Social Enterprise Planning Plus 30march2010

Some Not-Quite-Random Planning”

Notes

around

“Social

Enterprise

A colorful “white paper” from Alexander Carpenter Contents Definition of Strategic Planning.......................................................................................................................3 The Process...............................................................................................................................................3 What’s the Plan, Stan?..............................................................................................................................4 Why not “Strategic Planning?”....................................................................................................................5 The Challenge of Communications...............................................................................................................6 The Advantages of Social Enterprise Planning......................................................................................................7 Culture and Structure Are Strategy...................................................................................................................7 Crazy Things Happen in Planning Processes.....................................................................................................8 Prerequisites for a Successful Planning Process................................................................................................9 Style and Mood of an Effective SEP Process........................................................................................................10 Vision-Based Community Benefit Planning.....................................................................................................10 Complexity..........................................................................................................................................10 Simplicity............................................................................................................................................11 Interviews and Group Conversations............................................................................................................12 Key Distinctions from the Operational Model of Change of the Model for Community Change ...........................................13 Organizational Level:..............................................................................................................................13 Program Participant Level:.......................................................................................................................13 Community Level:..................................................................................................................................14 Advocacy Level:....................................................................................................................................14 “Complete Mission Statement” Examples:.........................................................................................................15 Values-Vision-Mission-Means-Goals Statement for a United Way Branch.................................................................15 An Internal Functional Vision-Mission-Means Matrix for a United Way....................................................................16 Healthy Kids Mendocino...........................................................................................................................17 Organization (and Organizational Chart) Parameters and Principles..........................................................................18 Corporate Titles....................................................................................................................................18 CEO/President......................................................................................................................................18 Finance..............................................................................................................................................19 Operations...........................................................................................................................................19 Resource Development............................................................................................................................19 Marketing............................................................................................................................................19 Accounting..........................................................................................................................................19 Job Descriptions....................................................................................................................................20 Organizational Charts Revisited.................................................................................................................20

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Challenges inherent in the transition:..........................................................................................................21 A Meditation on “Covert Leadership” (a tragic oxymoron)…....................................................................................23 Self-Valuation Key Distinctions..................................................................................................................26 Self-esteem............................................................................................................................................................27 Self-worth.............................................................................................................................................................27 Self-efficacy...........................................................................................................................................................27 Clarifying Distinctions on Sectors....................................................................................................................27 A Characterological Comparison of the Private and Social Benefit Sectors..................................................................28 Change Management..............................................................................................................................28 Comfort-Zone.......................................................................................................................................29 Private Sector Persons in the Social Benefit Sector..........................................................................................31 “Do Nothing”........................................................................................................................................32 Phobia of Criticism.................................................................................................................................32 Consequences.......................................................................................................................................33 The Cult of Mediocrity............................................................................................................................34 Five Tragedies......................................................................................................................................34 Supply and Demand................................................................................................................................35 “Servant Leadership”..............................................................................................................................35 Evil...................................................................................................................................................36 Major Resources........................................................................................................................................37 Quotations...............................................................................................................................................38 Appendices..............................................................................................................................................39 A Note on Political Correctness (and similar empty rhetoric):.............................................................................39 A Note on Hedging.................................................................................................................................40

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Definition of Strategic Planning Strategic Planning:

The process of developing strategies to reach a [pre-]defined objective. Identifies the medium-term goals integral to an institution's mission; general principles are fairly fixed, but the means for implementation are flexible. An approach to planning that aligns the unit's mission with its specific courses of action and results measurements.

Strategy:

A strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. Strategy is the way an organization seeks to achieve its vision and mission. It is a forward-looking statement about an organization's planned use of resources and deployment capabilities.

"What to do" ("mission") is not strategy; strategy ("how to do it") kicks in when "what to do" is adequately known. "What to do" is defined out of vision; “Why to do it” is defined out of values. To align on means ("strategy"), one must first have aligned on a mission. To have a meaningful mission, one must first have aligned that mission with the organization's (and its community’s) values and vision. These are organically distinct and essential stages, and are an integral part of the Model for Community Change, which provides an empowering values-centric context for organizational planning, as well as an algorithm (or template) for its implementation. For more information about the Model for Community Change, see its Key Distinctions below, and contact Alexander.

The Process What we in the social-benefit sector have been calling “strategic planning” should be done by a select group of Board members, most of the management team, and selected community peers, including volunteers. An organization that needs to hire a consultant for this purpose (or merely to “facilitate” the process), is probably already in some trouble and may need more than strategic planning to thrive or even survive. If the composite leadership can't do the planning, it can’t run and evolve the company as a modern “market-responsive” (or mission-focused) organization requires. “Facilitation” is not leadership. Planning/facilitation skills are the same skills leaders use every day to facilitate or actually lead an ongoing success conversation and enterprise, with the ultimate goal being an organization of adults who are self-responsible, creative, aligned, and committed in a team, and productive. If present management can’t do it now, then it can learn by doing it iteratively — it may be inefficient at the start but the results will be highly advantageous in the medium and long term. One way to bridge this gap is to have an outside consultant coach in-house facilitating leaders in a behind-the-scenes mode. True organizational planning must involve community peers or an inbred and involuted organizational culture will propagate itself. It’s just human nature. It’s no accident that things in the community are the way they are now, in equilibrium with the internal culture of the organizations within it. To drive authentic change in an organization’s community will require authentic changes in the internal culture. This is the hard part, the demanding edge of moral courage, to have change begin within (with the next stage, to confront and change the established order, only slightly easier). Peers from, say, a local Community Foundation, city and county government, and the Chamber of Commerce can work to align vision; peers from national equivalent or parent organizations, various major individual and organizational donors, and from other stakeholders such as churches can work to align mission; and peers from vertically integrated service agencies and other partners can work to

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align means. All will need to originate any re-alignment deep within themselves, through a ruthless and explicit conversation starting with shared values and resulting in grounded commitment. “Strategic planning” in the social-benefit sector is a metaphor taken from the private sector, where strategic planning actually does work as a means-defining exercise because the private (or business) sector’s relatively simplistic values, vision, and mission are such a given: at the very least, and ordinarily little more, to make profits and increase market share. The social-benefit sector usually undertakes this same kind of “strategic planning” to determine its mission (not just its means), without going deeper to its originating values and vision. This results in a fragmented organization participating (if at all) in a fragmented community conversation. This is a failure of “cultural diffusion:” the naïve social-benefit sector has been seduced by the glibness and apparent (but illusory) technical mastery of this process in the private sector, whose tools are inadequate to meet the needs of a more-demanding way of life and a more-profound engagement with the very fabric of society. “Strategic planning,” as such, is not able to meet the social-benefit sector’s needs (and, indeed, is inadequate for the private sector’s complete needs as well). Most social-benefit organizations do only a “strategic plan” because their mission is (or appears to be) self-evident but which might largely consist of un-aligned (and even antithetical) projections. A strategic plan is only one part (and a junior part, at that) of a master plan that examines the basis for being, the hidden assumptions, and the unconscious habits of an organization. Strategy can intrigue your mind, but a master plan puts fire in your belly. It breaks down the artificial silos in an organization or community, and enhances communication, collaboration, coordination, and alignment not just of efforts, but of will. Most organizations that do only “strategic planning” accomplish their means (or some of them) and fail to some extent at their larger mission because they have failed to link values-driven motivation and action throughout their culture and organization.

What’s the Plan, Stan? “Enterprise planning” is a modern business strategy for integrating continuous process improvement into real-time operations, and running in parallel all the tracking and forecasting that requires. “Enterprise Planning” is also known as “business process modeling” and “enterprise systems integration.” It can be similar financially, and an expansion from, a “business plan,” but is more comprehensive and detailed, and uses a “framework” or “model” specifically designed for the purpose. “Social Enterprise Planning” (SEP) is similar. It tends to be more broadly focused on society and used by non-profits that generate earnings in the marketplace (that “generate earnings” also applies to fundraising and other revenue-generating activities, so this notion is readily applicable to service-provider agencies, program operators, foundations and other funders, and even — and perhaps especially —corporations that are premised on a social or environmental component of their mission). It also seeks to integrate the social activities with the financing and fundraising so they work together. Both Enterprise planning and Social Enterprise Planning are much more comprehensive than “strategic planning” and encompass the range of distinctions of the Operational Model of Change — which is at least abreast of the state of this art (a good example of the convergent evolution of enterprise-planning models), and which now appears to be one of the more advanced presentations of the idea of modeling and integrating social and economic processes that have a distinct community-benefit orientation. Ultimately, every person or organization that has any social mission at all (even large corporations) can become more productive through Social Enterprise Planning, for all such organizations should ultimately be primarily focused on their social mission, which their business (or “market”) mission serves (or should serve). This would return corporations to their original rôle in service to their polity, performing functions that are neither governmental nor private, but an integrated hybrid of the two, and manifesting human values over (but not to the exclusion of) market values. An analogous example of another tool borrowed from the private sector is SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. While of limited but real value in a purely tactical business context, it is actively damaging when applied to organizational planning in the social-

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benefit sector, and for the same reasons as “strategic planning” (and for other reasons, as well; see below, in Resources) — it is crippling of coherent shared vision, values-based enrollment, committed alignment, and overall context. How do we generate a true master plan? We stop thinking in terms of “strategic planning” and think instead in terms of “Social Enterprise Planning,” which starts with values, vision, and mission (see below in the Key Distinctions), subsumes conventional strategic planning within the means distinction, and continues on through outcomes, results, and community benefit. It builds credible evidence for a stronger value proposition, and connects through an integral advocacy conversation into a community-wide conversation for healthy change. It inherently accomplishes much more than is possible with “strategic planning.” It iteratively applies and manifests the Model for Community Change as the template for its conversation.

Why not “Strategic Planning?” When most organizations gather together to do "strategic planning" they haven't adequately and explicitly distinguished between the values-andmotivations, objectives-and-goals, and the processes-and-plans to accomplish them — between their intrinsic (biological and cultural) motivators and their extrinsic (social, economic, and physical) motivators. That is why most "strategic planning" processes fail: because some persons have already identified with potential accomplishments (often largely unconsciously), while others are still seeking to discern them. The first are already looking to apply means for implementation; the others are still looking for the best or right things to accomplish (with the planning of strategies to follow). Many can say “What,” but most cannot coherently say “Why” or “How.” The conversation is crippled and the community is fragmented. The product of typical strategic planning, a topically conflated “mission statement,” combines mission (what to do) with means (how to do it): a large part of the organization is focused primarily on the means and another part primarily on the mission. It almost never addresses “why.” That first “means” part can be satisfied when the means are merely engaged, regardless of the results. The other “mission” part sees some results happening from the means, and has a hard time connecting them to their vision of the mission. The two parts are not sharing the same vision, nor receiving the same feedback — not because the facts are different (if they are adequately known at all), but because any predefined motivation and the social and cultural contexts for interpreting them is different. In both cases, there's a lot of wondering why things aren't coming together, not much organizational coherence (or mission success), and no active conversation to clarify what’s happening (or not), and why. Even worse, many if not most “mission statements” are expressed in terms of “trying” or “supporting” or “working at” some accomplishment or process. This is even more destructive to power and commitment: “OK, we tried hard, so we are adequately accomplishing our mission. Sigh…” — even when it is obvious that mission remains unaccomplished or even unaddressed. Another common reason for failure is cultural: most members of an organization are simply waiting to be told what to do, rather than actively engaging the process and expressing their own will toward a vision. They are habituated to that dis-empowerment and its “safety.” In this scenario, charisma and manipulation rule, as "leaders" seek to indoctrinate their own ideas (or “standard” ideas) into the mass so the mass internalizes them as their own myths. This can work in the very short run, but rapidly falls apart and becomes a campaign of slogans, "programs," and passive resistance. Without an evident connection to our intrinsic values, there is no widespread "ownership" motivation, little or no commitment, and no reward at the community level. Applied systematically, the Model will explicitly distinguish intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, and provide the community or organization with the power of applying shared intrinsic motivators. Without explicitly advancing through all the distinctions in the Operational Model of Change, organizational planners are inherently working in a fog of assumptions and projections, at cross (or divergent) purposes, and the result is unsettling mis-communications, mis- (or non-) alignment, and wasted trust, energy, and time. There’s no master plan, just strategy. No

