Beyond the Organization

We have a funny relationship with our organizations. We tend to forget that we built them. We tend to forget that without us they are abstractions, little more than a piece of paper in a government office. We tend to forget that we are alive and that they are not, they are tools, ways to structure how we work together so that we can do what we want to do, but better. I often talk of this situation of being a lot like “The Matrix,” the humans built the computers to serve them but instead they ended up mostly dead, in a fake world, giving up their energy to keep the computers alive.

Ok – so organizations themselves are not bad, in fact, they can be very useful, but we have to make them serve us. We not only have to change how our organizations work, we have to change how we relate to them. We must change them as WE grow, the point is not for the organization to grow, grow, grow – the point is for us to grow. Today we are stuck with terribly outdated organizational paradigms, it’s the information age, and yet we still organize ourselves in antiquated industrial structures that constrain our passion and limit our potential.

It is time that we transcend our organizational constraints – especially in the social sector, where our purpose is not profit but creating a new world. We can no longer afford to come around meeting tables and play organizational poker with one another. We can no longer afford to allow our organizational affiliations to get in the way of our doing work together. The social sector is full of good people, passionately committed people, brilliant-strategic-idealists, but we too often fail to catalyze the magic in our hearts – our core resource – because we can only relate to another through some sort of organizational identity.

There is a lot more to be said about this, a lot more to explore and discover together, and I hope that this space can become a part of our collective effort. But for now, here is the invitation – find out who is sitting across the table, not who they work for. Find out how they got into the work, what is their story – not just their ideology, find out what they are looking for, what they love and what they have always wanted to do but have not yet been able to do, because maybe, just maybe, they might want the same thing as you.