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Three Stories of Trust and Authenticity
By Michael C. Gilbert, October 31st, 2006
On the recommendation of other writers who've walked these paths before me, I'm about to write a book in a fishbowl. The book is provisionally entitled The Authentic Organization and the fishbowl is this blog: http://authentic.gilbert.org. Go there. Subscribe to the RSS feed. Write some comments. Share some stories.
In the meantime, I want to tell you a little bit about why I'm writing this book.
Although I'm not sure any of them could truly be considered a prime cause, I could point to at least three intellectual precursors to my interest in authenticity and work. My scientific, my spiritual, and my political educations have each had a meaningful impact on my views of work and values.
I started off as a scientist with a young researcher's commitment to intellectual integrity and I would like to believe that my early commitment to open inquiry has carried forward into my current work. The core of my spiritual upbringing was my exposure, in the wake of a childhood tragedy, to my father's less-than-exemplary Buddhism and an entire library of Eastern and Western mysticism. Finally, I came of age politically during the Reagan administration, mentored by Quakers and others who believed that democracy didn't just belong in the voting booth.
Each of these frames of reference -- science, spirituality, and politics -- is essential to me and my work and yet I don't think they actually reflect how I got here. That process is nowhere near so elegant as three cleanly delineated domains. My passion for authentic work can be found in three rather messy sets of stories.
Making Peace with Time
Time is the fundamental currency. All other aspects of scarcity and abundance find their basis in our experience and relationship with time. My own personal journey and my professional observations are reflections of this truth.
The peak of my own dysfunctional relationship with time might be more extreme than most. There was a six month period in my late twenties where I worked from 6 am to midnight, seven days a week. The breakdown that followed was a gift -- a chance to take things apart and put them back together again, a bit more mindfully.
That's when I started teaching time management workshops to social service and social change professionals. Among many techniques, I would encourage a close look at two fundamental tools of time management: First is the classic To Do list, which is a (hopefully actionable) snapshot of our desires. Second is the Time Log, which is a (hopefully accurate) picture of the truth of how we spent our time. Our ability to embrace both of these truths, complete with their creative tension, is a measure of the health of our relationship to time.
Most of the burden of this tension ends up on the individual, but that's not where all of it belongs. Although it is up to every person to exercise their agency in a given situation (and for some, the only option might be to quit their job), there are profound systemic patterns that affect an entire organization's relationship to time and resources.
At the same time as I started teaching time management workshops for individuals, I experienced a significant shift in the kind of consulting I was doing with organizations. Not only did entire organizations sign up for the workshops, I started dealing much more directly with conflict resolution, strategic realignments, management systems, leadership, and culture. I became, in essence, an organizational shrink.
Sometimes, organizations sent their scapegoats to my workshops, rather than their leaders. But when they did send either leaders or entire teams, interesting insight and leverage would emerge. The systemic patterns under which they were operating became more clear as did the power of the participant to change those patterns.
Most often, they named that pattern as a culture of scarcity. Our economic models depend upon the creation of scarcity and large portions of our society teach it and are shaped by it. The nonprofit sector is not immune from its influence. Many of us don't even hesitate to embrace scarcity as our frame of reference for almost anything we do.
Possibly the most eloquent demonstration of an organization's relationship to time and resources was the case of a multi-purpose community service organization who engaged me for a large block of time management related training and consulting. The people they sent to my workshop were mostly rather reluctant, viewing time management in general and my emphasis on mindfulness in particular as a waste of time.
This common perception opened up a line of inquiry into the possible sources of the constant sense of not-enough time. The fact is, we discovered it everywhere. It was hardwired into the management style of the organization. In the minutes of the most recent board meeting was a clear consensus that if only the organization had another half a million dollars, then they would be adequately staffed for their programs. But looking in the minutes of the preceding three years revealed almost identical assessments! This organization was making absolutely certain that there was never enough.
