Strong ideas, loosely held

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

One of the best pieces of advice I got about five years ago was that I should have “strong ideas, loosely held.”

The feedback I was getting was on the “loosely held” part. At the time people experienced me as having “strong ideas, strongly held.” I think I’ve made some good progress on that.

Five years hence, as I come back to the central paradox inherent in this notion, I’m understanding that the suggestion isn’t to have any less conviction around my ideas. Indeed nearly all of the time we need more conviction, more passion, greater commitment, and greater follow-through.

The real point here is that the passion we have for our own ideas must be coupled with a core, deep-seeded belief that most ideas, most of the time, get better when they interact with, and are changed by, other ideas.

Why I (like everyone) gave to ALS while on vacation

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A friend and colleague asked me.

It was personal and I didn’t want to let him down.

It was (a little bit of) a challenge to how macho and bold I could be.

It was public.

Turning something like this down, given who I am and my values, would be just a little bit shameful.

Everyone was doing it.

It was fun.

I could talk to my kids about it and get them involved in it.

It was easy and quick to do.

I could share it with friends in a way that felt totally positive – without putting them out. In fact, many friends said “Thank you! I was hoping to be challenged.”

It incorporated video, and allowed me, in 30 seconds, to create a video I was happy to post and that I knew would be entertaining (no edits, no storyboards, no nothing).

Did I mention how fun it was?

That’s a pretty good list to choose from for how you fundraise. I’m positive you won’t hit all of these, but if you’re hitting none of them then you’re pushing a rope uphill.

And the really tricky bits that I can’t stop thinking about are:

I did give to ALS, but most people won’t. That’s totally fine as long as what you create is huge.

The specifics of the organization I was giving to, and the cause, didn’t matter. This would have worked for any cause.

I talked to my kids about ice water not about ALS.

Pretty quickly my head starts to swirl about ends and means, whether (some? all?) philanthropy should be fun and what is lost when it is fun (and what doesn’t happen when it’s not).

When giving is more like eating dessert than it’s like eating your vegetables, is that a problem? Certainly not, today, for the folks suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

(and for those keeping track, the ALS Association has now raised nearly $100 million from 3 million donors…versus about $23 million last year).

What we need from you

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What we need from you isn’t better thinking, more analysis and caveats, the low-probability risks you’ve explored, and how you’ve smoothed the edges.

What we need from you is the fearlessness to put your best ideas out in the open,

unadorned

for everyone to see.

Not more smarts, more courage.

Your questions grow up with you

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Do I want to be a superhero or drive a firetruck?

Do I want to be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer or a veterinarian?

Do I want to be a salesperson, an entrepreneur, an investment banker or a professor?

Goldman or Morgan? TFA or Robin Hood? Charter school or public school? Facebook or Google?

…

Until, eventually:

What kinds of problems do I want to solve?

How much direction do I need?

And how much do I want those around me to need?

What kind of approval do I seek?

Do I like creating new things or polishing others’ great ideas?

Do I work best with people who are highly structured or more free form?

Do I thrive or crack under pressure?

Do I want a workspace that is quiet or loud?  Open or closed?

What happens when I’m in the spotlight? What should?

How do I manage my time to be most effective?

How hard can I work in a sustained way?

Am I a starter or a finisher?

Do I process information best alone or in groups?   In conversation or in writing?

How important is culture to me?   Values?

What does leadership mean to me?

How do I make others shine?

Solving big thorny problems

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

I like to divide big thorny problems (aka “the fun ones”) into three parts:

  1. The easy bits
  2. Parts that will be hard to get done, that will take a lot of work, but where directionally I have a pretty good hunch about what the answer is
  3. Parts where I truly do not know the answer

I often find that the trick to making progress on these sorts of problems is to think about them as if everything in the first two buckets is solved.

For example, imagine you (as I am) are trying to transform your organization into one that systematically produces insights worth sharing, in order to transform your own work and the work of your peers.  Clearly, this is a big, thorny problem.  And there are limitless things you can do to work on this problem.  That’s your first challenge: where to start, and how to spend your time.

This is an idea we’re working on at Acumen – in order to “change the way the world tackles poverty” we need to push on our own ability, globally, to synthesize what we’re seeing on the front lines; turn what we are seeing into insights that drive how we make and manage investments, the types of funds we raise and deploy, how we invest in leaders, etc.; and share what we are learning with the world.

