 |
Notes for
the Reflective Practitioner by Dr. Paul Pribbenow ARCHIVES |
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| Philanthropy
is a journey.
Let JGA be your guide. Johnson, Grossnickle and
Associates LLC |
Volume
One, Number One (October 1999)
"What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how." (R. Rilke) Dear friends, It is a great pleasure to welcome you to my Notes. As I mentioned in my letter announcing this project, I have a personal commitment to reflective practice and to encouraging others to be reflective practitioners. I hope and trust that this bi-monthly newsletter with my various musings and ideas about our common work will serve as an opportunity for all of us to pursue both our personal and pedagogical commitments to reflective practice. A few logistics. All of you receiving this newsletter by email have received a confirming email from the mail server at Wabash College. I am grateful for the good help and resources of Wabash in managing this list. There are over 100 of you on the initial subscription list and I imagine our numbers may grow as we extend our conversations. As the mail server email indicated, you can "unsubscribe" from this list by sending the appropriate message to the server. For the time being, though, I will manage the subscriptions, so if you know of someone who might enjoy receiving Notes, please e-mail me with the requisite information. For the sake of not overloading the emailboxes of our colleagues on this list, please send any comments or questions directly to me at pribbenp@wabash.edu and not to the entire list (by replying to Notes-l). At some future point, we may want to make this list "interactive," but for now let's wait and see. I am very pleased that "Notes for the Reflective Practitioner" also is available on two organizational web pages: www.jgacounsel.com and www.nsfre.org. The first website is managed by Johnson, Grossnickle & Associates, a consulting firm in Franklin, Indiana. The folks at JGA are very committed to reflective practice in their own work, as well as for their clients, and it is a privilege to be linked to their site. I also am grateful to Paulette Maehara, the president of NSFRE, and to Dick Chobot, the new vice president for professional advancement at NSFRE, for their kind invitation to make Notes available through the NSFRE site. I continue to believe-and I am nothing if not full of hope-that this newsletter will appear about every eight weeks or so. I have plenty of material! I also have a very full-time job. I trust that whenever you receive my Notes, you will share them, ponder them, disagree with them, take them to new places-and then let me know what you think so that I can share your reflections with the entire list. I'm just trying to get the conversation going; I'll count on you to help keep it alive and rich and challenging for your colleagues. ****** REFLECT ON THIS >>What is reflective practice?<< The concept of reflective practice is most fully-developed in the work of Donald Schön, who taught at MIT and wrote many books about the topic, including "The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action" (Basic Books, 1983) and "Educating the Reflective Practitioner" (Jossey-Bass, 1987). For Schön, there has arisen in our society a gap between a conception of professional knowledge (as developed by professional schools and the professions themselves) and the actual competencies required of practitioners in their work. In response to this gap, Schön proposes reflective practice as a way of understanding what he calls knowing-in-action (how theories are developed), reflecting-in-action (the on-going dialogue between reflection and practice in our lives), and professional practice (how professional-client relationships are developed). In this way, reflective practice is a way of being professional that looks much more like artistry than science. He commends the reflective practice model as a form of professional education (like apprenticeships and internships rather than sitting in classrooms and soaking up professional knowledge!). He also shows how reflective practice has implications for the relationships between professionals and their various publics-it demystifies professional expertise. We might say that in this view, professionals are neither the heroes sent with their technical expertise to save society nor the villains who would use their special knowledge to keep control over us, but rather, they are participants in a common, public conversation about the important work they help us do. I recommend Schön's work to you-it is rich and fascinating reading. For our purposes, we shall set the horizons of reflective practice in this way. Reflective practice is a way of living that: * values the mutual and abiding dialogue between what we think, what we believe in, and what we do; * points to the common and historical nature of human experience, leading us to see living as common work rather than simply my personal project; * accepts the tensions and dynamics of our existence as a source of imagination and hope rather than a sign that we just haven't got things under control yet; * is grounded in the profession of faith-faith in something larger and wiser than our own powers (we might say that this is what it means to be a professional!) >>The nature of the professions<< Earlier this summer, I had the privilege to participate in a Think-Tank on Fund Raising Research. I presented a paper to the gathering of fund-raising practitioners, scholars, and other reflective types, entitled "Love and Work: Reconceiving our Models of Professions." My central point was that the accepted models of professions in our society (primarily based on a medical model) don't do justice to the wonderful dynamic between