“Lincoln, Churchill, and Newton, to name just a few famous mopers, all accentuated the negative.”

I have been accused, a good part of my life, for only seeing the bad stuff.  Rightly so.  Some of this, probably, is genetics — my hardwiring — and other pieces could be learning: it got rewards from my father and others: being able to criticize or notice the imperfections is part of the Jewish culture: we are preternatural debaters.

Doom and gloom folks, like me though, seem to have skills that the optimists don’t: to see the future more clearly, the pitfalls, the dragons lurking in the dark that will breathe fire and…bite.

The pessimist’s skills and viewpoint could be very helpful right now: an Op-Ed piece in Business Week by Patricia Pearson, sheds light on the need for some balance.  (The optimists may have had their “run.”)  She reports that optimists have an “attentional bias” to notice opportunities and look for rewards.  They’re unlikely to pay much attention, though, to the gathering storm clouds on the horizon.  That’s the domain of the somber.  (How do you think we would characterize most of the folks in the “Occupy” movement?)

For the scientists out there, the analyticals, there appears to be a genetic link between mood disorders and “problem-solving creativity.”  A plus.  Those with irrational optimism are, by contrast, not the best at creating a “Plan B.” 

Businesses, especially during difficult times, are encouraged to tap “depressive realism:” the gift given to the melancholy to see “reality more accurately.”  While they won’t  be warmly welcomed at today’s relentlessly upbeat sales conferences, they are needed and should be listened to.  (Remember Sharon Watkins who told Ken Lay [Enron] about the impending “implosion of accounting scandals?”)

So, if you’re a curmudgeon like me, what’s your story?  What do you see?  Psst: you can use this Blog post to get more street cred: forward it to those [eternal] optimists: tell ‘em to give you some respect!

“Learned helplessness” (LH) may be more prevalent in the Social-Profit Sector than we know and it could explain some behaviors which might be counterproductive.  What is LH?  A situation in “which people or animals feel they are unable to positively influence their surroundings or personal situation.”  (John Bradberry) A diet of  continual bad news.

The prompting for this reflection was a recent Retreat that my colleagues and I facilitated; it was obvious, the next morning, that the members of this group seemed to feel powerless to alter the status quo.

Learned Helplessness was a discovery that was the result of an accident: in 1967, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, detected helpless behavior in dogs who were shocked after hearing a tone.  Dogs subjected to the conditioning made no effort to overcome the shocks by moving to the other side of the “shuttle-box.”

According to the researchers, “Due to their previous experience, they [the dogs] had developed a cognitive expectation that nothing they did would prevent or eliminate the shocks.”  (Seligman & Maier, 1967).

After some reflection, we began to wonder: is this problem more pervasive than we realize?  Since we have detected some elements of “mild paralysis” in some organizations, we thought it — this idea of Learned Helplessness — was worth exploring and…writing about.

A quick warning: LH is not a diagnosis; it’s a tool to better understand behaviors and provide solutions that are respectful of situations that are growing increasingly more complex.

Since many social-profits (SP’s) are now suffering adversities that have little to do with their own actions (few of them, I imagine, shorted AIG’s stock or packaged mortgage-backed securities), is it possible that their people are engaging in a higher level of Learned Helplessness?  Possibly, is my answer.

If this is indeed true, it is easy to see why some organizations cling to old models and “turn inward”  (See Harwood: “How Programs Crowd Out Community”) as they try to “defend” themselves.

We believe we can change this situation.  Risk-taking and courage can replace fear and reluctance if we: 1) develop a new series of conversations, and; 2) encourage a new model of leadership.

This new conversation must come with a few simple ground rules: we’re not here to blame or defend…we’re here to imagine a new way as we see many of our old, hierarchical, “go-it-alone,” win/lose models breaking down.

The model of leadership we need?  My preference is on “Servant Leadership.”  It puts the constituents first, ahead of self-interest.  Sounds easy.  It’s not.

What if…we could encourage a dialogue that is deeper, more reflective and begins with probing questions that get at meaning?  Questions like:

• what change do I hope I can make?
• how much am I willing to bet on my future?
• what are my rewards for success?

These are questions that deliver personal or “authentic” power.  Perhaps, these questions can get tried out in the next Staff, Board meeting?

