In the end, organizational strengthening is all about respect, care and love.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve departed a bit from my usual observations about our work in Nicaragua and focused instead on some of the content from The Gathering of Games, the national open-book management conference in St. Louis. The themes from that conference- knowing the organization’s numbers, broad participation of all members and the power of people working together- are so basic and essential that I thought they were worth the amplification. So if the essays here of late have sounded a bit academic or instructional, well, I confess that they should have!
In the end, though, building a successful organization is not about any specific leadership methodology or magical program that will cure all organizational ills; organizations are far too diverse for any single strategy to fit all of them. But if we could take the time to examine the most successful approaches to organizational strengthening, to “peel away” the layers of public relations and hype and esoteric terms, we’d most often find three elements: respect, care and love. Continue reading In the End→
I referenced here last week in my entry, “It’s All In the Game,” that The Gathering of Games Conference is one that is full of energy and, frankly, full of joy. It sounds strange to refer to a business conference in those terms, but I think they’re appropriate descriptions. First-time attendees like my Nicaraguan colleague Rene Mendoza recognize it immediately and cannot help but comment upon it. In fact, I overheard one participant ask, “Where does all that energy come from?”
The answers to that question could take many forms, because there are many ingredients that constitute such a sense of excitement, including the personalities of the attendees themselves. But one of the conference break-out sessions provided one perspective that I thought stated the organizational reality pretty well. It’s not a formula, but wisdom seldom presents itself that way. In this case, the insight comes in the form of three C’s:
CHARACTER
However one might try to define it, character is the glue that holds organizations together. Even if an organization is temporarily performing acceptably, that performance will be negated in the presence of motives that are personal to its leaders. Leadership lack of character cripples organizations.
Some leaders simply love the power or their position and the ability to manipulate others with it. Some seek their own self-promotion. Others might recognize the chance to leverage their authority for the sake of a few. And within these instances, the seeds of mistrust, doubt, fear and indecision take root to destroy organizational hope. It may be assumed that leaders will deeply respect the responsibility entrusted to them, but character is not always sound or automatic.
The character of an organization- its sustainability and chances for positive impacts- is shaped by the character of its leaders and followers alike. Where members seek to serve as good stewards of their authority and resources, their organizations have a much better chance of surviving and thriving into the future. And good stewardship simply means the motivation to nurture and protect the the interests of all members and the community-at-large. It’s the care exercised when members have entrusted to their leaders their economic, social, cultural and community futures for safe-keeping. Character is the measure of how any of us cares for such precious matters. “Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.”
COMPETENCE
Of course, organizations must possess the intellectual and energy resources to accomplish their objectives. But before anyone dismisses this need as too obvious, consider the kind of competence needed.
First, there is the need for the personal competence of the organization’s members. In a corporation or non-profit entity, members are hired according to the specific knowledge or experience they can contribute to the institution’s success. In a cooperative or non-profit, members are added according to the specific knowledge or experience they can contribute to the organization’s success; the members must be added on the basis of their common objectives with the other members, and their willingness to contribute personally to the strength of the group. Too often, organizations are weighed down by the tonnage of unwilling and therefore incompetent members, people who have joined only for the benefits and none of the work.
Secondly, the organization itself has to demonstrate competence. Throughout its ranks of members, the organization has to ensure that every player is is clear about what is expected. In successful enterprises, organizations are specific in emphasizing the needs for everyone’s contributions, that without each member supplying his or her piece of the puzzle, the picture can never be completed.
Competence also builds upon the need for the right character. Character, and all of the expectations of it, can be a learned attribute like any other. When individuals and their organizations become clear about the need for certain competencies, a high level of ethical behaviors rises to the top of the list. Such actions only become the norm when the organizational culture expects it.
Finally, if the organization has acquired or developed essential competencies, it can begin to work on business competence. In short, the members must know, truly understand, how the organization will succeed. Members have to know the “business equation,” what actions will drive success, what each of them must contribute. If each player in the game does not have such insight, they might well be playing a different game altogether. And when members are playing by different rules, seeking different outcomes, the organization loses.
