I’m getting worried that we are missing the point with our evangelism of knowledge sharing, creating lists and formulas.

I wonder whether one crucial piece missing from KM initiatives is recognizing the importance of individual passion.

Could it be that when people genuinely care about something, they want to connect with other people — and they’ll naturally seek ways to share what they know? The evidence for this is everywhere, it seems to me. Just look around Web 2.0. Isn’t that what we’re doing on all these millions of blogs?

Indeed, everything I see tells me that human beings have a built-in desire to connect with each other, just as they have a built-in desire to contribute to society and to do amazing things in their work. Just show us a way to act on those desires, and then stand back.

As long as we’re excited about what we’re doing. As long as it feeds our minds, hearts, and spirits (or maybe is just plain fun). As long as it means something and matters to us as individuals.

Conventional KM (like conventional fund raising, personnel management, etc.) seems to overlook that built-in want-to, relying instead on mandates, job descriptions, carrots and sticks. Maybe that’s because individual passion is so seldom visible in the business world. It’s usually closer to the surface in my world of social sector organizations (”nonprofits“) — and even there, it could be acknowledged and honored a lot more often.

Might this be a path away from the command-and-control knowledge “management” described in the article Nancy White linked to? It would mean a whole different approach — knowledge sharing as humanistic organization development. Perhaps starting with genuinely valuing and appreciating individuals for who they are — their unique, idiosyncratic ideas and contributions.

That gets messy by the standards of most management consultants. It falls outside the rigid boxes and flow charts of standard management practices. In many organizations, the odds are slim that such a path would be walked with integrity — although I certainly want to be open to that possibility, and to work toward it. So I like Nancy’s call for “ground up acts of rebellion and spirit.” (I have a few cooking myself right now.) After all, acts of rebellion and spirit spring directly from people taking responsibility for what they care about. And that’s a force more powerful than any directive from the CEO.

Maybe instead of working on our weaknesses, we should be enhancing and exploiting our strengths? What if the price for working on weakness (and who even decides what is and isn’t a “weakness”?) is less chance to be f’n amazing?

One year, faced with yet another round of reviews, a manager I know experimented with a radical notion: unconditional positive regard in the workplace. She’d studied the principles and practices of appreciative inquiry, and she knew that people can accomplish much more when they focus on their successes.

So she decided to set aside the HR department’s forms and procedures, with their deficit-based assumptions and numerical rankings. She conducted “performance reviews” that were intentionally designed to give people more chances to be amazing. That year, her reviews contained not one word of criticism — even though there were aspects of some staff’s behavior that she would have (strongly!) preferred to be different.

Instead, when she met with each of her staff, she asked to hear stories of their high points on the job during the past year — times when they’d been especially “on,” energized, alive. Together, the two of them explored what had made those best moments possible, what gave life to that particular individual and their work. They even talked about what was at the heart of their dedication to the organization and the cause it represented.

She concluded each meeting by asking the person to say what success would look like for them in their work during the coming years. Because they’d taken the time to look back and relive their best moments — and to connect with what mattered most to them — they set far higher aspirations for themselves than the manager ever would have imagined, or dared to suggest. Each person’s picture of success reflected their unique talents, as well their highest hopes for themselves and for the world around them.

In the process, the manager learned how to be in service to her staff — how she might contribute to creating the conditions in which they could be even more successful. You might say she learned how to make more square holes.

And in the months after these conversations, she saw less of the behaviors a more conventional manager would have sought to correct during performance reviews. When people are supported, feeling strong, they see more choices and they’re more able to choose to naturally move toward health.

Some may see this as “avoiding conflict” or shying away from telling people “what they need to know for their own good.” I see it differently. I think it’s just smart to apply what we know about human behavior to bring out the best in people—in the most effective, straightforward way. It also seems to me to be the right and honorable thing to do, the respectful way to treat other human beings.

How far can we take these ideas? I’d like to find out. It’s worth pushing the envelope. Especially in organizations of social good, where personal commitment to the cause is fundamental to success, a good bit of experimentation is in order.

What about the word “nonprofit”? How is it framing the way we see our organizations?

It seems an odd thing to designate a whole sector of society by pointing to what it doesn’t do — generate profits. After all, that label tells us nothing about what these organizations are about: caring for one another and the planet, working for social justice, educating children, advancing the arts, healing the sick.

Indeed, a lot of the things that ennoble humankind and make life worth living are held in trust by this sector of society. And yet we describe our organizations with a “non-” word that refers to their legal and tax status — what they’re forbidden to do — instead of giving them a name worthy of their contributions to society.

