 As a long time humanitarian response professional, I’m someone who likes to look on the bright side. My professional focus for over two decades has been on places and situations around the world where things are not going well, and help from the outside world is required to help people survive and rebuild from natural disasters and wars.
My professional career has focused on responding to disasters outside of my home country of the United States. When the COVID 19 pandemic hit the world a few years ago, that type of disaster came home, and my family and I experienced the pandemic in a personal way. It was an immediate experience that is not possible when you are working as an outsider in a foreign country.
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 United Nations peace keepers, Portuguese Battalion escorting us to the airport, Central African Republic 2017 Decision fatigue is the mental strain and depletion caused by making a decision. Decisions require cognitive processing. Even the smallest decisions can consume mental energy. Decision related stress is not always a bad thing. Positive stress, or eustress, is essential to making us stronger and facilitating growth. In the same way that muscles adapt and strengthen in the days after a run, the mind can also grow, and acquire experience, after a set of decisions or a period of heavier cognitive load.
As social sector professionals, we are often working in environments where massive events like an earthquake or a war overtake all good decision making processes, and we are reacting in the moment using immediate feedback based on accrued experience and past mistakes. And yet even in these critical environments, there is space to make the best possible decision based on the information available.  Escaping the busy trap and making hard decisions easier
What are they doing all day (in the other department, in the other organization)? This uncomfortable question strikes deep for us social sector professionals. Unlike our for profit counterparts, we are constantly worried that our work, organizations and lives are less justified since they are not generating direct quantifiable profit. We fall into these fears and down into the alluring busy trap where we do everything to appear busy (and thus validated) to others. This non-profit must be important/useful/valuable since I and my co workers are so busy all the time.  How Social Sector professionals can set up a personal performance system to thrive in an organizational change process.
My work with Social Sector organizations often puts me in contact with groups undergoing internal change processes. These small or large seismic movements seemed unusual and dramatic to me at the beginning of my career. Over time, I realized that organizational restructuring was common in the nonprofit world, and that certain patterns and themes repeat themselves as organizational tectonic plates shift over time. Each organization no matter the type, size or focus goes through change. While the timeline varies, the process of redefining a mission, structure, teams, and way of working, is universal to these Social Sector organizations.  Are you a maker or a manager? The question rarely has an easy answer. In his classic article Maker’s Schedule, Managers’ Schedule, Paul Graham defines makers as anyone in the workplace creating things like code, crafts or books. This maker approach requires long, unbroken segments of time throughout the day to produce these products. Managers divide their day into one hour or less segments and check in with a lot of different people and groups to make sure a project or goal is on track. Both roles are essential for any organization or social mission, but each requires a unique mindset, scheduling approach, and way of working. Graham himself works on a maker schedule, but also manages the Y Combinator, a group that helps form and launch new companies.
 This post is about decision making in complex scenarios: How to have a strong mind and make the right choice in a crisis. How to manage your own emotions to best help others in a crisis.
On August 12, 2017 a car plowed into a group of peaceful protesters in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. The attack that killed one and wounded 20 followed a tense morning of exchanges between so called ‘Alt Right’ groups and a large group of counter protesters. Just after the one year anniversary of the event, I’ve assembled some thoughts on crisis management that I started writing just after last year’s event. |
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