CONSISTENCY
As if the first two matters of character and competence weren’t demanding enough, it turns out that when our organizations have finally experienced success, it’s not enough. Exercise of stewardship character and personal/organizational competence have to become the habits of a successful organization, practiced, repeated and refined consistently by its members. Habits are no more than repeated patterns of behavior, and every act by every individual every day has the potential to become habit, good or bad. Strong organizational consistency is the ability to reinforce the strengthening habits and eliminate the weakening ones. The best organizations have discovered the importance of teaching its members the differences between the two.
Like competence, consistency builds upon the issue of character. The strongest organizations maintain a reliably consistent posture with regard to issues of integrity; there are no “situational ethics” which permit decisions that are not in keeping with the organization’s character. And the greater the consistency of character, the easier it becomes to demand the same of every member. There are no exceptions to what is right.
The three C’s described above constitute a big part of the high energy experienced at The Gathering. People become naturally enthusiastic in environments where there is trust, where members can be confident that their teammates have accepted their responsibilities, and that such behaviors can be counted upon day after day.
It’s true for organizations in the U.S. and ones in Nicaragua. It’s true for businesses and non-profits. It’s true for secular and church. It’s true everywhere because it resonates with the human soul. Organizational environments like these free people to become more than they may have thought possible. That awakening creates energy, and makes the hallways at The Gathering alive with dreams….
I’ve just returned from a particularly interesting business conference, “The Gathering of Games,” with a colleague of mine from Nicaragua. Rene Mendoza is the Interim Director of NITLAPAN, an institute specializing in research on and the creation and publicizing of new, local, rural and urban development models and methodologies. We thought that the themes from the Gathering- teaching financial transparency, broad participation, engagement of an organization’s people- fit closely with the development workshops that Rene and his colleagues have undertaken recently with rural coffee cooperatives supported by Winds of Peace. We were not disappointed: the wide range of organizations and speakers represented at the conference of over 400 participants provided story after story of transformational success, with results to make even the skeptics say “wow.”
The Great Game of Business is the title of both a book and a movement. (If you haven’t acquainted yourself with the concept and the company, I urge you to do so.) But it also stands for some of the most basic needs of organizational life and development, whether in a business, a government agency, a non-profit or other organizational model. Come to think of it, they’re pretty good guides for personal life, as well. And within the simplicity of these basic ideas lies the unqualified success of the concept. In short, they change not only the organizations that people inhabit, but the lives of the people themselves.
Rule Number 1: Know and Teach the Rules.
Every organization- every organism, in fact- has a formula for success. There are certain things that have to happen in order to experience surviving and thriving into the future. For all too many organizations, those rules, those keys for success, are known to only a few. Maybe it’s because it’s because things have always been done that way. Perhaps access to such knowledge is regarded as a “perk” to a select few in the organization, a sort of “special secret” made available as a badge of honor to high-ranking members. Or just possibly, these essentials are simply unknown to the majority of people in an organization and there has been no perceived need to know them, that they are, in fact, the province and concern of others.
Whatever the reason, when organizations reserve the understanding of the success equation to only a few, the organization has limited itself, and sometimes fatally so. To play any game, the entire team has to know the rules, what strategy is being followed and how to score. It’s not enough for only some players to know, because they’re not always the ones who are capable of scoring.
If I don’t know the rules, it’s essential for me to learn them. If my colleague doesn’t know the rules, it’s essential for me to teach him/her. We only win together.
Rule Number 2: Follow the Action and Keep Score.
The only way to know whether we’re winning is by keeping score. In a cooperative, it might be measured by how much harvest is produced, or how much is paid for it. In a business, it could be the total sales made, or what kind of profit was generated. For a non-profit, it ought to be a measure of the impact made in the lives of its clients, however measured. Whatever the enterprise, it’s not really worth undertaking unless there’s a means to measure the outcomes.