The core, hard parts of this problem that are staring us in the face are: how we go about creating the process and the ongoing culture change required to make everyone a more integral part of producing insights?  How do we take the amazing experiences and observations that are living in people’s heads, globally, and help get these ideas out more regularly in a more synthesized, formed way that can drive our own strategy and influence how we share what we are learning with the world?

When I was talking to my colleague Venu about taking this all on, we agreed, counter-intuitively, that all of that important work feels like a “bucket 2” problem.  Meaning, we don’t know exactly how to do it, it’s a lot to do and a long road ahead, but on some basic level we know how it will be solved, what the solution will feel like, and what the result will be if successful.

The part where we really didn’t know the answer was: imagine if we had, at our fingertips, a deep reservoir of our best insights – on everything from how cold chains could be improved in rural, developing markets to how to build business models with cross-subsidies that drive inclusiveness and reach to the poor – what would we do with those insights to drive large-scale improvements both in how we do our own work at Acumen and how the world at large addresses issues of poverty?  Yes, we know that we would share more of what we are learning, in blogs and articles and op eds, at conferences and the like, but that really doesn’t mean much.

If what we’re talking about is driving real change through insights, then the big questions are far beyond whether it will be valuable to have stronger, more codified insights on what we are learning on the front lines of the fight on poverty – of course it will.  But, before we start, we must be clear on how we will drive change once we have this deeper well of insights.  Will we drive big new initiatives like creating an Acumen publishing imprint akin to the McKinsey quarterly; will we start a large-scale global consulting practice to share insights with peers and those interested in getting into the space; will we create a filtering and voting process whereby the best ideas that bubble up are shared with a group of potential funders who will be given the opportunity to put capital behind the opportunities that have been surfaced?

None of those ideas is real, yet, not even a little bit.  But I’m sure we’d never get to thinking about them if we didn’t give ourselves and our team the piece of mind of knowing that we will pull off the hard bits, and it’s the unknown bits that we have to wrestle with from the outset.

If we put off the work on figuring out these sorts of truly big, truly hard questions in deference to the big but sort-of-known questions, that on some level we are putting off the hardest, most important work for later.

That’s not what I’d do

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You have two options when you hear this from someone you like and respect.

Either you decide that their wisdom, experience and perspective bring something to the decision that you didn’t see, and they are right.

Or you decide that there are things you know that they don’t know, things you can see that they cannot, and that even though it feels like 9 times out 10 you’d want to follow their advice, this time you won’t.

Either way, your job at this point is to hear the advice, process it, make adjustments, and take action with conviction. Getting stuck in between what both of you thought is almost never right, and moving forward tepidly is the worst outcome of all.

The hard parts

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The parts that are uncomfortable

The bits that no one else really wants to do

The things that make you feel exposed

And stretched

And outside of your comfort zone

The things that make it clear that what you thought it was going to take to get this done wasn’t right at all.  The funding isn’t there. The strategy hasn’t been sorted out. The roles and responsibilities aren’t clear enough. The team is too small and it doesn’t have all the right skills.  We’re just not where we need to be, and fixing things is going to be a heck of a lot harder than we expected.

All this really messy stuff?

That’s why we need you.

It’s because it’s hard that the work hasn’t been done….yet.

But that’s what I’d said!

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

There’s a stage in one’s professional life that is defined by spending our days figuring out right answers. Do this analysis. Value this company. Research this donor. Share your recommended plan of action.

This is an important skill to develop – we need to be able to understand a problem, take it apart, find out an answer and share that answer with others. But the half-life on this sort of approach is shorter than it initially appears. More often than not, the right answer is only worth the paper it’s written on, since what really matters is what people do. Indeed, Nate Silver’s great book The Signal and the Noise points out that pundits with the strongest opinions are most often wrong, even though they of course get the most air time. One of the tough realizations as we progress in our careers is that the right answer or the best analysis is nearly always a small part of the equation in getting people to act.

At a certain point, what the world is asking of us is that we to get out of the audience. The world doesn’t need more critics, sitting back with arms akimbo, taking mental notes for tomorrow’s water cooler conversation. We need more protagonists, people willing to take the risk of standing on stage, being on the line to make things happen.

What role are you playing?

Here’s a nice test: what do you think, and do, each time something goes wrong when you had been on the other side of the argument? What goes through your head each time someone else says what you were thinking (or said) in last week’s meeting, but it’s their comment that turns the conversation?

