more trust will continue, and less governance is needed. However, if trust has been broken, more rules might be created to qualify when and how to trust, and thus bureaucracy begins to flourish. But I will get back to that later.
Where you see the figure 8 on the side, I am explaining to Herman about polarity management. We are not just greedy and selfish nor are we just open generous cooperators. We exist in the tension between these extremes. And even the skeptics are willing to navigate the risks of cooperation when the benefits might be higher.
Incentives
Herman mentioned how the use of financial incentives can often be misleading. The amount of the financial incentive is not what allows the node to participate in the network. Instead it is the ability of that node to maintain identity with their peer group. Can they save face and have pride while taking the risk of cooperation? Yes if there is some token amount of money involved. Or it can be another kind of token.
We have another case where credits were used between players to negotiate their placement in a queue. I might let you pass me in line, if you give me your credit. I can still save face to my peers for letting you cut, because I got some benefit for it. This design may require an arbiter to view the transaction, but the arbiter isn’t needing to make judgements about whether it can happen or not. Tokens can make visible an exchange that allows both sides to save face to others and enable actions in cooperator networks.
Identity
We find the issue of identity to be a huge factor in the behavior of nodes in a network.
We talked about how a transaction between two people always seems to have at least a third party. I am not only negotiating with you for what the transaction is, I am also thinking about what my group or tribe will think of me for engaging in that transaction. In fact, I may have more anxiety about what they think than about whether you are making a good transaction with me or not. Most of us dedicate most of our time to identity formation, with everything we say and do designed, intentionally or not, to reinforce what we want to think of ourselves. We may not do a good job of it all the time, but that is a driving force.
Choices
I told Herman about a conversation I had with Benjamin Ellis about making choices. Benjamin was talking about a graphic designer that provided 3 choices. And we quickly riffed on why this works so well. We think that the selecting out of the bad option of the three builds the sense of confidence in decision making that enables the next choice between the remaining two to be faster and seem easier.
Rules, Rules, and more Rules
We also talked about how the centralized control design model has these negative side effects of generating bureaucracy because they tend to create rules to follow, and when those rules conflict, they create rules about the conflict, in an infinite cascade of rule making that ends up grinding cooperation to a halt. Thus we said they are limited in size by the ability to moderate the rules. This did help us transcend the 150 limit of community cooperation (limit to the ability to track the trustability of members of a network with each other). However, when you design for robustness (bookmark conversation on resilience, robustness, and anti-fragility)… when you design for robustness, you put the value and power at the edges of the network operating on principles instead of rules, and allow it to learn and grow from a simple structure, you get agility and adaptability in the network…and it can become scale-free? I think.
Optimize for what?
We moved to a meta-level discussion about how any group tends to design to optimize for one factor. When we succeed at that optimization, we also learn that there are negative side effects that may inhibit our achievement of another (possibly more important) goal. So we have to switch to design to optimize for something else. This can be long term human social evolution at work – when we exhaust the potential of something, we have to evolve to work around that. This often involves making distinctions between things that were previously hooked together in order to unlock value… but I digress. Will save that for another conversation…. back to the design at hand.
Rituals
In talking about Identity, we had taken a side track to talk about the power of ritual. I had shared a story about being uncomfortable – with a growing sense of dis-ease when I was in a group that had a series of actions that were meant to create bonding in the group culminating in a big ritual together. Rituals can help ease the anxiety of cooperation by bonding everyone into a peer group – we are all smart or stupid together, so I can work within that group easier. Everyone has crossed a threshold together. And you feel it in an embodied form. However, we need to take into account that humans have a spectrum of tolerance to peer influence. Some of us just don’t care what our peers think. And others can’t make a decision without being aligned with the group. It isn’t a stable known to design for.
There is that formula that Herman wrote. 🙂
Design to Evolve Cooperation
In pink at the bottom it says “It isn’t the form==> governance. It is TRUST==>governance.”
On the left in blue it says, “Design big” from the start and you get “bureaucracy, low trust, not agile, ultra specific and rule based.”
If you start small, simple, and mature through the growth of trust, you get evolving cooperation. What is the least that is needed? What is the smallest channel that enables a flow of information that benefits the network? Design for learning and self-evolution. Design to grow using minimal rituals for a foundation of trust to help mediate the anxiety of cooperation. When evolving cooperation against the will or inclination of players, manage their fear and sense of security. Sometimes tokens or credits can be used to mediate that trust.
I am very interested in how tokens are used to engender trust and enable flows. How does a token act as an object of trust transfer? Trust tends not to be transferable, whereas tokens can be. How do you route the trust into the token and the process, so that it can be transferred?
This is where we start really transcending that 150 limit.
