Are you a public innovator? If you’re reading this, I suspect you are. And I want to engage you on 10 questions I hear from public innovators repeatedly. I’m sending these questions to you just one week before the next Harwood Public Innovators Lab, which we sold out! See what these questions spur in you and write back.
1. How can I position my organization so that it not only provides worthy services or programs, but is catalytic and creates systemic change in the community?
2. How can I genuinely engage other people to see why I’m pursing the path that I am in my work – and when do I decide to keep moving forward despite their resistance?
3. How do I move my organization or group to focus on the tough, underlying questions at hand rather than to reach for the easy answers? And how do I avoid watering down our mission?
4. How do I keep our efforts aligned with the reality of our capacity, so that we have a chance to achieve results, and avoid doing things that sound good but ultimately won’t make a real difference?
5. How can I place my work in a larger conceptual framework – so that it’s possible for me and others to see the bigger picture of what we’re trying to do and why?
6. How can I sustain people’s engagement over time, especially when things get tough or move too slowly?
7. How do I take effective action when oftentimes there is limited capacity for action within our community?
8. How fast can I expect progress to come, and what should I do when everyone around me expects change seemingly overnight?
9. How can I engage my funders and supporters who don’t want to take the time to truly understand what we’re trying to do?
10. How can I keep myself going as I pursue my path?
These and other questions pervade almost every conversation I have with public innovators. I have heard them from leaders of large, fast-growing national organizations to individuals who lead small community-based groups.
What do you think? Print out the list of questions and try answering them yourself. Send in one or more of your responses so others can benefit, too.
In the meantime, I’ll be posting some thoughts on these as well as some of the individuals who are attending our Public Innovators Lab.
Be well.
You can ping this entry by using http://www.theharwoodinstitute.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/152 .
1. To be catalytic: My organization is required to interact with the community one-on-one. Rather than emphasizing the negative aspects of enforcement, we try to provide a teaching opportunity, to engage them in the why the regulations require what they do.
2. To engage organization: Within the organization there are strong enforcement types – the ones that support a reputation for “jack boots”. It is necessary to explain and demonstrate how working cooperatively has longer term benefits in effectiveness. Of course, there are some cases where the only method that works is strict enforcement.
3. Avoid easy answers: Keep talking about the big picture, and recognize that sometimes gathering the low-hanging fruit provides momentum and a sense of success that might be guided to more important achievements later.
4. Alignment with the reality: Relate each task to the big picture, and recognize that sometimes gathering the low-hanging fruit provides momentum and a sense of success that might be guided to more important achievements later.
5. Larger conceptual framework; This is where a clear understanding of the mission is important. Boring as some think this is, a discussion of the purpose of the organization, what they are trying to achieve can be very uplifting and energizing. But you have to convince those who think mission and goal discussions are non-productive.
6. Sustain engagement: Reminders: meetings, awards, group activities
7. Limited capacity: If you can’t do it through your organization, you have to figure out how to engage others in the community who are equally concerned. Sometimes that takes educating first. Then there must be a way to make the others feel a part of the solution – in designing it, in participating or support. Your role then is guidance, facilitation if possible, and to remind them periodically of the purpose.
8. Timing: This is part of the education process. You must be realistic in estimating the time involved from the beginning so that frustration over delay does not do your project in. And if the time-line is long, there must be identifiable benchmarks, periodic evaluation and joint reassessment.
9. Engage funders: It’s necessary to show them how the project will benefit their personal goals. If their goals are not the purpose of the project, there must be some other result – such as unifying community, creating reputation, etc. – that will promote their interests. And you need to periodically reaffirm to them the benefits gained.
10. Maintain own energy: Whether any one else periodically evaluates the effectiveness of your efforts in achieving your goals and those of the organization, you must do it for yourself. Where assessment suggests adjustment is required, you can make the needed changes before you fade out.
1. The only sustainable organizations are going to be the ones that use no non-renewable resources, maximize the use of people to perform necessary functions of life (food, shelter, community), and don't depend upon marketing of products.
2.The first thing you need to do to engage other people is to stop assuming they are as stupid as the media and entertainment that represents them to the public eye. Individuals, more often than not, do not agree with the image of themselves represented by mass hysteria and wasteful living.
3.Focus on what we are as a species; we are part of the planet, connected in every way to its future. We have to stop separating people from Life and our morality must come from the purpose of All Life: to provide usefulness to the universe, not to consume it.
4. Tell congress to pass the FairTax bill. Efforts need to be made to make the true costs of ALL of our desires show up at the point where our decisions are made and our resources are being wasted: the retail counter interaction. We need economy, not The Economy.
5. What is YOUR Net Creativity? How much usefulness do you add to the universe, compared to how many resources you consume? What are you teaching your children about their Net Creativity?
6. It's not up to you, it is up to them. If you follow a Net Creative path in life, then you will find plenty of challenges without trying to 'engage' people's interest in your actions. You will survive, and they will probably die in the coming world.
7. If you want Change, keep it in your pocket. YOur dollar is the proxy vote that you hand over to corporations, government, oil producers, or to your neighboring farms and tradesmen.
8. Progress is already here. It's killing us and our planet. We need regression and simplicity now.
9. Funders are, simply put, your enslavers. If you cannot survive without funding, then you won't survive when the money is all found out to be a false representation of value.
10. You work, you live, you buy less, buy local, build community. There isn't time to worry about how it is going to turn out or how it affects your dependency on antidepressants.
Also in the 1980s, Swedish oncologist Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt brought together leading Swedish scientists to develop a consensus on requirements for a sustainable society. In 1989 he formulated this consensus in four conditions for sustainability, which in turn became the basis for an organization, The Natural Step.4 Subsequently, 60 major Swedish corporations and 56 municipalities, as well as many businesses in other nations, pledged to abide by Natural Step conditions. The four conditions are as follows:
1. In order for a society to be sustainable, nature¹s functions and diversity are not systematically subject to increasing concentrations of substances extracted from the earth¹s crust.
2. In order for a society to be sustainable, nature¹s functions and diversity are not systematically subject to increasing concentrations of substances produced by society.
3. In order for a society to be sustainable, nature¹s functions and diversity are not systematically impoverished by physical displacement, over-harvesting, or other forms of ecosystem manipulation.
4. In a sustainable society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.