 |
Notes for
the Reflective Practitioner by Dr. Paul Pribbenow |
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| Philanthropy
is a journey.
Let JGA be your guide. Johnson, Grossnickle and
Associates LLC
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Volume
One, Number Three (February 2000) "What
we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how." (W.
Wordsworth, from "The Prelude") NOTES
FROM READERS >>What
you think<< A
couple of notes from readers in response to the last issue of Notes
caught my eye. Richard
Swindle, vice president at Franklin College (Indiana), wrote to recount
his own experience with a clearness committee when he was making a
particularly difficult career decision.
He says, "I will never forget the wonderful collection of
folks who came to our home in Atlanta that day.
They were from various parts of our lives, and they were all
ages. The wisdom they
offered was impressive. No
one told us what to do, they just helped us clarify some issues."
What a rare gift, methinks. Steve
Batson, chair-elect of the National Society of Fund Raising Executives
and vice president at Georgia Southwestern State
University, was
heartened by the quote from Frederick Olmsted about "living for
distant effects." He
writes, "…the hope that there will be some positive effect gives
me great pleasure in doing now a myriad of things that I love.
The challenge becomes to do them well."
And to continue to hope, I might add. Please
let me know what you think. Your
thoughts help me decide what to include in future issues—I promise
you, there is plenty of material! >>Subscription
information<< I
remind you that subscriptions to Notes are simple to establish. Send me an email at pribbenp@wabash.edu,
ask to be added to the list, and you will receive a confirmation from
the mailserver at Wabash College that you are on the list.
Please feel free to forward your email versions of Notes to
others—they then can subscribe by contacting me.
I also am happy to send Notes as an MS Word attachment to an
email, if that would make reading it easier for some of you.
Just let me know. The
current and archive issues of Notes are available on-line at www.jgacounsel.com. REFLECT
ON THIS >>Reflective
politics<< I
recently heard Scott Simon, the Saturday morning host on National Public
Radio, recount a story about Adlai
Stevenson, the Illinois Democrat who
served as governor and U.S. senator before running as the Democratic
nominee for president in 1952 and 1956.
At a campaign stop during the 1952 campaign, someone in the crowd
yelled, "You've got the votes of all thinking people, Adlai,"
to which Stevenson is purported to have responded, "That won't be
enough, I need a majority." As
we enter the political season some forty years later, perhaps we might
hope that our politics could at least aspire to some reflection, some
connection to the things we care about, some conversations of substance
instead of sound bites. But,
alas, thinking remains a minority activity.
May the voices of our minority be heard above the din of politics
as usual. >>The
disciplines of our lives<< I
have long been intrigued by the practices of spiritual formation, the
disciplines that clergy-in-training learn as part of their seminary
training. I have learned in
my own experience and from those who I trust and respect that formation
is a crucial aspect of any life well lived.
Who are you? How
have you been formed and by whom? What
disciplines do you maintain as a means of on-going formation? I
believe that those of us in the professions need to think more
deliberately about formation. Professional
disciplines may be the key to recovering a sense of the awe and wonder
of the work we have the privilege to do. A
few years back, I wrote an essay titled "And we will teach them
how: Professional formation and public accountability," (in
"Critical Issues in Fund Raising," edited by D. Burlingame,
New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997) in which I argued that there are
four central aspects to the professional disciplines. First,
the discipline challenges us to be imaginative and expansive in our ways
of learning about ourselves, about our work, and about our world.
Though this discipline might involve traditional forms of
professional education, it also might challenge us to participate in
experiences that broaden our perspectives.
For example, how does my volunteer service to the local community
foundation expand my understanding of the various motivations of the
volunteers at my own institution? This
discipline also challenges us to make connections between literature and
art and the work we do. My
experience working in an art school and museum taught me valuable
lessons about the visual nature of learning, which I now use everyday in
my work in a more "text-oriented" organization. Second,
the discipline challenges us to understand the need for silence as a way
of freeing our weary minds to receive the humbling truths found in our
everyday lives. This is
perhaps the most difficult discipline to grasp.
It is not necessarily about finding some quiet space.
Rather, it is about an attitude or openness to being quiet.
Silence is about genuine listening, I think.
We live in a noisy world, full of sounds and distractions.
The discipline of silence challenges us to listen, to pay
attention, to be still and thereby open to the lessons of our ordinary
experience. We may need a
quiet space to find the silence—we also need lots of practice, that is
the nature of a discipline. Only
in the ordinary will we find the truths of the world that help us create
the extraordinary. Third,
the discipline of professional formation presents a challenge to
understand the role of solitude, of being alone, detached from normal
routines, reliances, and roles. If
silence gives us knowledge of the world, solitude gives us knowledge of
ourselves. Solitude offers
the moments when we can face our own self-deception and distortion.
Think of how easy it is to deceive ourselves with notions of our
personal power or knowledge or expertise—all potentially damaging
aspects of the professional persona.
Solitude offers opportunities to recapture humility.
Might we recover the genuine sense of retreats as opportunities
for solitude, detached from the routines and roles that too often keep
us from connecting with the passion and purpose of our lives? Finally,
the discipline of professional formation also challenges us to find a
place in our lives for some sort of prayer.