But it turns out that those final outcomes are also made up of many smaller actions, activities contributed by every member of the organization, in some way, big or small. And before we can expect to measure positive outcomes on that final scoreboard, we need to be tracking those smaller, individual contributions that make up the final score. That’s the responsibility, the duty, of every organizational member to every other member. It’s the fabric that holds the organization together, that makes it strong or weak, that allows it to grow into the future.
Sometimes it’s hard for individuals to feel personal responsibility for an organization populated by many others; it’s easier to let others take on the obligations. But that’s like asking a teammate to do all of his work as well as yours, while expecting the same rewards in the end. It’s not fair, and it doesn’t work. Being engaged- following every bit of action- is the price that each of us must pay in order to win. It’s what feeds the scoreboard.
Rule Number 3: Everyone Needs A Stake in the Outcome.
There are no hangers-on in successful organizations (or at least, not many or for long). That’s why a stake in the outcome is critical to organization strength. And that stake in the final score comes about in at least two ways.
First, a stake comes about by an individual and all members investing themselves in the organizational group. It requires a commitment, a pledge, a willingness to do the things that must be done in order to succeed. If all the planning, or all the financial support, or all of the field work is done by someone else, it’s hard to feel any sense of ownership of an enterprise. But it’s that sense of ownership, the pride in having something that belongs to you, which drives people through the difficult times and allows for no quit. Care for an organization only happens when its members have invested a piece of themselves in it.
Second, a stake comes about in the form of rewards, the reason that people invest in the first place. And on any team, if anyone wins, everyone must win. If a World Cup soccer or World Series baseball team paid only a few of its members after victory, that team would dissolve in chaos and anger. Other organizations are no different. It’s neither just nor sustainable to allow only a few to reap the benefits that have been created by the many. And there is no more certain way for a team, a coop, a business or any organization to fall apart than to allow an individual or group of leaders or a family to be rewarded with benefits that belong to the entire group.
It turns out that organizational development is the great game. Behind the three basic rules above, there are a myriad of techniques and methodologies designed to build trust and values and genuine caring for one another, and I’ll address some of those in the days to come. But for starters, the week just ended has affirmed for us that it all begins with the three very simple and wrenchingly-difficult tenets above.
As is true for many games, sometimes it comes down to how badly one team wants to win….
For several years now, Winds of Peace has considered the idea of attending a business conference here in the U.S. with one or more Nicaraguan colleagues. We’ve come close to doing it, but the timing never seemed just right for what we were doing at the moment. This year, the timing is right. This is the year that Winds of Peace Foundation (represented by me), along with Nicaraguan researcher and social scientist Rene Mendoza, will attend the high-energy, capitalist-cultivating, profits-driven Gathering of the Games.
That’s right. WPF, focused on women, Indigenous, rural poor and education initiatives in Nicaragua, will wade into the alluring waters of one this country’s premier conferences for building capitalist thinking and understanding. But before you think that the Foundation has somehow lost its bearings or commitment to local solutions for local problems in Nicaragua, allow me to explain.
The Gathering of the Games features the art and practice of open-book management, the best and most effective means of engaging members of any organization. It is the outgrowth of the management approach at SRC Holdings and which gave birth to the bestselling management book, The Great Game of Business, by Jack Stack. In short, the strategy behind this concept is to help each member of the business organization learn how the enterprise makes money, and what every member needs to know in order to make his/her specific contribution to the success of the whole. It’s a process that I embraced in my business life and one that I feel could have application in Nicaraguan organizations, especially cooperatives.
But transplanting open-book management to Nicaraguan culture is no slam-dunk. It isn’t that easy in U.S. businesses, either, and for many of the same reasons: there are the ubiquitous organization leaders who are in the game for themselves; conventional wisdom and history dictate that only a privileged few can and will make good decisions; the rank-and-file members rarely receive the education or the opportunity to learn how their enterprise really works; leaders foster feelings of dependence in the minds of their followers to affirm their importance. The full list of obstacles is a lengthy one, which only serves to highlight the incredible successes achieved by those organizations which persevere through the challenges.
