 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. 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.  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.  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.
 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.  Was there ever something that was bothering you for years and you didn’t understand the origin? Was there ever something that was an underlying fear, like a low hum in the back of your mind that spiked up around certain triggers?
Personal wealth, money and finance was one of those fear factors for me. It took me until my late 30s to finally be aware, confront and take action on these issues. Below I’m sharing some of the mindsets and clear thinking that helped me realize, confront, and move past these issues. As Social Sector professionals we deal with money all the time. In our work, we are often managing multi-million dollar budgets, and may work with humanitarian organizations that manage billions. Many of my work projects in the past have supported humanitarian organizations like the World Food Program (WFP) that received $6 billion of contributions for food assistance in 2017. So we should be comfortable with managing our own personal finances right?  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.
 The athletic X factor to make you social sector work and life excellent
I remember well one of my first jobs in the social sector working in refugee response. It was a recent switch from my previous NGO and I was thrilled to be on the new team, ready to learn from my colleagues and increase my skills. The first week on this new mission location I noticed everyone was taking periodic breaks. This is good, staying fresh by taking quick breaks, but then I realized that everyone was behind the building (or in their offices with the windows open) smoking. During the intense times, late work sessions quickly turned into beer fueled episodes ending sloppily in bars. Weekend workdays ended in clubbing sessions. Sounds fun, right? Yes, but to a point. These people were dedicated heros but also had physically unhealthy routines ingrained in their work and life approach. |
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