Proceed Until Apprehended

A recent post of mine was about the library, of which I’m a huge fan and user. I’m passionate about the museum, too, but it’s a different kind of love. I don’t particularly like going there, I just like what it represents and what it could be.

I work directly across from our Provincial museum, the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM), and right next door to their annex. They house three collections, a biological collection, a paleontological collection and an Aboriginal artifacts collection. I’ve had the opportunity to tour through the annex, which is not open to the public. It’s more interesting than the museum itself by a factor of ten.

I think this goes for many museums, but I’m picking on the RSM. The museum is, unfortunately, much too static. This is because of money, of course, but it also seems to be because they’re presenting a history of Saskatchewan through mostly physical artifacts, and those don’t change over time. Once you’ve tweaked your presentation, you’re largely into preservation, right?

As you might guess, I don’t agree. I think the RSM should be all about the interpretation. This shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. The tour guides are called interpreters, after all.

Right now, the museum presents the facts, and just the facts. By “interpretation,” I mean that the museum should be in the business of helping me understand what all the history and the worldview they present means for me right now.

The museum offers a picture of reality that is not warped or diluted by other noise. It’s a view of our world that hasn’t been overly polished, manufactured or “defined” by someone else. It’s contact with a reality you can really trust, and that’s exceeding rare in our lives… check that… the lives of people like me, living in the city and going to work each day.

The museum says: These are the environmental regions of our province. This is the bedrock beneath our feet. These creatures once roamed our land. These creatures now roam our land. These people and these cultures defined this province. This vegetation naturally covers our landscape… When I spend all my time outside on paved roads and my indoor time in the air-conditioned comfort in front of a screen, these things can be forgotten.

Somewhere along the way, museums defined their role as protectors of history. They are preservationists to the point that most of the collections are hidden away from public view. The mandate of a museum ends up being, “We protect things that are irreplaceable.”

I think there’s a relevance problem here. Museums need to be challenged to make these collections and this ”real” look at our world relevant to the public. The museum I dream of would be dedicated to helping others understand the world, past and present, so they can make better choices for their future.

Leadership is often understood to be “principle-centred.” You figure out what’s important to you and then you stick to that path. You establish the path that’s integral to you, and even when distractions try and pull you from it, you know what’s important. I see the museum offering a reality-centre. It can be trusted. It can help you buildi an understanding of yourself and your world, offering a solid foundation from which you can develop principles that govern your behaviour. The museum offers an excellent foundation for leadership.

The museum offers bedrock in more ways than one, but we need help using it. It’s not enough just to be there.

Museum, thank you for helping me understand the past, and thank you for helping me understand the present. Please help me plot a path for the future that is grounded in reality.

At the moment, there’s limited transition between “What we know to be true,” and “What we should do now.” I’m inspired by the Human Factors exhibit at the RSM, which connects our human influence to the world’s current state, but it only implicitly invites a tough self-examination. For most, the principles at the centre of their behaviour are  left untouched after a museum visit.

I’d like to see the museum:

• provide examples of leaders who stuck to reality, even when it made them appear unreasonable
• ask me to make a personal commitment to respond to something I learned today
• organize our community to take action on important issues that are largely ignored
• reach out and engage the community in interpreting current events through a scientific and historical lense
• offer orientation for public servants and any organization that’s committed to Saskatchewan
• lead a movement of choice and change based on a trusted understanding of the world
• when I’m physically in the building, engage me in a dialogue. Pull scientists from the back room and focus on engaging with the public.

I’m sure this is easier said than done. There’s undoubtedly a laundry list of items and infrastructure that just need maintenance. Here’s my tradeoff: I’m OK with seeing historical artifacts suffer damage if it means people’s future decisions are more thoughtful, deliberate and grounded in reality. I say that, but I don’t think it would get that far. In truth, becoming more relevant is the first and most important step in getting more funding.

I love books and I love quiet places. By extension, I love the library. I could spend hours in the library just reading near-random books off the shelves. In reality, though, my relationship with the library is somewhat transactional. Primarily, the library serves as an exchange, a place where I check in (online), request pre-identified books, physically go in to drop off and pick up books and pay the occasional fine. I think I’m only using about ten percent of my library. The rest, at least to me, is irrelevant.

Aside from access to printed paper, the library is a quiet refuge, a place to focus a little more internally and find some organized information in a steady stream rather than the firehose of the internet. In truth, there’s lots of places to do that. Any number of coffee shops are happy to have you do that for the price of a cup of coffee. Is the physical space and the money devoted to a library worth it?

