Find Your Tribe: The “Who” of Leading Change

By CJ Callen



Originally posted at: http://www.compasspoint.org/blog/find-your-tribe-“who”-leading-change

Recently I found myself chatting with someone with roots in philanthropy about my current effort to lead my organization in a process of re-imagining our future to increase our social impact. That person provided her insights and support; she recognized that my “big idea” for my organization sounded like it built on our organization’s history and strengths. She also understood that I was doing this as a process of co-creation involving all our stakeholders.

Time flew by because I did not need to explain all my terms and she had no defenses up or agendas hidden. She told me to “Find your tribe!” so that I can be surrounded by positive supporters who can help me maintain the momentum as I shepherd my organization into a new era – a transformation that won’t happen overnight. “Will you be a member of my secret brain trust?” I asked. “Yes,” she responded. And with that, I have my second member of the trust. (The first member is a wonderful funder who is a thought partner but not a financial supporter.)

What a refreshing connection! The day before, I suffered through a meeting with a person in the world of philanthropy who (1) condescendingly asked me if I had involved anyone else in this process (huh?!) and (2) employed the arrogant royal “WE” when I used a term that they assured me only they really understood from where they sat. I sent the person a thank you note, but no response – and no surprise. Grace rarely follows arrogance. Looking back, I can now say “definitely not my tribe,” move on, and not let that weigh me down.

But it gets better: After my meeting in which my friend and colleague told me to find my tribe, I found another person who understood instantly what I was trying to do, and who encouraged me and started to connect me to others who might help me figure out how best to do it. (Yeah, another new member of my tribe!) In addition to providing me with instant inspiration, she gave me a great reading list for nonprofit leaders willing to engage in playful inquiry and to take on risks – and sometimes fail – all in service to greater impact:

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Action by Scott Sinek – This book got me with the title alone. For years, when working in the philanthropic sector, I noticed that funders often discussed the “what” and sometimes the “how” of what they do but rarely the “why.” This book captures what I tried to do: to help funders connect deeply to the “why” of their work.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz – This book reminds me of the old song lyrics, “If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.” Now the trick is to go from celebrating failure in all its glory in theory to placing it squarely in the reality of the nonprofit and foundation boardroom.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg – The bad news is that we all have some bad habits and sometimes are blind to them, but the good news is that we can be intentional about changing them.

My addition to the above list: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp. Any nonprofit leader embarking on a major change to their organization is going to have to call mightily on their often underutilized right brain. This book provides some good guidance on how to do that.

So here I am: building a tribe as I launch into an exploration designed to transform my nonprofit enterprise. My hope is to have the opportunity to share my story over the next two years, invite others to share theirs, and thereby break the isolation. As nonprofit leaders charged with the improbable and sometimes the impossible, we need to be proactive about creating the community or finding the tribe that will make or break our ability to advance change (from the inside and outside) that matters.

What will happen next? I don’t know but I promise to stay honest and share the true unfolding of the story. I stand before you vulnerable, excited, anxious but not alone!

Speaking of “tribes” and “community,” here’s an update: In my last blog post I asked for new executive directors (one year tenure or less) to join me in a supportive community for periodic discussions about our leadership experiences and I got it! Several new nonprofit executives jumped at the offer to start a conversation group. The five of us (with aspirations to be seven) now meet every six weeks for just an hour and a half to connect, share, and explore issues in a safe space. Will you join us in this tribe?

In community,
CJ

P.S. In the “so good I just had to share with you” category, there was a billboard with this slogan that resonated with me: “Humankind. Be Both.”


Resources:
Read CJ’s 05.09.12 blog post: “Reflections of a Reflective Leader: Authenticity as Authority”

Trapeze image: Mark Setchell
Tulip top image: Pink Sherbet Photography

Connect To A Network Of Likeminded Organizations

At the Whitman Institute, we invest in the power of relationships, constructive dialogue, and the connections they generate to trigger problem solving and creative approaches required to achieve our vision.  As we move into 2013, we are looking towards inviting ever more opportunities for our network to connect to each other.  In that vein, we have "found" some of you online and compiled 2 lists of places to roam to better learn about what people in our network are up to, what questions they sitting with, and what they are working on. You can also find the list of blogs here and the Twitter feeds there. Enjoy!

Follow us @TWI_2022 and subscribe to our blog (on the right hand side of this post)!

Did we forget to add you? If you are a member of our network and we forgot to put you on our lists, send us an email with your links at whitmaninstitute@gmail.com.

Tweets from @TWI_2022/network

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!  

We hope you have glided with grace, ease, and vibrance into 2013.  Here are a few notes for our network that we send with love into these first, fresh days of the year.

