Tag: Change

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.”

Why isn’t this working?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

…asks the helpful critic.

Why has this project lost its mojo?

Why aren’t we wowing our customers?

Why do we keep missing our deadlines?

Why hasn’t the tough decision been taken?

Why aren’t we getting to the heart of the issue?

Good to raise the question. Much better, though, to realize that every single one of these questions offers an opportunity for leadership with a big and small “L.”

Leadership is not about authority or seniority or permission. It is about stepping up, taking the risk that others won’t, taking a point of view, putting yourself on the line.  It’s about saying the things you wish someone else (your boss, your colleague, the young new member of your team) would say.  It’s about grabbing the agenda, or ending the meeting early, or even walking with a new sense of purpose.  It’s about changing something in your own behavior in a way that shifts the structures and the attitudes of everyone around you.

We know you’re smart enough to ask the tough questions. What we need more of is the courage to lead.

Fazle Abed and Thulsi Ravilla – Learning at the Feet of the Masters

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The other night I had the chance to witness a remarkable conversation between two of the true pillars of our space: Dr. Fazle Abed and Thulsi Ravilla.

Dr. Fazle Abed is the founder of BRAC, a Bangladeshi organization that began with a focus on microfinance and has expanded organically in a massive way, now employing 130,000 people with a budget of more than $700 million. In addition to being one of the world’s largest microfinance organizations serving tens of millions, BRAC has provides livelihoods, maternal care, and nutrition, including now growing and providing 80% of the improved rice seed and 30% of the improved maize seed in Bangladesh.

Thulsi Ravilla is the President of Aravind Eye Hospital, the first truly scaled social enterprise outside of the microfinance space. Aravind has performed more than three million eye surgeries, two-thirds of which are to patients who do not pay. Its doctors perform 2,000 eye surgeries a year compared to 120 in the United States. They are the world’s largest manufacturer of intraocular lenses, selling these lenses for $3 versus the $200 they used to pay to buy them. And 15% of all ophthalmologists in India have been trained by Aravind.

Abed and Thulsi were being interviewed by Acumen’s founder and CEO (and my boss) Jacqueline Novogratz, as part of Acumen’s annual Advisory meeting – Abed serves on our Advisory Council and Thulsi on our Board of Directors.

I didn’t have a notebook for the conversation, so will share impressions of what really stuck in my mind and not the blow-by-blow:

  • This has been a life’s work for both of these men. They have each been at it for 40+ years in Abed’s case and 30+ years in Thulsi’s case. While it’s possible that the new funding mechanisms we have created around impact investing could accelerate this path today, it’s also completely clear that this is what a life’s work looks like, and there’s no way we will create massive, lasting and sustainable change in 5 or 7 years time, no matter how we finance it. This is about building enduring institutions.
  • Both share a relentless focus on poor customers. These men, and their organizations, know deeply and inviolably who they are serving. Poor customers (most of whom are women in BRAC’s case). That customer is known and fixed, and they have built the culture and logic of their organizations in answer to the question: what will it take to serve this customer in the most efficient, most dignified, most impactful way possible? And how can we build a sustainable organization so we can be here for decades to serve that customer?
  • A notion of service. Abed had been working at Shell and had been part of the Bangladeshi independence movement (in its separation from Pakistan) when he founded BRAC. To fund it, he liquidated all of his assets including selling his home. When asked in the conversation if this was hard to do he said, simply, “After you have been a freedom fighter, after you have witnessed life and death, these sorts of questions become less important. I had a home which I sold. I thought, ‘What is this change that will happen if I live in another home? It is still a home with four walls.’ The sacrifices I had to make were not that big.”
  • Building culture globally. Whenever talk came to culture, both men became especially focused and clear, as if they were about to utter their most serious and important truths, the wisdom that comes after decades of work. “The systems are easy to build and to transfer, and they do build efficiency,” said Thulsi. “But the culture is what makes the system work. It is the interaction of the culture and the systems that make our work possible.” Thulsi said that 90% of Aravind’s hiring is about culture and fit, literally asking questions like how much the bus fare was to the interview to get underneath what kind of person the interviewee is. If you’re hiring someone to do a job for a few years, perhaps the yield on short-term skills is higher, but to hear Thulsi describe it, it’s all about the culture. Some of the most interesting conversation was about how you build culture at scale, and while I didn’t leave the discussion with a clear “how to guide”, I was left with a renewed sense of clarity that for any scaled organization, culture is the most important thing to get right and that it requires constant investment and renewal.   This in addition to building the systems and other institutional underpinnings that allow for efficiency.
  • With time, persistence and endurance, anything is possible. Both of these organizations have moved into adjacencies that are far from obvious at the outset: Aravind as a major supplier of intraocular lenses – because they were a big expense line they wanted to address – and BRAC a huge supplier of seeds – because, in Abed’s telling, he discovered a group of 300,000 women whose repayment rates were relatively low, and rather than change policies or squeeze them he went to investigate and discovered that they were using low-quality vegetable seeds whose yields were low. So BRAC started manufacturing its own seed. While I am sure both organizations tried lots of new things that didn’t work out, it’s also clear that when these organizations got their core right they were strong enough to take on new business lines that, at first glance, would seem to be far afield.
  • Need versus demand. The recent Monitor/Delloitt follow-up report to Blueprint to Scale talks about “push” versus “pull” products, a point that Thulsi made using different words. “Need” in his definition is clinically defined – reduced or no sight – but even though Aravind offered free surgeries, many people with need would not show up. What they learned was that if they could go to the village – using telemedicine (which an Acumen grant 12 years ago helped facilitate) and other technology – they would, within 24 months, have treated 100% of their target market and 90% of those would follow through on recommendations from Aravind (to get glasses, to have surgery with Aravind, or go to a specialist hospital).
  • Scale. When asked about the importance of scale both men found the question almost trivial – the need is big, the solutions have to be big, we have no choice in the matter.
  • Urgency. When asked about whether he would have liked to have gone faster, Abed said “absolutely.” “A child,” he said, “can get stunted from malnutrition as early as age 6, at which point that child has reduced prospects for life.” Abed said he is always in a rush because the clock is ticking for that boy and for everyone like him, so we must always move with a real sense of urgency.

These are just the big pieces that stuck with me from a conversation that could have gone on for many more hours with everyone on the edge of their seats.   We were sitting at the feet of the masters, getting pearl after pearl of wisdom, hard-earned in a life’s work.

Just as the conversation was wrapping up, Abed jumped in to close. He told the story of Mahatma Ghandi, who interrupted a conversation by saying, “Excuse me, I have to go. My people are going over there and I have to follow them, for I am their leader.”

Indeed, what picture of leadership could be more powerful, or more relevant for today, than this?

Extremist for Love

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Monday was Martin Luther King Day in the United States, an opportunity to celebrate the life and leadership of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.  One of the many great pieces he wrote was the Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  King wrote this piece in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper while imprisoned for nonviolent protests on April 10th, 1963 in Montgomery, Alabama.

The letter is a response to a statement made by eight Alabama clergymen condemning the Montgomery protests, describing those leading the protests as outsiders and rabble-rousers, and positioning themselves as reasonable men wanting “honest and open negotiations of racial issues in our area.”  Most of all, these clergy argued that they “do not believe…that extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”

King’s letter is a clear, measured, but also deeply powerful response to these clergy.   His language, his eloquence, his clarity of thought and his refusal to compromise on issues of morality, rights and dignity inform the conversations we are having today about inequality and social justice.  King writes:

The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations.  He has to get them out.  So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides.  If his repressed emotions do not come out in these non-violent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence.  This is not a threat; it is a fact of history.  So I have not said to my people “get rid of your discontent.”  But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channelized through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.  Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist.  I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.

But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually grained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist.  Was not Jesus an extremist in love – “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.”  Was not Amos an extremist for justice – “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”  Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ – “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”  Was not Martin Luther an extremist – “Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist – “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.”  Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist – “this nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” So the question Is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be.  Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love?

We discuss this passage at length with the Acumen Fellows, pushing one another on what it means to be an “extremist for love” and asking one another if, where and when we are willing to be extremists for causes we believe in.

Are you an “extremist for love?”  Do you aspire to be one?

New Year’s Resolution

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

When I take time off in December and don’t travel I inevitably find my way back to the piano.  I played classical piano very seriously for about 20 years, so it’s part of me and part of who I am, even if I don’t make the time to practice most days.

