I attended a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution this afternoon about the release of the new book, Catalyzing Development:  A New Vision for Aid.  You can read my tweet blurbs here.

At the end, an audience member posed the question, “how do you [the panelists] measure success?”

That’s a great question.  I think the answer is “it depends on who you ask.”

Aid has a diverse customer base.  If you ask the U.S. or UK government, aid is successful when it keeps our nation safe and helps us meet our foreign policy goals.  If you ask the aid beneficiaries, it is successful when they have something to eat tomorrow or a tent to sleep in after an earthquake.  If you ask the governments of the countries receiving the aid, it is successful when they can use it for their goals, which may or may not be successful for the beneficiaries or the entity giving the aid.

The reason aid reform is so slow, difficult, and game-changing is because we have so many different customers, who have different expectations, goals, and success measures.

The NGO community must hold the torch for the beneficiary customer because the rest have enough power on their own.  I hope this will happen with enough representation from beneficiaries at the upcoming 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness coming up in Busan.

[This is a cross-post from Peacebuilder Magazine Online]

Regina Holliday dedicates the 73 cents Mural in Washington, DC; photo by tedeytan under CC license

Regina Holliday was at work teaching art when she got a call from her husband, Fred. The doctor had just told him he had growths and tumors in his kidneys. She rushed to the hospital to process the news with him and understand the diagnosis. Before she got there, Fred’s oncologist had left for a 4-day medical conference. Fred had kidney cancer and would die within months, but neither he nor Regina knew that because Fred was transferred to another medical facility and was not given a proper diagnosis nor his medical records for the next doctor to use. When Regina went to claim Fred’s records, she found they would cost 73 cents a page to print (they were several hundred pages), with a 21-day wait. When they did get copies, the records were inaccurate and incomplete. Frustrated by a lack of information from medical providers and the U.S. health care system, Regina reached out to her friend who suggested she talk to a patient advocate on Twitter, @ePatientDave, a stage-four kidney cancer survivor. Through Dave and other friends, Regina got answers and connected to the health advocacy community online. An artist, Regina painted a mural in DC about her ordeal, called 73 cents, which she promoted on Twitter, Facebook, and her blog. Soon CNN, BBC, CBS, and other traditional national news media picked up her story and she became part of the national health care debate in May 2009.

Regina did not know what Twitter was when she received the phone call from Fred in the hospital. However, she took a chance and with one tweet made connections to health advocacy groups she would never have found otherwise.

Twitter, Facebook, and blogs are tools that can amplify the message and build the network of any peacebuilder. Many of these tools even let you send messages from email or your mobile phone, so you do not always need a fast internet connection to use them. Your stories and ideas can spread to the right people further and faster than ever before. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Create a Twitter account: You can follow interesting people and talk to them using special characters in your messages. You can even send messages called tweets using your mobile phone texting service.
2. Create a Facebook account: Either for yourself personally or your organization (to create an organization account, you will need to first create a personal account). You can add friends you already know, post pictures, videos, and stories to share with other people.
3. Start a blog: There are many free services, and I suggest Blogger, WordPress, or Posterous. You do not need to spend a lot of time or know much about technology. Just write a few articles about what you are passionate about and tell your friends and colleagues about it.

The world needs to hear your stories. In July 2010, a year after Fred passed away, Regina got a standing ovation for her speech at the Health Information Technology conference, on a stage with the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. How far can your story go if you use these social media tools?

You can learn more about Regina Holliday’s story in The Big Book of Social Media Case Studies, Stories, Perspectives by Robert Fine. Her mural, “73 cents,” is located at 5001 Connecticut Ave, Washington, DC 20008.

What patterns and processes are developing in your organization (aka system) that could be blocking, frustrating, and leading to misunderstanding and unproductive conflict?

How do you even go about uncovering those issues without divulging into arguments or jumping immediately to solve only the surface problem?