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context, just content. No integral connection to society or humanity. The conversation becomes amorphous mush. Poorly-defined visions get lost in poorly conceived and poorly coordinated actions, which, for want of that vision, often become ends in themselves (as “programs”). Similarly, without explicitly identifying the criteria for success, and calibrating the accomplishment of that success (in both means and results), focus on interim accomplishments (e.g., raising funds) distract from, and often diminish, overall mission effectiveness (e.g., benefit from use of those funds). Because of its larger and more-coherent vision, a social enterprise plan can drive community benefit through program-participant benefit — strategic plans have tended to focus almost exclusively on driving participant benefit, and very rarely expand their vision and value proposition to offer and deliver community benefit. Obviously, “leaders” whose style and practices include variations on “divide and conquer” will find use of the Model threatening to their rule. Similarly, such leaders have avoided any real accountability, substituting “We tried…” for “We succeeded” — hiding behind the illusion of irreconcilable complexity in a situation. Those leaders have always been willing to sacrifice true mission accomplishment to maintain their political position; they have always been able to rationalize and substitute the mediocrity of low expectations and partial engagement for genuine success. Using “strategic planning” for overall organizations in the social-benefit sector is a pernicious mis-application of an inappropriate tool. Even more than in the private sector, organizations and communities need Social Enterprise Planning. This is essential if there is to be an effective focus on community benefit, and an organizational focus on community benefit requires community-wide participation in a community-wide conversation. Working stepwise (and always iteratively) through the Model’s distinctions provides an opportunity for an entire organization and its community to generate a shared vision and align on the actions to realize it and the means to effect the actions. It connects the intrinsic and the extrinsic. That connection is tremendously motivating and empowering to the organization and its individuals and community, and that begins a feedback loop of success engendering more success. The set of distinctions also provides a working structure for sequencing the conversation. Then, once a clear values-vision-mission field has been defined within an organization or community, we move into the Means distinction, where strategic integration and tactical planning should be done by a management team (a real mission-focused team based on actual personal strengths, without regard to position or title) comprised of carefully selected or perhaps even most team members, and others (including community volunteers) when advantageous. This results in a series of “benefit scenarios” that describe how we will deliver program-participant benefit, community benefit, and a compelling value proposition to the community through the Advocacy Model of Change.

The Challenge of Communications Given a coherent process, the greatest remaining challenge is communications — continuous, internal, and external. Communications happens before, during, and after a Social Enterprise Planning process. In effect, Social Enterprise Planning is communications; there are few real action verbs involved. Communicating content through shared visualizations, using an adequate visual metaphor for time, space, and process, leads to enrollment, alignment, and commitment. Stakeholders must see the potential benefit in its wholeness in their own lives. The “vision” metaphor is literal. A linear sequence of words on a flat page, even with pictures and maps, is not adequate, if only because the world isn’t flat and isn’t sequential in any two-dimensional way. The reliance on such media is another reason why most strategic planning processes fail to be communicated. They generate a printed and linear “plan” that sits on shelves while people continue to improvise and build ever-more-elaborate workarounds until that added complexity implodes and drives them to yet another “strategic planning” process and yet another flat-field document on a shelf. In practice, any planning process is an opportunity for people to have conversations they wouldn’t ordinarily have, and to share knowledge. Most of that knowledge is shared informally and locally, and it usually doesn’t get organized and presented in the “plan” to gain high utility from being clearly integratable by all, individually and collectively. A Social Enterprise Planning “master plan” approach is inherently more capable at dealing with these added dimensions of reality, desire, caring, and will. Modern matrix-visualization tools are

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available to deal with the need to assist and structure vision —to generate and structure a coherent larger plan, to communicate it, and to guide its implementation. They are accumulating an amazing track record in every respect (see below, under Resources, for one example).

The Advantages of Social Enterprise Planning Social Enterprise Planning (using, for example, the Model for Community Change as its template) is contemporary Management Consulting and Organizational Development at its best and highest, stepping back from the illusion of knowledge and alignment (usually projected or simply assumed) to build a living consensus from the ground up. This requires true leadership (as opposed to manipulation, intimidation, and fetishistic congeniality at any cost) and generous vision (as opposed to self-aggrandizing), with illusory seductions not prejudicing the process. It also requires tremendous moral courage, and highly skilled and even charismatic internal adult mission-focused facilitation without ego or narcissism from self-serving factions corrupting the process and its outcomes. In a very benign way, it challenges assumptions and habits, and liberates authenticity. It goes beyond collaboration, through commitment, to building community. The implementation part of strategy generates “benefit scenarios” and definitions for success and how it will be known and communicated. Strategy is the senior part of the means distinction in the Operational Model of Change (see below). A strategy is the organizing principle for applying resources through a tactical operations plan, which arrays the incremental means (techniques). Even if its original ambition is small, a “mission statement” or “strategic plan” process structured through all these distinctions organically becomes a “master plan.” Then, when it is time to adjust the mission or the means (from effectiveness feedback and advocacy evolutions) the vision can remain intact. Similarly, with mission and means distinct, one can recognize some means as successful and others as inadequate or inappropriate, and emphasize some and choose others while maintaining the mission (and the whole process) intact. Or the vision can itself evolve to accommodate a changed reality, and in turn drive adjustments in the mission and means. We will assume that our values will be the most stable part of the entire statement, with the vision a close second. Each distinction can be an independent variable, giving us more degrees of freedom. If we haven’t explicitly distinguished one of these stages, we haven’t chosen (and can’t choose) its content; it remains lost in a fog of assumptions, projections, interpolations, and guesswork. When intact, this process gives us adaptability with integrity and coherence, as well as an inherent structure for improving mission and community-benefit effectiveness and for generating increasingly credible evidence of success. Upon applying the right distinctions within good process models, and with a knowledge-sharing culture (with appropriate infrastructure), an organization becomes more efficient and more effective at its mission, and makes fewer and more-recoverable mistakes at every level — conceptual (vision and mission) and operational (strategic, tactical, and technical).

Culture and Structure Are Strategy The organization of a happy, thriving, successful learning organization is not an arbitrary fixed structure into which individuals are plugged like standard “modules.” The highest creativity, productivity, and responsive market (or mission) adaptability comes from exercising the art of integral team building, which is always a dynamic, evolving enterprise. Most organizations are very poor at this. Most organizations’ structures represent the bad habits, dead-end conventions, and obsolete cultural rituals of an ineffective past, and then institutionalize them into a confining, morale-killing straight-jacket that symbolizes and propagates a damaged (and damaging) culture of reactivity and control. Overall, peoples’ fundamental emotional and psychological makeup doesn’t change much, if at all. People can learn new information, and resulting behavioral overlays can be maintained until stress forces reversion to their core automatic patterns. It is better to design organizational systems around what people are than what they pretend or aspire to be, and it’s better to design systems that are inherently re-

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balanceable as personnel rotate through (and even as they evolve, which does happen but shouldn’t be counted-on). Unless personal evolution is the actual mission of an organization, the real-world mission of an organization should not be sacrificed to that end. Some balance is calledfor. Instead of a corporate-style linear or hierarchic “silo” report structure, a small organization needs “radial” or holarchic parallel coordination made easier by a knowledge-sharing infrastructure applied in an adaptable culture less about power and authority (vertical and horizontal “structure,” and “territory”) and more about actual workflow (mission-accomplishment “movement”). This helps escape the nominalization trap and free people to have their personal capabilities be more important than their positional authority — which is always the case in any healthy organization. This is a structural learning-organization modality, and requires (and facilitates) a demanding and substantive (that is, not merely social) teambuilding process that generates alignment, elicits commitment, and includes community volunteers. It generates a culture of peers, with management and its leaders in a primus inter pares or “servant” role. The culture requires participation discipline in content-rich meetings and many short stand-up-type encounters; it also requires an expectation of immediate direct interpersonal communications whenever possible, even if awkward (especially if awkward), instead of intermediary media such as telephone and e-mail. It holds people and groups accountable for results. It is kind, it is real, it is implacable, and it is successful. With this culture and structure, acknowledgement for accomplishment is shared throughout the team, and no-one can get away with sequestering credit (or commandeering blame). An “inverse prisoners’ dilemma” culture, modeled high and low, in which at every opportunity all parties give full credit to all others involved in an enterprise, will generate the most confidence, highest productivity, and highest morale (a sense of generosity and equity being essential for high morale). In a mature culture, credit is not a zero-sum game (such games being typical of a primitive organizational paradigm): if I give you all the credit and you give me all the credit, there’s twice as much credit.

Crazy Things Happen in Planning Processes A tremendous clamor of chatter and flak as stakeholders seek to claim mind-space and hedge dominance Spasms of arbitrary power-grabs with no integral mission-aligned basis or goal Frenzies of projection, presumption, and posturing, unleavened by reality-checking and quality-control Abandonment of core competencies in favor of attractive alliances Seductions by grandiose attempts to “save the world” that are inherently and safely impracticable Embracing distracting fads (such as PC) with no payoff or that actively interfere with values and vision (such as PC) • A random walk of individuals and factions about transparency and disclosure, with whiplash extremes of overloading excess to crippling secrecy • Compulsive “reasonableness” and appeals to, claims of, and hiding behind, pseudo-science (“Posivitism”) and calls for “proof” • Rote and frantic random faction-building before any new purposes and functions are even defined • Pre-existing lack of trust will generate paranoid position-taking and advantage-taking; both will undermine the power of choice and commitment • People act out through mis-direction their fear of examining their assumptions about the world they live in; afraid to go deep enough to challenge their own personal premises • People neglect to examine their assumptions that their world is in a stable steady-state. They don’t dig deep enough into their basis of being and look at the meta-context of their existence and functioning — they don’t look for the master plan

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• • •

A crisis of moral courage about really taking on the established order of things to effect meaningful change Every permutation of the above …

Prerequisites for a Successful Planning Process • •

Institutionalized moral courage, through leadership by example A cultural climate of trust, confidence, inclusion (of the personal, non-PC kind), and transparency (all unlikely under most leadership regimes) • A sufficiency of shared values, confirmed explicitly through a process such as the Model for Community Change • Skill at aligning persons and eliciting their commitment • To have explicitly identified actual and latent competencies, and to prioritize them with appropriate humility • An end-game that involves active commitment to the values, vision, mission, and means co-chosen as part of a master plan • A healthy tolerance for benign interpersonal confrontation at an adult (“professional” or impersonal) level • A practice of regular accountability conversations in which the organization measures its success and examines how it’s happening • Recognizing that we are accountable for our overall outcomes and benefits not to our donors (and not only to our shareholders), but to our community at large. We do, however, have a fiduciary obligation to our donors to use their money responsibly and efficiently. Any benefit we bring our donors comes from their sharing in the overall community benefit we advance using our resources • Include explicit contingency plans for the most likely fundamental changes in the larger context of their operations and advocacy (e.g., accelerating inflation, Peak Oil, economic instability, redistribution of war expenses, changes in national policies, natural disasters and social epidemics; recognizing that mediocrity, not drama, is the default resolution) • Some way to effectively and universally communicate the master plan and its component strategic plan visually as a dynamic whole system of aspects, responsibilities, and actions • Some effective communication that we are really seeking to make changes, based on newly established priorities • A willingness (or better) on the part of the established “leadership” to do their job differently, and on a different basis (one of relatively low ego and reduced “control”) without having been wrong about prior approaches • ... There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513 Even without the highest levels of interpersonal skills, these prerequisites can be approximated until they become effective and authentic.

