NOTES FROM THE

REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER by Paul Pribbenow, Ph.D.

Volume Five, Number 6 (August 2004)

"What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how."

–W. Wordsworth, from "The Prelude"

NOTES FROM READERS

What you think

My wife, Abigail, and I are about to undertake another international adventure – traveling, sometime before I next correspond with you, to China, where we will adopt Maya, our daughter, who is in an orphanage in Chongqing. We ask your kind thoughts and prayers as we travel, receive this wonderful gift, and return to Rockford. I imagine I’ll have something to say about our travels in the next issue of Notes!

Several good posts from readers after my last issue of Notes:

Tim Burchill from St. Mary’s University of Minnesota writes:

“… I was asked to be the commencement speaker at our (Saint Mary's University of Minnesota ) campus in Nairobi , Kenya last month, and I concluded my remarks with the Benediction you shared in your May newsletter. It was very well received and more than a few graduates told me they found the words personally meaningful.” We’ve gone international with a remarkably universal prayer!

A new reader, Pat Read, vice president for public policy at Independent Sector, writes with various hats on:

“A friend just passed on to me the latest issue of your Notes for the Reflective Practitioner, because you had mentioned the work Independent Sector has been doing on ethics and accountability.  I thought you might be interested to know that I am a Rockford College alumna (class of 1974) and am heading the public policy work for Independent Sector and am deeply involved in all of the work we are doing on federal and state legislation and regulation affecting the sector as well as encouraging best/better practices among boards and organizations in the nonprofit and philanthropic world. The strong liberal arts education I received at Rockford has served me well through a career that has moved from library and information science through publishing and for the last 25 years, nonprofit management and public policy advocacy.” Sometimes our various roles converge magically…

Friend and former colleague at Wabash College , Nancy Doemel, writes (this extended but well worth reading tale):

“Your story about Lin Tao reminded me about the lessons we teach our students by doing.

…. I led (a group of incoming Wabash students) to Indianapolis, (where) we demolished the insides of a house in a Southside, low-income neighborhood, so that a community housing group could rehab it cheaply.  It was a very hot late August - high 90s, humid, and very dirty work (picture the dust from wallboard and the insulation sticking to sweaty faces and arms).   I left the 20 students with their 4 upper class leaders and went to get lunch groceries.  When I returned, the sophomore and junior leaders met me at the curb.  "We're in trouble - they're refusing to work."  I sat on the sidewalk while they sat on the steps facing me, explaining, one by one that they didn't see why they had to do this work, that their parents would be upset to know that they were sleeping on the floor of a church, that they had come from Carmel, a privileged community, and didn't have to do this dangerous, sweaty, dirty work.  I listened while they complained, but the gist of it was that they felt they were being forced to do something they shouldn't have to do.  Finally, one of the quiet students in the group said, "You know, I did this kind of stuff with my church youth group, because it is important to help other people."  Another one said, "I've been on mission trips, and believe me, I've slept in much worse places than this church."  Finally, when they were finished, I said to them, "Do you want to know why I think we're doing this work?" They said yes.  I told them that no matter who they were, no matter what neighborhood they came from or what previous experiences they had, they were blessed by many, many gifts.  They were about to receive a fine education, a nearly free education, one that would equip them to make their way in the world and live in neighborhood far from this one.  But this house, and the pride of ownership it would provide, might be just the help some family needed to make their own way in the world.  These students were paying forward through this work for the opportunity they were about to receive at Wabash.  The students thought a little, finally asked whether I'd brought any cold drinks, and went back to work - in fact, began to compete for who could fill the dumpster most efficiently.  That might have been the end of the story, but it wasn't. 

This spring at Wabash, a couple of the seniors here decided they should petition the Student Senate for $40,000 to use in….help(ing) the local Habitat for Humanity group build a house on ground just beyond the new field house, in a low-income neighborhood.  The debate about whether student activity funds should be used for this - instead of another band on campus - was fierce, but the students persisted and won the argument.  Over a period of several weeks, nearly 300 students and local residents participated in the Habitat project. 

Who was that student leader who persisted?  John Smith - the kid who sat on the top step and told me that he came from Carmel, he was privileged, he didn't think he owed anybody anything, and he wasn't going to do this work.  I saw John at graduation this spring, and I told him how proud I was of his contributions to Wabash.  I reminded him of that conversation on the steps of the Indianapolis house.  His eyes welled up with tears and he said, "You know, you're right.  I never made that connection."

I continue to think that we are all teachers and educators, no matter whether we're in the classroom or pursuing other vocations.  And if philanthropy is important to us, we have many opportunities to teach it to others.”

