 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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Principles: Running your Social Sector work and life like the world’s most profitable hedge fund11/8/2023  Social Sector critics believe that if our organizations ran like the private sector, our problems would be over. This reasoning is wrong. The high level dilemmas, structures and missions are not easily comparable. Systems, and cultures are not easily interchangeable between these divergent worlds.
The exception to this rule is when the high level essence of an idea surpasses the domain where it was developed. When an idea or an approach becomes a macro level principle, it can apply across every scenario. This post is about one of these high level operating systems that emerged from the hedge fund industry but directly applies to our Social Sector work and life.  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.  As the due date of our first child approached ten years ago, I remember that feeling of pure fear, similar to the roar of a large, unknown rapid ahead on the river, with no way to get out of the stream to stop and look before dropping in. Life is changing with the arrival of the new baby. It marks a progression point for your life, but it doesn’t have to mean the end of outdoor adventure. Quite the contrary. A new adventure chapter is opening before you. Ten years into the experiment, I am happy to report that there are some technical changes, but the adventure life is fully accessible to those who set up a plan and go for it.
 Picture this: You wake up after 8 solid hours of sleep. You make a simple but nutritious breakfast for yourself and your family and sit together and enjoy the early parts of the day with a steaming cup of nice coffee. The kids and your spouse head off to work/school, you walk outside to see them off, then grab your backpack and walk a short distance to your workspace. This is a small structure of rough cut lumber nestled beneath tall pine and oak trees. Surfboards and kayaks adorn the ceiling above a large white board. After a few minutes of meditation, You fire-up the treadmill under your standing desk and light up your laptop and large monitor screen. Your workday has begun.
 The formula: stress + rest = high performance works for athletes, scientists and warriors. Why should Social Sector workers not adopt this approach? Learning this system can help us design cycles of deep focus and stress, and mitigate these with recovery periods that then allow us to focus again later with deeper attention and effort. We can use this approach to do better work, retain our focus over time, and enjoy life more outside of the job. This is a human performance lens for Social Sector performance.
 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.
 A few years ago I was talking to a friend who works for a Social Sector organization. He is in his mid 30s, athletic, confident and great at his job. However when I invited him to come with me to a networking event where organizational leaders would be present, he refused. My friend had a long list of reasons why it was not possible to attend the event:
“I hate networking.” “Those people are WAY above my pay-grade.” “I’d have nothing to say to those people. What would we talk about?” ‘Those kind of events make me nervous.” At first I was surprised at his reaction, but then I remembered my own struggles with overcoming a fear of hierarchy in the Social Sectors. Although I consider myself a free thinking and open minded person, hierarchy scared me.  Social sector professionals fear job loss, or contracts ending as much as people working in the wider private sector. Our modern work ethic comes from the factories of the industrial revolution where your place on the assembly line was everything. Being a part of this mythical, idyllic ‘factory’ guaranteed your own security and that of your family as well as your place within a community. The job created and sustained identity. You had to show up and do your job, and the company takes care of the rest. This simplified version was never fully true, but even the imperfect version is long over for most of us. We are living in the third industrial revolution of the Internet age. Many jobs in our environment are moving to a short term contract basis. Pensioned long term employees are rare in our social sector fields.
 Let’s start with a simple question: How much of what you are making and managing in your social sector work will last one, five or 10 years? What about beyond that time, centuries from now?
In his new book Perennial Seller, author and strategist Ryan Holiday discusses this phenomenon of enduring work that outlasts its creators. As social sector strivers, we always say we are working on something that is sustainable. In theory, as social sector professionals, we are working on a problem that if solved correctly will make us irrelevant. We are teaching a skill, creating a piece of physical infrastructure, or building an organization that will stand the test of time. |
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