The Great Game strategy is an innovative and successful one within the businesses where it has been deployed. The question arises, though, as to whether it can be expected to generate the same results within a rural, grassroots cooperative in the remote countryside of the second-poorest nation of the western hemisphere. That seems a good long distance from the corporatocracy, markets and economies of the capitalist west. It is.
But there is something in the transparency and participation of the open-book strategy that reaches beyond simply good management technique. What is successful about the notion is that it recognizes the significance and need for every contributor of an enterprise to contribute. It acknowledges the strength of collective wisdom and the limitations of unilateral thinking. It embraces the individual as a critical entity rather than a disposable commodity. It rewards participants both emotionally and economically. And it touches something fundamental in the human hearts of people in collective work by affirming their importance and being a part of something larger than themselves. It suggests the spiritual dimension of life’s work, and that’s why it resonates so elementally with most of its practitioners.
There may be a temptation to think that all of this methodology would be too complex or sophisticated for a population which is severely undereducated. But the wisdom, the beauty, of the open-book approach is that virtually everyone can understand the notion of their own work. Whether university-educated or functionally illiterate, people at work can recognize how one activity impacts another. That’s all that’s required to elevate the game being played.
There may be a temptation, also, to believe that neither this nor any other western-born idea should be imported into Nicaragua, where solutions to long-simmering economic troubles ought to be solved internally, through local players and ideas. That’s true. But good ideas don’t care where they come from, and local adaptations of innovations that have worked elsewhere in the world are still local solutions. It’s why we have introduced the Spanish edition of The Great Game of Business. It’s why we have refrained from teaching and touting the concept as the salvation for cooperatives and other institutions. And it’s also why we’re bringing one of Nicaragua’s most credible and influential researchers to a conference where he will have the opportunity to hear for himself about innovation potential from many diverse sources. This is how the concept can become localized.
Is it asking too much? Can The Great Game be expected to deliver in this context? I don’t know. I’ll ask the Great Game people when it’s over. I’ll ask Rene when he’s had a chance to reflect. And I’ll share it with you in September….
Stories about unscrupulous behaviors visited upon unsuspecting innocents are commonplace these days. From politics to business, from banks to non-profit organizations, from developing countries to supposedly well-developed nations, from organized fraud to scam artist, the tales all seem to end with a similar result: somebody entrusted with power and/or authority has stolen from somebody else who could not see the deception coming. Nicaragua, unfortunately, has had more than its share of such history and the result is that such acts have tended to spawn more of the same.
I recall meeting the members of a second-tier cooperative up in a coffee growing town in the Madriz province area years ago, and discovering a philosophy and practice that really got me excited about what might be possible in working with rural coffee coops. Here was an organization which spoke of holistic, community development, educating its members on all aspects of what it means to become whole and healthy, and involving its women members in financial education. We provided loans which were always repaid timely. The coop grew in stature among producers in the countryside and in many ways modeled what was possible when peasant producers linked up with a progressive, connected leadership. In several subsequent visits over the years, we re-connected with this organization, always coming away with a renewed sense of hope that organizations like this one could be replicated elsewhere in the countryside. On more than one occasion, we referenced what was happening there to other coops with whom we met. When Winds of Peace began funding a series of workshops in the area, including all members in the coffee value chain, this group responded with its presence and its participation as a leader in the territory.
Quite suddenly two years ago, there came “rumblings” from the territory that something was not right with this second-tier coop, that some mishandling of coffee and revenues had occurred and that the family occupying the primary leadership role within the organization had been misappropriating resources. The claim was a bombshell in the region, both for the members of the coop and the people of the surrounding communities. Police were involved, auditors came to assess, funders nervously checked in with the leadership. We did, too.
Not wanting to believe that the accusations were true, WPF met with the president, who is also the son of the original founder and president. We spoke directly about our concerns arising from the accusations. We asked point-blank whether the principles and objectives espoused years earlier were still in place, or whether they had changed in some ways. We asked whether there was any hint of truth to the allegations and, if not, what might be precipitating such claims. (Politics was the culprit, we were told.) More importantly, we had the opportunity to look straight into the eyes of this young man and discern for ourselves whether we were hearing the truth. We came away convinced that the coop was still on very solid footing.