A New Face
We're welcoming Fabienne Doze to the team to provide much needed, hands on communications and administrative support a few days a week.
 

Fabienne is a recent graduate of Golden Gate University where she received her Master of Arts in Psychology with honors. She volunteers for the International Coach Federation - San Francisco Bay Area Coaches as Director of Virtual Programs where she researches and tests technology for virtual meetings and coordinates gatherings in the Bay of San Francisco. During her studies, she worked as the Global Strategic Initiative Manager for a social media start-up and was responsible for developing and launching some the organization's largest Organizational Development programs. Prior to her Master, she pursued a Bachelor of Business Administration in France during which she worked in Business Development, Communication, Marketing, Public Relations and Management Consulting for a variety of businesses in many countries, such as France, England, Morocco, and the United States. Welcome Fabienne!

Connect, Connect, Connect
We want to gently remind you about the TWI Connection Fund.  Fiscal Year 2012-2013 Connections Fund:  As a way to encourage our network to be in relationship we have set aside resources for “connecting.” Up to $1,000 per nonprofit organization that attended the retreat is available. For budgetary reasons, we are limiting the eligible organizations to either current or former grantees. This resource is an invitation to follow up on conversations, to come together for mutual learning and support, or to just get to know each other and explore possibilities. The funds are unrestricted and can be used for travel, meals, renting space, etc. Configurations can be of any size as long as at least two of you are partnering on an endeavor to connect. This resource is available from August, 2012 until June 30, 2013.

Participation is completely voluntary and emergent. Our aim here is to experiment with how we can support connection and collaboration within the TWI community in ways that move both our individual and our collective work forward. Please let us know if you have any questions, and contact Pia or John if you'd like to pursue a connection.

You Make Us Smile


We look forward to hearing your stories of struggle and triumph, and laughing with you in the coming year.  Without you, there is no magic amalgem of good people and organizations that we are happy to call our network.  Thank you for all the ways you creatively are demonstrating the potential and power of TWI's mission:

We invest in the power of relationships, constructive dialogue and the connections they generate to trigger problem solving and creative approaches required to achieve our vision of a healthy, peaceful, equitable and sustainable world.

Interactive CA Voters Guide

TWI partner City Club is happy to introduce a new resource, powered by the wisdom of California voters.  This free, non-partisan resource is intended to support thoughtful civic engagement by lifting up the voices of citizens who will be impacted by the policy initiatives on the ballot this November.

In fact, a few days ago, Living Voters Guide was awarded first prize is the Evergreen State Apps Challenge, a brand new competition hosted by the State of Washington, King County, and the City of Seattle to encourage local entrepreneurs to build mobile software applications that help people create useful experiences out of the data that government provides.

An interactive Voters Guide for Californians

to exchange thoughts and opinions on statewide ballot propositions

cali.livingvotersguide.org

written by the people and for the people

Reflections of an Art House Filmmaker in a YouTube World

 

By Sam Green

These are exciting times for documentary filmmakers like myself. With technological advances from newly affordable HD video cameras to avenues of dissemination like YouTube revolutionizing the field, it’s never been easier to make a film and get it out there. People all over the globe who had once been voiceless can now be heard.

Some parts of this new world, however, are less great. Filmmakers now have to accept that people will often watch our work on tiny screens––an iPad, a laptop––while checking their email, the weather, and dealing with a million other tiny distractions. The old world where a viewer sat in a movie theater giving your film her rapt attention is no more.

Many filmmakers, myself included, find ourselves at a crossroads: we either embrace this new viewing paradigm, or we make something that cannot be consumed in such a fleeting manner. I’ve actually tried to do both.

Over the past few years I’ve begun making “live documentaries”––these are events where I narrate a film in person and cue images from a laptop, while a live band performs an original soundtrack as the film plays. (I have a new “live documentary” touring this fall called The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which I'm performing with the legendary indie rock band Yo La Tengo.) I adore this form of filmmaking because it’s a way to hang on to the live experience of seeing movies, which I feel is a precious thing. It shouldn’t be lost. When you see a movie in person you experience it with others. You share in some sort of communal time and space, and then continue the experience through conversations afterward. All of these connections around the film are often as important as the film itself. So the "live documentary" format is a way for me to fight the tide of isolation and home viewing, and try to bring people together to experience my films.

That said, I am also very interested in utilizing the power of the Internet as a distribution system for a diverse and disparate viewership. I recently made a documentary about Esperanto called The Universal Language and decided that there would be no better project to experiment with online distribution than this one.