Like any frame, “nonprofit” has subtle effects, often beyond conscious awareness. For example, many people consider making a profit to be good and desirable, a sign of competence and success. A “nonprofit,” then, starts out with a built-in sense of falling short, not quite measuring up. I’ve even seen leaders of organizations apologize for having more money coming in than going out — although that’s a sign of fiscal responsibility, just as essential to their long-term stability as it is for any other enterprise.

All of this reinforces the scarcity mindset of so many in the social sector. It reinforces the unspoken sense that we’re not quite as capable as those folks in business. It affects the way we see the value of our organizations, and even our own capabilities. As Jim put it some years ago,

You might call it the “nonprofit syndrome”: We’re famous for helping others unselfishly, but not respecting ourselves. We tend to undervalue the power of our professions, the excitement of our jobs, the importance of the work that our organizations do.

There are good alternatives to the “nonprofit” terminology, but they have yet to become as commonly used: third sector, independent sector, social sector, organizations of social good, civil society. Could it be time to get these terms into wider use, and give up on “nonprofit” altogether?

(By the way, why do we still use the term “nonprofit” — and well as “fund raising” — here in these posts? Search engines. It’s the rare person who’s going to google any of the alternative terms. For now.)

A colleague once phoned me for advice on a case statement. She’d recently become executive director of an organization that was so small, she was the first and only staff person.

She peppered me with questions: What’s a case statement supposed to look like? Can you send me some examples? How long should it be? How detailed? What should it say? Do I include a budget? Should I get a designer to make it look good?

She was understandably overwhelmed at what seemed to her a complex, daunting task. She was also anxious about raising money, a new role for her.

I knew her well, and knew that one of her greatest strengths is personal relationships. She’s warm, authentic, completely transparent. People instantly like and trust her — and rightly so. On top of that, she’d been to a workshop where she had learned experientially the new approach to philanthropy that we’re advocating here — and had her own best qualities supported.

So I suggested she remember what she already knew, step away from the keyboard, and go talk with some of the people she’d been planning to impress with the case statement. Have a conversation, I said, just two human beings getting to know each other. Listen more than you talk. Learn about what matters to them. Be yourself.

“But Pam, I won’t have any paper to leave behind. Why would they take me seriously?”

“Because of the way you show up,” I replied. “Because of who you are.”

“Well, OK,” she said hesitantly. “I’ll give it a try.”

She called me a few weeks later. The case statement was still unwritten. But one of the people she’d met with had made a six-figure commitment to the organization.

I wonder whether she ever got around to writing that case statement.

To my mind, a case statement is genuinely useful only if it’s developed in an authentically collaborative process — one that fosters enlivening, significant conversations among the organization’s people. It’s that process, and the insights and relationships it develops, that actually does the job of advancing the organization. The pieces of paper — what most people focus on as the “product” — are simply a record of what happened.

Yet as my colleague on this blog, Jim Lord, put it in one of his writings on the advancement of philanthropy—equally relevant to all forms of voluntary action and civic engagement:

I believe our greatest leaps in productivity will come from examining and rethinking the metaphors and paradigms that underlie our work.

As an analogy, take the role of the physical sciences in industry. It’s obvious that no one would consider building an airplane without first studying aerodynamics. Isn’t it a little presumptuous for us to embark on the “construction” of a development [”fundraising”] program if we don’t understand the basic principles of, for example, group process? And that’s only one of the many forces at work in our field.

Indeed, the human dynamics that come into play when people gather in groups may be more difficult to define than the physical forces that act on an airplane in flight. So our time is well-spent when we study the assumptions and models we use in our work.

Yet how many people in your organization have actually made a serious study of what makes people tick and how they interact? Is that sort of knowledge valued, or are people solely focused on “action” and dismissive of “touchy-feely process”? As Chris Corrigan puts it,

For some reason, conversation and the skillful design and conduct of productive conversations aren’t seen as work and so they don’t get the same attention as “results.”

And yet, everything we know about innovation, creativity, competitive advantage and responsive service talks about how critical it is that these be incubated in an atmosphere of quality social interaction. Convening meaningful conversations is hard work but the effect of skillful dialogue is real talk and real talk is real results.

So here’s the big deal: This is about effectiveness. There’s a lot more at stake than merely “making nice.”