If I had ever wanted to be a professional pianist, one of the things I would have had to have gotten better at was learning new pieces of music faster.  I never was much of a sight reader, and I allowed that summary of one of my weaknesses to define how I learned new music (slowly).

The advantage of returning to something intermittently is seeing it with fresh eyes.  This year, sitting down at the piano to learn one of my favorite pieces, Shubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat, D.960, I realized that while I’m not a great sight-reader, there’s also a next step where I’m falling down for no good reason: I let sections, measures, tricky bits, sit in a limbo of “I don’t quite play this right” for way too long, when a little bit of focused attention upfront would be the difference between taking 20 and 40 hours at the piano to learn a new piece.

So often our new year’s resolutions are about big new things that we are going to start: exercising again, cutting out sugar, sleeping more.  And sometimes those can create major shifts in our lives.

But more often than not I find it’s the minor shifts that end up sticking: if I say I want to sleep 7 ½ hours every night and keep it at that, I’ll fail miserably.  Life’s too busy, I have too many other obligations, and the binary nature of do/do not (“there is no try”) makes it too easy to write something off quickly as a failure.  But if I notice, say, how long it takes me to get from planning to get to sleep to sleeping, and then, by paying attention to that one new bit of information, if I make small tweaks where I can in my nightly routine, this might just be enough to have lasting impact.

When it comes to the shifts I want to make in my life, I haven’t had much luck with big sweeping changes, because the power, logic and momentum of the way I do things today doesn’t give way easily.  At the same time, like water to a stone, noticing old behaviors in new ways and then making small shifts has the power to reshape everything.

Happy New Year.

7 words to increase your productivity

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“What would help me the most is…”

Whether to a peer, a boss, a Board member, someone you are fundraising from or a friend, the act of clearly and specifically asking for help is transformative.

Of course it is easier to sit on the sidelines bemoaning the one thing that someone didn’t do.  This gives you a person to blame and it keeps you off the hook for taking the next step.

Or, you can take the much more powerful step of (figuring out and) asking for that one thing that would really make a difference.

And then you can get on with the important work of make the changes that only you can make.

Where the Magic Happens

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I’m a big believer in people’s capacity to change.

In fact, I think that one of the most powerful levers we have in life is recognizing that we can change.  This can be around mental plasticity – realizing our ability to learn big, new things.  Or we can go deeper, reconfiguring our habits, our outlook, even our emotional responses – how we are wired.

It all starts with knowing that we are not static beings.  And with recognizing that the way we act and the person we are aren’t one and the same thing.

We also have to give ourselves permission: the space to see that it took us decades to learn to act the way we act today, so it no doubt will take years, not months, before our new behaviors and orientation grow deep roots and feel natural.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the first Lean Impact Summit organized by Leah Neaderthal and Leanne Pittsford.  It was an energizing, entrepreneurial event based on the premise that we will create faster, more powerful change if we learn to embed Lean Startup principles into social change work (you can too!).

I got a huge positive reaction (judging from the Twitter pics) to the last slide of my presentation, an image drawn by Jessica Hagy – whose new book How to be Interesting has lots more great stuff.

Where the magic happens_Lean Impact Summit

Jessica’s right, of course, the magic does mostly happen outside of our comfort zones.  That’s where we change and grow.

You’re repeating yourself

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Why yes, that’s on purpose.

Did you know that children often need to be exposed to new foods 10-15 times before they’re happy to eat them?

Same thing with ideas and action, it turns out.

It used to be

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

It used to be that you could go to a meeting, or a job interview, without having really prepared in advance: without looking up the details of who someone is, what they’ve done, and where they’ve worked; without checking out their organization, the role they play, and who they work with; without skimming their LinkedIn profile, reading a few of their blog posts, and watching a video of them speaking; without seeing who they’ve helped along the way, or checking out the interesting, generous things that they’re involved with in their free time.

Now, skipping those steps is not allowed.  Now, it’s a sign that you’re unprepared and care less.  Now it’s a missed opportunity to have a conversation that’s more relevant to both of you.

The other side of this coin, lest we forget, is that just like you’re using The Google to figure out who you’re meeting and what their story is, people are doing the same thing before meeting you.

It used to be that them discovering nothing about you other than the boxes you’ve checked was enough.  It used to be, but it isn’t any more.