what we love and the work we pursue. I suggested (with a nod to H. Richard Niebuhr's classic study, "Christ and Culture") that there are various ways to think about the relationship between love and work in the professions: there is love against work, love and work as co-existing, love and work in paradox, and love transforming work. If you think about it, you probably can put your own attitudes toward your professional work in one of these categories-and probably categorize some of your colleagues as well! You can read more about my ideas in the essay from the Think-Tank, which will be published next year in "Public Policy and Public Trust: Issues for Fund Raising Research," (John Wiley & Sons, expected late 2000-if you can't wait, give me a call and I'll send you a copy of the paper.) My inspiration for the love and work framework was an elegant essay by Wendell Berry, entitled "Health as Membership" (in "Another Turn of the Crank," Counterpoint Books, 1995). Listen to Berry's beautiful words: "And so these two incompatible worlds (love and work) might also be designated by the terms "amateur" and "professional"-amateur, in the literal sense of lover, one who participates for love; and professional, in the modern sense of one who performs highly specialized or technical procedures for pay." (105-106) Which would you rather be: amateur or professional? Can you be both? Berry is not sure; I have hope, because of the example many of you set for us. >>The philanthropic dimension of our lives<< My friend and teacher, Bob Payton, has a provocative essay in a recent collection ("Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector in a Changing America," Clotfelter and Ehrlich, eds., Indiana University Press, 1999). The essay, entitled "A Tradition in Jeopardy," is Bob's personal history of moral imagination, challenging us to think about how the tradition of philanthropy is one of several "mother-traditions" in our democracy, which helps to nurture social trust and human values. He asks us in the essay to think with him about the philanthropic dimension of civil rights, of liberal education, of professionalism-and then he challenges us to be stewards of the philanthropic tradition that is so inextricably bound up in our experience as Americans. This is such powerful material. Why have we allowed philanthropy to become simply a sector, defined by public policy and organizational boundaries? What special responsibility do we bear as those involved in philanthropic fund-raising to be stewards of the philanthropic tradition and what it means for our common well-being? Consider your own role-your own autobiography-as a steward of the "love of humankind." There is a philanthropic dimension to our lives that we cannot afford to lose. Teach your children and the children of others well about this philanthropic tradition. It is ours and theirs to care for. >>Stewardship and leadership<< I believe that the great American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, had a point, when, in a 1931 essay, he asked "Is Stewardship Ethical?" Niebuhr's message was that the use of stewardship by mainline Protestant churches had become so watered-down (just a synonym for fund-raising, he said) that it was no longer ethical. He said that if these churches truly understood stewardship, they would radically change their lives. I believe that the same can be said today about the use of stewardship in our organizations. Stewardship changes your life if you genuinely accept the notion that we are gifted people; people to whom much has been given and from whom much is expected. Stewardship demands that we take responsibility for how we order our common resources-if you are gifted as an organization (the Biblical writers teach us that stewards managed households!), then how do you take care of those gifts by ordering/organizing your life to full advantage? Some people conclude that being good stewards means being conservative, not risking anything. I contend that genuine stewardship actually challenges us to seek change for the better. I have spent a good bit of time reviewing the recent literature on organizational change and want to contend that a stewardship perspective on management and leadership (taking care of the gifts we have been given) gives us at least four very effective tools for being change-agents: * Stewardship teaches us that life in organizations is value-based and thus one of the things we must do as we face change is to articulate and embrace those values-they will be our anchor as change happens; * Stewardship teaches us that life in organizations is multifaceted and full of the tension between good and evil (stewardship is realistic!). Therefore, a stewardship perspective on organizational change requires that we have a holistic understanding of what is going on in an organization as it faces change. The problems we face in organizational change may be about structure; they may be about the fit between organizational and personal needs; they may be about power; they may be about meaning and culture-likely, they are about some combination of all four aspects of human experience. Our responsibility as good stewards is to understand these tensions and dynamics-imagination and strategies reside in the tensions. * Stewardship teaches us that organizations must be cultures of accountability, not cultures of entitlement-especially when facing change, when accountability may be our only tool against the fear that change always precipitates. * Stewardship teaches us that organizations must be teaching and learning communities, places where change is faced with all of the gifts we have been given, no matter where they are found and who possesses them. Only teaching and learning helps us to find all of the gifts we need. If