Sorry this isn’t an essay yet. It is just notes from an extended conversation.
5 Changes I Want to See in Philanthopy
by Jean RussellI am currently participating in the Illinois Task Force for Social Innovation. And working on ci2iglobal, and transitioning Inspired Legacies. Having worked in or around nonprofits and philanthropy for a decade, I have seen the field changing. I remember the first budding of Mission Related Investing, when there were basically 3 foundations championing it. Then I discovered people were doing Program Related Investing, and we started to see a broader spectrum of how money was being used in the philanthropic sector. We were collectively working to optimize how much money was creating purpose-filled value.
Last year I toyed around with some friends on mapping the financial spectrum. We are doing it again with the task force. It is exciting to see the hybridity between for-profit and for-purpose work and the financial innovation to support it.
However, concurrently there has been an increasing demand for nonprofits and social purpose organizations in general to quantify what they do. When I look at what I consider charity (aka bandaids on existing issues), these metrics really help tell the story about what an organization is doing to deliver that bandaid.
And… my struggle all along, even before I joined the social change effort, was to find the big levers that shifted how things are. What would it take to remove the need for these bandaids? I keep looking for the big levers.
But big levers don’t get funded until they pay off. Usually.
I never bothered to even look for foundation funding or grants for my work on shifting culture to be more thrivable. Who gives grants for core culture change? I think it ought to be funded. It may actually catalyze more transformation in the system, by aligning people and projects along a story. But how do you measure that? How would you even track the spread of the idea, all the people making hundreds of choices differently because they started to see the world differently? At the end of the journey, you can find your way back. But where is the end of the journey? Can you find where it ends and hear back? Do people even come back to you 2-5 years later and tell you a story of how “thrivability” led them to do something different. (Usually only when they know you.) If five years from now, scientists working on environmental science shift their view to look at the world from a thrivable perspective and it unlocks something that allows a cascade of action to follow that make the world more livable, can I claim that as my impact? Could I possible ask for money for the hope that this happens?
2. Be more like an investor and less like middle management
In startup land, this isn’t unreasonable. A startup can develop a product or an idea, pitch it to investors, get some funding…and if their idea works, the funder gets payback. If it doesn’t…well, losses all around. Investors know that most of what they fund will fail. It is an art of finding enough that succeeds with big enough returns to keep going. Where is this attitude in philanthropy? Both transformational change and startups live in complex adaptive systems… they can’t be predicted and causality is challenging if not impossible. And yet, there is a vital part of the startup world funded by people willing to put big dollars into unpredictable possibilities for the small opportunity of making a big return.
Philanthropy, in adopting more practices from the business world, took on a middle management mindset in far too many cases. Instead of optimizing for what might make the biggest change in the area to address, the optimization has tended toward who can show impact in the funding cycle. It tends toward projects that have strong “predictability” in them. I know how many people will be fed, clothed, housed, cared for if the project is funded.
Let’s be careful here. There are some foundations and philanthropists that are willing to be risky with their giving. They give to a collection of efforts knowing that some won’t turn out as hoped. They may even fund across the spectrum from highly predictable charity efforts to systemic change efforts. But the general vibe of the field is one of mitigating risk of money being used ineffectively by having the metrics to back it up.
3. I want to see a Venture Capital Philanthropy company.
adVenturePhilanthropy or something. They share the risk of some of the projects not achieving desired results…but have smart portfolios of giving capital. Think of it like a high end giving circle where you pay sophisticated philanthropic advisors to fund a portfolio of efforts on causes that you and others care about. The advisor or firm then shares with all the donors the report on value created through giving.
4. And, like a business, ROI can be based on value created instead of “impact” made.
Impact. Benchmark. Difference from before. What is the impact? I want to see what is the value. Can we switch from impact assessment to tracking the value created? By doing so we open up more options for tracking the transformational work we want to do in really evolutionary giving. (We are working on this in the book Christelle Van Ham and I are writing called, for now, Action Spectrum).
5. Power Adjustments
Additionally, as someone who has managed to avoid having any big donors to yank me around, we have got to get better as a collective about the co-creation of strategy. Grantees are so beholden by the power of the money a donor offers that they can’t say, “what you want me to do doesn’t work.” Instead they all too often feel like they must say whatever pleases the money master. This isn’t really their fault. Nor is it the fault of the givers of money. Both sides need to work on creating agency for everyone involved, which takes a lot of conscious practice and communication clarity.