To be fair, I can think of a few other things the library offers. It’s a place of “trusted” information with professionals that can help you find data and knowledge that’s vetted, tested and approved. There’s also education programs and lots of obscure books that can introduce you to new worlds. There is support for businesses and access to databases.

The fundamental contract we have with the library – we’ll pay tax dollars so you can make information available – is a deal whose death knell is fast approaching. It’s not that libraries haven’t kept their end of the bargain, it’s just that the internet makes it faster, cheaper and infinitely more efficient to stay home and get the same. I certainly love the focus on ideas that comes with reading a printed book, and I want that from the library. I could do without the big, air-conditioned building and all the administration. I suspect that there’s an Amazon-style model of book exchange that could lower our taxes by a good touch.

I don’t think the library is going to go anywhere anytime soon, though, and its disappearance would not be my first choice.  My first choice would be to rethink libraries and shift them from a role of providing information access to leading us in learning how to manage our information. We’re experiencing an epidemic in our society right now. We’re losing ourselves, our purpose and our intentions to a glut of information. Libraries can be a big part of the solution.

Many of us don’t know how to manage all of the information that’s now so easily accessible. Heads bent down in the Blackberry prayer, texting at inappropriate times, the interruption of important conversations for the randomness of a ringing telephone, pulling an all-nighter in Second Life, watching another episode of Deadliest Catch instead of going to bed at a decent hour, mindlessley surfing Fail Blog… all this media can easily sidetrack us. Often, we don’t choose to apply our attention, our attention is simply stolen by whatever is in front of us. The library is the antithesis of “unplanned” attention, and building our capacity to be deliberate with our attention could be their cause.

If the library’s mission were to be, “We help people control the information,” they could:

• Help their users develop strategies to sort their daily stream of information
• Provide classes on keeping a clean email in-box
• Help users prioritize their information needs
• Communicate the importance of being deliberate with one’s attention
• Provide coaching on how to find and establish information feeds that are meaningful (I’d go to a course called ‘Getting Value from Twitter’)
• Help their users make personal learning plans to pursue their interests
• Research 101: Provide formal instruction on how to find information (and determine its credibility)
• Developing simple, flexible guides/frameworks for individuals to undertake self-directed study

I see this as being more valuable than a university education in many ways. Who needs university when the information on any topic is at your fingertips?

If you can find it when you need it.

Information and learning is now DIY. With information’s ubiquity, the barriers to knowledge are now our ability to search, sift and absorb. We would thrive with teaching focused on how to do this well. The library is in a pretty ideal position to take on the role.

I’m preparing a presentation for a School Community Council conference I’m speaking at in a couple weeks to a bunch of councils throughout the city of Regina. I’m working on memorizing this and I’ll do it with a powerpoint that is primarily images or bullet points of lists. This is just draft, but I thought you might be interested to see it. Any feedback you want to provide is greatly appreciated.

Thankyou.

I appreciate being able to come and speak with you today.

I am chair of the Dr. Perry SCC (school community council). This is my second year as a member of our SCC.

My daughter, Annika, is in the first grade this year.  My son Joshua will be starting kindergarten this coming fall.

The province-wide movement from Parent Teacher Associations to SCCs came with some pretty audacious objectives. SCCs are envisioned to be at the centre of the community and to drive a lot of value and services. There’s a lot of responsibility to shoulder being on one of these councils. We really are in a pretty influential position to do things not only for our school, but for our neighbours as well. I want to congratulate you and thank you for making this commitment and putting in effort for a greater good.

I’d like to establish a couple ground rules for my presentation.  First, ask me questions anytime you want.  This becomes a lot more interesting if it’s a conversation. Please, fire away. Second, please don’t take notes. Everything I’m saying and everything I’m showing is available for download on my website, which I’ll share at the end.

I hope to save lots of time at the end for more questions and discussion, too.

I’ve been invited to speak to you because the Perry SCC is taking some steps you might find interesting. Before we get to that though, I want to tell you a little bit about myself.

I’m passionate about improving the quality of life in my community.  I believe we’ve lost our sense of relationship at the local level. There’s too much of an “every person for themself” kind of vibe to the world. I’d like to help change that. I don’t think all the advances and technical innovations happening in the world have to come at the expense of knowing your neighbour.

This is easier said than done, though. I’m just one person and the trend towards anonymity is obvious.

Nevertheless, I want to help people and make a difference in my community.

Here’s the real problem, though. I’m not very good at the traditional things that would help people, like baking cookies, compassionate hugs or chaperoning a school dance.  I’m trying to play to my strengths, which are things like strategic planning, conceptual diagrams and theoretical models.

So while I want to help people, I’ve realized what I really need to do is help people help other people.

