Tag: Change

The identity monologue

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

I had the misfortune of being floored by a minor, but extremely unpleasant, illness for about 10 days earlier this month.

Nothing like an abrupt change in circumstance to give a bit of perspective.

What I noticed, especially because the illness came on so fast (and showed little sign of getting better for a little while) was how an abrupt change in how I spent my time totally flipped my perspective.  Home-bound, practically quarantined, counting the minutes (because I was absolutely miserable) for 72 hours (= 4,500 minutes!), I felt powerless, and time shifted for me.   My life is often regimented and tightly structured, nearly down to the minute, which is my way of trying to be productive and fully engaged and present on multiple fronts.  Going from optimizing my commute and my Inbox and meetings down to the last minute to watching a two-hour movie and then another, waiting for time to pass and watching the clock not move, left me feeling miserable, unproductive and, temporarily, powerless.

It reminded me of a day I spent over the winter, an exercise called “everyday barriers” that all Acumen staff participate in.  It’s something the Acumen Fellows undertake as part of their training.  Like our Fellows, each Acumen New York staff member came to work and then left everything in the office except for $5 in cash and a round trip Metrocard.  We were to spend the day in New York City and come back with suggestions for how to improve public services.  It’s an exercise in what we call “moral imagination,” cultivating the ability to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, and to see problems from a new perspective.

Having talked to Acumen Fellows who had participated in this activity in the past, I recalled profound stories of connection, as well Fellows gaining a much deeper understanding of the challenges of being a poor person in New York City.  I recall a Fellow telling a story of a woman who walked everywhere with a giant box filled with papers – they were all of her identification, phone bills, records, etc. because the woman had gotten sick of getting to the front of a long line only to be told that she didn’t have the right paperwork.  Fellows experienced what was and was not working well in the provision of New York city public services, and the day served as a jumping off point for discussions about identity, empathy, and social change.

To me the most surprising part of the exercise came right at the beginning.  After about an hour of walking, feeling pretty relaxed, I started to feel a bit hungry and thirsty, and it hit me that it was 9:30am and I had 8 hours to spend in the city on a cold day with nowhere to go and almost no money in my pocket.   While part of my plan was to go to new neighborhoods, suddenly the very familiar parts of the city started to feel different.   The glass windows of a coffee shop or a high-end clothing store felt like they had “keep out” signs flashing at me with my empty pockets, big parka and heavy boots.  The transformation in my experience of something as simple as walking down the street in an upscale neighborhood was profound and shocking.  How could a shift happen so quickly?  I bought an apple for 50 cents and trudged on, making my way to a church (where the music was uplifting), a homeless shelter (for lunch), and then taking a massive trek (that turned out to be a wild goose chase) to an employment center in Queens, with a lot of time in the NYC subway noticing how everyone except for me was in an iPod / newspaper / book bubble.  Time passed differently, and most of New York City felt like it was for someone other than me.

How can the experience of self shift so quickly?  The troubling notion is that we have a silent but persistent “identity monologue” going through our heads, an active but unconscious process of defining and reiterating our own identity.   (I guess the Buddhists would call this “ego.”)  The humbling part is that the constant process of self-(re)definition actively colors my sense of self and how I interact with the world, and what’s surprising is how fragile and mutable it is.  Just think of what it felt like to lose power in Hurricane Sandy (or whatever natural disaster is closer to home for you).

The positive side of this realization is around mutability.  As quickly as my outlook darkened when I got sick, it started to improve three days later once I got out of bed, and within a week I was mostly back to normal.

I’ve had times in my life when I’ve been stuck, where a situation, or where I was living, or a crummy job was sucking the energy out of me, and where it felt like there was something fundamental and permanent about my situation.  Making changes at moments like that can seem like too tall a hill to climb, partly because of the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves feels big, real and permanent.

It is none of these things.

And it is wildly freeing to know that even one small change in our circumstance can begin to change our whole outlook; and that changing your circumstances can change your outlook and perspective (not the other way around).

Starting something

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

“OK get ready New York!!!” shouts an older African American gentleman on the uptown 1 subway in New York City.  He’s dressed in perfectly-pressed ivory linen pants and a neat white collared shirt.

And then he bursts into song, belting out, “This little light of mine…” in a voice that could only be described as angelic.  It deserves a full Gospel Choir behind it.   Barring that, his partner singing harmony was pretty incredible.

Along with just a few of my fellow-passengers, I smile, I enjoy, I give him a dollar.  I get a nod and a nice fist bump in return.

On my next subway ride, a white guy in a suit looks at me quizzically and says, “I thought you were part of the group…on that last train, I mean.”