Barry Oshry, a noted organizational anthropologist, has many answers in his book, Seeing Systems.  He recommends we become anthropologists and analyze our organizations from a detached, scientific, objective perspective.

This is difficult when you are in the weeds of day to day work.

You need a mechanism for people to 1) tell the truth about issues without being blamed or arguing about the cause and 2) listen to other people without interruption.

A really great activity is to have a sacred cow BBQ.  No, you are not cooking beef together.  You host a company BBQ where people can eat lunch or dinner together to make it a space outside of regular business meetings.  Then you ask people to write a sacred cow on a piece of paper.  A sacred cow is something in your organization that never gets discussed and people have felt uncomfortable asking about.  Usually they are policies, rules, formal, or informal, that someone doesn’t understand or something that is inhibiting their productivity.  After everyone has written a sacred cow on a sticky note, stick it up on the wall and have a discussion about each one.  As an organization leader, you can then see certain places where your system is stuck and ask either at the BBQ or later for advice on how to remove that barrier or take the opportunity to explain the sacred cow to your staff so they will at least understand the history and context behind it.

We had a great discussion tonight at the Voices of the Sector community dialogue with young black nonprofit professionals, hosted by YNPNdc.

Two huge themes emerged – 1)  The need for mentors and 2)  Resources

Mentors

We need people who believe in our talents and can promote our unique skills within our organizations.  Professional development still has a lot to do with who you know and entree into leadership roles.

Resources

In order to get jobs in certain sectors, like international development, students and young professionals start out with unpaid internships.  Unfortunately, many people cannot afford to go without an income for that long, blocking us out of certain jobs.  This was actually one of the hugest issues of the night – how can we build our careers in nonprofit jobs that do not pay anything at first?  Where are resources for scholarships?

The discussion brought up some great issues, and the extremely intelligent members of YNPNdc challenged us on the leadership team to continue now with solutions.  We heard you!  In January we will have a large cross-community event that will bring us all together to discuss what we’ve learned and how to move forward.

What a great event!

You may have heard about the Billionaires Pledge, a call to the world’s wealthiest individuals to give away a majority of their wealth to philanthropy.  I think that’s a great idea.  I’m not a billionaire, though, so is there a club for the rest of us?  Well, some friends and I thought there should be, and we recently launched Givr, a movement about giving.  You can pledge to give more than you gave last year – more time, service, money, advice, writing, or anything generous.

Working in the nonprofit sector, I used to feel that my daytime vocation is sufficient for giving back.  But then I read Seth Godin’s post about how insurance salesmen should buy their own insurance to 1) show they believe in their product, and 2) understand what it feels like to buy their product.

I believe in the nonprofit sector’s ethic to give without expecting anything in return for personal benefit but for social benefit and since I’ve been finding excuses to give more often.  Over the summer I gave what I could to the Haiti and Pakistani relief efforts, as well as $25 for a friend’s charity bike ride and a day of service for 9/11 with the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network of DC (YNPNdc).  I now understand the experience of being a funder, or philanthropist, more directly.  This helps me out professionally and personally.

We young professionals working in nonprofits may not be able to give billions, but we can give collectively adds up.  You can take the pledge and join other young professionals in a greater commitment to giving here:  http://givr.razoo.com/ and fan us on Facebook.

If you really took a look at your organization’s mission, you would probably find that enough urgent but not important tasks keep slipping into your days, then weeks, that you start to wonder what you actually have accomplished that month.

Is this because you are doing too much?

You will become overwhelmed and burned out if you continue at that pace.

We like to help and be super heroes but we can’t be effective if we spread ourselves too thin.

Carve out time to do the important – that which will move your organization’s mission forward.  Carve out time to eat a healthy lunch, go for coffee with a colleague.  You need to stay human while you do your human services work.

I caught two movies this weekend that reminded me why it’s so hard to play to your strengths.

A Reformed Arrogant Drummer

Drumline was on reruns on MTV, and it’s actually a really good movie so I watched it again.  This time I had a new lens to watch it through thanks to Dave Rendall’s Freak Factor blog.