Esperanto is an artificial language invented by a Polish eye doctor named Ludwig Zamenhof in the late 1800s. Zamenhof believed that if everyone in the world spoke a common, neutral language people could overcome war and racism. Although Zamenhof’s dream might seem naive to us today, during the 1920s and 30s there was a huge Esperanto movement worldwide.

Today, surprisingly, a vibrant Esperanto movement still exists. Estimates range from 50,000 to 2 million present-day speakers of the language, and every summer there is a world Esperanto congress in a different city. I attended a couple of these and was surprised to find 2,000 to 3,000 Esperanto speakers each time, traveling from all over the world.

Because Esperantists (as they are called) are such a scattered, global community, how could I effectively reach out to broad swathe of them? The Internet!  Right now, for the first time ever, filmmakers can distribute our own work online solo––no iTunes, no distribution company, no one else needed.  Last year, my Bulgarian friend Stoyan Dabov set up a great website for the film (in both English and Esperanto) where people can download a file and watch the film instantly on their own TV or computers.

It can’t be overstated how radical this new technology is for filmmakers. In the past a filmmaker was dependent on a distributor or studio in order to get a movie out into the world. They were the ones who had the networks and relationships to put a videotape or DVD on store shelves and ultimately into the hands of a viewer. Filmmakers occasionally did this on their own, but it was an epic and uphill struggle.

It’s only been in the past year or two that the technology has evolved to the point where a person can download an entire film relatively quickly (movie files are generally huge files!). With The Universal Language, we're able to do this through a company called Topspin, which actually takes care of the downloading and billing, but the person who is purchasing the film never leaves our site. Again, this is revolutionary; it's the first time ever that a filmmaker can get a film out into the world this independently, and it is an exciting moment!

It’s been interesting to see how this kind of thing can work. Over the past months, I’ve been surprised by the steady stream of people downloading The Universal Language from our site. Every day there are people all over the world watching the film and hopefully thinking about Esperanto, the concept and role of language, and other issues the film raises, which is so neat. 

On the other hand, it’s been clear that the notion that one can just put something out on the Internet and people will flock to it, or that it'll “go viral,” is plainly naive. With the deafening roar of so many books and movies and albums and causes all vying for attention online, we really had to promote and market the film like crazy in order to get people to notice. But this has been a good challenge. It's spurred us to create a blog on our site where we've posted interviews and short articles for Esperantists and non-Esperantists alike, for which we've been continuing to research new and interesting Esperanto-related leads. (A recent example: an interview with one of the many Esperanto-speaking members of the Pirate political party in Germany.)

So this whole thing has been a real learning experience. Yes, technology is making us all more scattered and frazzled and isolated, but it's also providing us with first-time-ever opportunities to reach out and make contact with each other. The other day some Esperantists in the Congo got in touch to let us know about a screening of The Universal Language they had recently. I was struck by the fact that although we might not have reached the world of peace and internationalism the Ludwig Zamenhof imagined when he created Esperanto, in some small ways technology is helping us to lurch in that direction.

A Network with No Expectations

By Pia Infante


The practical magic and inspiration of Boston's Barr Fellows Network story is captured simply by the following admission from Lyndia Downie, Executive Director of Pine Street Inn, - "I'm not sure I buy all this network theory, but I love the people in this network."


I encourage you to study this living history of how providing sometimes long divided (and very different) local leaders with opportunities to renew, connect, innovate, and be fish out of water together (in the global south) are some of the building blocks of "networking a city." 


In the Barr Foundation's learning partnership on networks with the Interaction Institute for Social Change, they coalesced existing understandings of networks and decided that the network they sought to seed and support was one of connectivity for the sake of connection and relationship.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.  And waited to see what would organically emerge from this.  


These are 3 distinctions I found useful:

• Connectivity network: loosely structured with no expectations of shared accomplishment (read here: relationship over time without pressure to perform)
• Alignment network:  shared vision
• Action network:  people mobilize towards common goals and collective action

In the event that this case study not only intrigues, but inspires an open source open spirited desire to copy, here are some guiding thoughts:

1. Prepare to invest in sabbaticals and disruption.
2. Select from a broad base and be flexible. 
3. Engage a network knowledge partner and assess early and often.
4. Recognize that the funder-grantee relationship is complex.

Reflections of a Reflective Leader: Authenticity as Authority

by CJ Callen

TWI Trustee CJ Callen, who has recently taken the helm at the Youth Leadership Institute, blogged about her learning so far in this new role.  Take a peak at CJ's thoughts on leadership transition, the importance of reflection, and translating learning into practice - in this piece, published on CompassPoint's blog earlier this month.