Keeping Our Eyes on the (Right) Ball

By Curtis Ogden

In an article in the most recent issue of The Nonprofit Quarterly, Margaret Wheatley speaks to the need for greater trust in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors in order to move through the current challenging financial times as well as to address the complex social and environmental problems we collectively face (see “An Era of Powerful Possibility”). She writes that accountability measures prescribed by funders have often tended to place undue onus on nonprofit leadership and demand excessive reporting and unrealistic measurement systems from staff. In essence, she says that we have had our eyes on the wrong ball.

Instead, what the times indicate if anything is that we need to shift our attention to our own flawed thinking. What we suffer from most profoundly at this point in time is an acute case of uncertainty. What got us into this mess? What does the future hold? What should we be doing now? Our resulting and understandable anxiety can tend to push us into a mad search for answers, and even push us backwards to what we perceive having worked in the past, or worked in a particular situation. The unfortunate part of this reaction is that we can end up concocting or transferring simple or simplistic responses to complicated or complex situations, which inclines us towards mechanistic, overly controlled, expert-driven and ultimately irrelevant and damaging approaches.

A good example of this is the documented case of genetically engineered food in developing countries, intended to alleviate malnutrition. While perhaps well intentioned (and with respect to some parties there are questions about underlying virtue), this approach has not had an impact because it has applied a simple solution to a complex situation. As conservation biologist David Ehrenfeld has written (Becoming Good Ancestors), many people are hungry not because their rice lacks beta carotene, but because they lack a diverse diet. They are suffering from a lack of biodiversity, loss of traditional sustainable know-how and practice, and economic systems with perverse incentives. The blind drive towards genetically engineered mono-cropping not only misses the point, but can make matters worse for both people and planet.

So what are we to do? First of all, recognize that many if not most of the problems we face are systemic and complex in nature. They are both bigger than us and include us. This just might inspire a deeper sense of not only realism, but also humility and responsibility. From here we might recognize the deep call to reach out, to bridge boundaries, to get curious, to listen, to bring our experience and knowledge to the table with an abiding desire to be of service . . . and trust. We must trust one another, whether community member or funder or politician or “expert.” This would seem to be a core lesson from Obama’s strategy and ultimate victory. Trust is the basis of building effective networks. It is also a key lever in overcoming fear and triggering the kind of creativity we so desperately need. Perhaps our most important challenge is to apply this ethic of trust to the natural world, from which many of us are so alienated to the point of fear. If we do not successfully reacquaint ourselves with our very life support system, trust its wisdom, and listen to the warnings and important lessons it has to impart, well . . . then pass me that bowl of rice.

On Dave Brooks, Faith and Trust and Social Change

Wow! The secret is out! And it’s in the New York Times! David Brooks is breaking it down; Newtonian physics is not the end of the story. The industrial paradigm has broken down, we live in An Economy of Faith and Trust (this is the title of the piece!). Brooks boldly calls out the fantasy of control that we keep hoping will solve our problems, the ideas of “input to output” that dominate how we think about the world are being called into question. We have to shift from the complicated to the complex. (See David Snowden of Cognitive Edge, there are problems that are complicated where input to output is measured, and there are problems that are complex where you just can’t account for all the inputs – so what does that say about output?)

David Brooks applies similar logic to our economy and goes even further by saying “we must account for faith and trust.” There are lessons to be learned here for those of us who work for social change. “There is no outside” say Hardt & Negri and the Buddha, and so we are all in this mix, we are all influenced by the idea of homo-economicus and the paradigm that makes it possible. The social sector was born out of the same Newtonian paradigm that hopes to measure all inputs and outputs – and we are still seduced by it.

In the last 40 years alone, what was once a living and breathing organic movement became so institutionalized that we started to believe that it would be a business mindset of supposedly rigorous measures that would finally set us free. Today as the entire financial system breaks down the best we can do is look backwards and say that the forefathers of movement were right, capitalism will undo its own self – but what do we have to offer that is new? And what have we forgotten along the way?

The truth is that we lack as much faith and trust as the rest of them, fighting for grants, hoarding ideas and constraining ourselves. “People seek relationships more than money,” this is David Brooks in the New York Times, neither revolutionary nor new age, and if they get it why can’t we? This is what we have to be radical about, we have to drop the stuff and meetings that are overloading us, let them die with the dying while we seriously intensify our relationships to each other – connect in non-meeting space, get personal, get deep, get authentic, realize that we all want the same thing!

If you want to make people act like machines and steal most of their labor from them you build an oppressive organization, and this is what we’ve inherited oppressive organizations – system wide, the whole thing! Foundations, advocacy groups, service organizations, intermediaries, most coalitions and faith-based groups – all in the same paradigm. But when people are self-motivated, when they want to do something together, and the technology is there to do it, then we just have to cut the whole thing loose, not hold it back with our hopes for control.

By God we are the ones with heart, we have the competitive advantage on this one, we are the ones that want to go radical and this crisis is our chance. I think of my Rockwood year-long cohort and the economy of love that has now evolved among us – what else can we do with that? I think of the Boston non-meetings, of the effort to keep it real here at the Interaction Institute for Social Change, of the Gathering for Justice and it’s leaders telling me that they had built relationships together, that they have love and they have trust and they want to work with those. This, my friends is the raw material for movement, a paradigm shifts only as we step into the new – movement is not an election, it is social transformation. Let’s go!