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Style and Mood of an Effective SEP Process Vision-Based Community Benefit Planning If the board of a non-profit organization is planning for Community Benefit, it will not be creating a traditional non-profit strategic plan. It will also not be creating an organization-focused business plan. Further, it will not be considering the current situation via an environmental scan, a SWOT analysis, or any other analysis of the current situation, as the context for moving forward. Why not? Because when we tether our plans to today (via traditional planning processes and their precursor analyses — SWOT, etc.), those plans are, in effect and in practice, tethered to what we do not like about today. As we try to find a way to move away from those negative circumstances, that tether keeps us anchored there. If, however, a board is planning to create the future for the people it directly serves and for its community, then the tether-point of that plan will be that positive, inspiring image of success — the future it is planning to create for its community. The vision. How well that vision has been realized will be the measure of the organization’s success. And the plan will be anchored in (and therefore pulled along by) that positive vision, which in turn is anchored in the values of the community and the organization. When a board regularly considers and re-considers that proactive planning focus, and then monitors its progress throughout some well-defined period, board members will have a system by which to hold themselves accountable for all four of the board’s functions — those focused on ends and those focused on means. The “back-casting” approach inherent in the Model for Community Change (with its fundamental orientation around shared values and common vision) and pioneered by organizations such as MGTayor (see MGTaylor Axioms: A Model for Releasing Group Genius at http://www.mgtaylor.com/index2.html and the new incarnation of the MGTaylor social technologies at http://www.mgtaylor.com/I7/index.html) is squarely and almost exclusively focused on what we want to accomplish and not on the impediments to that accomplishment. As such it is a classic application of the Law of Attraction, which states that what we focus on is what is most likely to actually happen. When we establish our ambitions (our vision of the world we seek to create and live in), set aside our present problems, look backward in time from a mind-space future in which we will have accomplished them, and explore, define, and synthesize an untrammeled means whereby we will have made them real, we are freed from the often-obsessive focus on the problems we are currently dealing with and largely unable to solve. We can also escape the predicaments for which there is no solution. If we focus on the impediments to our accomplishment, that is where our energies are trapped and expended, in an aversive and negative enterprise. If we focus on the positive benefits of our ambitions, and create a de novo, anything-goes process for accomplishing them, we are liberated from the present impasse — an impasse because we have not been able to escape it and accomplish our goals from within the perspective of the present situation.

Complexity Social Enterprise Planning © 2007-2010 All Rights Reserved Alexander Carpenter

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Evolutionary psychology has shown us that human beings, as individuals and as groups, have evolved to react automatically and algorithmically to urgent situations, overwhelmingly emphasizing immediate benefit at the expense of any potential long-term benefits. So threat-responsive “problem-solving” is entirely natural and advantageous, but has limitations, especially when groups and organizations are involved, and even more-so when situations are complex. There are vastly more things we don’t want than those we do want (there are an infinite number of ways things can go wrong); fixing or preventing them won’t necessarily get us what we want, and it can consume all our energies in the process. A “problem-solving” approach inherently generates complexity as it layers ad hoc solutions to superficial problems upon layers of ad hoc solutions to even-more superficial problems without returning to the basic challenge and building an integrated approach from scratch. This gratuitous complexity actively interferes with accomplishment and adds a tremendous physical, financial, and emotional cost to attempting it. It also reinforces focus on problems and the struggle and even failure to solve them (with its consequent erosion of any sense of viability of the overall enterprise). This results in a discouraged, even pre-defeated, mood that drives the people involved to default to self-serving (rather than vision- and mission-serving) behaviors. If you don’t understand how things are connected, the cause of problems is solutions. Amory B. Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute. The “problem-solving” mood is one of vexation and frustration, victimhood and blaming (invariably someone else) and irresponsibility, as people limit their involvement and vision to shrinking aspects of the overall enterprise (“Not my problem…”). This approach can result in a death-spiral of discouragement, equivocation, and, ultimately, failure. It is depressingly common. It invites under- or over-reaction to situations, and inappropriate changes in approach to developing and implementing the organization’s plan. Changes are integrated after they are put in place, requiring yet another layer of “problem solving” for the unintended consequences of the solution to the previous problem. The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple. It operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences. Andrew Gelman In this analogy, the political system is “problem-solving;” the complex system is the organization at large in its social and environmental setting. That complex system requires a sophisticated approach to regulation such as Social Enterprise Planning using the Model for Community Change.

Simplicity A “re-define-and-re-integrate-the-whole-situation” approach represented by SEP using the Model maintains and recovers simplicity and refamiliarizes all persons involved with their motivation and inspiration, as well as with how what they do fits in with what others do.

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A good solution will: solve more than one problem, while not making new problems; satisfy a whole range of criteria; be good in all respects; accept given limits, using, so far as possible, what is at hand; improve the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern — it is a qualitative solution — rather than enlarging or complicating some part of a pattern at the expense or in neglect of the rest. Wendell Berry on Solving for Patterns This approach is inherently inspiring, as it periodically clears away all the dead-end underbrush and allows not only the trees to flourish, but also the forest. It refreshes commitment as it clarifies how what we are doing connects to our values and vision. It maintains space for small or incremental changes as well as large and sweeping changes in the way an organization implements its plan. It mostly pre-integrates changes and minimizes unintended consequences. It generates an uplifting and inclusive conversation. Accommodation for what would become, or had been, “problems” are designed into the system, and they can be entirely averted. “Problem-solving” simply can not do this.

Interviews and Group Conversations Four core questions, for individuals and groups: What do you like about your own job? Describe what your work and its outcomes would be like in the best of all possible worlds… What most inspires you about what you and your group/organization are doing here? What would you do to make this situation better for everybody? Instead of questions such as: What don’t you like about your job? What’s getting in your way? Why do you even bother? Who is a thorn in your side? Maintaining focus on the positive requires rigorous and steadfast discipline on the part of the leaders of the process. It helps to explicitly set the parameters of the conversation to exclude focus on problems until the integrated master plan has been defined, aligned around, and committed-to. Inevitably, some focus on impediments and immediate problems will be called-for, but it is an entirely different matter to do integrated “problem-solving” in the larger context of a backcasted master plan instead of as a stand-alone ad hoc approach to getting things done. Problems and sets of problems too-readily become predicaments when there is no sense that they are just minor irritants on a path we have committed to following, to accomplish a vision we can acknowledge and perhaps even feel throughout the organization.

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Key Distinctions from the Operational Model of Change of the Model for Community Change Organizational Level: A values statement is a list of the human and social values we will apply, in balance with, but not subordinate to, market-value constraints. A vision statement is a description of a social condition of the community (a state of being) we seek to make real. This contains and generates interim (individual and family) and ultimate (community) intended outcomes. A mission statement is a description of exactly what we are committing to accomplish in the community (usually with program participants) that will realize our vision. A goal is a milestone on the way to accomplishing our mission A success is an accomplishment of an interim or ultimate goal or mission (or output or outcome or objective) The objective of the enterprise or organization or community is to make real its vision A metric is an objective measurement of a success; in other words, a measurement of change A key metric is a widely-occurring metric that will correlate with community-level statistics or provide return-on-investment ratios A means statement identifies the strategies, tactics, tools, and techniques (a set of engagements) we plan to use to accomplish our mission An input is a resource the means consumes or applies. It includes infrastructure, program personnel, and program participants. An activity is a tactic a program performs (“what it does”) to accomplish a strategy; its deliverable(s). An output is the delivered content of an activity, to a person, family, or group (the output unit).

Program Participant Level: An outcome is a change in program-participant behavior in consequence of something a program does. There are two principal kinds of outcomes: 1. Internal changes (interior, subjective outcomes — learnings of knowledge and skills, planning, and changes in thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and moods), leading to 2. Changes in behavior (exterior, objective outcomes — observable changes in actual physical behavior), leading to Results are the consequence in a participant’s life of the changes in her behavior, observed as changes in life situation or circumstance. Results are measured in terms of: 1. Changing occurrence of events; 2. Market value of averted drain events and added gain events (the return); and

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3. An experience of improved Quality of Life.

Community Level: Cumulative results are the consequence in the community of the results in many participants’ lives from many programs. Community benefit occurs from the multiplier effect of cumulative results. This, not outputs or outcomes, is what we are working to accomplish. Credible evidence of community benefit comes in three ways: 1. Correlating changed occurrence of events in cumulative results with third-party community statistics 2. Return on Investment is the return divided by the program cost to accomplish that return, whether individually or cumulatively Return is the sum of market values of averted drain events and added gains from individual or cumulative results or event. Program output-unit cost is the total program budget divided by operating capacity (average outputs over time) Operating capacity is the average (not total) volume of activity or output units throughout a period, or incidence of events 3. Changes in individual, family, and community experience of Quality of Life from community benefit. Our value proposition to the community comes from accomplishing our mission (community benefit) and communicating that success with credible evidence.

Advocacy Level: Community change happens when the community internalizes the applied and evolving values that led to the changes that accumulate to community benefit. This is manifest as a shift in priorities from intervention to prevention and earlier intervention (because prevention-ROI is always greater than intervention-ROI, and because the community can’t afford a high volume of late intervention). Facilitating that shift is the Advocacy Model of Change… Please note that operational flow through the values-vision-mission-means-goals-outcomes-results-benefit distinctions is a dynamic combination of linear and iterative, singular and parallel.

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“Complete Mission Statement” Examples: Values-Vision-Mission-Means-Goals Statement for a United Way Branch [Present in vacuo public United Way Mission/Means Statement: To improve lives by mobilizing the caring power of our community.] UW Values:

Integrity and equity (inclusion, fairness, trustworthiness, transparency), accountability with responsibility, responsive and adaptable, commitment to equal opportunity,1 courtesy, compassion and kindness, collaboration, wellness, geographic equity and integration, courage and leadership, operational excellence (efficiency and effectiveness), strategic mastery, catalytic concentration of focus, ... — all in the context of addressing the human2 needs of individuals and families in our community and maintaining human values over market values.3

UW Vision:

One fulfilled three-county community with no un-met needs4 and a [self-]responsible culture of caring action.

UW Mission:

To help cause, advance, and demonstrate opportunity and benefit for the community and all its members. [less specifically, and more as a slogan, to advance the common good]

UW Means:

Community collaborations, inspiration, enrollment, resource and attention concentration, conversation-generation and influencing, content-seeding through convening, disciplined catalytic focused funding, needs assessment; added value from program and United Way accountability; education and training, ...

