Finding Our Way

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“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
— Rudolf Bahro

Figuring out how to create our right livelihood in a world of jarring uncertainty is one of the most important tasks we face.  With this post I’d like to introduce you to Meg Wheatley and a few others I found to help me think through what I needed to learn, when I needed to learn it. Their ideas are as fresh today as they were twenty years ago, and their prescient ideas are more important than ever.

I've titled this post Finding Our Way after a book by Meg of the same name, and I've opened it with the quote she chose to introduce us to this task.  What follows is a quick look at the people whose vision and ideas I have blended to create my collaborative approach to Organization Design.

The Dalai Lama  

After two decades of rewarding non-profit management and fundraising engagements, two devilish back-to-back contract experiences stopped me in my tracks.  I found myself being asked to fundraise for organizations that, upon inspection, were in no condition to effectively use (let alone account for) the funds I would be helping to raise.  Sticky wicket for a fundraiser.

The leaders involved were well known, well-meaning, and highly respected business men and women.  And although they knew how to run successful businesses, and I knew fundraising like the back of my hand, I discovered that together we didn’t have the requisite knowledge, skills, or time to get their social-profit organizations into shape for accountable success.  I cut both contracts short.

Despondent about the future of our sector, I packed up my old Volvo with books and fly-fishing gear and headed for a cabin in Wyoming to give my head a shake:  Now What?!

Among the books I chose to bring along were a few by the Dalai Lama, including one enticingly titled, The Way to Freedom.  Over four months, through his writings and the "away time" I had carved out, I learned to meditate as well as how to re-kindle basic, value-driven confidence.   As the summer slipped by, my frustration morphed into curiosity, and I began to think about how to address the challenges I saw harming our sector's efforts.  

Peter Drucker

The first thing I wanted to do when I got back was to learn as much as I could about business.  It didn't take long to find my guy:  Peter Drucker, a businessman, social-sector advocate, and prolific writer known as “The Father of Modern Management.”  Peter was 90 when I found him, and he was still at the top of his game –– and running conferences!

I attended my first Drucker Conference in LA in 2000, and another in Dallas a couple years later.  Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions, and the wonderful people he brought in not just to speak, but to truly teach, confirmed my mid-life course-correction: Yes. Our sector had much to learn.  Here's a taste from those conferences:

Fred Kofman

The next piece of the non-profit puzzle I wanted to dive into was Leadership: How to effectively lead a non-profit?!

I chose to go to the international Authentic Leadership in Action conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia because in its salad days, ALIA attracted cream-of-the-crop leadership scholars and practitioners.  As anticipated, this single week was another life-changer.

Because Fred Kofman literally wrote the book on Conscious Business, and was the recipient of MIT’s Teacher of the Year award, I figured I couldn’t go wrong choosing to spend the bulk of my week learning from him.  (I wasn't disappointed, and suggest if you read only one business book in your life you make it Conscious Business.)

During this week I was introduced to six more giants of Leadership exploration in a swiftly changing, challenging world:

Meg Wheatley & The Women of South Africa

Meg Wheatley is a scholar in the most exciting sense of the word, and a fierce proponent, trailblazer, and teacher of humanizing leadership and community practices.  After meeting Meg in Nova Scotia and devouring her books upon return, I joined her on her Women’s Learning Journey to South Africa in 2002.  Our group's mission:  To learn about collaborative self-organizing  from the women of South Africa.

Meg took fifteen women from four continents to Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Soweto to meet sixteen groups of women in who, with little or no resources, were successfully taking on the challenges of racial and gender injustice, HIV/AIDS, extreme poverty, government corruption, environmental degradation and the continuing trauma of apartheid. Having witnessed what these women managed to accomplish by steadfastly working together to create and scale up their own solutions to deeply systemic problems strengthened our resolve to learn how to do the same.

Tim Brown

And finally, I'd like to mention Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO.  I haven't sought him out (yet), but Tim’s effort to bring Design Thinking to anyone who wants to learn how to engender empathetic, human-centred change is unparalleled.  He’s taught me a lot through his writing; I think he’d be fun to learn with in person.
 

Your Turn

I hope you will want to check out some of these people's ideas.  If you are interested in leading social-profit change, you will find the time well spent.  And you have a few minutes, I’d love to hear the particular challenges you have struggled with, and who you have discovered to help you find your way.   We're all in this together -- perhaps more today than ever.