This is a provocative claim, given the natural links to religious
experience that prayer elicits. For
me, however, prayer is a metaphor for admitting that I do not understand
everything that is happening around me.
Prayer is the form that knowledge takes when I accept
responsibility for the fact that I cannot solve every problem, control
every situation. Prayer is
the means by which I ask for help. Prayer is a way of professing faith in something larger and
wiser than my own powers. >>Blending
commerce with community<< All
of the exciting and mind-boggling progress in the world of e-business
and e-communication certainly is a challenge to all of us as we strive
to understand and integrate technological tools in service of
organizational values and missions. A
recent article in the Winter 2000 issue of "Net
Company," a
quarterly supplement to "Fast Company," has a great article
entitled, "Are You on Craig's List?" (pp. 026-034).
The article, which profiles Craig
Newmark, a San Francisco-based
online community organizer, offers this set of tips for our virtual
organizing. (1) Uncommonly good communities have members with common interests. The interests are often mundane—we live in the same city or have the same job title or the same alumni class year—but they give the participants a common reference point. For me, this tip is a reminder that our efforts to build virtual communities often suffer for our tendencies to try to offer something for everyone on our website. (2)
To generate strong connections, provide down-to-earth information. Though we may be after communities of passionate conversation
and interaction, ironically it all begins by giving people things to
know that are useful to them. So,
for example, before I try to help a community discuss an important text
or topic, I need to give community members access to information about
everyday life that they will find useful for connecting with each
other—perhaps news of a favorite professor's latest project, an update
on classmates, and so on. The
down-to-earth information sets a context for further involvement. (3)
It's virtual and physical, not virtual or physical.
The online world is not a substitute for the physical world.
Virtual community participants also need opportunities to meet
each other. I can organize
a wonderful, innovative virtual reunion for the class of 1991, but I
also need to offer the members of that class plenty of opportunities to
get together on campus. (4) Think globally, act locally. We should not push for on-line communities to grow unnaturally. It is best to let them evolve organically. We've found, for example, that our efforts to introduce online giving met with little initial excitement. We could have pushed harder, marketed online giving more aggressively, but we didn't. And now, we're starting to see growth in activity that is an appropriate evolution of our audience's comfort level with the technology. Our aspirations are still very global, but we're realistically incremental in our growth. [Though incremental may be defined differently in the cyberworld. I recently learned that WBEZ, the NPR affiliate in Chicago, met its pledge drive goal in record time by encouraging on-line gifts. They reported that over 50% of their $400,000 total had been pledged on-line.] I
am struck by how these "rules" for establishing good virtual
communities are equally helpful in building communities of any sort! >>Leadership
redux<< The
literature on leadership is rather overwhelming these days.
We get it in journals, newsletters, computer programs, websites,
videos, videoconferences, etc. So,
what might the reflective leader want to think about? The
November 1999 issue of "Harvard Management Update" summed it
up fairly well when it proposed "Three Skills for Today's
Leaders." First,
strong leaders are able to handle ambiguity and tolerate uncertainty. In other words, good leaders know that they can't control
what is going on. Instead,
they must seek to understand and navigate the ambiguity.
That skill, it seems to me, requires a great deal of reflection
and self-knowledge in a world that rewards action and control. Second,
strong leaders learn how to manage systems.
Complex systems, such as many of the organizations in which we
work, are not linear. They are webs of relationships and dynamics that
interact and connect in a variety of ways.
Good leaders must be able to understand and guide organizational
change (inevitable as it is), even when complexity and pace are
overwhelming. My graduate
students in nonprofit management used to refer to my initial
presentation of organizational behavior as the chaos theory of
management! There was some very real truth to that—our responsibility
as good leaders and managers is to accept the chaos of complex systems
and learn how to bring order out of the chaos in pursuit of
organizational aims. That
requires lots of good reflection and thinking. Finally,
strong leaders recognize that leadership is all about sharing
responsibility with an ever-expanding group of fellow workers.
Peter Block reminds us that "power comes from below"
and good leaders (he calls them good stewards!) help those who have the
power learn to use it well. Our
leadership, then, is about facilitating participation, learning, and
accountability for all of those with a stake in our institution's
mission and work. This often means that our most important task is to keep a
conversation going, to mediate dialogue, to help people think about and
make sense of their work together.
In other words, to create a reflective organization. PRACTICE
TH >>Integrity:
crafting an ethics statement for your organization<< An
organizational (or departmental) ethics statement can be valuable, both
as a finished document and for the process of reflection and
collaboration that its creation occasions. One
way to commence a process that leads to such an ethics statement might
be to use Stephen Carter's helpful framework described in his book,
"Integrity" (New
York: Basic Books, 1998). Carter
reminds us that to be persons (or organizations) of integrity, we must
take three general steps as we face moral decisions and dilemmas: First, we must reflect on the values and relationships that are important to us and are at issue in the moral situations we face in our lives. Second,
we must act based on the values and relationships we have identified in
our moral reflection. Finally,
we must be willing to be publicly accountable for both our moral
reflection and action. We
must be able to describe and argue for the values we hold most deeply
and the actions we have taken based on those values. Carter's
concern is that most Americans (at least) tend to forget the reflection
and accountability demands of integrity.