you want to read more about stewardship and organizational life, I highly recommend Peter Block's "Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest" (Berrett-Koehler, 1993), which offers a very concrete plan for implementing stewardship. >>Pursuing Accountability<< We are in the midst of a fascinating strategic planning exercise here at Wabash College, and it has reminded me once again of how easy it is for those of us who work in mission-based organizations to forget the claim upon us to be accountable for the public trust that is inherent in our missions and in our very right to exist in American society. How do we argue for, become advocates for, the values and ideas that our missions embody? That is the claim of pursuing accountability. In July, I had the opportunity to lead a workshop in St. Louis for a group of senior fund-raisers and foundation executives. As we talked about accountability, it became clear that most of the folks in the room saw it only as the need to file reports on time-in other words, to have accountability imposed and instead of pursued. Until one of the fund-raisers in the group said: When I am in the midst of a foundation-funded project and something great has been achieved (or, we've run into some tough obstacles), where do I go to be accountable when the report is not due for another six months? How do I share with the funder, with other organizations, with the wider public, news of our successes and questions about how we might do things better? That is the pursuing accountability question. The structures of our lives sometimes keep us from telling our stories-good or bad. And what is accountability if not the telling of our stories-good or bad so that others might join us, learn from us, teach us, be inspired by us? >>Ideopathic systems<< I was so very pleased to see that the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Faith, Health, and Ethics again has begun to publish its wonderful journal, "Second Opinion." The Park Ridge Center, based in Chicago, was founded by Martin Marty and several colleagues some 15 years ago and has played a significant role in extending important conversations about how various religious and moral traditions intersect with the health care system. "Second Opinion" is the Center's scholarly journal. (For more information, contact the Park Ridge Center at (312) 266-6086). In the new issue of "Second Opinion," I was intrigued by William Henry's provocative essay entitled "Idiopathic Health Systems: A More Powerful Way to Look at Health Resources." His essay has a powerful message for all of us, whether in health care or not. Idiopathic is a term used by pathologists to describe a disease with an unknown origin. Henry says that the term, idiopathic, may be appropriate for thinking about our personal health systems. In contrast to the monolithic healthcare delivery system, built to serve corporate and apersonal needs, an idiopathic health system is the way each of us builds and manages our own healthcare system, using the various resources available to us (including, but not limited to, medical professionals, family members, religious communities, neighbors, alternative medical practices, and so forth). The point Henry makes is that idiopathic systems are a more realistic way of understanding human experience in our society. Though some may want to contend that the monolith exists, the truth is everybody makes his/her own way in seeking to be healthy. In this way of thinking about healthcare, health is construed as a means to an end, not an end in itself; compliance is no longer defined solely by healthcare providers who set the standards; evidence of health is much more subjective; learning is a central aspect of seeking health (because we don't rely solely on someone's expertise to save us); and so on. I wonder in what ways we might think of our organizations as idiopathic systems? What if, instead of attempting to control organizational life by prescribing certain monolithic practices and policies, we allowed solutions to problems to arise from the natural connections between different resources available within our organization (people, power, moral suasion, outside help, and so on)? I think about how we are attempting to build a more fluid advancement office here at Wabash. I might impose the structure to make that happen-or I might allow alumni affairs, fund-raising, and public affairs staffs to find their own solutions to common issues and needs. What if the answers came up from below, from people on the front-lines who have a clear and pragmatic view of how to get things done? Am I able to accept and encourage idiopathic management styles? Food for thought. ****** PRACTICE THIS >>The stewardship covenant<< One of the exercises associated with my stewardship presentations asks participants to develop stewardship covenants for their organizations. I ask them to name four or five stewardship principles-values or ideas that embody the meaning of stewardship in the organization-and then to think about how to translate the stewardship covenant into practice. Here at Wabash, our stewardship covenant has five principles: * Students always come first * Philanthropy is common work * Always balance tradition with the future * Never wait for someone else to take the lead * Fluidity between offices and departments is a sign of abundance Each of these principles translates into action, each and every day. Can you name the principles of your organization's stewardship covenant-and tell us what difference they make to your day-to-day life? >>Story-telling and planning<< I had a good time last spring leading an all-day workshop for fund raising executives entitled "Weaving a Social Fabric: The Role of Stories in Organizational Culture, Philanthropy, and