On August 15, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Essentials Conference. I've pulled the content from that speech into a series of three blog posts on change.

So, if change is constant and you don’t actually make change, that means we need to move from a perspective of making change to creating the conditions for change to happen. This is going with the flow of change. This is doing the honeybee waggle dance. How do we do that?!? What helps us effectively ride those rapids?

Some of these tips come from my own experience, and others come from some of my favorite sources on this topic including Emergent Strategy from adrienne maree brown, Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, Leading From the Roots by Kathy Allen, Active Hope by Joanna Macy, and from an organization called Biomimicry for Social Innovation.

• Start small: adrienne maree brown says “Small is good. Small is all.” Things don’t scale immediately. It takes time. My work has actually moved from working on large scale capacity building projects to working one-on-one with people through coaching or with cohorts of leaders. A pearl starts with a single grain of sand. What is your grain of sand?

• Trust people: Easier said than done, right? But funny thing about trust, that it’s much more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than not. Rather than waiting for people to prove themselves trustworthy and then we give them our trust, if we trust people first, they tend to become trustworthy. That takes vulnerability and courage on our part. That relational way we need to create conditions for change to happen? It requires trust. Especially if you find yourself feeling resistance to the rapids, remember to trust.

• Relationship before task: One thing that builds trust is to build relationship. I know. We’re talking about work. And I’m telling you that before you do the work, you have to build relationships. This does not mean you become best friends with your colleagues, but riding the rapids is more fun when you’ve got other people in the boat with you.

• Always lessons, never failure: Every single thing that happens, every rock you run into on those rapids, every time the boat flips, none of this is failure. It’s only an opportunity for you to learn. What if you saw everything as an opportunity, rather than a problem?

• Use emotional intelligence: Remember what I said about our resistance to learning from disruption is often about fear? Well, fear is our amygdala telling us to run or to fight. And we have developed deeply ingrained behaviors all the way from childhood on how we react when faced with fear. Emotional intelligence helps us realize what fear feels like, how to recognize it, and how to create a pause so that it doesn’t take over our brains so that we can be in the moment, stay present, and keep going.

• Assume abundance: Many of the reasons we try to force or control change within organizations because we believe that we have scare resources in order to make it happen. But, if we assume that we, our partners, our organization have abundance - of talent, knowledge, innovation, ingenuity - then our job is not to hoard it, but to unleash it.

• Rest: Tap out to tap back in. It’s ok for it to be someone else’s turn for a while. It’s ok. It’s ok to disengage so that you can re-engage. Self-care is a radical act. Then the most radical thing you can do is nurture yourself.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series!

On August 15, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Essentials Conference. I've pulled the content from that speech into a series of three blog posts on change.

​With nature as our teacher, we have the opportunity to reconnect with our human experience with change. You’ve been riding those perpetual rapids, and you are still here. You’ve already been doing this your whole life. I invite you to do your own little naturalist exploration of your own past for just a few seconds. Think back to the you that you were three years ago. Where were you? What did you look like? What were you doing? What were your priorities at the time?

You already inherently know what it is like to experience change. You are literally experiencing it all the time. This is how change actually happens is: Change is not episodic, it’s constant. Those disruptions I was talking about? They either accelerate the pace for change or shift or nudge its direction. But change is in fact a constant flow. It’s already happening and you are moving with it. Our ability to handle it comes with our ability to move with it and to ride those rapids. 

But that actually requires us to become very comfortable and ok with change. We have to jump in. We have to say yes to riding the rapids. I’m not an experienced white water rafter, but I do know that the easiest way to get hurt or worse when riding rapids is to stiffen up, to try to go against the water, to move away from the flow rather than with it. But I also know the easiest way to drown is to jump in without a boat or just limply be carried away or carried under.

Why do we resist going with the flow of change? The biggest reason is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of failure. Uncertainty, ambiguity. It’s scary. We are not completely in control. We can’t necessarily control the outcome. We can read the river, but we can’t control it. But let’s turn again to mother nature, our greatest teacher. What if we handled this the way nature does, using our intuition to intentionally ride the rapids without really knowing what might happen? What if we let go of the outcome and just let it be? The caterpillar has no clue that it will become a butterfly. The tadpole doesn't know it will become a frog. They don't have a choice in their change. It just is. In nature, these happen all the time. You know what nature doesn’t do? Six months of strategy planning to decide the direction. It does not get stuck in analysis paralysis. It just happens.

You do not make change happen. You can create disruption. But as I’ve already said, that’s not the change. So, that term “change maker”, let it go. You may very well be a disrupter, a shifter, a nudger. But change is happening whether or not you do anything. That river is running. How much do any of us like to be forced to change? What happens instead if we allow change to happen organically?

I have a few favorite examples of organic change from nature, these first two are described in the book Systemic Leadership. If you’ve ever run barefoot on wet sand, you know that when you are running and moving fast, really slapping your feet again wet sand, it feels hard, almost like running on concrete. But, if you stop and just stand there, you will slowly start to sink and your feet will be absorbed by the sand. The sand accepts your presence. You become part of the system. Change should actually disappear within the system. Just notice where you might be doing one or the other. Are you slapping people upside the head with what change you think they should be making? How well is that going? What would it look like to sit with it rather than try to force it?

The other image is birds on a wire. When you see a bunch of birds hanging out on a wire, it’s very rare that they all take off at once. When one of them determines it’s time to move, it will get up and circle away and then come back, then another one will join and they will circle away and come back. A few more join in until all the birds get the hint and the whole flock takes off of the wire.