I told him I wasn’t, that I just liked the music and thought it was gutsy to perform in that way and put yourself on the line.  I couldn’t tell if he was satisfied or confused by my answer.

But I did think it was interesting that just by smiling and enjoying myself, I might be confused for the third member of the group.  Because, of course, being the first, second or third person to stand up and follow enthusiastically can have just as much impact as being the guy standing up and singing.

Leading courageously and following with conviction are both needed to make change.

Leverage or control

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Ever funder, rightly, loves “leverage,” as in “each dollar I put in brought in another four dollars of additional funding.”

What’s not to love?

Except of course that getting leverage means you’re giving up control.  There are more folks around the table, more great ideas being kicked around, and, yes, more expectations and priorities to manage.

All good, unless you’ve decided that doing it your way is more important than getting it done.

Your choice.

What it takes to build dreams

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

I keep on bumping into the same parallel conversations around the future of the impact investing sector.

With those in the trenches, what I hear continuously is that it is a long, hard slog.  That companies take a long time to build, that the costs of getting things right are high, that grants and really forward-looking and patient risk capital is key, and that there’s not a straight path from here to there.

And yet the reports that keep on coming out and the sectoral conversations continue to cheerlead about all the capital that is coming into the space – prevailing estimates for total potential market size by 2020 are in the $500 billion (Monitor Group) to $1 trillion (JP Morgan) range – and to get there, we’re told, impact investing has to become an “asset class.”  Part of getting from here to there, it’s implied, might mean sweeping under the rug the significant segments of impact investing where the economics don’t seem to fully work and where the financial risks are too big relative to the expected financial returns.

An investor I recently met at a roundtable on understanding and quantifying impact put it simply to me: “anyone who is looking at less than a ‘market’ rate of return is mispricing risk.”

(Whereas I think the big problem in the world is that we’re mispricing returns by equating returns with what we can see in a discounted cash flow analysis, thereby demoting “impact” to a fuzzy, non-quantifiable something for which it’s not worth taking actual, real risk.)

Without getting dragged into what is clearly a definitional conversation – namely, until we agree on what we mean by “impact” we can never have a serious conversation about the economics of “impact investing” – I have an observation that keeps on nagging at me: increasingly across sectors I meet more and more people who acknowledge that most of the most important (dare I say the most “impactful”?) work they do has crummy economics.  Getting these projects/endeavors/businesses to happen requires the dogged determination to get many different stripes and flavors of capital to come together, lots of irregular stakeholders to develop a shared vision of the future, and, usually, a healthy dose of subsidy or public funding because there’s a clear public good being created when you succeed.

And yet in the impact investing sector we often hear that if investors aren’t fully financially compensated for the risks they take, capital will never flow in any serious way.

If that’s right, how do we explain away the fact that we have managed to create trillions of dollars’ worth of parks or mixed-use developments or hospitals or museums or great schools, most of which don’t make full economic sense but all of which are integral to a vital, vibrant society?  The truth is that markets don’t fully work all the time, and yet huge amounts of capital are regularly mobilized to create things that are worth creating.

What I’m struggling to do is to better explain, by looking outside our sector, my feeling that the conversation we’re having in the impact investing sector is far too narrow and binary.  When I identify the underpinnings of what makes vibrant, successful societies – you know, all those things that disappeared for a little while when Hurricane Sandy hit – and if I think about all of the incredible pure market plays that have been built on top of the existing infrastructure that was provided by the public sector….well it becomes clear that the “markets” / “not markets” conversation we’re having is far too simple.

And yet I don’t know specifically which data to look for to help tell this story.   I need more examples across sectors and history, more evidence that helps explain clearly and succinctly what I know to be true: that solving big, intractable problems for disadvantaged communities by and large doesn’t pay (nor should it pay) handsome financial rewards.  And the fact that it doesn’t isn’t some sort of failure of a prevailing orthodoxy, it is in fact a vindication of a rich history of bringing public, private and third sector players together – to bring the best of what each has to offer, including skills and preferences and the right kind of capital – to solve big problems.

I’ll be talking about some of these questions next month at the Global Philanthropy Forum, and I’d love your great ideas on how to prepare for this talk.

So, help, please! What are the best examples out there from other sectors (housing, roads, infrastructure, parks, museums, schools, biotechnology, the Internet, telecommunications…) that will bust open this “market return” mindset that is hobbling our thinking about how to create real and lasting change through impact investing?

Multi-purpose spoon

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Multi-purpose spoon

Your job isn’t to take the same thing that everyone else offers and pretend it’s something different.

You job is to create something that actually is different and then let people in on the secret that you’ve made something remarkable.