Nick Cannon plays Devon, a cocky, superstar drummer in one of those great college bands who gets a scholarship to A&T in Atlanta.  He wows the crowd with his amazing drum solos and entertainment power.  It turns out that he can’t read sheet music so his arch rival calls him out and gets him kicked out of the band.

It also doesn’t help that he’s arrogant and doesn’t want to be a team player.  He is better than the whole drumline.

After a fight with Sean, his rival band member, Sean admits Devon is the best but gets him to focus on being more of a team player:

Sean:  “You’re the best, Devon! But when we’re on the field, nobody hears you! They hear the band.”

Devon becomes convinced he needs to change.  He teaches himself sheet music and focuses on becoming a team member of the drumline.  This proves to the band director that he has developed his character and he lets him back into the band, (spoiler alert) just in time to win the final band championships.

The band director and school system certainly socialized Devon into working with a team, but what will happen to his confidence in his ability to come up with new sounds independently?  No longer a freak, how will he be able to stand out again?

A Reformed Womanizer

The other movie I watched was Nine (2009) about an Italian film director named Guido who couldn’t come up with a new script for his film because of his personal problems with all of the women in his life.  It turned out his other movies were successful because they were about all of the personal problems he faced in his life.

(Spoiler alert):  Without giving too much away, Nine resolved by Guido making a movie about apologizing to all of the women in his life for how he’s treated them.

The movie implies Guido was a good storyteller and film director because of the practiced he had in telling good lies to all of the women in his life.  Now that Guido is morally better after he stops womanizing, what will happen to his storytelling?  Can you change for the better as a person without losing your unique talents?  I think so, but thought it was an interesting question.   When should you allow yourself to be socialized and when should you not change?

Hollywood Makes it Hard

Enjoyable Hollywood movies make it hard to stand out because so many plots focus on the drama of society morally reforming a confident outsider.  What’s interesting to me is that there would be no movie without this outside, or freak, character.  Think of all of those nerd makeover movies.  That’s who the movie is about.  No freak, no movie.  But it’s up to you to decide if you will become more like them or more like yourself.

Courtesy Photo

1. Make friends
   People with at least 3 close friends at work are 88% more likely to be satisfied with their lives.  When we were kids it was easy to make friends.  We actually put effort into it.  It does take time – to ask someone out to dinner, go for a walk in the park, or hang out at your family’s cabin for the weekend.  It might be uncomfortable at times as you adapt to their habits and re-learn social graces.  But it will actually make your other relationships stronger – if you do not have friends at work, make friends outside of work to give you something to look forward to at the end of the day.  Go beyond hanging out with your wife’s friends.  You will make your relationship with your significant other better if you have mates to give you a new perspective on yourself and relationships in general.
2. Wear Chucks with dress pants
   This works especially if you are young and work in a rather casual workplace.  But what if you were an executive and wore them?  Why not?  I wear them all the time with black and khaki pants.  They send the message that you are comfortable, approachable, and playful.  Try it on a Friday and see what happens.

Obama woke up at 6 am, same time I woke up, and someone told him, “Oh, hey, you won a Nobel Peace Prize.”

When I saw the news on Yahoo, I was elated – good for him!

Then several of my friends commented that he didn’t deserve it.  What has he done?  He’s too young.  Hasn’t been in office long enough.  He’s stealing my freedom.  All talk no walk.

Why is his win so contentious?

The reason is the reason he won.

According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee he won for the creation of a “new climate in international politics.”

A “climate” is an intangible thing – it’s like an X factor thing – you can’t teach it or describe it or make it happen, it’s either there or it isn’t.

It’s really hard to tell why he won or should win.  Does that matter now that he has?

When an opportunity comes it is how you roll with it that counts.

Julien Smith says you can’t even prepare for when “it” happens.  You can only adapt to it.

Even Obama himself thought it was premature, but he’s not downplaying it or making an overly huge deal about it.

We will see how he adapts.