I think this actually works out do be pretty helpful.  When I’m working with SCCs or other public-serving organizations, it’s pretty clear that there’s a need for some assistance at the organizational level. This also allows me to maximize my reach. If I can help a community group get better that serves 300 people, I feel like I’m doing some pretty positive stuff.

This is all to say that the thoughts and ideas I share with you today come from an intention to make the world a better place. I worry sometimes I sound a bit too objective and unfeeling, but perhaps that’s just me trying to help get results in my own way.

I’ve got a fairly practical objective here today. Very specifically, I want to help you see how important it is to step back and evaluate why you’re doing what you’re doing. I want you to examine WHY your SCC exists.

This is the same exercise the Perry SCC has gone though. Our council isn’t done. We’re still figuring it out and growing our capacity, but I think we’re on the right track.

As a starting point for a discussion about building focus in an SCC, I want to share my take on what SCCs typically are like right now.

They’re often stressful situations. There’s too much to do and there’s not enough time or people to do it.  There are lots of expectations, needs and challenges. Quite often, things don’t get dealt with until they’re an emergency. There’s not much planning involved. It’s pretty reactive.

Your own experience went something like this. Your kid started school. You thoughtfully determined that the quality of your child’s education and the formative years of grade school were important enough for you to get engaged. You showed up for that first meeting full of vim and vigour, eyes aglow with possibilities for the things you could do for the school… and they said, “Thank goodness you’re here. Jim just quit the fundraising committee and we need a new chair.”

You didn’t say no. You couldn’t say no. These people were pouring their hearts and souls into serving the school and you couldn’t bear to see them suffer. 1, 3, 8 years later, and now you’re completely invested in the projects you didn’t care about when you started.

I’d like to make a broad, general distinction between two different roles that come up in SCCs. There are individuals who are focused on Program Delivery and there are individuals that focus on Solution Development.

Both of these roles are necessary to make an SCC work, to make any non-profit work. If you have just one or just the other, you’re going to be out of balance. If you have all people that are focusing on Developing Solutions for the future, you have a lot of theory and ideas and no-one to do the work. If you have all people that are focusing on Delivering Programs, you have a bunch of people doing hard work, but we don’t know if it’s actually the right or best thing for the school.

My experience with SCCs is that they tend to err on the side of Program Delivery. Most people feel most comfortable if they’ve got a job and they’re working hard to get it done. Asking whether it’s the right job at the right time for the right people falls to the wayside.

When this is the predominant practice in an SCC, we often forget to ask why we are here. We get laden with tasks and responsibilities and don’t make time to ask if we’re pursuing the right goal. This is an activity trap. We get caught comforting ourselves that we’re creating value while we may just be making a flurry of activity. In short, the environment changes, but we sometimes don’t.

When I’ve spoken with SCC members, I see some recurring themes that happen. When we just keep doing, and we don’t ask why, that’s when we get in trouble. When we’re not asking WHY, here’s what happens:

We get too narrow in our focus and just do a few things for the school.

The SCC becomes a pretty small group that works hard but also burns out.

The SCC makes lots of assumptions about roles and responsibilities. We decide we’re supposed to do X and not Y, but we don’t really consider what’s needed or correct.

There can also be a lot of back-seat driving and micro-management.  Even if it’s not their responsibility, members start focusing and digging on some pretty narrow details of programs.

I want to stress a key point here. It’s not that this stuff isn’t important. It is important. There’s lots of other things that are important, too. The opportunity is for you and your SCC to decide, of all the imporant things, which one or ones should be our priority?

The Dr. Perry SCC went through an exercise to examine what our purpose is in meeting every month. Asking and answering WHY was powerful.

Let me tell you how we did it.

First, we acknowledge that we weren’t working to a plan. We were just doing stuff.

Second, we deliberately made space to ask ourselves a “Why are we here?” type question.

I used a facilitation method that worked really well for this, and I want to come do it for your school. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Third, we have been working hard to make sure we don’t fall back into habits of just “doing.” We’re keeping the plan alive.

Here’s what we came up with:

1 Enabling Parental Involvement

2 Sharing Spirit through Partnership

3 Acknowledging Student’s Value and Worth

4 Diversifying the Learning Experience

5 Growing Citizenship

I won’t get into too much detail about what each of these means to us. If you want descriptions, again, I’ve got them up on my website at nevindanielson.com. The point I’m trying to make here is that the exercise of stepping back and determining our purpose was essential and gave us real energy.

I will say, though, if you go through an exercise like this, it’s pretty easy to fall into the trap of defining yourself by your past practices. I’d encourge you to shake those conventions and ask yourself anew, “Why are we here?”

