Month: October 2023

The Invisible Crown

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Not long ago, I had the chance to speak to a friend who is facing a major health challenge in their nuclear family.

The bravery that they are showing is astonishing, a reminder that courage isn’t a thing anyone would choose; it is simply what required in the face of unspeakable challenges.

As we chatted, this friend shared some hard-earned wisdom: “Getting older really sucks, but it’s also a million times better than the alternative.”

When I was in my 20s, my cousin, who is very religious, would remind me that most of us walk through the world wearing an invisible crown: it is the crown of good health and good fortune, and most days we fail to see it.

We forget it is there, forget how beautiful it is, forget how lucky we are to have it on.

Until it’s gone.

Of course, our normal, day-to-day challenges are very real. Life throws us all sorts of curveballs, and it’s natural to ride ups and downs of the emotional roller coaster.

But we can also build in some moments in every day to consciously appreciate all the good things—to see our own crowns.

Doing this regularly—having a practice of gratitude and appreciation—is one of the best ways to stay grounded, happy, and healthy.

Leaders Operate in a Low Gravity Environment

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

For years, I thought of myself as a flat-organization person.

After all, I value what each person has to say.

I know that good ideas come from everywhere, and the best ideas rarely come from the top.

I want to have genuine relationships with the people around me.

And I don’t want these relationships to be impacted by our relative positions of authority in the company or organization we work in.

But what I want is not the same thing as what is.

The reality is that each person comes into each organization with an inherited orientation towards authority.

And it’s the job of the person with authority to understand this and act accordingly.

That means that, if you have authority, you have to remember how amplified each of your actions is: the more authority you have, the further your words carry, the more likely it is that they will land with a bigger impact than you intended, the greater chance that what you do and don’t say will be noticed by more people than you expect.

I find it helpful to think of myself standing on the moon: each step is much bigger than it would be on earth.

And every leader operates in this sort of low-gravity environment.

Adjust accordingly.

What Implementation Really Means

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My first job, in the mid 90s, was as a management consultant. Though I was often working 70+ hours a week, on some level I knew the job was easy:

  1. Gather information, from inside and outside the company we were working with
  2. Understand client needs, and trends in the marketplace
  3. Talk to folks who knew what was going right, and going wrong
  4. Do a bunch of data analysis
  5. Write it all down in a coherent story
  6. Present that story to the client
  7. Walk away

The job—at least how I experienced it as a more junior person—boiled down to synthesizing and collating what was already known. Often, the main purpose was to force a set of conversations within the client company, by laying out an existing, but murky, perspective clearly.

After that, our job was to walk away. We’d leave the “implementation” to the company, as if that were just the last, eighth step in the process.

Nearly three decades later, I find myself in a world where all the world’s information—and more, thanks to AI—is literally at our fingertips. Everywhere we turn we find versions of 10 Tips to Be More Effective, 8 Ways to Inspire Your Team, 12 Steps to Driving Your Strategy Through Your Company.

The catch is this: it’s one thing to consume all of this information, to reflect on the gaps between what’s described and what you see in your organization.  And it’s another thing entirely to turn awareness of these gaps into real and meaningful change.

The “implementation” is not a small part of the overall job. It is often the whole job.

The job of making change happen with and through people, given all the existing constraints—culture, customers, expectations, old habits.

The job of doing it in a way that makes everyone empowered and excited, that treats them as part of the solution.

That’s the hard part, every time.

By all means, be curious and active in consuming information about better way to do things. We need that curiosity and external focus, always.

But also remember that there are few stances that are safer than that of the person who sits on the sidelines, like I did when I was a management consultant, describing what could be, and leaving the “implementation” to someone else (or, worse, sitting on the sidelines with arms crossed, saying to anyone who will listen something like, “If only they would [blank] then everything would be better.”)

There are few stances than are easier and safer than describing what needs to be done, and placing the weight of inaction at someone else’s feet.

And there are few stances more courageous than putting yourself on the hook, getting your own hands dirty, and walking the path from idea to implementation.

That’s called leadership.

Anecdotal Evidence Won’t Help Us Understand Financial Inclusion

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a piece I just published reflecting on the findings of the 60 Decibels 2023 Microfinance Index, which we launched last week. As an industry, it’s time to stop falling prey to superficial claims about “lives impacted” that masquerade for meaningful impact; and it’s equally important that we question broad-brush journalism that relies on a handful of targeted customer interviews to paint the picture of an entire industry. We say that we are in the business of improving peoples’ lives. If that is true, then we owe these people the respect and deference of listening directly to them in a systematic, rigorous way, to hear what they have to say about what is happening in their own lives. My full article is here.

 

An article published last year in Bloomberg was highly critical of the microfinance industry and the international institutions that invest in it. The article described many negative practices—including but not limited to aggressive debt collection—and implied that the microfinance industry is doing serious harm to customers while international, public, investors turn a profit.

While there are, in fact, serious issues in the microfinance sector that need to be addressed—including over-indebtedness, debt collection practices and discrimination—these issues need to be seen in the context of many of the very positive impacts that microfinance is having for clients. And, more importantly, both the negative and positive impacts of microfinance need to be quantified objectively, to better understand the proportion of clients microfinance is working for, and the proportion that it’s not.

This kind of balanced approach is not possible when reporting is done with small scale,  largely anecdotal evidence about a complex situation on the ground.

As I have said in the past, social interventions like microfinance loans vary a lot in their characteristics and impact across contexts and periods. It is problematic to use a handful of interviews with clients or “experts” and extrapolate about an entire country or industry from these narrative accounts. And yet, the basis for the article’s broad claims are “dozens” of interviews with microfinance borrowers, along with expert interviews—a radically narrow sample from which draw sweeping conclusions.

What we need is large-scale, objective, comparable customer data to understand what’s really happening for all—and not just a few—customers. In service of these goals, in the last two years, the firm I lead, 60 Decibels, has listened to more than 50,000 microfinance customers in 41 countries, using a single, standardized survey tool that allows for full comparability across all questions. For each institution, we spoke to a representative, random sample of clients, and, in total, these customers represent an estimated 48% of the 173.5 million microfinance clients globally.

We can use insights from this data to cast some light on the murky claims made in the Bloomberg piece.

  • Claim: Clients are pressured to sell their homes, land, and other assets in order to make repayments.
  • What we found:  19 out of 20 of the microfinance customers we spoke to said that agents treat them fairly, are trustworthy, and have never pressured them to sell an asset.

(read the rest of this article on the 60 Decibels website).

Cringing in the Rain

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Rain starts falling, and what do we do? We lift our shoulders and hunch our backs to stay dry.

It turns out that this doesn’t keep us and drier or warmer. It’s just our primitive, protective stance in the face of discomfort. We shrink.

The other option is to intentionally stand tall, drop our shoulders, and stride purposefully. We don’t get any wetter, we’ve just stopped hiding.

The rain, as always, isn’t just rain.

But we are still, and always, ourselves. And we have the chance to see how our unconscious reactions might be the same in all situations—and to learn from this.

Just because we are confronted by something different, difficult, or scary doesn’t mean that our posture should be one of defensiveness, protection, or fear. These stances both fail to keep us safe and worsen our experience. Their only real impact is to increase our sense of suffering and hardship.

Lest we forget, inside of all of us is that fearless girl standing in front of the bull.

We just need to remember to tap into that.

The Fearless Girl (Mark Lennihan/Associated Press)