Planning." The impetus for this presentation was two-fold : One was Neil Postman's powerful diagnosis of our lives: "Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we are awash with information without even a broom to help us get rid of it. Information comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular...And there is no loom to weave it all into fabric. No transcendent narratives to provide us with moral guidance, social purpose, intellectual economy. No stories to tell us what we need to know and what we do not need to know." ("Utne Reader," July-August 1995, p. 35). The second impetus was a wonderful article in the "Harvard Business Review," entitled "Strategic Stories: How 3-M is Rewriting Business Planning," (HBR, May-June 1998, p. 41-50). You will enjoy both Postman and the HBR on stories, they remind us that human experience is narrative-and thus stories are the best way to persuade, motivate, depict, criticize-in other words, the best way to live. * Consider the role of personal stories, using autobiography to illustrate moral imagination (see Bob Payton's essay, discussed above) * Think about "a teachable point of view," Noel Tichy's model for thinking about how personal stories (and their translations) help to shape organizational culture (more about Tichy in later issues). * What about stories and planning, stories that help to break down the linear, hierarchical model of our lives? Stories meander, like life; bullet points attempt to normalize dynamics that cannot be normalized. * And then there are stories about philanthropy, about the work we do in common every day with our staffs and donors and volunteers. Practice story-telling and see how it frees you to see the world in new ways. ****** PAY ATTENTION TO THIS >>A few suggestions<< Two books that might be instructive for those of you struggling with leadership issues: Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal, "Leading with Soul: An Uncommon Journey of the Spirit (Jossey-Bass, 1995) and Patrick Lencioni, "The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable" (Jossey-Bass, 1998). These also are good books for senior executives to read together and discuss. My favorite magazines-which you will see mentioned here a good bit in future issues-are: "Fast Company"-chock-full of fascinating and provocative articles (and ads!) about leadership and change in a high-tech world; "Harvard Business Review"-always something relevant to our work, ideas and practices we need to consider for our organizations; "Second Opinion"-see my comments above, we owe it to ourselves to look for ideas in systems other than our own; and "The Wilson Quarterly"-history and politics and ideas for the liberally-educated. For those of you especially interested in the relationship between religion and your work, I recommend "The Mars Hill Tapes," a cassette tape series that features interviews with scholars and others about the religious aspects of our lives (call Mars Hill Audio at (800) 331-6407 or tapes@marshillsaudio.org). >>The Art of Dialogue<< A recent article in "Fast Company" (October 1999) featured the work of Bill Isaacs, the author of "Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together" (Doubleday, 1999). Isaacs says the key skills of good conversation are: find your own voice and then speak with it (offer your thoughts in a way that engages people), listen generously (leave room in your mind for someone else's ideas), and listen respectfully (assume that speakers know what they mean to say, even if they're not clear in saying it). Isaacs goes on to describe a four-stage architecture of conversation: stage one is polite talk, the usual banter of everyday life; stage two is breakdown, where conflict between positions becomes obvious; stage three is inquiry, where conflict has led to real dialogue; and stage four is flow, the folding of individual voices into a group voice. There is much more to Isaac's theory-well worth studying and a helpful diagnostic tool in thinking about how conversations evolve. And good, healthy conversation is at the core of our lives. >>Enough<< Another recent issue of "Fast Company" (July-August 1999) was devoted to the issue of how much is enough. Questions of sustainability, of healthy organizations, of healthy and balanced lives, were the order of the day. There are some wonderful articles in the issue. The issues raised there go to heart of the need for reflective practice in our lives. If it is all about doing and doing more, without time for reflection and contemplation and rest, how can we hope to sustain ourselves and our planet. The articles in "Fast Company" led me back to perhaps my favorite book of all time, Parker Palmer's "The Active Life: Wisdom for Work, Creativity, and Caring" (just reissued by Jossey-Bass, 1999). Palmer's beautiful and moving essays remind all of us that reflection (what he calls contemplation) and practice (what he calls action) can never be separated from each other-and that, in fact, the integration of reflection and practice is a spiritual act. Amen. ****** Topics for the next issue (December 1999) >> How do we create seamless, integrated organizations? Our publics deserve it, our missions mandate it, and the Web makes it possible. Are you ready for radical organizational change? >> Do you view your work as a calling, a vocation? What do those words mean in our busy, bottom-line oriented lives? Can we recover the sense of calling in our lives? >> Do you have a teachable point of view? How do you share it with those around you? >> What disciplines do you have in your life? Do you read, pray, exercise, write? Professional disciplines may be the key to recovering a sense of the awe and wonder of the work we have the privilege to do. (c) Paul Pribbenow, 1999 |