UW Goals:

First Round:

1 2 3 4

$5MM unrestricted Focused Funding distributions Zero communications and connection lag in addressing un-met needs (211) 100% community-wide name and value recognition for United Way Real-time community needs assessment in place (demand-side feedback through program evaluation and 211) Doubled community participation in United Way process: campaigns, volunteers, major giving, sources providing community-level statistics (and sharing credit for success); ... Transformed value proposition through credible results-correlation and return-ratios Significant and productive increase in demand-side engagement where appropriate

as opposed to equal outcomes. See the Hayek quotation at the end of this document. in accord with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. note the absence of “diversity” and other Political Correctness rhetoric (see Appendix) as opposed to un-met wants, which engages an entirely different conversation.

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An Internal Functional Vision-Mission-Means Matrix for a United Way Department

Administration & Finance

Marketing

“Resource Development” (Fundraising)

Community Benefit

State

An effective team, learning A community fully aware and and growing, and inspiring supportive of United Way the community

A thriving self-responsible A community with no un-met community with bountiful giving, needs investing, and participating (“Give, Advocate, Volunteer”)

Mission

Support the operating departments

Concentrate community attention

Strategies

Executive, donor, investor, and volunteer enrollment

Communicate the United Way value proposition; invite participation

Motto

What do you need? How can we serve you?

How can we tell a more compelling and bigger story?

Concentrate community resources (money, people, materiel) to use for community benefit Applied expertise at effective inspiring, enrolling, and fundraising. Answering the question, “What’s in it for the community?” How can we help you do a better job at benefiting your community?

Generate and show community benefit. Provide knowledge for Marketing, RD, Admin, and community Develop, evolve, and implement a robust Model for Community Change; enhance accountability for benefit, value, & credibility The difficult we do with deliberate dispatch; the impossible takes a bit longer.

Good physical, cultural, and IT/MIS infrastructure; team building, alignment, and empowerment

Media, buzz, events, website, videos, printed materials, ...

Workplace campaigns, majordonor outreach, special events, direct mail, ...

Lead (not manage) and Serve the process

Communicate the product (and the process)

Sell the product (better: enroll people in the process)

Convening for content-seeding, focused funding, capacitybuilding awards, added value from evaluation, focusing the community conversation on benefit Provide the product (Community Benefit and secondary value)

History and psychology

Noise

Culture, economy, and noise

Vision

Commitment

Means

It’s not about us...

Tools Tactics & Techniques

Business Metaphor Challenges

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ANOTHER “COMPLETE MISSION STATEMENT” EXAMPLE: Healthy Kids Mendocino Values • • • • •

All children have a right to quality health care, regardless of immigration or other social status. All children have a right to be free from hunger and have quality food to eat. All families have a right to be treated with respect and cultural sensitivity. Cultural sensitivity is vitally important. Our partners are an essential resource in responding to the needs of children in their local communities.

Vision A community of healthy children. Mission To promote access to health care for all children in Mendocino County. Means • • • •

Assisting families to enroll their eligible children in government-funded health insurance programs for children. Paying the health insurance costs for children that are not eligible for government-funded programs. Working with community partners within local communities to reach families in an environment that is comfortable to them. Support parents in using the health care their children’s insurance makes available.

Goals A one-page statement of values, vision, mission, and means can act as a complete, stand-alone communication of the entire ground of being of an enterprise. It honors the intelligence and caring of a potential enrollee by being more incisive than a slogan (which is almost always trivially demeaning), and less collapsed and amorphous than the typical “mission statement.” It invites engagement at many levels.

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Organization (and Organizational Chart) Parameters and Principles Be very wary of organizational charts. The organizational chart of a happy, thriving, successful learning organization is not an arbitrary fixed structure into which individuals are plugged like standard “modules.” The highest creativity, productivity, and responsive market (or mission) adaptability comes from exercising the art of integral team building, which is always a dynamic, evolving enterprise. Most organizations are very poor at this, present company included. Most organizational charts represent the bad habits, dead-end conventions, and obsolete cultural rituals of an ineffective past, and then institutionalize them into a confining, morale-killing straight-jacket that symbolizes and propagates a damaged (and damaging) culture of reactivity and control. Overall, peoples’ fundamental emotional and psychological makeup doesn’t change much, if at all. People can learn new information, and resulting behavioral overlays can be maintained until stress forces reversion to form. It is better to design organizational systems around what people are than what people pretend or aspire to be, and it’s better to design systems that are inherently re-balanceable as personnel rotate through (and even as they evolve, which does happen but shouldn’t be counted-on). Unless personal evolution is the actual mission of an organization, its real-world mission should not be sacrificed to that end.

Corporate Titles Be very suspicious of enterprise-level corporate title-sets in smaller companies. They don’t work in most smaller companies, and definitely don’t work in an organization as small as most organizations in the social-benefit sector. In fact, enterprise title-sets actively interfere with mission-accomplishment in small organizations. They tend to over-hierarchicalize functional flow, compress creative improvisation within confining conventions, and rob us of work-arounds. They lead directly and immediately to a dysfunctional culture and organization that magnifies the effects of, and can be crippled by, the weaknesses of its officers (rather than facile at working around those weaknesses to maximize the results of their strengths). We may use some of those same words in titles, but unconventionally, and without taking them too seriously.

CEO/President Be very wary of an organization in which one person is both Chief Executive Officer and President. Those two jobs require very different personality-types and skill-sets. There are very few persons with both. An organization with a CEO/President either has nothing to actually do, does its operations poorly, or is helmed by an exceptional person who is at high risk of burnout — which is why most functional (as opposed to posturing) CEO/President arrangements are temporary by intention as well as by default. The roles of the “CEO” and the “President” are exactly analogous in an organization in the social-benefit sector and in a small and growing company in the private sector. In both cases, the CEO’s principal task is raising funds and the President’s is spending them as effectively and efficiently as possible. The CEO is the master politician and deal-maker; the President is the master of getting specific operational things to happen. Although there are rare exceptions, the right person to be President should no more be CEO than an entrepreneurial scientist should remain head of a rapidly growing company he founded. Every investor knows this; why don’t social-benefit organizations and their Boards.

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Finance Most social-benefit organizations have no "finance" and need no VP of Finance. They have money-management (including payroll), G/L accounting, audit-responsibility, and sophisticated and specialized fund-accounting and transaction-tracking responsibilities; and one of accounting's most important tasks may be the money-history half of potential-donor research (with the personal-profile half done in Resource Development – “RD”). Please note that fundraising is distinct from accounting. Even fairly large organizations just need an accounting department reporting to the President, with real-time liaison to RD and the CEO through shared assistants. Most social-benefit sector organizations are weak in managerial accounting, to their detriment. Anything approaching a true "financial" decision is the rightful domain of the composite leadership, with content support from Accounting.

Operations Operations would be run by a President/Chief Operating Officer (or even “Community Benefit Officer,” recognizing the true immediate or ultimate purpose of the organization), who would also coordinate Community Benefit product development and delivery, logistics for convening, special events, and campaign operations (one person would liaise intimately with RD on this, especially on content), guide accounting, and administer legal and employment matters. Presidents with diverse operating responsibilities must guard their boundaries and be wary of burnout and getting over-immersed in the myriad details of their mission. They must have more-than-adequate administrative support. Strategic integration (the fine-tuning of means) and tactical planning should be done by a management team (a real mission-focused team based on actual personal strengths, without regard to position or title) comprised of carefully selected or perhaps even most team members, and others (including volunteers) when advantageous.

Resource Development Resource Development, or “fundraising” would essentially be run by the CEO, whose principal job is “dealmaker” fundraising at the highest levels and below (and other political duties). Another task would be systematic advocacy at those same levels. A VP of RD would be his lieutenant, factotum, and researcher, and coordinate the content-delivery and relationship-building side of campaigns. Another lieutenant would be a major-gifts specialist; yet another would be a workplace campaign specialist. They would share at least one assistant.

Marketing "Marketing" would appear to serve two masters, RD and Community Benefit (CB) through community enrollment with value propositions (value propositions work two ways), and events and campaign collateral. Those two would be tightly aligned and coordinated by the President.

Accounting Accounting and executive management require two very different personality-types and skill sets (even if it’s just managing operations), and very few persons have both. Some of the greatest businesses have foundered when “money people” have taken over from product, operations, and market people. Smart investors and Board members know this; are social-benefit-sector Boards necessarily less smart? Accounting would also have a “split” function, with time-series reporting to the President and close coordination with campaigns and donors through the various RD personnel. Good software will help this, as will sharing an assistant with RD. Internalizing transaction and G/L accounting

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functions, as well as a general multi-purpose organization-wide database, would be a major early preoccupation of this team. A real-time organizational “dashboard” would be an important ongoing responsibility of Accounting, with RD (resources) and CB (benefit) also providing information. In addition to a typical overall-campaign-cashflow meter, this dashboard would have a major-donor meter and also communitybenefit, return, and internal-operating-efficiency metrics (as opposed to effectiveness-and-efficiency metrics for grantees). Most dashboards provide neither enough detail to inspire and ground operating departments, nor enough synthesis and time-series perspective to inform executive and Board management. This need not be the case here.

Job Descriptions Be very wary of job descriptions. Most job descriptions are artifacts of the skill-sets of former individual occupants, or of those of even earlier occupants. Job descriptions tempt us to fit a person to a canned “job” instead of finding a person whose strengths are complimentary to the existing strengths of other persons operating in a genuine team. Most people do not change in fundamental ways, and their personality type is more controlling of their value than what they know (which can be changed, up to a point). Standard, cookie-cutter job descriptions can work for a large, complex, relatively rigid organization (but barely). It is better for a dynamic organization to define a necessary set of team skills and knowledge, and organize any desired additions around the existing personality-types and available skills. Of course, that will require an effective mission-substantive team awareness, which is very rare. A matrix of the functional capabilities in a team will reveal missing skills (personal and technical) to be incorporated to make the team whole. A standard job description will interfere with this process. Working job descriptions are better prepared on a one-time, ad hoc basis from a general template, in the context of a relatively fixed (but still evolving) team-function expectation. Hiring becomes more an art supported by science — an art for which the sterile ritual of merely “reviewing resumes” for nominal qualifications can be seriously counter-productive, as essential personality and complementarity elements are not captured.

Organizational Charts Revisited Instead of a corporate-style vertical-linear or hierarchic “silo” report structure, a small or even larger organization needs "radial" or holarchic parallel coordination made easier by a knowledge-sharing infrastructure applied in an adaptable culture. Such a chart would have more radial vectors, less about power and authority (vertical and horizontal “structure,” and “territory”) and more about actual workflow (missionaccomplishment “movement”). Note that we wouldn’t represent those vectors with arrows, but with a matrix with varying densities of attention and sharing. This helps escape the nominalization trap and free people to have their personal capabilities be more important than their positional authority — which is always the case in any healthy organization. This is a structural learning-organization modality, and requires (and facilitates) a real and substantive (that is, not merely social) team-building process that generates alignment, elicits commitment, and includes community volunteers. It generates a culture of peers, with management in a primus inter pares or “servant” role. The culture requires participation discipline in content-rich meetings and many short stand-up-type encounters; it also requires an expectation of immediate direct interpersonal communications whenever possible, even if awkward (especially if awkward), instead of intermediary media such as phone and e-mail. Assistant-sharing is equally valuable as a leaven of dynamic processes in a learning organization, especially if the officers are not natural and generous communicators. In this case, shared assistants would also assure even distribution of evolving value-content between “departments.” With this culture and structure, acknowledgement for accomplishment is shared throughout the team, and no-one can get away with sequestering credit (or blame). An "inverse prisoners' dilemma" culture, modeled high and low, in which at every opportunity all parties give full credit to all others involved in an enterprise, will generate the most confidence, highest productivity, and highest morale (a sense of generosity

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and equity being essential for high morale). In an adult culture, credit is not a zero-sum game (such games being typical of an adolescent organizational paradigm): if I give you all the credit and you give me all the credit, there’s twice as much credit. With this culture, a thriving learning organization emerges, generating productivity and a quality of life, and an aliveness that is threatening (even terrifying) to old-paradigm, command-and-control management, and to accountability-adverse persons fearful of commitment and its implications and risks and thus unable to be fully engaged and creative in their commitment to their mission.