Instead, we simply act. We're
a Nike society—"just do it" is our motto. I
wonder whether we might bring together representatives of our
institutions to ask what we value as an organization, i.e., to reflect
on our common values and relationships; to explore how and whether (or
not) our moral activity is grounded in our common values; and then to
consider the means by which we are accountable to various publics for
our common values and moral activity. Are we an organization with integrity? Our
reflections and deliberations might provide some important material for
an organizational ethics statement.
And such a statement—aimed at describing and sustaining an
organization with integrity—might just allow us to begin to struggle
with the many cases where our missions and core values don't always get
practiced in our day-to-day lives. >>Administrative
case rounds<< I
have long been intrigued by Stanley Reiser's concept of administrative
case rounds as a strategy for using the discussion of specific
situations in our organizations as opportunities to examine the links
between organizational values and practices.
Adapted from the concept of medical case rounds, where a case is
presented to a group of doctors and nurses from various specialties for
discussion, administrative case rounds bring together diverse
administrative, program, and board constituencies for discussions of
cases that are of some common concern. For
example, here at Wabash, we used our development office stewardship
plans and practices as a common theme for cross-departmental
conversations. Instead of bringing together just the usual suspects (from
the development staff), we also invited representatives from the
President's office, the Dean of Students office, and the admissions
office, to join in a conversation about what stewardship means for our
college. They were
fascinating conversations that resulted in both a better stewardship
plan and a better sense across our campus of how stewardship is part of
our common work. Perhaps
the best outcome was the off-hand comment from one member of the
discussion group that she now understood how much of her job involved
stewardship. We had a
convert. For
more about administrative case rounds, see Reiser's article "The
Ethical Life of Health Care Organizations," (in the Hastings Center
Report, November-December 1994, pp. 28-35). PAY
ATTENTION TO THIS >>Some
of my favorite books<< One
of my all-time best reads is Martha Nussbaum's
"Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and
Public Life" (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), a reflection on her
first couple of years teaching literature to law students at the
University of Chicago. She
argues—in her always erudite and moving way—that literature and
literary imagination can help us to understand and describe what Henry
James once called "the record" of our public lives.
The literary imagination, she claims, is part of public
rationality, the means by which we are able to concern ourselves with
the good of other people whose lives are distant from our own.
Her point seems clear: Read a good book, recognize the common and
not-so-common aspects of our humanity in the stories, and see the
stories as a part of imagining a healthy public discourse and democracy.
Many
of us work with boards of trustees or directors.
Though there are many good books that offer advice on how to
organize the work of boards, I have been most inspired by a wonderful
book about trusteeship titled "Entrusted: The Moral
Responsibilities of Trusteeship" by David H. Smith, professor of
religious studies at Indiana University (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1995). Smith
describes his book as an extended essay intended for "reflective
trustees," those men and women whose service as trustees and
directors of nonprofit organizations has led them to seek to build
communities of inquiry and interpretation.
He addresses the moral parameters of trusteeship. He comments on
the sorts of problems trustees face as they struggle with organizational
vocation. And he concludes
with three general duties of reflective trustees: reasonable support,
standing for justice, and subordinating institutional self-preservation
to mission. Share this book
with the trustee or director you know who cares enough to serve and
wants to find the words to say why. Finally,
a variety of topics in this issue of Notes remind me of the powerful
work of Michael Ignatieff, whose "The Needs of Strangers: An essay
on privacy, solidarity, and the politics of being human," (New
York: Penguin Press, 1984—out of print, I fear) is one of the most
inspiring books I have ever read (and read, and read again).
[Ignatieff, a journalist and photographer, has chronicled many
aspects of our modern experience, including war in the Balkans in his
forthcoming "Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond."]
Like Nussbaum, Ignatieff argues from literature for an
understanding of the aspirations and needs of humans that might sustain
common purpose and action. Ignatieff
reminds us, "We need justice, we need liberty, and we need as much
solidarity as can be reconciled with justice and liberty.
But we also need, as much as anything else, a language adequate
to the times we live in…We need words to keep us human…Without a
public language to help us find our own words, our needs will dry up in
silence." We
need to help each other recover the languages, the vocabularies, the
images that are part of our common heritage and that promise an equally
common future. >>Topics
for the next issue (April 2000)<< * What's the buzz about strategy?
The concept of strategy has received lots of attention in the
management literature. We'll
look at some of the various theories of strategy and perhaps find that
strategy is about doing what you do best, what you care most about, and
what is most needed. * Lessons from our journeys.
Many of us travel a good bit in our work. I've gleaned a few lessons from my travels, lessons that are
part of expanding my perspective on life in the world. *
Linking leadership attributes with organizational results.
Does your organization have a "leadership brand," a way
of leading that is most effective and appropriate for its values and
work? Recent work on
"leadership brand" offers some interesting strategies for
assessing the connections between desired results, leadership styles,
and how we're doing. (c)
Paul Pribbenow, 2000 |