My third favorite is the way the bees self-organize to collaborate on complex tasks, which you can read about in the book Honeybee Democracy. To select a new colony hive site, a few scouts go out and find a new place, and then come back to the colony to perform a “waggle dance” that shares the site location, quality, etc. When a “quorum” of 15 join the waggle dance, the whole colony moves to a new location. Doesn’t that make change sound like fun?

Where are you resisting the flow of change in your life?

Is there anywhere in your life you are trying to force change to happen? What would happen if you let go of trying to make change?

Read Part 1 and Part 3 of this series!

On August 15, 2019, I gave the keynote address at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Essentials Conference. I've pulled the content from that speech into a series of three blog posts on change.

If you actually feel or perceive that change is happening faster and more dramatically than it has in the past, you are not wrong. The rate and pace of change has accelerated in many ways. One of the areas this is most obvious is in the tech world. The first iPhone was released in 2007, just 12 years ago. It’s now not only the most ubiquitous technology out there, but it has had huge influence on the tech industry. The ripple effect of the iPhone on communication, banking, music, photography, is enormous. In 2015, several executives in the tech industry got together with the Apsen Institute to talk about what was happening and they have described it as navigating continual disruption. A “disruption” is an event, often unexpected, that interrupts the normal course of events or challenges the unity of something.

So, what happens when we are living in an era of continual disruption? When we have an unexpected, unity challenging event basically all the time? It requires us to radically change our views of the world and embark on a very painful transition that will significantly effect us in the short term. As humans, we have an almost infinite capacity to rationalize why responding to disruptive challenges is not necessary. In the tech world, those that didn’t respond went away. Does anyone remember the Zune? I had a Zune. 

What are disruptions in the nonprofit sector? What are the unexpected unity challenging events that affect our work? Often, these can be changes in policy or the funding environment, like when funders change their strategic priorities or when the business model of longstanding funders like the United Way no longer works. Or in times of recession when demand for our services come at the same time when funding becomes constrained. 

But disruptions are not all bad. We often need disruption. We need it to challenge the status quo. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have been important disruptions to the unity of white supremacy and patriarchy. We need disruption when we need to make important shifts in the ways that we do our work. They are the things that cause disequilibrium, discomfort, which is actually the place where growth happens, where new ideas and innovations emerge. 

Sometimes we need to challenge our previously held conceptions of the world. A disruption is not change in and of itself. It is the catalyst to accelerate or shift the course of change. And in almost all realms of our modern lives, both professional and personal, these disruptions are happening on a constant basis.

A metaphor that is often used for people in organizations experiencing this kind of continual disruption is permanent white water. This was first introduced by Peter Vaill, in Learning as a Way of Being. Here’s how he describes it:

“Most managers are taught to think of themselves as paddling their canoes on calm, still lakes. . . . They’re led to believe that they should be pretty much able to go where they want, when they want, using means that are under their control. Sure there will be temporary disruptions during changes of various sorts–periods when they’ll have to shoot the rapids in their canoes–but the disruptions will be temporary, and when things settle back down, they’ll be back in the calm, still lake mode. But it has been my experience . . . that you never get out of the rapids. . . . The feeling is one of continuous upset and chaos”

I have a feeling, whether you are a manager or not, this feeling is familiar to you. That maybe in your work, or in another part of your life, you are riding perpetual rapids. 

Where in your life are you riding perpetual rapids? What does it feel like?

Where in your life do you NEED some disruption? What needs to shift or be challenged?

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of this series!

The 2019 Nonprofit Leadership Conference is on June 13th this year at the McNamara Alumni Center at the University of Minnesota. And I'll be co-presenting two great sessions at the conference this year!

First, I'll be presenting with my good friend Erik Jacobson, donor engagement officer at Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative AND founder of his own awesome company, Lulo. Erik and I met through the iPEC coaching training program, and we LOVE to talk about nonprofit leadership anytime, anywhere. So you better believe we are going to bring all of our energy to our 8:00 am session Skip The Coffee! Shift Your Nonprofit's Energy Naturally. At this session, you'll get a glimpse of the energy levels that you have within your power to use as a nonprofit leader, and how that energy directly affects the actions and behaviors at your nonprofit organization. 

After the morning keynote, I'll be back with my awesome colleagues from the Public and Nonprofit Leadership Center to present our session on Navigating Systems Change at 11:00 am! We've created a session that will engage your brain and your body in what it's like to be part of complex system and help you realize your impact in that system through the way you show up. We promise it will get you thinking and talking right up until lunch time!

I'm excited for ALL of the sessions at this awesome conference. It's truly one of my favorite conferences of the year. I hope that you'll stop by these sessions or say hi if you are there!

At the 2018 Nonprofit Essentials Conference, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite topics. It's my experience that when most people think of leading from the middle, they think about how to manage up and down: providing direction and guidance to people who report to them and influencing the people they report to. There are certainly challenges of leading from that position and I totally get the desire to want to know what to do if you find yourself there. But, I actually think there is a completely different way to think about leading from the middle that can help you not just with the people that you work with directly, but about your role within the organization and with your organization's partners. If you think of your role in a networked way, and think of yourself less like a funnel between two parts of the organization and more like a hub in interconnected system, you open your perspective and perception of what is required of you from your position. So, if you are going to think of yourself in this way, what do you need to know? What skills do you need to have? How do you make change from this position? I'll be talking about all of this and more at the Nonprofit Essentials Conference! Register for the conference and stop by my session to learn more.