Challenges inherent in the transition: •

Realigning “leaders” to recognize their strengths and weaknesses, despite their self-myths and desperations, and to accept the need for support • Motivating officers to trade the illusions of control they find in the false security of structure and secrecy for the rewards of success • Realigning all persons out of a heroic “cult of individuality” into a team mentality, also motivated by success as well as quality of life and emotional “belonging” — a “tribal” synthesis • Psychological inertia, vanity, and hubris • Stark fear of failure and exposure • The discomfort of developmental un-blocking • Insecurity about change itself, so it must be handled with integrity and transparency in a mission-focused impersonal context • Finding new titles for everybody, so those who might otherwise feel they are being “demoted” don’t feel dishonored • Finding an entirely new schema of titling that tells more truth and is more transparent and inspiring, organized less hierarchically and more of a “team” or “tribe” metaphor • During the transition and in continuing operations, exceptional presence and attention must be placed on everything. This can’t be done by one central person; it must be distributed. Transparency, alignment, and active communications become (and may remain) all-important. • …

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A “Buddhist Lineage Tree:” the structural analogue in a hierarchical religious organization of a corporate organizational chart. The flow is through time and generations; the authority is spiritual rather than operational. There is a genetically mediated social-behavioral algorithm (an “archetype”) that supports this pattern in all cultures and social settings and organizations, even when one might least expect it, and even when contrary to the nominal professed philosophy.

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A Meditation on “Covert Leadership” (a tragic oxymoron)… Leadership by compartmentalization, triangulation, and manipulation sacrifices aliveness, productivity, and creative synergy throughout an organization, to accomplish only the illusion (as always) of control. It murders creative adventure for the illusion of emotional security. It guarantees mediocrity or outright failure for the illusion of reduced risk. And then it lies about what happened, irresponsibly externalizing and excusing cause instead of mastering circumstances. It is morally and intellectually bankrupt, while hoarding righteousness. Another way to look at this is that it represents management with a hidden advance agenda that tries to remain hidden. However, all but the most resolutely clueless participants and stakeholders will sniff it out, if only unconsciously, and that will kill trust and creativity. An otherwise competent leader cannot actually lead with open inspiration and merit because of a neurotic (or worse) failure-risk aversion. Good intentions and some genuine native strengths can nonetheless result in bad processes and mediocre (or worse) results. It is usually the organizational projection of the character of a leading narcissist (and his cadre of like-minded or sycophantic Betas), who sees challenges as coming from others instead of inherent in the system and his personal style projected onto the organization. Typically, reactivity to that imaginary competition or opposition blinds the covert leader to his part in creating and maintaining that system and culture. He is blind to the mission requirements because he is more committed to, and hedging at any cost, his personal outcomes and — most important — his selfmyth. His life is more about his reasons (usually “excuses”) than about his results, which erodes or outright demolishes both the fertility and fecundity of his community. The narcissist’s ultimate fear is that his profound unconscious “self-worthlessness” be revealed through failure. That any such worthlessness is merely a belief through conditioning is invisible and irrelevant to him. He is a hero divided against himself. The antidote is transparency and true teamwork (alignment and commitment of peers around the substantive content of the enterprise, not merely social bonding), and a moral courage that is readily (but not comfortably) learnable. Change for the better, even when it is unanimously desired and from a benign intention, is as disruptive and awkward as change for the worse from a malign (or indifferent) intention. To ease these (and many other) transitions, we say one thing and do another. The covert leader attempts change, but indirectly and often irresponsibly, with hedged, plausibly deniable equivocation. Because he is inexperienced at challenging his own self-myths, he is inexperienced in exercising the moral courage to directly confront the core myths of our society and polity and resistance to any change. Attempting change without benignly yet explicitly confronting that resistance results in unconscious, unchosen, fragmented, and largely unsuccessful engagements and outcomes, because there can be no commitment or accountability under these implicit and evasive circumstances. To truly make a difference in the world, conscious choices must be made, shared, and evolved with continuous, incremental communications, instead of rote habits of word and deed. It is commitment, after all, that is the essential element for successful change. Its handmaiden, accountability, is invaluable for defining and re-defining means, and knowing how successful we are, and why. Why all this focus on Covert Leadership?

First of all, because it is disappointingly common and disproportionately destructive of both established and potential success, in favor of “safe” mediocrity. It is an expression of what Ken Wilber has called “boomeritis” (after the Baby Boom generation) which is a near-universal developmental disorder of our times and civilization, more noticeably manifested in men, if only as an artifact of men’s greater social prominence. Especially pernicious is narcissism combined with associated ancient (Pleistocene) concealment instincts (and other manipulations) of bred-to-dominate Alpha (or would-be Alpha) persons and clans, expressing adaptive behavioral algorithms. We must recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure.

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Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism, 1914 “Narcissism” is not used here in a pejorative or clinical sense, but to describe a morbid intensification of normal self-reflexive consciousness. There are two threads of use of this notion, the older one focused on neurosis-level vanities and egotisms; the newer one developing in the last decade and recognizing that narcissistic behaviors usually represent compensations for severe personality and developmental damage — deep and unconscious demolished self-worth masked by exaggerated self-esteem, intelligence, and charm, and by clear patterns of rituals to protect against exposure of the “true” worthless and incapable self. Those rituals revolve largely around the illusion of “control.” Sadly, the person affected is almost invariably unaware of the damage as such, as it mostly occurred before his personality coalesced and self-recognized. It’s the water in which their psyches’ fish swim. This contemporary notion of narcissism integrates with evolutionary psychology in that it recognizes the influence of genetically mediated impulses that have provided a distinct survival advantage for those who have been bred to manifest them. It is no accident that what we call narcissism manifests very differently in Alpha clans compared to the proletarian masses; and it’s no accident that the narcissist is driven to seek positions of apparent power, power that can provide an illusion of control to shelter them from their worst fears. Providing a substrate of consonance with the experience of the individual damaged psyche is the universal fact that helplessness is the native ground of being of an altricial species such as Homo sapiens. The helpless-versus-worthless distinction is interpretational and can be influenced by appropriate nurture that supports maturation over infantilization — clear and beneficial interpretation of process rather than focus on incremental events, and consistent realistic validation by others (primarily parents at the critical early age), such that a person gains self-worth. The damage tends to result from a paralysis and atrophy of confidence and core substantive engagement-skills when a child is confronted by erratic and contradictory stressors in his family or social environment — when there is no possible reconciliation of what people say and what people do, when there are only lose-lose choices to be made, when true evil destroys their aliveness through subversion and betrayal. [An aside: The different effect of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in different social classes is marked by different distributions of expectation, Alpha breeding, and social resources such as education and money] An additional factor is the conditioning of the “Cult of Individuality” reinforced by the isolating breakdown of the bicameral mind. See Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and the quotation from David Foster Wallace in an Appendix, below, which remind us of the structural semiotic reinforcements for narcissism. There is a developmental threshold in mid-life (variously between 40 and 50, depending on other factors) when a person becomes newly able to distinguish the valuation choices and re-interpret his experiences. First of all, this requires time measured in decades. It also requires a history and an environment rich in human connection without trauma, and trustability, coaching, and non-judgmental witness. This reinterpretation is primarily at an empirical-experience level, and is only secondarily cognitive (which is why cognitive, or “talk,” therapy tends to be ineffective in that arena). It occurs after a critical mass of cumulative events, is based on evidence from active life engagement, and not by re-experiencing the original defining traumas which occurred prior to personality formation. The notable exception to this is the benefit of somatic release and re-patterning of structuralized stress through body-work and athletics. Both such integrations can gain a person self-efficacy. “Self-esteem” becomes the narcissist’s universal compensatory projection, marked by masterful deception of self and others, enrolling others through genetic-algorithmic bargaining (“reciprocal altruism,” in the parlance of evolutionary psychology) to not challenge each-others’ selfmyths, and reinforced through co-conspiratorial Political Correctness. As always, when you want to know what’s really happening in this world, turn off the soundtrack and watch the action. Listening to the masterful patter of the narcissist leader will only distract one from recognizing their actual patterns of behavior and outcome. The narcissist is usually very poor at aligning others with objective substance, because he has little or no internal such process to externalize. So he must “control” through reciprocal altruism, co-conspiracy, and the arbitrariness of political power, while separating through triangulation all persons he bonds with, and preventing (even suppressing) knowledge, creativity, and engagement except on his own terms. This represents the dynamic social-archetypal dichotomy between power (what one can control and suppress) and freedom (what one can create and liberate).

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It is a primate behavioral archetype for leaders (covert and otherwise) to exaggerate or even invent false dichotomies (the “other”) to control the social conversation. If we can’t talk with our “enemies”, by default we have a conversation with ourselves, a conversation dominated by a very few voices (some of whom represent in token “opposition” the presumed and projected voices of the “other”). In typical practice, this winds up as “straw-man” opposition with both “sides” represented by essentially one voice. There is no space for wholeness, creativity, or progress in such a regime; nor in a regime defined by triangulation, manipulation, and secrecy. It is a macrocosm of the narcissist’s internal conversation.