Here’s some assumptions you may have to get past:

• We’re here to raise money and buy stuff
• We’re here to make sure parents have a voice at school
• This one’s related, but it deserves it’s own statement: Our job is to assess school policy
• If it weren’t for us exceptional people, no parents would be involved
• We’re great at delegating

I can simplify the process we went through for your SCC to get on the right track:

one, take an hour to have a conversation about “Why are we here?”

two, commit to the results and change what you’re working on

I want to see your SCC get stronger.  If it’s of any help, please invite me in to do the same facilitated session we did at our SCC. I would discuss the key focus question that we’re going to answer. It might be as simple as “Why are we here?”, then we would go through an exercise to answer it. It’s called a Group Concensus Workshop.

As I said, today’s presentation is available for download from my website, nevindanielson.com. I’ve got contact info there if you want to find me. I’ve also got a link to an online forum I created for SCCRegina. To respect everyone’s privacy, it’s by invitation only. It’s a place for you to raise concerns and interests with fellow SCC members from across the city. Come find me at my website and ask me for an invitation. Everyone here is eligible to be a member.

Thanks very much.

I wouldn’t say it’s happened a lot, but a few times when I’m being an effective volunteer and I’m addressing an issue, I’ve been asked to take an “executive” role, like chair or board member. It’s flattering, and given the old rules of power and hierarchy, I have an immediate gut reaction to say yes.

Thankfully, I’ve trained myself enough that I’m able not to blurt out the first thing that comes into my head. You see, I don’t want to run the movement, I want to help lead it.

Organizations come with responsibilities and obligations. Being the change-junky I am, I’m usually not too keen on helping out with all those old expectations and deliverables. There’s a bright, exciting future to be had, and the old stuff seems to be a distraction to the story. Now, I know that there are some old things that still need to be done… let’s call those the fundamentals. Things like budgeting, stakeholder communication or volunteer development, but there seems to be a steady supply of people to take on those roles. I’m really thankful those people exist. I want to play where there are no rules, no expectations. It’s people taking adequate care of the fundamentals that allow for others to explore innovations and growth.

So, back to the opportunity. What to  do? The roles have offered influence, but only if you’re not too busy being distracted.

I’ve found it works well to be uflinchingly honest in what I’m capable of doing. I’ve found myself saying, “I really care about the outcomes and am passionate about the work this organization can do. I like the idea of a bigger platform, the access to resources, the ability to influence the thinking of others, but I’m not really interested in many of the conventional things being done. In fact, I’ll probably be frustrating to you as I don’t ‘pull my weight’ on some of this stuff. You can have me, but I’m not going to be very helpful for maintaining business as usual.”

Kinda sounds like my job interviews, huh?

What I’ve found is that there’s a HUGE appetite for this kind of truth telling. The response has been a ready acceptance for this kind of approach. The big hurdle here isn’t the people inviting me to join. The hurdle is in my head, and whether I’m going to embrace the discomfort of being something different than expected.

The older I get, the more I see meaning, purpose and fulfillment in not-for-profit, community service activities. I’m ashamed to say that for a good long period, they just didn’t seem relevant to me. Most organizations in this category are really passive and reactive. Rarely do they reach out, market or do something remarkable. If you’re not looking, they’re not selling.

It seems to me many don’t even know (or question) if they’re relevant. They laid out their charter in about 1967 and they’re sticking to it.

In the past ten years, I’ve woken up to these organizations and how much they mean to me. Now, I sign up, I get plugged in, I participate, I wonder why it’s done that way, I shrug it off and just provide my time, I get frustrated, I decide to pull back for my sanity. Later, I try again. I come up with a good idea, it’s met with resistance… it’s sort of a circular, love/hate relationship. I’ll feel foolish if this is only my story, but I don’t think it is. I think many of us struggle with finding organizations that are willing to receive new ideas and challenges to the old model.

I tend to try and volunteer at the governance level. That may be the problem, but it’s also where I feel like I can make a difference. I’m struck by how un-strategic and short-sighted these boards can be. I guess much like our for-profit organizations, many of the “leaders” around the table are those who proved their mettle in the rank and file, doing the blood, sweat and tears-work. Unfortunately, there are different issues at a board table, but old habits die hard. Being an excellent fundraiser isn’t a strength in that discussion. Constantly pulling the discussion back to a side issue or a particular project is downright detrimental.

That table needs questions like, “why do we exist?” and “are we relevant?” Those are the earth-shattering questions that could bring these organizations back from the brink of extinction.

Personally, I don’t think it’s in the cards. More non-profits are going to dwindle away than build an evergreen culture. I haven’t lost my passion for community service, but creating alternate methods of delivery looks more appealing, even if it’s a lot of effort to start them.