The quantum mechanics of intentions

September 21, 2018September 20, 2018 ~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

Think about a Spotify playlist for a minute (or whatever music service you use).

Today it’s easy for a computer to put together a list of songs on a common theme or genre, and it’s just as easy to have that same computer create a playlist that weaves together a few different themes. Once you’ve got that – voila – you have a playlist that’s indistinguishable from one made for you by a friend.

What I can’t help but wonder is: what, specifically, is the difference between the two playlists – the one made by a machine and the one made with thought, care and intention? What role does the intention play when I listen to the music?

Is that intention real? Is it tangible? Does it have a weight and a meaning? Or is my experience listening to the music, potentially insulated from that intention, all that matters?

Of course, hard-to-experience intentions are everywhere, not just in playlists but in works of art, say, or even hidden within the work of an impact investor.

I bring this up because, lately, as impact investing veers towards the mainstream, it’s become common for some investors to wake up and say, “look at the impact my investments created! I’m an impact investor and I didn’t even know it!” And then it’s just as common for those whose cup runneth over with intention to say, “Not so fast…without intention you cannot be an impact investor.”

Who is right?

To be clear, intention alone is not enough. It needs to be coupled with material, measurable impact to mean something.

But, taking a half a step back, are we able to articulate why, exactly, intention matters?

The end customer of an intervention is likely to be oblivious to the intention (of the investor) that led to that experience. Doesn’t she simply experience – like the person listening to the next next song on a playlist – what she experiences? And if she doesn’t care about intention, why do we?

Here are some thoughts, meant to open not to close a conversation.

Intention might matter because you could learn about it later. When I discover from my friend why she put two songs together, or when I hear the story of a particular song’s meaning to her, that discovery creates meaning and connection between us. But this one falls apart in the absence of a real relationship between the two parties involved, so I don’t think it’s useful for the broader conversation.

Intention might matter because it influences current and future behavior. To argue this, you’d be saying that the fact that, in this case, the customer doesn’t experience intention doesn’t matter. What matters is that the person deploying capital (or running an NGO or a social enterprise) has a purpose guiding her actions. We believe that having purpose oriented towards positive change is likely, in the medium- and long-term, to result in more decisions and actions that create positive change (and less harm) than being agnostic or skeptical of making positive change. Similarly, the existence of this purpose could influence how durable the experienced impact is: if the going gets tough (profits down), we believe the person with intent will stick it out longer.

Intention might matter because it influences others. A person with intent inspires others to have a similar intent. A person with intent might cause those lacking intent to question why they don’t have it. It might also rally others to the cause.

Intention might matter in and of itself, in a way that is neither instrumental nor quantifiable. It just exists out there in the world in ways that are positive and worthwhile. Juju is a good thing, the light in me touches the light in you.

I find it surprising that I struggle to make a longer list, and hope that you have more to add (here, on social media, in an email to me, wherever).

The conclusion I’ve come to for now is that I’d always prefer that someone have intent than not. But at the same time I won’t go so far as to say that intent is a necessary ingredient to creating massive positive social change.

What do you think? Does intent matter? Where, why and how much? It is the roots of the tree, or one of many ingredients in a big stew: seemingly important, but not necessarily required?

Baby steps

October 3, 2017October 2, 2017 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

We’re sometimes confounded by the big changes we want to make.

We get a glimpse of the person we hope to become, or a new behavior we hope to engage in, and nearly immediately find ourselves frustrated that we’ve not suddenly mastered that new set of actions. This isn’t how we change.

Real, honest, deep change starts small and builds, with steps like:

I will observe my reactions.

I will understand what triggers me.

I will watch the group.

I will experiment with new ways to respond.

I will be more observant about how people react to the things I do, and about how I react to the things they do.

Step by small step is the only way we get to bigger things like “I will stay grounded in stressful situations,” or “I will be more effective at confronting aggressive people.”

We owe ourselves the space to start small, figure out the component parts of the change we want to make, and then be deliberate and persistent. Our job is to go easy on ourselves along the way, while also not letting ourselves off the hook of continued progress.

Looking backwards the changes will look like leaps, but often they’re the accumulation of lots and lots of baby steps.

Attention and Intention

January 26, 2016January 26, 2016 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I first began practicing yoga regularly in 1999, and for much of my first few years of practice, I took more classes from Rolf Gates than from anyone else.

Rolf doesn’t cut the familiar profile of a yoga teacher: he’s an ex-Army Ranger, marathoner and wrestler who is built like an NFL running back, one for whom physical hardship is something to chuckle at. When I’d be straining 30 minutes into a class and Rolf would smile and bellow, “We have miles to go before we rest!” I’d know that Rolf had been there and done that, and I’d remind myself to toughen up a bit.