Second, to be kind and compassionate and find a way to shelter such leaders (and their organizations) from their tragic flaws while liberating them to exercise their actual powerful gifts for the benefit of all. Can we design an organizational system in which success is a structurally supported element for all, providing stress-relief for the entire organization? Some modest stress is desirable, however, to maintain focus. It’s that incoherent, unconscious, embedded stress that is so toxic and ruinous — the stress of conflicting totally-incompatible messages between what is said and what is done (that same stress which demolishes the sanity of a young child and drives narcissistic compensations). What • • • • • • •

are those gifts and virtues? They are driven and very hard-working, perhaps even “overachievers” (sadly, with only modest achievement) They are skilled at becoming liked and becoming one of “us” They tolerate the mediocrity of compromise They are very intelligent and thorough They are often genuinely likable and well-meaning (unless they are simply bad people) They can keep a secret if it’s to their advantage …

What are those flaws? • They are highly, sometimes pathologically, risk-adverse (especially if there any personal implications) • They generate the mediocrity of compromise • They fall back into rigid authoritarian positions under stress, stonewalling substantive content (they rely on the authority of position rather than the strength of content and merit) • They choose amorphous and often-impossible challenges that structurally they can neither succeed nor fail at • They tend to be commitment-phobic, except for those grandiose challenges • They politicize the technical to the detriment of its coherence and success • As they grow up, they are driven to emphasize intelligence and charm as things within their control, and other development lags • Management by projection and presumption • Callowness behind a sheen of sophistication • They rely on secrecy, often pathologically, with triangulation a core isolate-and-manipulate strategy • They tend to infantilize their “subordinates” and the cultures of their organizations • They are run by fear, and cannot maintain a climate of love, either personal or principled • …

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How can we avail ourselves of the virtues of the narcissist? By placing them where their drive and skill at being liked is an advantage, so they can enroll others in our enterprise so we can use their resources. The essence: so they can make deals. How can we protect ourselves from the weaknesses of the narcissist? Have risk-responsibility undertaken by others more capable of mission-reward, while giving personal credit to the nominal leader(s), all, to the extent possible, in an open culture of abundance, transparency, and shared courage. Sheltered by a Board of Directors or an Executive Committee on one side (taking responsibility for vision and mission), and sheltered by a President and staff team on the other side (taking responsibility for mission and means), the narcissistic “CEO” leader is liberated to do what he does best with no immediate potential downside. He is free to be creative and experiment for optimum results without the paralyzing possibility of personal failure lurking at every turn. He can generate more of a solid track record of accomplishment (which goes to self-worth) and an experience of gradually increasing confidence and risk-tolerance (which goes to moral courage). He can undertake more direct responsibility as his development recovers and advances. He can generate an increasingly whole self-myth and evolve out of his personal and social conditioning. He can replace entirely subjective self-esteem with objectified self-worth, worth recognized and shared by others from their own direct experience. This is an area where moving away from corporate-style title-structures can be liberating of new kinds of roles. Being trapped in what we think a “CEO” should be doing prevents us from redefining the actual real-time functions of that officer, other officers, and staff. J.P. Morgan reminded us that “The CEO is just another hired hand.” Organizational mythology and self-serving aggrandizement by narcissistic CEOs (and other officers) tends to obscure this basic fact, and that robs the organization its ability to provide emotional support for its leaders. Such support requires a true team mostly impossible for the covert leader to generate on his own because of his internal self-narrative — a conversation of one. Whence the need for other responsible officers and Board leadership. This requires explicit divisions of responsibility and consonant structures and actions to manifest that division, which will inevitably be tested. This calls for a cultural evolution that is well within the skillful means of many Organizational Development craftsmen and artists. It requires a new template for the organizing conversation (such as the Model for Community Change). The developmental “graduation” from narcissism requires external support, and an internal spiritual and developmental growth that may be the most significant and valuable of his adult life. It is almost impossible to do without the active support of others, and is always very difficult to do even with that support. It is a major life accomplishment. The support must make the self-worth connection before it breaks the old selfmyth (or the result is “borderline personality disorder” of varying severity). The ability to abandon the prop of nominal position and title is a huge initial stressor (so it must be spun properly, and customized for each person); the ability to give others credit will be a tremendous initial challenge to a person voraciously needing all the credit he can get, and habituated to a zero-sum game. The ability to merit credit from others will simultaneously challenge and rebuild the devastated identity behind the self-myth. And yes, this is all a game of sophistries, but they define the rules of the game. We say it, and our agreement and commitment make it so.

Self-Valuation Key Distinctions All of these have been found in use by people in the real world, without any actual clarifying definitions in context. Curiously but not surprisingly, these three modes of self-regard map to the Subjective Outcomes/Objective Outcomes/Results distinctions of our scalable fractal Operational Model of Change within the Model for Community Change.

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Self-esteem • •

About very-early-age personality damage leading to narcissism (among other things), and about conditioning by others Politically-correct self-delusion reinforced by others (“Everyone’s a winner,” social-promotion, etc.) • Close to 100% subjective, with no reality-testing (potential failure is too risky to self-myth) • Usually has tinge of desperation with a subtext of denial-flight from an unconscious belief of worthlessness or from dissonance between reality and interpretation/projection • Gets people in tailspin when their reality is challenged, because it is without basis in shared reality, so no framework for calibration • Has no resilience

Self-worth • •

• • • •

About applied values and energies in life Based on feedback from personal and worldly engagement, and exercise of authenticity and integrity Self-regard supported and calibrated by engagement-experience and a history of personal accomplishment Willingness to risk Can range from largely subjective (e.g., poems) to somewhat objective (relationships) Resilient

Self-efficacy •

About personal power in the world • Based on experience, personal and worldly success, and feedback • Self-regard supported and calibrated by engagement-experience at getting things done that involve others (whence political) or changing things (crafting or inventing, whence physical) • Highly objectifiable (and even transferable) • Highly resilient and often accompanied by an enjoyment of risk (when accompanied by a compulsion to undertake risk it could be an expression of the denial syndrome associated with “self esteem” issues). In individuals and in the collective, these can evolve with maturation and experienced engagement. They can also devolve (e.g., in the 19th Century America had self-worth, and in the 20th Century it had self-efficacy. In the 21st Century it has self-esteem issues, is in denial about profound dissonances between principles and practice, and is risk-adverse — if there’s no profitable market transaction, then there’s no incentive). This scalability is analogous to the scalability of the Model for Community Change and its components (particularly the Operational Model of Change).

Clarifying Distinctions on Sectors Increasingly obsolete and even misleading distinctions presently used: Public sector = government Private sector = corporations, small business, personal affairs

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Non-profit sector = charities, foundations, service agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGO)s This set is confusing at best, and does not reflect the power dynamics in our civilization. Rather more trivially, it is hardly informative to identify something by what it isn’t, since there is a vast number of things that any given entity isn’t and a finite number of things it actually is. It must be better to define a sector in terms of what we want from it, not in terms of something entirely different. It’s that pesky Law of Attraction again. So both “non-profit” and “non-governmental” are confusing identifiers, and non-definitions at best. A better and more realistic set (acknowledging that for now corporations are not social enterprises): Public-Benefit sector = government Social Enterprise sector = corporations, foundations Private sector = small business, personal affairs Social-benefit sector = charities, service agencies, NGOs This re-connects the notion of government-chartered and -licensed entities acting in the common good to corporations now independent of any requirement to have a social mission that provides for the common good. The dissonance between these sets reminds us once again how names (and syntax) constrain perception and how misbegotten characterizations typically degrade clarity of understanding, relating, and acting.

A Characterological Comparison of the Private and Social Benefit Sectors Change Management When business-people (small-business or corporate) hire a change-management consultant (e.g., Organizational Development), they are anticipating a certain level of conceptual and operational discomfort, a certain level of learning, self-confrontation, and re-conditioning around values and beliefs, and a certain level of dislocation and disarray within their organization and in its external relationships. They also expect that they will settle into a new equilibrium that will be either more efficient or more effective (or both) at their mission (which itself may have been redefined). The business sector, when it enters into a change-management process, is acting more-or-less voluntarily, and is wellmotivated (either internally or by external forces otherwise outside its control). Its successes are often measurable relatively easily in terms of profitability, market share, Return on Assets, and cashflow. It tends to be relatively responsible in its relations with its facilitators, and tends to not attack the messengers who are bearing difficult news. In fact, business-people often use the personal discomfort it engenders in them as a metric to calibrate the overall value of a change-process — a perversely macho “no pain no gain” aesthetic. Their motivation is more external. They display more sequential thinking (both a curse and a blessing). Market values tend to predominate (both a curse and a blessing). The social-benefit sector (whether at the technical level of service-delivery programs or at the strategic level of funders and community planners) tends to manifest a very different dynamic. Although they characterize themselves as “change agents,” their moral rectitude becomes conflated with the technical merit of their methodologies, and they have difficulty distinguishing and addressing either separately (especially in a change process initiated — imposed? — from outside, which is typically the case). The personal and cultural aesthetic in this sector tends to be grounded in a damaged narcissistic personality that leads them to be phobic about being judged and thus avoid evaluation, and has a

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chronically disempowered “ground of being” that is often uncomfortable with even the notion of being powerful and accountable in the world. Social-benefit-sector persons tend at least marginally more to take difficult news personally and defensively, and often resent that an outside force is acting on them (even if there is a potentially motivating promise in the proposed changes). When they hire change-management consultants (often as “facilitators”), they tend to have a difficult time with setting clear definitions of what would constitute success, and equal difficulty with the means for measuring and reporting that success. This goes far beyond the genuine difficulties inherent in measuring intangibles such as quality of life. Their motivation is more internal. They display more magical thinking (both a curse and a blessing). Human values tend to predominate (both a curse and a blessing). Were the origination and architecture of typical change processes in the business sector more similar to those in the social-benefit sector, their personal reactions would often be very similar to those in the social-benefit sector, so the distinctions above are not absolute. The lessons: • Seek to have social-benefit-sector persons own and internalize what is essentially a continuous change-management process, and regulate its benefits. • Be kind and compassionate (while remaining truthful), and offer motivation native to the sector. • Be generous with value and honor for the caring and expertise of the persons and their community. • Enroll active change-agents who at least appear to come from within the sector, to seed the conversation with local idiom and motivation, and perhaps even some actual experience. • Primarily offer to empower and align with their mission accomplishment, and only secondarily to evolve it. • Exert great effort to explicitly clarify distinctions and models to find the optimum levels and styles of structure in the sector conversations: specificity and precision give us power. • Be explicit about the inter-relationships and balancings between human and market values. Set priorities. • Work iteratively to give complex non-linear systems time to evolve, and persons to adapt. Find the best pace for change, in balance with the benefits of change. • Have clearly defined metrics and standards for success an integral part of the change-management process, and always defer to them when discomfort arises. • Always maintain the distinction between interim accomplishments and the overall mission, and evaluate those interim accomplishments in terms of their contribution to that overall success. • Passive-aggressive behavior is always masking an opportunity for enrollment. • Because private-sector persons tend to be more entrepreneurial that social-benefit sector persons, then tend to be more confident and less concerned about “job security.” • …

Comfort-Zone In the private sector, if something becomes newly worth doing, it is probably not easy, and attempts have probably been made at it in the past with varying levels of success. A certain amount of “suffering” and stretch is generally regarded as necessary to accomplish something new that is important. When an executive or manager maintains a front of total mastery, he loses credibility and trust, because he is either being clearly unauthentic in his communications, or is seriously under-challenged and pretending engagement. If he suffers excessively, he is regarded as a