New wine, new bottles.

A week

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

It hasn’t been a great winter for running for me.  Between the cold snowy weather, late sunrises and general busyness, I’ve just not gotten out there that often.

That didn’t stop me from deciding, this past weekend, to take my one free daylight hour and head out for a 7 mile, very hilly run in 25°F weather.  Brilliant, I know.  Usually I feel like most of the effort is in just getting out there, and after I start things get easier.  This time, between the cold and the brutal hills (I think there was maybe 1 mile of true flat road on this run), I spent the better part of an entire run talking myself into finishing the run.

Even in that context, one moment stood out.  The last mile of this run is practically straight uphill, and steep, and I was at the base of the steepest part of that incline.  I had psyched myself up by convincing myself that this section of the last hill was short and steep, and the strategy had been working as I trudged along with my head down.  Then, reflexively, I looked up to discover that the hill was about three times as long as I’d pretended it was.

At that moment I had an overwhelming urge to stop.

The interesting part is that being out of breath or feeling a huge burn in my legs didn’t demotivate me, but seeing how far I still had to go did.

And so, switching gears, I wonder: how do we really go about making changes in our lives? (Alternately: why do New Years resolutions fail?).

I’d propose that the thing that holds us back is that “looking up” moment, when you see how big the hill you want to scale is and decide that it’s just too darn big, too hard, too much, so you don’t start.

Despite being a believer in big audacious goals, when it comes to the hard work of personal transformation, I’m most successful when I start small.  If I want to cut out eating sugar, if I want to meditate daily or be more generous or ignore my inbox for an hour a day or give myself more whitespace for reflection, I’d much rather set myself a clear one-week goal and start on it today.

You can do anything for a week, easily.  And by committing to just a week, you don’t have to engage in the meaningless anticipation of what this undertaking will mean for you – because, let’s be honest, until you do it (whatever IT is) you really don’t know what IT feels like.  The powerful part is that a week is long enough to start getting used to a new habit: it’s long enough to change how salty your think food should taste (try it, it’s true).  It’s long enough to discover whether mornings or evenings work better for you for _______ [YOUR NEW ACTIVITY]; long enough to discover why, really, it’s hard not to check your smartphone right when you wake up or right when you go to bed or every time you step into an elevator.

Just one week.

Don’t allow the sight of the big hill keep you from starting to run.  Give it a week, start today, and see how you actually feel when you behave differently.  Then decide how big this is going to be for you.

Investing in leaders and ideas

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

At the start of this year, I took on a new role at Acumen as our Chief Innovation Officer.

Acumen’s mission is to change the way the world tackles poverty by investing in companies, leaders and ideas.  The Chief Innovation Officer role is about scaling Acumen’s impact: building out from our core investing work to create the ecosystem of leaders the world needs to do this work; and investing in the spread of ideas by digging in to measure and understand the direct impact we are having through our investing work and sharing these learnings with the world – so we can all get smarter about what it really takes to tackle poverty at scale.

The impact piece is the most challenging and potentially the most exciting part of this work.  Challenging because deciphering and quantifying impact is the 10 zillion dollar question in any social change work.  And exciting because I firmly believe that the day we can clearly and succinctly explain and quantify impact is the day that everyone stops pretending that financial returns are the closest proxy for success for impact investors.

I dug into these issues in my recent talk at Acumen’s Investor Gathering last week.  The talk just went live on YouTube (see below or link here), so I thought I’d share it here first.

(Special thanks to Niklas Peters at Acumen who helped with the presentation and, while juggling a million other things, found the image for my favorite slide – the one from Brazil.)

And suddenly it’s up to you

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I distinctly remember the first time I had this feeling in a professional setting.  I was three years out of college, three years into my stint in management consulting, working for a client who wanted us to do a bunch of regression analysis on piles of data to see how they could respond to the rise of mobile phone service.

[answer: stop running and hiding and burying your head in the sand. Mobile wasn’t going away.  Kinda obvious in retrospect.]

The terrifying bit was discovering that, on that client team and in the small office where I worked, I was the person who knew the most about what kind of analysis we should run – terrifying because I knew I didn’t know enough, and I definitely knew less than the client expected.

In retrospect, since most of the gap in what I knew was technical I should have found a way to find SOMEONE who could help me bridge the gap.  But how to better navigate the regression wasn’t the important bit.  The important bit, the part that sticks out is the “this can’t possibly be up to me” moment I experienced.  I felt like if it was all in my hands then something was massively broken, it was a temporary glitch in the Matrix and we’d soon get back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Because what did I know?