For the organizations and social causes I work with and care about, being more effective means playing a bigger part in shaping the course of history. Our effectiveness may well determine whether women everywhere have the right to run their own lives … whether children grow up with food, education, housing—and love … whether there will still be orcas in Puget Sound and organgutans in Indonesia 100 years from now.

Our effectiveness matters to the future of the planet.

With so much at stake, I think I could be excused for getting angry when I see individuals, organizations, and causes squandering their potential by clinging to outmoded, ineffective ideas about human beings.

But critique is itself an outmoded, ineffective model of human development. I’m trying real hard to outgrow it. ;-) So rather than say anything more about what doesn’t work, I’ll end this post by inviting you to join the growing movement to talk about—and do—what does work. These are exciting times.

Without new superpower “proxy wars” starting in the Third World, overall armed conflicts have fallen by more than 40 per cent, and extremely violent conflicts — those with 1,000 or more battle deaths — have dropped by 80 per cent… International arms transfers, defense budgets, armed forces personnel and refugee numbers have also all decreased.

The report argues that the single most compelling explanation for these changes is found in the unprecedented upsurge of international activism, spearheaded by the UN, which took place in the wake of the Cold War.

Yet as Nicole-Ann Boyer points out, people tend not to believe such good news. (more…)

Twenty-some years ago, I was living in Hawaii, home for the first 30 years of my life. Making a living as a tax lawyer brought me little joy, and I was looking for more meaning.

I found it in the mountains of Molokai, one of the smaller Hawaiian islands, on a preserve owned by The Nature Conservancy.

On three-day weekends, I’d go there on work trips organized by the Sierra Club. One day, we’d hack New Zealand flax, or dig out ginger—introduced plants that were spreading into the native forest. The other day we’d hike for hours, exploring and learning, usually drenched in warm rain.

It was on Molokai that I fell in love with Hawaii’s native flora. (more…)

Two years later, the “poor widow” sees herself as a wealthy woman, so much that she gives money to a sick relative. “How good it feels that I have so much I can share.”

Evelyn Rodriguez tells of a similar story on her blog … about an art therapy program for women with HIV in Thailand.

But what really fascinated me was that after the tsunami, the women at Life Home Project wanted to “assist those less fortunate than themselves.” They established Project Neptune and worked on a variety of grassroots relief work. … What struck me about this story is the uplifting 180 degree turnaround.

First the women shyly demure in the beginning of their drawing class: A common refrain is “Tam Mai pen,” or, I cannot do.

Next, they are selling their artwork for a profit. And then they are helping others “less fortunate than themselves.”

It would be easy to see all of these women as impoverished and helpless, rather than the wealthy, powerful human beings they know themselves to be. We might focus on what they have been denied, rather than on the gifts they see they have received.

They’re seeing themselves differently, and they show it in their actions. Maybe it has to do with their growing sense of self-efficacy, as small accomplishments lead to larger ones.

And maybe they’ve come to see themselves differently as a result. So much depends on where we stand — how we look at the world and what we choose to see, rather than the way the world is. Where we stand shapes what we see — and what we see as possible.

Yet in everyday life, most of us are held back by our sense that our resources are limited. If the women you’ve just read about saw they had the resources it took to act, what might be possible for you and your cause?

Achieving a flow state is fulfilling on a personal level because it creates an “I Rule/I Kick Ass” experience. And that’s a Good Thing, whether it’s attached to an important cause or not. Happiness is beneficial all by itself.

(And one can argue that in a systems thinking way, the more experiences like that a person has, the happier they are and ultimately–the more likely they are to contribute in the world. To pursue more adventures and challenges and who knows where it could lead … but that’s not necessarily our job.)

Lucky for us, that is the job of those of us who work to engage people in the common good. Create more chances for people to be successful in affecting the world around them … make darn sure they see that they’ve made a difference … and they’ll want to do even more.

What better way could there possibly be to “market” an organization of social good, or a social cause?

And what a relief.

You can stop trying to convince people that your organization’s “needs” are bigger, more serious, more urgent than anybody else’s. You can focus instead on showing what people are accomplishing through your organization—let them taste the happiness that comes from being engaged and effective.

More than that: You can stop trying to convince people they have to act (volunteer, give money) or the world will end. No more guilt trips, no more painting a bleak picture, no more hand-wringing and arm-twisting.

The truth is, people want to be engaged. They want to make a difference. And they want to be happy. We’re hard-wired that way.

Your job is to give people a chance to enjoy doing what they already want to do. And to let them feel their personal power. They’ll naturally want to do even more, and the world will be the better for it.

Link: The post over at Creating Passionate Users

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