Fail Faster
In the context of knowledge management and learning, I've been actively exploring the topic of failure for many years. There are good reasons for this focus. Our relationship to failure is a powerful force, tied in with approval, shame, love, and even our sense of survival. In our lives and in our organizations, we reflect this dysfunctional relationship, and thus reinforce and reproduce it. Because this is very much a systems phenomenon, it's hard to point to a single source from which the dynamic flows.
The mainstream culture in which I grew up (and which many of you share) has, at best, a difficult relationship with failure. Just start with the bizarre, one-dimensional definition of success: It's all about wealth. That would leave anyone committed to civil society and nonprofits insecure from the very start.
I've oscillated between two destructive poles in my own relationship to failure: On the one hand, I am capable of sticking my head in the sand and denying failure, to my inner and outer detriment. On the other hand, I've often chosen to be quite candid about failure, but frequently this is in the context of an unforgiving environment. On those rare occasions when I'm wise enough, I realize that the two poles are a false dichotomy and then I choose the middle way.
"Fail Faster" was a motto of an organization I founded many years ago. It served as a reminder to me and my colleagues to shorten the cycle of experimentation, to recognize failure earlier, and to defuse its emotional baggage. Sometimes it worked.
It's not just our culture or individuals that have a dysfunctional relation to failure. The more I learned to examine my own patterns, the more I saw corresponding patterns both in the organizations of which I was a part and in those which I had the opportunity to serve. This only makes sense, since organizations play a large role in mediating the relationships between individuals and society at large.
Everyone has stories about organizations and failure. One of my favorite is from a grantmaker whom I cannot name. (Of course, my choice to leave this anonymous, however appropriate, is very much a part of the cycle of reflection and reinforcement of the dysfunction.) They contracted for a multi-million dollar evaluation of a program area that had given hundreds of millions of dollars toward a particular strategy for serving at-risk youth and communities. As the story was told to me, the results of the evaluation were rather damning. But as those results made their way up the chain of command, the spin was slowly but relentlessly changed, all the way up to the board of trustees, who heard a classic mix of good news, with room for improvement.
Nonprofit programs that defy the gaze of realistic assessment survive because they serve unnamed social purposes quite distinct from their programmatic goals. Ego, power, and relationships of many kinds are at stake. And that, of course, is where things get both dangerous and interesting.
Brave Relationships
By now it must be clear that our relationship to time and our relationship to failure must be fairly strongly linked. My own intuition about that linkage is part of what led to my focus on authenticity and work. But there is one last story to tell, the third and most personal perspective.
In my very early twenties I was the outgoing chair of a statewide advocacy organization. We were at a retreat for a very large pool of new young leaders from around the state. Toward the end of the retreat, the current leadership were each asked to say a few words about why they were involved. In my own statements, I committed a major faux pas.
I told the truth. After having been in a leadership role for several years, having brought the organization through a period of huge growth, and having founded another organization in the meantime, the answer I gave was highly personal. From my point of view, there would always be more than 24 hours of good work to be done in a day and what mattered was whether that work sustained me. Because of the amazing people in the organization, I felt that I was blessed with beautiful, synergistic working relationships. I spoke of my gratitude for that.
The right answer, from the view of the staff and others, was something else entirely. The right answer was to position working with this organization in contrast with doing nothing at all. I felt that someone should acknowledge the long term, personal dimension to a commitment to public interest work. And I was frankly bored with the party line. I wanted to recruit people who would commit their lives to social change. The staff wanted to be sure we all looked like we were on the same page, so that people would come back the next week.
I acknowledged later that responsible people can differ in their judgment of the right strategic decision to make when developing new leaders. What pained me at the time was that there was no room for public disagreement, even one as benign as personal stories of involvement.
In my twenty years of consulting since then, I have continued to explore the edge that I explored that night. There is no magical place to draw the line, where on one side people are honest and on the other side everyone is hiding. It's far more complex than that. Furthermore, I am neither an individualist nor a communitarian. As I see it, the most interesting work happens at the edge of the two, where we choose to compromise or not based on love, rather than fear. I believe that it's in that synthesis that we are called upon to be brave in our relationships -- brave enough to realize that the relationships are big enough to contain us, our contradictions, and our evolution.
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