Category: Nonprofit

The Transformational Power of Listening

8/2/2019

Any time I lead an organizational or leadership storytelling workshop, I split folks into pairs and ask them to share a story with each other. Person ‘A’ goes first and Person ‘B’ is asked to simply listen without interjection. After the exercise, I ask everyone what they noticed about sharing and listening to the stories.

Based on what I’ve heard after facilitating this exercise hundreds of times, one of the most challenging parts is not telling the story, but listening without speaking. This makes a fair bit of sense: most of us have been culturally training to treat conversation like a tennis match. We listen primarily for an opening, a chance to return the volley, to share our own point of view.

What happens when we’re challenged to simply listen, to take in another person’s story without any agenda of our own other than being present?
Based on what I’ve heard and seen, what happens is empathy, compassion, and a bond that forms quickly and with unexpected depth.

According to Otto Scharmer, the author of Theory U, listening happens at four different levels:

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Want to have better meetings? Structure them like a performance.

10/17/2018

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I recently attended a meeting that went something like this:

Everyone came in, many of them rushing, a few looking at cell phones. They sat at the conference table, laptops popped open. The person who’d called the meeting looked around, said ‘I think we’re all here,’ immediately threw a spreadsheet up on the screen, and started going through a bunch of numbers.

The attendees (I was there as an observer) scrambled to keep up. . .then they started asking a ton of questions about the spreadsheet. They questioned assumptions, tried to solve for problems that hadn’t been directly mentioned, and asked for additional details. The meeting-caller became increasingly flustered as the gathering spiraled out of control.

After 45 minutes, time was up. Laptops collapsed and everyone left. No action items, no real resolution. I wasn’t even clear what the intention of the meeting had been.

It didn’t feel so great. The meeting-caller, who happened to be my client, looked at me: ‘Please tell me there’s a better way to do that.’

There is.

Master storyteller and teacher Doug Lipman breaks a storytelling performance into four sections:

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The 'Innovation' Trap: Unintended Consequences of Solving the Wrong Problem

7/9/2018

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The problems of poverty, disease, and environmental decay cannot be solved merely by the use of more and more scientific technology. Technological fixes usually turn out to be a jumble of procedures that have unpredictable consequences and are often in conflict with natural forces. Indeed, technological magic is not much better than primitive magic in dealing with the fundamental issues of human existence, and in addition, it is much more destructive.
–Rene Dubos, 1967

At a recent conference billed as an exploration of the intersection of Social Impact and Exponential Technologies, a prominent tech luminary spoke on the increasing incidence of depression and how technology will be essential to dealing with it.

She walked us through data showing that depression is projected to increase several-fold in the next decade. Other data laid out the developed world’s current capacity to treat depression. There was a clear and growing gap. We simply will not have the resources to handle the epidemic.

We must, the speaker said, find a way to increase our capacity to serve those grappling with depression. It’s not possible to train enough therapists in time to offer support. Fortunately, exponential technology, specifically adaptive intelligence, can help.

Currently, those working with depression have limited options for getting support. Almost all of them involve having to find and vet a therapist, go to therapy consistently, and/or get a prescription medication. With adaptive intelligence, help could be as close as an app on your phone.

The speaker walked us through a use case. Someone feels unmotivated, disconnected, and depressed. They log on to a secure (much emphasis was placed on ‘secure’) app and are greeted by an adaptive Artificial Intelligence that approximates warmth and curiosity. With a few questions customized to inspire reflection and sharing, the AI triages users.

Some people may only need a bit of space for reflection. For them, the AI provides the necessary level of support.

Others may require more intensive support. The AI detects this and links them to a trained therapist for a consultation.

This technology driven solution solves for the problem of capacity. Exponential technology saves the day.

I listened to the talk with a growing sense of dread and frustration in my gut.

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Case Study: Using Story to Bring Humanity Back to Organizational Communication

4/25/2018

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Client: Nonprofit Finance Fund Advisory Services

Founded in 1980, Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) unlocks the potential of mission-driven organizations through tailored investments, strategic advice and accessible insights. NFF functions both as a CDFI Lender and a provider of advisory and consulting services and helps organizations connect money to mission effectively, supporting innovations such as growth capital campaigns, cross-sector economic recovery initiatives and impact investing.

At a broad level, NFF works towards a world where capital and expertise come together to create a more just and vibrant society.

The Challenge

As NFF’s consulting arm, the Advisory Services team has struggled to communicate its value effectively to nonprofits and funders alike. Over the past decade, Advisory Services’ offerings have evolved from relatively basic financial trainings and analyses to encompass complex, long-term engagements that touch every level of client organizations and, in many cases, their funders. While the offerings have evolved, the way the team communicates about their work has stayed narrow and highly technical, focusing on financial analytics and tools over the human impact the team’s work has had both on individual organizations and, more broadly, on the sector as a whole.