Occasionally, I (or my colleagues) refer to items from previous issues of Notes. If you have not been a subscriber previously, and wish to review our conversations, past issues of Notes are available on-line at www.jgacounsel.com. The website version of Notes also includes helpful hyperlinks to sources for purchasing or subscribing to the various publications mentioned in Notes. I thank my friends at Johnson, Grossnickle & Associates for their many years of abiding support for our reflective practice.

REFLECT ON THIS

Making lofty missions real – the strategy platform

One of the abiding themes of my own research and writing for the past several years has been the issue of how to translate an organization’s priorities and values throughout its daily work. How do we ensure that every front line worker understands, practices and is held accountable for how his or her work is linked to organizational mission, vision and strategy?

Many have offered potential solutions to this dilemma – Peter Block’s work on stewardship and Noel Tichy’s “teachable points of view” come to mind. Now comes Harvard Business School professor V. Kasturi Rangan offering a roadmap for nonprofit organizations in his article, “Lofty Missions, Down-to-Earth Plans” (Harvard Business Review, March 2004).

Rangan’s basic premise is that translating mission statements into effective mission-based programs requires systemic methods of program planning, development and execution. He suggests four primary steps in this systemic method as he urges nonprofits to imagine a stairway linking core mission to program and activities:

• The mission statement – get it right, make it inspiring, capture the core values, help people imagine a long-term process that culminates in solving a major problem – Habitat for Humanity intends “to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the face of the earth.” Wow – no how-to’s, a statement of (what Hank Russo called) our reasons for existing.
• The operational mission – this step translates the lofty mission into quantitative measures that allow an organization to trace its impact. These can be measures like numbers of people served – but it also can be negative measures like numbers of people still homeless. The operational mission answers provocative questions: What is your unique role in doing something about this problem? What is the environment for your work on this problem right now and what difference does it make?
• The strategy platform – this tells you how the operational mission will be achieved. Rangan suggests that there are four components of the strategy platform: client and market development; program and service development and delivery; funder and donor development; and organization development and governance. You can imagine each of these four functional areas of the platform arrayed around the mission and operational mission, ensuring that the links to each component are clear and measurable. Each component links to others as well because they share a link to mission. For example, a particular form of delivering a service or product (Habitat builds houses for those who otherwise could not afford to buy their own) provides a link to potential donors (for Habitat, imagine the authentic link to the building products industry).
• The choice of programs – with the strategy platform in place, the process of developing programs is always linked to the question: How does this program contribute (or not) to the appropriate strategy component? Habitat, for example, may have an opportunity to participate in a program that would appear to serve its mission (e.g., educating homeowners about financial issues so that they do not risk losing their homes by developing debt or credit problems), but they must ask whether this particular program fits in the strategy platform they have developed – or does someone else already provide the service?

Rangan concludes his fine essay by pointing out how this model for translating mission into action also helps nonprofit board members to ask the “right” questions of an organization – questions such as: Is the core mission a statement of an important problem worthy of our dedicated attention? What is our strategy platform and does the organization have a coherent model to execute strategy? Does our strategy platform contribute to mission impact and how do we know?

As nonprofit organizations seek to be ever more effective and responsible, it seems to me that Rangan offers us an accessible and focused model for ensuring that our noble claims are translated into our worthy work. And that is a crusade I will never give up on!

Erasing boundaries: a meditation on vocabulary and engagement

I have just concluded an intriguing consultant project, helping my city’s human services department develop a strategic plan for its work. The department, which offers community block grant assistance, Head Start programs, and energy assistance, has an identity problem in our community, despite a strong track record of service to vulnerable citizens.

Apart from the specifics of the department’s work, what I found most compelling about the process was that the staff and board members pretty quickly agreed on the primary obstacle to effectiveness in their work: The rest of the community viewed the human services department as its safety net for the poor and not as a facilitator of community action to help create more social and economic inclusion.

In other words, as we have more and more professionalized the work of meeting the needs of the poor (through social workers and other community agency staff), our society has pushed that work to the periphery of our social imagination. We are pleased that someone takes care of the poor so that we don’t have to think much about it – and that ends up making the work of the good people in organizations like the human services department marginal and fragmented.

Interestingly enough, two of the most influential teachers in my life – Jane Addams and Michael Ignatieff – have taught me how we must respond to this marginalization of the work of meeting people’s needs. Our response must be to change our vocabulary and to awaken our imaginations to understand our common needs, our common aspirations, and the work we must pursue in common to ensure that our needs and aspirations are addressed by society.

The human services department staff suggested that their vision was to “erase the boundaries between the poor and the rest of our community” by finding ways to educate the entire community about our common needs for social and economic inclusion. They considered how to change our community’s ways of talking and thinking about a lack of financial resources. They challenged themselves to become leader-citizens, not just pursuing their daily work for the department, but positioning themselves as resources for all citizens who might join in the work of meeting needs and spurring dreams.