But although the physical toughness was what you’d first see when you met Rolf, he taught a deeply reflective and introspective class. The son of six generations of ministers, Rolf followed his time in the Army with a stint as a social worker and a substance abuse counselor. All of this came together in a yoga class that might have seemed to be about sweating like crazy and the serenity that followed, but really was about wisdom and perspective. Regulars at his class used to call it “the church of Rolf.”

Rolf and I both left Boston years ago, and I miss his class, so I’m thankful that I can now take his class virtually, online.

I took one of these classes the other day, and I noticed that, as Rolf has continued to grow and deepen as a teacher, his wisdom has become both simpler and more profound. I experience Rolf as a student of life, someone who is winnowing down what he is learning, finding his way to the essence of his truth.

In the class that I took, the mantra Rolf kept repeating was, “As you breathe, know that you are breathing.”

Indeed.

This phrase stuck with me the next morning as I made my way to the train on my commute – walking too fast as I quickly checked the weather on my phone, rushing and distracted. And then I looked up, saw the blue sky, the bright white clouds and the swaying trees, and thought, “When I walk, shouldn’t I know that I am walking?” Of course I should.

This is about attention and intention.

Attention is the choice to focus my energies on the action I’m engaged in. If I’m walking to the train, I can bring my attention to that action, and experience the world more fully. This gives the space to allow what I’m doing penetrate my mind and my body.

Intention both precedes and follows attention. I can use my intention as the source of the actions that I take. And intention can follow attention since the act of reflection can give rise to a new set of intentions in a powerful set of connecting loops: I set a purpose in a given moment, and, when I am fully present in that moment, I can let that experience guide my next intention – a loop that is both deliberate and open.

What I’m realizing is that I’ve come to the point in my life where I’ve got no more time to squeeze out of my days. There are no big breakthroughs in efficiency on the horizon. If that’s the case – if I’m not going to uncover any more time – then the only leverage left to me is around how I spend that time. Sure, I may still be able to shift how I spend a few hours here and there, but the big remaining shift, one that I’m sure will take a lifetime to unfold, is around the quality of attention and intention I bring to each and every moment.

Shorten your backswing

October 20, 2011October 20, 2011 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

It was time today to sit down and write a blog post.

I keep track, by email, of blog post ideas when they happen, and was just about to go into that email account when I saw an interesting tweet….that led me to a clever article about Occupy Wall Street, that…. wait a minute, what was I planning to do?

There’s the real work we need to do, and there’s all the muss and fuss that we do as part of our process of starting our real work.

This can happen a lot in sports. In racquet sports there was a whole move-my-racquet-forward-before-hitting-a-backhand thing that I used to do. I have the same problem (never fixed) when throwing a frisbee. If you ever go to a yoga class, watch how much hair-fixing and water drinking happens at the exact moment the instructor calls out a challenging pose.

It feels minor, but think about all the wasted motion I was doing for the 500 backhands I hit in a one hour squash game – energy spent, speed reduced, extra steps taken for absolutely no reason other than that I’d built up a bad habit.

This isn’t just about not getting distracted by social media and your inbox (though those are particularly dangerous because they pretend to be work). It’s about shortening the distance between “I’m going to start working” and “I’m working.”

Proactive vs reactive

July 5, 2011July 4, 2011 ~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

In today’s ping-pong world of global teams and connections, zillions of emails, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates, just keeping from falling off the treadmill can feel like success.

It might be worth checking, every now and again, how much time you spend being reactive or proactive, meaning:

REACTIVE

Reading things you’re copied on
Responding to email threads
Attending standing meetings
Reading something “interesting” (article, etc) someone sent you
Doing something your boss asked you to do
Anything you do on Facebook or Twitter if you’re not there for a very specific reason (e.g. communicating with your customers)

PROACTIVE

Initiating a conversation
Reaching out to a customer
Tweaking something to make it better
Taking a mundane task and doing something surprising, or even beautiful, with it
Sharing a crazy idea, and then get to work on it

The surprising thing isn’t that reactive outweighs proactive, the surprising thing is that we can go through a whole day doing nothing proactive at all and still feel like we’re working.

* * * * *

Bonus: fun feature from The Atlantic Wire on Maria Popova’s (@brainpicker) media diet, with other links to the likes of Ann Coulter, Chris Matthews, Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, Chris Anderson, and many more.

All of them read like crazy, and all of them are very deliberate about delineating between what/when they read and what/when they produce.

Is ______ an impact investor?