We can’t predict the future nor can we control it but we can co-create it.  As one wise philosopher tells us: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”  Yogi Berra (1925–  )

The Original

The New AT&T

In December of 2006, Cingular became a wholly owned unit of AT&T. It’s OK that you don’t remember; very few people do. (Yes, you can smell an object lesson coming?) I call it “The Cingular Dilemma” (TCD).

Cingular, prior to its acquisition, was the second largest wireless carrier in the world’s largest wireless market and….we don’t even think about it anymore. It was re-branded “The New AT&T.”

(Unless I’m way off base, I think we’re unlikely to see anything in the non-profit sector the likes of “The New Gates Foundation” or “The New Alzheimers Association.” )

Just this sort of phenomenon — The Cingular Dilemma — is, I believe, what keeps non-profit, and foundation, management teams up at night, tossing and turning. Why?

In these perilous and uncertain times, the plight of non-profits, and the entire sector, is an unknown. As demand for services continues to and funds continue to drop, non-profits look to the possibility of “mergers, collaborations, partnerships” as a way through, a tactic that could insure survival.

The Model: Buy Me Up, Scotty

The models which are often used are based on the for-profit M&A (Merger & Acquisition) design. While it’s well known, it’s worth stating that: there are no golden, let alone, brass parachutes for discarded management teams; there are no severance packages even when you fail or when you can’t come to terms with the Board on an outlandish pay package for yourself. And, of course, in the event you would like to “cash out,” there is no stock exchange on which to launch an Initial Public Offering. In fact, non-profits are required upon closure, by IRS statute, to distribute their assets to other non-profits.

If for-profits and non-profits are so different, why do we treat them the same on this subject of partnering? Why haven’t we created a new set of rules that would assure, let’s say, that Cingular’s name would still be around…in some form?

Clip from Points of Light Institute Website

My answer is that I think we’re stuck and scared. I see a shortage of imagination and a language that is lacking in subtlety. Even though we have models, like the Points of Light Institute (recently ”merged” with HandsOn Network) that tell a different story, we’re stuck in an old model: “if I partner with you, I go away.”  Yes, there is a cultural theme here, too: cowboys ride alone.

Combine the cultural and creative reality with the landscape — 74% of our non-profits are under $500K in annual revenues; 61% are under $250K — and we can see that there isn’t a lot of perceived “wiggle room” to make anything earth-shattering happen.

This reality puts the subject of partnering in the non-profit sector in a relatively unsophisticated stage that makes any change complex, expensive, time-consuming and fear-producing.  (Here comes the pitch.) We in The Minerva Project are working to create tools and methodologies that would drive down the expense and increase the simplicity of evaluations and potential integrations.

Where do we go from here?  Some more talking wouldn’t hurt. But, experimentation would be better.

The New Year is upon us: in a mystical way, many of us feel like it is a “clean slate,” a tabula rasa on which we can write our new lives: The World Of 2011.

I like this concept.  I like it so much that I would advocate for a monthly “clean slate” where we could, symbolically, “start fresh.”  This concept meshes with my burgeoning view that we are all engaged in the arts; we must all create, innovate — whether in business or in the arts — or we languish.  Wasting away, mental or creatively, has never been one of my options and I think we would be fooling ourselves if we thought otherwise: we are engines of creativity, innovation.

With that premise of continual invention, this might be a good time to visit “where good ideas come from.”  Steven Johnson, in his four (4) minute YouTube Video, provides some insights (from his studies on the subject) on how an environment that promotes the fanciful, new inklings can be helped along.

His most profound finding is that, often, we each have a piece of a great idea.  Through the bumping of one hunch into another hunch, a good idea is formed.  Rarely, he finds, is it just a one person event.

Going back in history, he cites the early English coffee houses of the 1650′s that created a place where ideas could brew, marinate.  Johnson calls it “The Liquid Network;” the stimulants of coffee and tea were quite radical to the previous consumption of large amounts of alcohol in the form of beer (breakfast), wine (lunch) and more spirits for dinner.

What the www. (World Wide Web) now provides is the kind of connectivity, for example, that allows for more bumping, more collisions of hunches, notions.  (We don’t give it enough credit.)

So, what would it take to create an ecosystem in your organization that mimics the alacrity of “The Liquid Network?”  Some ingredients Johnson thinks need to be present: fluidity; information spillover; diverse views, and; different fields of expertise.

In short: chaos.  Why not give it a try in 2011?

Are you interested in boosting performance, efficiency, throughput?  It might be time to revisit the lessons from Goldratt’s “Theory of Constraints” and look at your organization’s rules, procedures, methods.  