The sad truth is, he lied. In subsequent months it became clear to everyone that in recent years the coop had been used for the personal enrichment of its leading family, that some loans received by the coop never made it into the hands of its producers, that coffee commitments made by the leadership could not be fulfilled, and that an enormous indebtedness had been incurred in the name of the coop, while none of the funds could be accounted for. This once brightly shining star had tarnished seemingly overnight, and the tarnish had been spread to the unsuspecting peasant producers who had trusted in its integrity and promise. This has been a tale of corruption and betrayal of profound impact, and its victims completely undeserving of such fate. Except for one small matter.
The cooperative is nothing more or less than its name implies, an entity owned by its members, its benefits and responsibilities shared by those members. Therein lies a significant piece of the problem. For as deceiving as the perpetrators have been in this episode, it is the closed system that they created which allowed them to syphon coop assets for their own use. The lack of transparency made for an easy cover-up, long enough for the family to temporarily cover their tracks, recruit several key confederates, avoid suspicions and establish a set of outcomes which would both insulate them from prosecution and further enrich themselves even as the coop’s bankruptcy plays out. Their plan was fiendishly clever and utterly without regard to the financial impact upon the hundreds of family members who had trusted them. But this closed system which allowed the cover up was also the direct result of coop members who did not pay attention, who trusted blindly, who shed their own responsibility in exchange for the ‘ease” of letting someone else do it. Too little knowledge, too little participation, too much trust, and too late to prevent a collapse.
It’s a formula all-too-common in Nicaragua. The “gatekeepers” of coops and Indigenous governance and other organizations occupy a place of control, whether intended or not. And in that space they can come to recognize not only the power they wield but also the ease with which they can deceive. It’s a temptation that might infect any of us, but especially after being in a position of want and need for so long. Finally, we might think to ourselves, there is a chance to do something for myself, for my own family, even at the expense of my neighbor. It might be a price that any of us would be willing to pay and that too many elected leaders have chosen to accept, and never with good result; in the end, somebody must absorb the hurt.
That pain is not the burden of WPF. We have sustained disappointments in the past and there will be more in the future; the human condition does not encourage perfection. Nor does the continuance of our work depend upon the performance of any one actor or group. The pain is the burden of those brothers and sisters who relied on the integrity and honesty of their leaders only to discover that the enticements of easy money were too great for such leaders to ignore. And the pain, eventually, is also the burden of those who would abuse the trust of their neighbors. Because in time, the easy money is spent away on things that do not last. But the scars of betrayal last forever and leave a legacy of shame that remains long after the violation. The pain burdens both the victims and the perpetrators alike, and the circle of loss is complete.
Such a postmortem as this may seem to offer a despairing view of future development progress. But the remedies for this ailment are relatively available, clear and demonstrably effective. The wall of betrayal is prevented when members of a group stay connected and active. The disease of unilateral decision-making is cured when participants decide to participate. The veil of deceit is pierced when leaders are held accountable for transparency and truth by the peers who they represent. These remedies could be cited as requirements by funders and technical groups which purport to serve our sometimes inexperienced partners; organizational leadership and governance are hardly topics taught in whatever limited schooling partners may have had. And the irony of these actions is that they not only maintain the integrity of the organizations, but also enhance their performance, as people can openly see the cause-and-effect of their actions. In the U.S. it’s sometimes referred to as “open-book management” or “ownership thinking.” Whatever its label, it represents the curative for the ailment of the closed system. And in the case of a once-promising coop in Madriz, it might well have derailed what has become an organizational and community train wreck….
Winds of Peace Foundation (WPF) continues to make available the opportunity for partners to learn basic techniques of business literacy and ownership characteristics to enhance their own entrepreneurial endeavors.
Open Book Management and Employee Ownership Transformation are well-demonstrated techniques for enterprise development that can be a big help to people who are trying to learn how to stay afloat.