June 15, 2011June 14, 2011 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

On Monday I had the chance to speak at the iiSummit on Impact Investing, organized by Kellogg and the Chicago Booth School. It is exciting to see the level of interest in impact investing growing everywhere (beyond the obvious hotbeds of New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC). The goal of the conference was to explore how the tools of impact investing could be applied in the Midwest.

During one of the conference breaks, I had a conversation with a student who wanted my take on whether Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the Indonesian microfinance bank where I worked a decade ago, is an impact investor.

I was and continue to be stumped by the question, and I think the question sheds light on a worrisome trend in our space.

Let me explain.

What the question seemed to be about was whether BRI aims to have social impact, specifically because the interest rates are “high” (~25% p.a.); because it does collateralized lending (as opposed to group lending); and because, it was implied, BRI is highly profit-seeking.

My take on BRI is a little different: 25% p.a. interest rates are in line with global microfinance interest rates (so I have trouble arguing that they should be lower); limiting itself to collateralized lending does mean that BRI is likely serving the better-off segment of low-income customers, but these customers still clearly have a need for these services; and, at least when I was there, BRI had a 4:1 ratio of savings to lending – which is only possible because it is a regulated financial institution. Since I personally think that savings might be more powerful to the poor than lending as a tool to smooth consumption and have capital available for big expenditures (which is really what a lot of microlending is all about), I think this a really big deal. So, in sum, I’m a fan of BRI from what I saw when I worked there.

But I digress.

What the question got me thinking about was that, rather than asking, “Do you think that BRI is having significant, positive social impact?” the question was “Is BRI an impact investor?”

The implication seemed to be that “impact investing,” as the coolest, hottest trend in our space, is a proxy phrase for doing good work, a notion that was reinforced by the numerous speakers who qualified lots of worthwhile, not-so-new activities (negative screen, public market investing first pioneered by Domini; positive screen, public market investing best represented by Generation Investment Management; CRA lending everywhere; everything that OPIC has done for the last few decades) as “impact investing.”

Personally, I don’t care what is or is not “impact investing.” What I care about is whether we are creating positive social change.

Impact investing, to me, is nothing more and nothing less than the use of investment tools for social ends. Our collective “aha moment” was the realization that investors can strike a deal with sources of capital whereby social impact goals are made explicit. This allows investors (stewards of others’ capital) to pursue social goals without shirking their fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. Volia, we have more tools (not just grants) that we can use to pursue social impact.

This is simple enough and hard to disagree with.

But from this perspective, I find myself discouraged by the “finance first” and “impact first” terminology that’s become popular in our space. It feels trite. Isn’t the whole point of “impact investing” the “impact” piece? Without that you have investing – which can create all sorts of impacts (positive and negative; financial and social). But either you set out to create positive social change or you don’t. The idea that you’d set out to create only a little positive social change…what exactly does that mean?

I don’t want to know whether you or I or anyone else is an impact investor. I want to know how much social impact you and I are creating with a dollar (or a euro, or a rupee, or a shilling, or whatever). Everything else, to me, is just old wine in new bottles.

The power to mobilize resources

September 29, 2010September 29, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Remember that old, broken conventional wisdom about how fundraising works in the nonprofit sector– a few folks that sit in the corner while the rest of the people do the important program work over here?

Just the other day I was talking with the new class of Acumen Fund Fellows – as impressive a class as we’ve ever had – and I was struck with how important it is to strike at the heart of this destructive, outdated mindset.

What I shared with them (more emphatically than I or they expected, I suspect) is that for anyone, for absolutely anyone, who plans to make change by working in the nonprofit / social enterprise sector, the ability to mobilize capital behind your idea is one of the most important, most untaught, most underdeveloped skills around.

If you can get funding, you can set up shop, you can create breakthrough approaches that cut through the status quo, you can make things happen.

It’s ironic, actually, because in the high-tech world, successfully pitching a top-tier VC fund is fetishized even while the capital needed to launch technology businesses keeps decreasing. Yet in the nonprofit sector where by definition we are in the business of addressing social issues in a way that the market is not – as it currently is structured – built to address, the ability to mobilize resources is downplayed in its importance.

So let me be as clear as possible: this is a skill required of all you who aspire to be leaders in our space. We need you to learn how to do this because we need you to make lasting, large-scale change.

Please don’t put this off or think someone’s going to do it for you. And please don’t think that just because you don’t know any really wealthy people that you can’t start working on this now.

The first shift you can make is to acknowledge that this is something you want to learn how to do. That intention alone will unlock your potential, will set you apart from your peers, will set you down the path that you’re going to need to walk – and going to want to walk – sooner than you know.

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