The safe, self-validating approach is to say, “You see, they should listen to me. I was right.”

But what really makes change is to use that as a moment of introspection to ask, “What is it that I’m doing, or not doing, that my great ideas aren’t shifting the way people think and act?”

And if it turns out that the reason they listened to that other gal, and not to you, is because of who she is – the experience she has or the position she holds – then go ahead and spend your time trying to influence her thinking. That counts too.

Just finding the answers, though, isn’t nearly enough. You can do more.

(Of course, the same logic applies to “I created great art, it’s not my fault that no one wants to see it.”)

This Leads to This

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We get rapid-fire requests every day, and often end up beating them back with a stick.

As in: can you….write a quick response here? ….help this new potential Board Member better understand the program that you run? …meet with this journalist for 45 minutes? …share your 200 word biography for this conference? …write the first draft of our next quarterly newsletter? …give the team a 60 second update on what you’re focused on this week.

Most of the time, when we’re asked questions like this, a quiet internal narrative takes over, often with a dollop of panic: “I need to be really complete” “I’ve gotta to show them I’m on top of things” “So and so will be mad if I don’t include something about their work” “Why are you asking me that question????!”

Put another way, so often when we’re in the “answering the question mode” we feel put on the spot, and our deep desire to “do a good job” takes over in a way that shuts off any real sense of strategy or purpose.

The antidote to this natural response is to get into the discipline of saying out loud (or just to yourself):

I would like THIS (update, letter, email, 1-on-1 conversation, speech) to lead THIS person to do THIS.

Each and every time, I have the chance to start with clarifying, to myself, that this thing I am doing will create, for a small number of people (maybe just one), a specific response, a specific change, a specific action. Achieving that change is the purpose of what I’m doing.

*phew* that helps.

Step 1, then, is being able to say what that change is in what kind of person.

Step 2 is, for every word you write or say, for who you look at, for how you stand, for how you dress, for the words you choose, and, most important, everything you decide not to say…every thing is in service of that single purpose. Everything utterance that doesn’t help you achieve that goal becomes extraneous or, worse, undermines that purpose.

Here’s a nice test: when we brief someone on your next _______ (speech, email campaign, fundraising meeting, brief at the staff meeting), what do we tell him? If we dive in to “here’s how we do this, this is the content we have to cover,” we’re failing the “this leads to this” test. Whereas if we start with, “we’re trying to reach THIS kind of person to tell them THIS part of our story so that they will do THIS,” we are very much on the right track.

And every time someone on your team says “can we stop talking about this purpose stuff and just get on to creating the _______ (document, email, video, etc.) you’re well within your rights to say, “Actually, until we know what we’re trying to do here, I’m pretty sure that’s the only conversation we should be having.”

Six months later

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

When I was in business school, private equity was all the rage. I’d never been an investment banker, and I didn’t even really understand what private equity was, but I did throw my hat into the ring for a few private equity jobs.

The notion of actually getting any of these jobs filled me with dread. I had no passion for that work, and I only managed to land interviews with lesser-known firms where the people I met seemed to truly dislike their jobs and the lives they’d signed up for for the next 5-10 years. I vividly remember the pit I’d get in my stomach waiting for these firms’ final decisions – fearing I might actually get one of the jobs I’d applied for.

When I did get a couple of those job offers, I remember discussing them with classmates who said I had no choice but to take them. Objectively I was not qualified, yet I’d managed to get my foot in the door. I should take the job to learn the ropes, as a stepping stone to the next one and the next one and… My friends essentially rolled their eyes at me for even considering turning the jobs down.

One person, not a classmate, shared a different perspective. He said, “six months from now, all of these people who are telling you what to do, all of these people whose approval feels really important right now, they’ll all be gone. Six months from now it will just be you sitting at that desk at whatever hour of the day. Not them, you. Think of how you’ll feel six months from now when you’re the one doing the job. That will tell you what you should do.”

This isn’t a post about following our passions. Even the chance to follow a true passion only comes up once in a while – most of the time we don’t know what our passions are or we don’t have the skills, the perspective or the wisdom to really make the dent we dream of making in the universe.

But we do, each and every day, and especially when we are at real junctures in our lives, have the opportunity to understand the choices we make. They are our choices, and the minute we own them is the minute we understand who it is who is walking our path.

It is only us.