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“drama queen” and weak. Obviously this is a delicate balancing act, but the point is that creative new accomplishment is recognized to entail some struggle and enlivening challenge. That acknowledged challenge invites supportive enrollment of others, while the heroic all-knowing “master” isolates himself. In this sector, with its relatively simple metrics, that new accomplishment can almost always be easily measured and calibrated to the effort and participation required. In the social-benefit sector, it often seems that the very worst crime is to disturb the comfort-equilibrium of a community by challenging the illusions and mythologies it uses to maintain its collective self-esteem. It is no accident that the social-benefit sector has a very hard time distinguishing between the entirely subjective notion of “self-esteem” and its grown-up cousin, “self-worth,” which is grounded in, and vouched-for, by any actual real-world accomplishment it reflects. That grounding and testing is difficult technically, yet the art of doing that is available from synergy with hard lessons learned in the private sector. Part of the resistance to effective program evaluation and accountability derives from the self-examination and reality-confrontation it requires at fundamental levels usually far outside the comfort-zone of this community. This resonates with Item 10 in Richard C. Harwood’s Top Ten Ways to Live United (http://www.theharwoodinstitute.org/ht/display/ViewBloggerThread/i/9836/pid/185): We must be willing to take on enemies of the public good — enemies like inertia, cynicism, mechanized responses to human problems, false hope, distorted reality, and superficial efforts to take on real challenges. Bringing about hope and change was never easy, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that our current time will be any different. It also approaches taking on the power base of entrenched special interests, the superficial comity of enabled complacence, illusions from the mongers of contrived fear, and the hypocrisies of those who say one thing and do another. In other words, it’s impossible to take on the “enemies of the public good” Harwood mentions without taking on the people who apply them to their own advantage. That includes those who pretend that all is well and under control and that progress is happening as quickly and as equitably as possible. When an executive or manager in the social-benefit sector maintains a front of total mastery, this façade is accepted as non-threatening by others who aren’t secure in their own accomplishments and methodologies. In other words, they don’t know exactly (and often not even approximately) what they have done and how. Why is often shaky, as well. There is an often-unconscious conspiracy of pretense and enabling: “Everything is hunky-dory and we’re all groovy.” “I’m OK; you’re OK.” “We’re on top of it…” “We know what we’re doing” (even when it’s obvious that’s not the case, and even when no reasonable and compassionate person would expect mastery and ease). This spin is easier than in the private sector because in the social-benefit sector the consequences are so much more difficult to identify and measure objectively (and there is no universal standard for evaluation), and the expectations, alas, are so much lower. Substituting “facilitation” for leadership is much easier in the social-benefit sector, and ultimately just as destructive of inspiration and effectiveness. The great misfortune here is that an executive or manager will spin the pretense of mastery differently for different stakeholders (group and individual, within and without the organization) and then become trapped in the need to keep those stakeholders apart lest they compare notes and discover inconsistencies and perhaps even deceptions (if only by interpretation and projection). This behavior is perfectly congruent with the triangulation-instincts of the narcissist, and leads directly to a crippled internal conversation, because developing a true team culture requires all players be on the same page and have the same experience of, and perspectives on, what is really happening. So instead of substantive team content focused on the actual accomplishment goals (interim and ultimate), “team-building” devolves to a series of social events with no actual operational content. The “team” members will thereby like each other, but have no adequate or even empowering sense of what is really happening with regard to how they are working together. This kills aliveness at both personal-productivity and organizationaleffectiveness levels.

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The external, community-wide conversation is also crippled, because trans-silo coordination and rapport are concentrated in a few hands, and the invitation to participate is gutted of workable challenge and any genuine need for an outsider’s sacrifice, commitment, and stretch. That’s what most people are really seeking: a sufficiently safe venue for growth. The private sector is often too challenging; the social-benefit sector too safe. This is especially true when the ask is just for money rather than anything potentially more meaningful such as personal participation and (shudder!) commitment. The most effective ask displays the genius of knowing how to offer an opportunity just at the cutting edge of a potential donor’s personal growth curve. Just the right level of discomfort generates aliveness and alignment. Both too much and not enough create losses that are difficult to recover, because in the process of generating those losses, we lose credibility and trust. Any enrollment style that is phobic around personal challenge will fail at its overall mission (to generate the most community benefit possible — not comfortable — under the social circumstances, and with the resources available) but will accumulate a lot of shallow alliances and facile friendships in the process. United Way provides an excellent example of a philanthropic enterprise playing many roles in many communities: a national organization with many local branches dealing with patterns of similar circumstances that have local variations; all structured around the same set of principles for guidance and improvisation. A slogan such as United Way’s LIVE UNITED tagline of “Give, Advocate, Volunteer” recognizes a potentially expanding invitation; how will we manifest it for the greatest community benefit? Any effective United Way vision and mission statement will recognize this as an integral part of its message (see the mission statement, above). In all sectors, the trap of pretending mastery is real and crippling: if leadership is maintaining a position that it is already master of its enterprise, they have no space to embrace improvements without losing face. Some sectors are culturally and structurally more immune to its damages, and more supporting of personal authenticity in its management. It helps that in the private sector the calibrations of success are so simple and clear (if illusory). Ironically (and always subject to a wide range of variation), the private sector, with its simpler ambitions, facile metrics, and clearer consequences, performs better in this regard. What will it take to bridge the greater human challenges of the social-benefit sector to the streamlined accountability of the private sector? Part of the answer lies in the methodologies represented by the Model for Community Change. Social-benefit-sector persons tend to be power-aversive (except for the compulsive narcissists) and commitment-phobic, perhaps expressing their true internal sense of self-efficacy and callow inability to be held accountable for their word and their deeds. The Lessons: • Abandon pseudo-science as providing neither support for realistic assessments nor genuine emotional comfort — only its illusion. • Don’t pretend mastery you don’t have. Few really believe it, anyway. It’s OK to be in the process of acquiring and improving mastery. • “Knowledge” from direct experience is of the greatest value. • Don’t reject such knowledge because it dies not conform to ideology or theory. • “Comfort” isn’t as important as our sensitivities and habits might indicate. • Success can soothe a tremendous amount of discomfort. • …

Private Sector Persons in the Social Benefit Sector There is a long history of disappointment from bringing private-sector persons into leadership positions in the social-benefit sector. They “just don’t work out…” Perhaps we can apply the Model for Community Change to explore why. When persons come to the social-benefit sector from a corporate or business environment, they bring with them the mental and emotional habits and perspectives and styles that have worked in

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their prior setting. Even the most aware and sensitive person will bring unconscious baggage with them, often in the fundamental assumptions that are generally not explicit for the entire sector. Their tendency is to apply market values (instead of human values), the apparently universal yardstick of monetary value, the cultural conventions around leadership and consequences, the relatively simple metrics to define success, and goal-orientation focused on relatively small and simple goals. All of this falls in the Means distinction of the Model, and mostly in the Strategy and Tactics distinctions (given that they are usually brought in to leadership positions in well-established organizations). The Social Benefit Sector faces much more difficult and much more complex challenges than the Private Sector. … A new leader from the Private Sector, suddenly in place in the Social Benefit Sector, must abandon the previously legitimate preoccupation with Means (the How), and start over with a systematic, organization-wide (and even community-wide) conversation to make explicit and coherent the Values, Vision, and Mission of her new engagement and enterprise (the Why and then the What). Interestingly, all parties — the organization and the community, as well as the new leader — will benefit immeasurably from this, which must happen periodically anyway, but which is essential when powerful new leadership comes aboard, to universal advantage. The Model provides the template for this conversation, and a pre-proven basic set of distinctions to structure it for completion and success. Otherwise, all the unconscious inertia of habits and implicit values from both sectors will survive to cross-pollute (and even corrupt) relationships within the organization and the community. This will cripple the effectiveness of whatever fresh energy and perspectives the new leader brings with her. Ironically, the new leader from the private sector will likely be more tolerant of the consequent stress than the longterm residents of her new enterprise in the social benefit sector (see above). So she’s doubly flummoxed that things aren’t working out, since the social-benefit people tend to be very poor at the confrontations that could clarify what is happening and why. Again, the Model provides a scalable fractal of its applicability, and the Model can be used to describe and guide the communications around the personal development of the new leader as she adapts to her new culture. The ex-private-sector person must also learn different and much more subtle metrics to calibrate success, and learn to live with winning battles and losing the war unless they can apply the Model effectively, especially in its Advocacy mode, where she just might have a mastery rare in the Social Benefit Sector. There is no call to abandon all her expectations.

“Do Nothing” There is a strange macho among private-sector executives. It finds expression in notions such as “The masterful executive never handles any piece of paper more than once.” Its ultimate expression is “The best executive does nothing.” It is productive to think of these assertions more as Zen koans than as literal directives; more as guidelines for balancing than as actual behaviors to aspire to. What, for instance, is the sound of one executive doing nothing? If an executive does nothing alone in the forest, does it make a difference in the world? Does a butterfly land on a different flower in the rainforest?

Phobia of Criticism The social-benefit sector is the least masterful about anticipating and managing criticism from any source. This is related to its emotional insecurity (including the narcissistic risk-aversion explored above) and its general lack of experience with mission-clarity and substantive accountability. It also derives from an anomalous naïveté in its internal conversation about political manipulation and positioning.

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Both the private and the public sectors explicitly acknowledge the universality of personal and institutional conflicts of interest that lead to both overt and covert struggles for power and control; the social-benefit sector is woefully reticent about this, as that would challenge its fundamental beliefs (as well as challenge its conflict-resolution skills). The bottom line is that one can be, and probably will be, criticized for whatever one does, however nominally successful. Life’s too complicated to expect to satisfy every interest in society or in an organization. That many persons would not venture to risk success or failure (those risks are joined at the hip) because one might be criticized results in a tragic conservatism that undercuts mission-effectiveness and builds frustration all around. Ironically, they are always criticized, and especially, eventually, if they do that little or nothing. If one recognizes that one will be criticized no matter what one does, one can plan a strategy for dealing with it, both in advance and after the fact. Even more empowering, that “dealing with” is a great opportunity to align and enroll critics in whatever larger vision they can be made to see they share with one — a larger vision based on shared values. Mission-contribution follows, as a win for both parties. Unfortunately, the standard social-benefit sector defaults for dealing with criticism are mixtures of political correctness, narcissistic triangulation, infantilization (within the organization), and obfuscation (taking advantage of the poor accountability conventions in the sector — including using data-fixated pseudo-science), and usually after the fact. That impulse to obfuscation creates a structural conflict of interest in the sector against advancing even institutional mastery of accountability: were accountability more grounded in experience of reality and successes more readily recognizable, mastery (or lack of it) would be unmistakably and irreversibly revealed. While pursuing mastery of accountability requires courage, it does reward the courageous. When one is not alone, but in a values-sharing coalition that has arisen organically from a community conversation informed by the distinctions in the Model for Community Change, that courage is both easier and more rewarding. The risks inherent in change are almost always tractable, but non-trivial — the transition from a culture of “security” to a culture of accountability is almost always accompanied by turnover as some individuals find themselves unable to adapt to the increased stress. Properly supported, the organization always benefits from this, from improvements in decision-making, responsiveness, and quality-control.

Consequences In expressing an ability to embrace the consequences of accountability in the social-benefit sector, it greatly helps to have taken responsibility for real-world consequences in other aspects of life. Not just responsibility for the consequences of one’s own actions (or non-actions), which are relatively easy to control, but responsibility for things outside one’s direct control but over which one has (or can arrange) influence. This invites the examination of how almost all such control over worldly things is merely illusion, but aside from that eternal hedge, one can actually arrange complex systems to converge to generate (or avoid) consequences. There is a potential lightness in social-benefit sector enterprises, one that most participants miss out on, because they have never been in positions to accept responsibility for potential dread consequences in other engagements. They take things inappropriately seriously, even somberly, and joyous adventure and creativity suffer. “If I fail, someone may not benefit” is a universe of consequences away from “If I fail, someone can die.” “If I make a mistake, no-one dies” (which is the case in almost all social-benefit enterprises) can be a great relief and liberation, but only for people whose experience can distinguish consequences. When mere embarrassment is the greatest potential harm, the mature person shrugs and moves forward. Let’s maintain some perspective, here.

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The “liberal-guilt” seriousness and somberness of a “Save the downtrodden; save the world” approach can be relieved by a recognition that worse things can happen than failure to prevent or to rescue: since most of the people to be “saved” are responsible for their situations (note that is very different from “at fault in” or “cause of”). Undertaking third-party responsibility and investing one’s self-esteem or even self-worth in outcomes outside our control is a fruitless promise that no-one can fulfill. Even mere influence should be regarded as a gift and not an outcomes-weighted burden on the giver. Political dimension: Chattel ownership by the state versus independent freedom (see Green Economy Plus document) Developmental dimension: Young people still have an unconscious commitment to their conditioned self-myths because they have not outgrown them and experienced their illusion and (ironically) their disempowerment by them (despite the interim strengths of rigidity they provide). Another macho attitude in the private sector about the social-benefit sector is that it’s where we “hire the handicapped.” The people that can’t cut it in the private sector (and aren’t corruptible enough for the public sector) find their comfort level in the amorphousness of “going good,” with its grand un-winnable challenges and lack of accountability and consequences (and so we’re back to the seductions of narcissistic grandiosity).