As more consulting firms turn their focus to helping nonprofits build their financial management capacity, NFF Advisory Services is searching for a way to capture its value that resonates deeply and distinguishes it from the competition.

The Need

To support the creation of a new, more compelling narrative, NFF sought help in:

Collecting powerful stories from the 40 person Advisory Services team;
Examining these stories to surface shared narratives, themes and values;
Using the stories and shared narratives to form the core of a new way of communicating about Advisory Services;
Empowering team members to integrate storytelling into their presentations, pitches, and client engagements.

The Approach

Working with NFF’s Director of Knowledge and Communications, Managing Director of Advisory Services, and Vice President of Advisory Services, I designed an engagement that combined virtual strategies to involve Advisory Services team members located across the country and a 2 day in person workshop at NFF’s headquarters in New York.

Part I: Engage the Full Team
The engagement kicked off with a 30 minute webinar for the Advisory Services and Knowledge and Communications teams. The webinar aimed to establish a shared understanding of what exactly story is, how it functions in building communities and teams, and why telling powerful stories is so important. The webinar also laid the groundwork and framing for asking team members to complete a fairly extensive set of three questionnaires designed to solicit specific stories and reflections that delved beneath old ‘Financial Services’ to reveal the human core of the team’s work.

At the close of the webinar, the full Advisory Services team received links to the surveys along with a deadline of one week to complete them.

By the deadline, 60% of the team had completed the surveys. This response was, frankly, better than anticipated!

Part II: 2 Day Facilitated Workshop
The workshop, attended by 12 leaders from both Advisory Services and Knowledge and Communications, flowed through four sections:

Re-discovering the power of story gave participants the chance to connect with and experience the power of storytelling by developing, sharing, and reflecting on their own narratives. Starting with experiential work set a frame and foundation for the remainder of the workshop.

Reflecting on questionnaire responses allowed the group to delve into their colleagues’ experience, reflect on any surprises or common themes that emerged, and begin to piece together the core of a new way of communicating about Advisory Services;

Crafting the ‘Myth’ of NFF and Advisory Services combined the first two sections. Working in small groups, participants built and shared a new narrative for the organization from its origins to the present.

Examining the NFF in relationship to the competitive landscape again gave participants the chance to explore the responses to the questionnaires, integrating findings from earlier sections, to identify NFF’s ‘secret sauce’ and begin to create strategies to highlight it in communication efforts.

The final hour of the workshop was dedicated to review and establishing concrete next steps.

The Impact

The immediate impact of the engagement was to reveal the human side of the team’s work in concrete, easily accessible narrative ways. One participant shared that the workshop had changed her understanding of storytelling as a tool to convey complex ideas more efficiently than data and freed her from using ‘wonky, conceptual language’ to explain her work. Another said that a door had been opened and that it was now up to the team to walk through it.

At the close of the engagement, NFF had built a library of powerful stories, had a much stronger (and story-validated) sense of the value its work brings to its wide range of clients, and felt empowered to begin telling the story of Advisory Services differently.

In the longer term, the NFF team has committed to sharing the findings of the experience and working to build a culture that empowers team members at all levels to build and share their stories as a core practice and way of connecting both with each other and externally.

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Open Letter to Social Impact Orgs: Here's a Powerful Way to Present Your Cause

4/23/2018

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A few months ago I attended a lovely event that honored a few local nonprofit organizations. The audience was fairly diverse. There were more than a few well-heeled folks in attendance.

In other words: the event presented a fantastic opportunity for these organizations to get in front of potential contributors and expand their community of support or at the very least raise their visibility.

All three organizations, two of which have decent sized budgets, whiffed. And all three representatives followed the same outline. It went a bit like this:

Thank you so much for this honor!
The [INSERT ORGANIZATION NAME HERE] is dedicated to [MISSION STATEMENT].
There are over [statistic] in Los Angeles and of those [statistic] [random fact].
If we were not there for them, the [target population] would [something terrible].
Thank you again for this honor.

I could feel the room going cold as each person spoke. There was no sense of connection or humanity. Just a bunch of words, ideas, and generalities. And no one included a call to action.

As each presenter spoke, I found myself getting unreasonably frustrated. These were great organizations doing important work and they were coming across as boring and inconsequential. There is NO REASON that every single person speaking on behalf of a nonprofit shouldn’t be able to deliver a 3 to 5 minute talk that connects with an audience, communicates not just what the organization does, but also why it’s important, and calls the audience to action, even if it’s just to visit their website.

Here’s a proven structure anyone can use that’s been used for hundreds of years to rally people to action:

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Articles + Musings

The Transformational Power of Listening

Want to have better meetings? Structure them like a performance.

The 'Innovation' Trap: Unintended Consequences of Solving the Wrong Problem

Case Study: Using Story to Bring Humanity Back to Organizational Communication

Open Letter to Social Impact Orgs: Here's a Powerful Way to Present Your Cause

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