These moments are hitting people earlier and earlier in their careers, because we’re no longer asking people to walk a path or climb a ladder.  We’re starting to recognize that whole industries (music, books, finance, technology, energy, infrastructure, philanthropy, healthcare) are either already unrecognizable or will be within 20 years, so we don’t need young people to master the old tricks of the trade, we need them to reconceive everything.

I can shout that from the rooftops but I probably won’t get you to believe that it all should be up to you, today.

But I bet I can get you to notice the next “this is up to me” moment and have you pause for a second and say, “Wait a minute.  Maybe that’s exactly the way this is supposed to be.  Maybe I’m the perfect person for the job.”

Because you are.

An “intangible” dividend?

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So here’s a curious narrative: in the early 1990s, 4,600 poor families in LA, New York, Chicago and Boston were moved from very poor neighborhoods (more than half the residents living in poverty) to wealthier (less than a third of the residents living in poverty).  The hope was this would result in better jobs, higher incomes, and better educational outcomes.

After rigorous, scientific testing, the initiative failed to deliver the desired results.

And yet, in what was described as an “intangible dividend” by the NY times, the recipients ended up significantly, quantifiably happier.  “The improvement [in happiness] was equal to the level of life satisfaction of someone whose annual income was $13,000 more a year.”

This is the dividend that’s called intangible.  Happiness.

Of course it’s hard to measure, of course it is squishy and self-reported, but if we’re ever going to get anywhere we have to have the comfort and confidence to say out loud that things like human dignity, pride, and yes happiness are the whole point, the only point really, and that everything we’re doing is aimed at loose proxies to those results – what could be more real or concrete than that?

Just think how much we’ve punted on this issue, if we’re really honest with ourselves.  We’ve come to a point where we’re saying with a straight face that if we put a lot of money into the impact investing sector and that money realizes a healthy level of financial return then we’ve had success.  That puts us about seven degrees removed from actually understanding if anyone is better off, happier, freer, more proud or connected or more able to realize their potential, if someone is more likely to realize justice if they’re wronged or less likely to fall back into poverty if they get sick.

As a sector we have to have the courage to say out loud that happiness is not an “intangible” dividend, it’s not a silver lining in a program that otherwise failed to raise people’s incomes.

Would that we lived in a world in which the NY Times headline could have been: “large-scale government program a huge success, making 4,600 families happier, healthier, even without increasing incomes.”

It feels like looking at the sun, saying out loud that the whole point is happiness or pride or dignity.  It’s so much easier and safer to look away.

Full and hopeful conviction

~ Sasha ~ 9 Comments

One of the great nuggets – that I’d otherwise have lost had it not been for the visual notes I took – from the Adaptive Leadership piece in HBR that I talked about yesterday is about how to run experiments in adaptive settings.

Since adaptive challenges have unknown solutions, by definition we must make adaptive leadership decisions with incomplete information.  Even better, often the biggest breakthroughs come from holding two seemingly opposable ideas, goals, even values at the same time and trying to meet two seemingly incompatible needs.

In these adaptive situations, our only choice is to run experiments – to make a decision based on the information we have, with a clear statement of our hypothesis and an articulation of what data we will use to determine if the experiment is working.  (Very Lean Startup-y, in a very different context, which is always nice to see).

The soft underbelly of these situations isn’t WHETHER to run experiments (we have no choice) it’s HOW we run these experiments.

It’s all too tempting to view these tough calls at 51-49 situations, to continue to see all sides of the argument even after you’ve started running the experiment.  This is even more tempting in situations in which you disagreed with a decision – it’s so alluring to talk about the path not taken, to keep on hedging your bets just in case this path doesn’t work out.  Think how smart you’ll look if you have an “I told you so” moment three months from now.

Here’s another way to look at it, from the Adaptive Leadership piece:

Holding incompatible ideas in your head at the same time is a little like deciding to get married. At the moment you decide that this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you have to fully embrace your choice; you have to believe wholeheartedly that it is the right decision. But your practical self also knows that you probably would have fallen in love with someone else under different circumstances. So how can your intended be the only “right” one for you? If you treated the decision to marry this particular person at this particular moment as a 51–49 question rather than a 90–10 question, you would never take the leap. The same paradox applies to adaptive leadership interventions. You have to run the experiment with full and hopeful conviction.

I’m much more of a romantic than that, so the analytical approach to the decision to get married just doesn’t sit right with me.  But that’s another conversation.

What I like is the memorable analogy and the great last sentence: “You have to run the experiment with full and hopeful conviction.”

Not doubt, not worry, not with side conversations about how this will never work or with hesitation or second guessing.

Full and hopeful conviction.