The Cult of Mediocrity In the social-benefit sector, the cult of mediocrity (a human social archetype) is particularly pernicious, coupled as it is with a peculiar and largely covert cult of despair and inadequacy. If there is a sector with “self-esteem” issues, this is it, as it seems to attract persons who find refuge in its unchallenging low-expectation culture — persons who bury their personal issues under the shroud of sector issues.

Five Tragedies The adolescent: Unable to trade unlimited potential for actual but limited accomplishment Young adult:

Unable to experience their authentic self through their conditioning

Adult:

Lacking the moral courage to engage the system that betrayed their authentic self, or getting trapped in their rage or grief about it

Geezer/Crone:

Too jaded and demoralized to actually do what’s necessary to transmute that rage or grief and apply wisdom (to commit and follow through)

Organizational:

See below…

Whence the need for trans- and inter-generational enterprises and engagement, even more than multi-cultural and trans-disciplinary. The individual motivators and advances and the organizational motivators and advances are more aligned in the private sector with its simpler standards for accomplishment. The tragic mistake/projection of most Boards of Directors most of the time, with greater harmful effect in the social-benefit sector than in the private sector, is that the Board gives executive power to those who want it because they need it to make whole their self-myth and meet their own personal needs (see the exploration of narcissism, above). Such ingratiating persons have a very hard time sharing power with others and find it almost impossible to give it away, so the organization’s internal culture suffers (from infantilization and frustration), its effectiveness suffers (from hedging), and it doesn’t grow genuine mature leaders from, say, middle-management within. A balance is called-for: is their engagement about themselves and their drama and process, or is it about the needs of their part of the world? Is it

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driven by desperation or generosity or what balance of those? Is the greatest priority advancing the common good, or their own? Both are necessary in balance, advantageous to the whole and the one, but the balance must play more toward the common good (or, in the private sector, toward the organization’s market mission). That one’s life might actually not be about one’s self is one (of many) definitions/parameters of maturity, and both the Board and the executives should be acutely conscious of this archetypal tension.

Supply and Demand The conversation in the social-benefit sector is almost entirely a supply-side conversation about what the sector offers and delivers; what it knows to do or provide. Demand isn’t even presumed; it never even emerges from perceived need. Except very rarely, the sector doesn’t look beyond what people need to what they want, or, to be more precise, what they want so they can take care of their own needs. We offer a supply-side formula, and tend to be unwilling to allow our subjects to fail in a different way, in a next-developmental-stage way, than they have already. At least not explicitly, despite all the talk about “recidivism.” We are patient, though, and can focus away from our own patterns. At the intervention phase, what increase in Community Benefit can we expect from an earnest and honest engaging of people’s actual desires for what programs supply (or could supply), right now, as they are, in transit through their dharma? What entirely new programs might emerge thereby? In the prevention mode, how much of that might of necessity be guided supply-side delivery of early intervention based on our best knowledge of what’s necessary to avert the causes of what we would otherwise intervene to repair? How do we gain that knowledge? By carefully examining the whole process, and back-tracking to early life experience, before the personalities coalesced and began iterating their self-myth cognitively. Any preventive interventions must be developmentally appropriate or they just build a carapace around a gap in integration of function, a shell around an implosion. The Community Knowledge Base, although focused mostly on supply, also recognizes demand: the desire for people to improve their lives on their own terms, in accord with their own motivators and for their own after-the-fact “reasons.” This is a doorway into a whole ‘nother realm of effectiveness that the sector has yet to embrace. Once again, personal and cultural projection blind us to our true worldly potential.

“Servant Leadership” There’s a lot of confusion about just what or whom is being served. Quite simply, it’s the mission (and in a larger sense, the values and vision) of the organization or community. Many “leaders” are unwilling or unable to “serve” their “subordinate” officers, employees, and other workers as they serve that mission, as that would erode or outright demolish their self-myth and its posturings. A workable equivocation is to serve the organization’s team as it works at its mission. The team-building challenge is to align those employees and workers with the mission so typical command-and-control “leadership” is not necessary. Creating and maintaining a organizational or community conversation structured through the Model is invaluable in this regard, because the Model makes explicit the shared values and vision and engages those “subordinates” in a way that calls any bluff, and dispels any fluff, about their intrinsic motivation (thereby reducing or even eliminating any need for extrinsic motivation, which is often arbitrary, disconnected, and weak).

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Evil Needy people may be victims, but there’s little or no talk in the social-benefit sector of victimizers. There’s no effective talk of who is responsible for the present situation our “subjects” are in, either directly on their own responsibility or from structuring the parameters of “the system.” In addition, how many case-workers can say, “He’s doomed. He’s in a Buddhist “short-path” life, and we are just in his way.”? How many foundation, agency, and program personnel are ready to take on the system and name names, as Richard Harwood calls for, if only implicitly? That would not only violate their own comfort zones, but those of (almost) everyone else. How can we identify those “almosts” and apply their idealism, resiliency, denseness, mission-focus, commitment, and moral courage in the right places to advance our mission, while supporting their personal integration and maturation? Where can we sign up service-provider shock-troopers, and how can we support them so they are successful? They have their weaknesses, too, with naïveté, OCD, Asperger’s Syndrome, and general poorly socialized wonkiness prominent among them. Physician, heal thyself. And of course, how can we improvise and promulgate alignment on what constitutes “advancing the common good,” without inappropriately and unproductively concentrating some of that “good” in undeserving or wasteful hands? How much un-fulfillment is planned and exploited? There’s no sensible recognition and no effective engagement of the “dark side” in people’s lives, nor, indeed, in society at large and its neofeudal owners. There’s no recognition of evil and no honoring of the courage it takes to engage it. Especially challenging is taking on the unconscious (or semi-conscious) evil of those either sincerely (or just pretending) to advance the common good while in practice systematically demolishing it for their own advantage.

Alexander Carpenter 305 Sovereign Lane Santa Rosa 95401 California, USA 707-527-2732 [email protected]

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Major Resources Social Enterprise Planning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_enterprise www.ecell.iitkgp.ernet.in/resource%20pages/SocialEnterprisePlanning.pdf

http://www.cognos.com/pdfs/whitepapers/wp_best_practice_planning.pdf

http://www.redf.org/learn-from-redf/tools/539 http://www.slideshare.net/xmergnc/social-enterprise-planning-guide/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Return_on_Investment http://www.threelawsofperformance.com/

Community-Driven Institute at Help4NonProfits.com http://www.help4nonprofits.com/NP_Bd_Governing_for_What_Matters1-Art.htm# http://www.help4nonprofits.com/NP_Bd_MissionVisionValues_Art.htm http://hildygottlieb.com/ http://www.help4nonprofits.com/H4NP.htm

Visible Strategies “see-it” making the essential visible http://www.visiblestrategies.com/ http://www.shiftinaction.com/node/1635 http://www.hologenesis.tv/ http://www.civicactions.com/node/181

Meetings-Results Technologies http://www.openspaceworld.com/brief_history.htm http://www.threelawsofperformance.com/

MGTaylor Axioms: A Model for Releasing Group Genius http://www.mgtaylor.com/

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Quotations From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict which each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time. F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 1978 Evolutionary psychology is not just one more school of psychology. It is a perspective on the whole of psychology that claims that we are human animals, and that our minds, no less than our bodies, are products of the forces of nature operating on a time frame of millions of years; human nature was forged from our ancestors' struggle to survive and reproduce. David Livingston Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our defaultsetting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real — you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue — it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hardwired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term. David Foster Wallace, from a commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122178211966454607-lMyQjAxMDI4MjExOTcxODkyWj.html ‘The prevailing system of management has destroyed our people,’ says Dr. [W. Edwards] Deming. ‘People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.’ Intrinsic motivation lies at the heart of Deming’s management philosophy. By contrast, extrinsic motivation is the bread and butter of Western management.... A corporate commitment to quality that is not based on intrinsic motivation is a house built on sand. Peter Senge, Building Learning Organizations, Journal for Quality and Participation, March 1992

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Appendices A Note on Political Correctness (and similar empty rhetoric): If, just for example, a United Way branch is to use the national slogan LIVE UNITED as its marketing tagline, it must be wary of the inherent divisiveness of political correctness and identity politics, and of the erosion of individual expression also inherent in political correctness, however trendy and “safe” Politically Correct posturing and sloganeering might be. Individuality tends to be lost in the categories, and the richness from that true individual diversity is more important to our mission than nominal representation in nominal categories. A United Way can have the utmost integrity in its community engagement without embracing the subtle and debilitating hypocrisies of Political Correctness. A United Way can thrive in a post-PC world, as can any other organization… Instead of “reflecting diversity,” we can “represent interests.” According to the conventional wisdom, in the first case we would have to have an identity-representative to do the reflecting; in the second case we wouldn’t. Organizations will never have proportional personal representation, and probably not even token personal representation, of many minority constituencies. We can have non-identified (or trans- or multi-identified) people who can fairly represent the interests of more than one (or more than their own) constituency, as challenging that can be: the individual and organizational maturity required manifests a broad generosity about process and fairness, and perhaps even compassion. In practice, people who actively (and especially those who aggressively) identify with identity politics tend to lack the human qualities we seek, and project a dualism, even a divisiveness, we are seeking to avoid, instead of the union and alignment we are working to achieve. Similarly, there are “leaders” who foment identity politics to paralyze a body they wish to dominate or distract. Further, we would include as human beings any person with whom we were engaged, but not as examples of some abstract and over-simplified category (and thereby dishonored as individual persons). The Cult of Individuality isn’t all bad. Simple personal integrity and common courtesy calls on us to treat others as we would be treated ourselves. Is there any one of us who would not feel diminished if he or she was categorized and stereotyped instead of regarded as a unique creation potentially unconfined in any standardized way? An organization can focus on the LIVE portion of a slogan such as United Way’s LIVE UNITED. A universal commitment for our culture to support authentic personal presence can liberate us from the algorithmic drives of us-versus-them sophistries and conventions. Those dualities are inherently false in every important dimension. Similarly, the synthetic notion of “multiculturalism” only works in the polity when a critical mass of comprehensive common values are explicitly stated and held acceptable or not-acceptable by universal acclaim. Moral, ethical, behavioral, and legal double-standards, with one part of the polity answerable to different standards than another part, simply does not work. Multiculturalism itself can be fatally divisive unless the values of the different cultures are consonant. In this case, systematically applying the values distinction is critically important, as all else flows from and to values. Good thought experiments about this: honor killings, secular criticism of religious figures, and (ironically) political correctness. Free speech is what is left over when a community has determined in advance what it does not want to hear. Stanley Fish, Chairman, Duke University English Department, and New York Times columnist Words wreak havoc when they find a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly. Jean Paul Sartre

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A Note on Hedging There is no advantage to “reasonable” goals beyond being a hedge against the emotional discomfort of failure. Any goal worth accomplishing is worth failing for — a magnificent failure usually accomplishes far more than a mediocre success, and is invariably more inspiring. Whence “eliminate” rather than “reduce;” “all” instead of “some.”

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