Collectively, we need to truly and deeply believe that everyone at the table working on transformation has some value to contribute. That value may come in different forms: it may be time or ideas, or network or skill, and of course money or influence. When we cater to the one with the money we make small or even invalidate the other forms of capital at the table – the experience capital or intellectual capital etc. And that will undermine our shared goals. It gives us less assets to work with instead of more! We all have power. It can come in many forms. It doesn’t make us equal… it just allows us each to have something to offer. And thus everyone at the table of social transformation is valuable.
Co-Created Solution Design Workshop at Chicago Bioneers
by Jean RussellI hope you will join me November 2nd in Chicago for a workshop on Co-Created Solution Design at Chicago Bioneers.
This workshop is for you if:
My goal for the workshop is two-fold:
Why Co-Created Solution Design?
Since January 2011, a small group of facilitators working on social entrepreneurship and international development have come together to find ways to impact the system of social innovation globally. We call ourselves ci2iglobal, which is short for Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. With a collective 100 years experience in the area, we pooled our experiences together to figure out where we can be most useful. We believe a crucial part of the difference we can make is spreading the work of co-created solution design.
Collaboration might be the hot word of today, but we believe co-creation gets closer to our intent to help solutions arise from group creation. Too often gatherings come together and the path or outcome has been pre-determined. And it limits the engagement of all stakeholders, which is vital to successful social innovation. Co-created solution design provides a method – a process – to create solutions, but it does not presume answers. It opens questions to be answered by the group.
While much of what we do is about getting something done together, what actually gets done depends heavily on the relationships between the participants and their commitment to action.
I remember very vividly learning first hand the difference between advice and self-generated solutions. On the second day of my coach training, we were asked to provide advice to our partners on how to achieve one of their goals. We talked at them for 30 minutes. Then we were asked to listen as they thought through another challenge. The difference startled me. I am a quick thinker and prided myself on my ability to offer useful advice. However, the solutions my partner came up with had deep understanding of all the forces at play. Most importantly, my partner hesitated in implementing my solution, whereas the partner eagerly looked forward to testing the self-generated solution. The difference in engagement and commitment was tangible for me. I have tried to listen more and advise less ever since.
Co-created solution design is just like that, except it is working with groups and even groups of groups on larger systemic issues.
Strategies
I will be highlighting three different strategies for doing co-created solution design:
So, how do we do it?
Come to the Co-Created Solution Design workshop to find out! After the workshop, I will share some of the materials from the workshop here for those of you who can’t make it.
Give it away now!
by ThriverI get asked a lot to do many things for free. All the time. And I find I sit in a tension between advocacy for the content of the work – give that away to promote the work – AND that my work is a service process that I earn a living from.
So people ask for me to help put together events, curate things, or advise on their projects. But I also make a living facilitating events, curating and managing projects, and consulting. So when do I say yes to the free services they ask me for and when do I say, “yes, and that costs money.”
I can sense by gut when the opportunity doesn’t seem to be reciprocal. But describing that sense of reciprocal benefit in terms that can become principles for consistent action…that seems more tricky. How do you manage it?
Is it worth it to do for free?
Events:
That exchange seemed worth it to me. This year the benefits are not clear or pressing enough to them.
Consulting:
How do you decide what to give away? When is it worth it? How do you do your cross-capital forms accounting?
Find Awakening
by Thriver…whever you are.
It is that time of year when those of us who know burners get to watch our social media feed fill up with photos and anecdotes about this year’s burn.
I have never been. I hear it is transformative. And last year a friend who has been a burner gave the best advice, I thought. She said, “Jean, people go to Burning Man to see and be a part of something that they didn’t think was possible – so many people functioning together in gift economy and with agility.” (okay, something to that affect) And then, “But Jean, you already believe in that and you already live in the gift economy all the time.”
And I think this was fantastic insight. (And part of why I fear getting vastly disappointed if I went to the burn). It is not the thing itself that is all that phenomenal by itself. It is how it transforms and awakens those who come to have the experience.
I politely decline when friends invite me to this transformative retreat or that one. Not because I don’t think my friend was transformed by it. I believe that was their experience. But I don’t go because I have to find my own.
It is not the burning man experience… or going to an ashram in India… it is not about a jungle adventure in the Amazon or going to Africa, India, or somewhere else. It is not about a spiritual retreat or a personal development methodology. It is about you coming to your own awakening – through whatever portal is available at the time you are ready.
It is about getting out of your own sleep to see something you haven’t seen and do something you haven’t done to keep yourself awakened. To discover awe. To explore what is possible that you didn’t know was possible. Find what awakens you – and do that. And then find the next thing that awakens you…
At some point, you begin to build the muscles of the mind and spirit to be awakened by awe. And then – it is not burning man or Marrakech… it is the light in your window and the flower in the garden that brings you to new levels of awakening. Because you know how to awaken. To perceive anew. To refresh yourself.