Michael Ignatieff reminds us that we need, “as much as anything else, language adequate to the times we live in…We need words to keep us human…Our needs are made of words: they come to us in speech, and they can die for lack of expression. Without a public language to help us find our own words, our needs will dry up in silence.” (The Needs of Strangers, p. 141-42)

And Jane Addams remarks with great power, “We know instinctively that if we grow contemptuous of our fellows, and consciously limit our intercourse to certain kinds of people whom we have previously decided to respect, we not only tremendously circumscribe our range of life, but limit the scope of our ethics.” (Democracy and Social Ethics, p.8)

What a privilege it was to be part of a group of professionals who had a deep hunger for the public language and the social ethic that will change our world. We must take a lesson.

PRACTICE THIS

Getting unstuck!

Perhaps the most ubiquitous book in the management literature these past several months is Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro’s Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World (Portfolio, 2004). A sign, I imagine, of a relevant problem! The logic of the book is: Recognize the symptoms, get the diagnosis right, and then face your “stuckness” head on. There will be obstacles, for sure—think office politics, distorted values, change overload—but the message here is that we can all learn to cope and even prosper.

Yamashita and Spataro identify seven states (the Serious Seven) related to being stuck:

States of Stuck

1. Overwhelmed: Problem is too much going on, not enough people or time. Action plan: Be clear about which mode your team is in—"blue sky" (big picture) or "tuning" (what works now).
2. Exhausted : Problem is your team is paralyzed, burned out. Action plan: Look at your watch. Companies that measure results against the time invested tend to outperform their peers.
3. Directionless : Problem is no big picture; action but no results. Action plan: Put your idea in words. Articulating it will help you see potential problems that can then be addressed.
4. Hopeless : Problem is the passion is gone; the team lacks purpose. Action plan: Come up with a moonshot—a big, ambitious goal to unite and motivate the team.
5. Battle-Torn : Problem is your team is at war. Action plan: Build a common identity or choose a common enemy before going forward.
6. Worthless : Problem is poor metrics make measuring success impossible. Action plan: Prototype the end objective rather than constantly debating where the team is going.
7. Alone Problem is your team isn't in sync. Action plan: Use public recognition and praise as a motivator.

Lots of concrete examples and easy to grasp concepts make this diagnostic tool one of the most helpful I’ve seen since Lee Bolman and Terry Deal’s Reframing Organizations (Jossey-Bass, 1991, 1997) – high praise! And who doesn’t feel stuck every once and a while?

Tactics for changing minds

How do we get our colleagues to see the potential of an exciting new idea we believe will transform our organization, our work, our community? Over and over I have workshop participants tell me that, though they believe an idea or strategy will make a real difference in their organization, they just can’t fight through the bureaucracy or resistance they find all around them. What to do?

Harvard education professor Howard Gardner (of multiple intelligence fame) writes in his new book, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds (Harvard Business School Press, 2004) about seven levers for breaking through resistance to new ideas.

To persuade someone to embrace a new idea, use:

• Reason, presenting all relevant considerations of an issue, pro and con
• Research, relevant data and information about your idea
• Resonance, convincing your listener because of your track record, effective presentation, sense of audience
• Representational redescription, recalling that different people learn in different ways and delivering your idea in a variety of formats
• Resources and rewards, find resources to present your idea and incentives for others to adopt it
• Real-world events, drawing on current affairs to make a persuasive and concrete case for your idea
• Resistances, using considerable energy to identify and overcome the main resistances to your idea

Multiple intelligences applied to one of the vexing issues of managing change – know how people learn and meet them there. Good teaching!

PAY ATTENTION TO THIS

Walden after 150 Years

Cedar Crest College English professor, Carolyn Foster Segal, writing in the July 16, 2004 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education celebrates the 150 th anniversary of the publication of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden with an intriguing letter to “Henry.” She reminds us all of the many distractions we face in our contemporary lives – the current dynamics and issues in our lives that challenge us to find our own Walden-experience, to be in search of “the true necessaries and means of life.” And to proclaim, along with Thoreau, that “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Resources for your reflective practice

The buzz on the president’s list serve this summer was about a new book by James Surowiecki entitled The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (Doubleday, 2004). The title pretty much sums up the argument – more about Surowiecki’s thesis in a future issue.

I also had the occasion on a trans-Atlantic flight to finish former Connecticut College president Claire Gaudiani’s The Greater Good: How Philanthropy Drives the American Economy and Can Save Capitalism (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2003). Again, there will be more about this provocative text in an upcoming issue of Notes.

Loving the questions

As a new academic year begins (my 29 th consecutive fall on a college campus!), Rainer Rilke’s wise words seem relevant once again:

“You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living: train yourself to it--but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing."

[from Letters to a Young Poet]

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Topics for the next issue (October 2004)

• Wisdom and citizenship
• A commonplace on generosity
• Family thoughts

(c) Paul Pribbenow, 2003