The simple conclusion from the book: policies, not necessarily bad ones, get in the way.  Not machines.  Not bad, unthinking people.  What’s the solution?  Think systemically.  

The 1984 Parable

Policies, in my view, are often designed to deal with the exceptions…the customer who wants to ship to multiple locations with one billing address, let’s say.  So, we create a new policy to deal with the previous ineffective one.  (Look at what much of what comes out of Congress, too.)


In my experience with client organizations, I’ve seen policies — aimed at dealing with 10% of the employees, customers, whomever — take up 90% of the intellectual energy of the business, whether it’s a non- or for-profit organization.  There’s no energy or motivation left to really figure out how we leapfrog from where we are right now.


This kind of stance — to develop solutions for the exceptions — could have negative systemic impacts: many of your best folks could get the wrong message.  


That message might be seen as: “let’s spend a good part of our time and energy on insuring this mistake doesn’t happen again….oh, by the way, we didn’t really get damaged from that mistake…it was just a violation of  another policy…”  In the process, the 97% of the work that’s going well can be ignored, forgotten.  More unintended consequences.  Think whole-istically.  

Click to Enlarge

Theory of Constraints White Paper: Open PDF

Moskoff’s High Performance Organizations Blogpost: July 2010: Theory of Constraints.

Would you like to raise productivity?  Don’t implement a “top-down” initiative.  That’s the simple finding from this Study of more than seven decades ago.

From 1927 to 1932, several professors from Harvard Business School, began studying organizational and social systems at the Hawthorne Western Electric (AT&T’s manufacturing arm) plant in Cicero, Illinois.   The Study was only supposed to last one year, but…it got complicated.   And, was extended.

This Study was one of the first “management science” gifts given to us by the stable business model of AT&T back then: regulation did produce consistency and predictability which allowed for studies like this one.

Anyway, what did they do and what did they find?  First, they asked a small group of employees about ways to improve productivity and efficiency.  The workers were delighted to talk to the researchers: they got a boatload of possible changes to the workplace: more than they could implement. 

Humidity.  Lighting.  Breaks.  Work group behaviors.  These, and other, of subjects got covered.

No matter what they tested — increased lightning; decreased lighting — there was a positive effect.  Production went up.

Why?  The researchers ascribed it to the process of the workers being asked.  And, of course, the researchers listening and acting on the information.  (This is quite similar to another similar phenomenon called “School Belonging.”) 

Would you like to increase productivity and reduce anxiety in your organization?  Just ask a few questions and implement a few of the ideas that come out.  Magic.

BTW, here are the major Findings from the Study:

• The aptitudes of individuals are imperfect predictors of job performance. Although they give some indication of the physical and mental potential of the individual, the amount produced is strongly influenced by social factors.
• Informal organization affects productivity. The Hawthorne researchers discovered a group life among the workers. The studies also showed that the relations that supervisors develop with workers tend to influence the manner in which the workers carry out directives.
• Work-group norms affect productivity. The Hawthorne researchers were not the first to recognize that work groups tend to arrive at norms of what is “a fair day’s work,” however, they provided the best systematic description and interpretation of this phenomenon.
• The workplace is a social system. The Hawthorne researchers came to view the workplace as a social system made up of interdependent parts.

Copyright 1999 by Donald Clark

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the noted Harvard Business School professor,  speaks about the steps that are needed to “turn a culture of decline into one of success.”  A bigger task than most realize, she simply says “…you have to restore employees’ confidence in the system.”

She Looks Harmless

“Learned helplessness” is the term that psychologists use to talk about school-aged childrens’ resignation.  In that context, the internal dialogue is something like…”I’m stupid…I can’t do this…”  It is the opposite of their other term: “Self efficacy.” 

In the workpalce, the learned helplessness addresses the sentiment that sounds something like: “We can’t do this….we tried this before…we’re stuck and…that’s the way it’s going to stay….”  It’s more than the feeling of an underdog because an underdog thinks s/he can move up, win a few.

“….as communication and the willingness to face problems openly deteriorate, infighting and finger pointing increase.  Employees in different unit lose respect for one another and…for themselves.  Groups start withholding information from one another.  They look to maximize their own results but not to contribute to the performance of the organization as a whole.”

So, turnarounds in any organiztion, says Kanter, are special situations.  And, of course, they require special skills.  The first “cornerstone of confidence” is accountability.  It comes from open dialogue and mutual respect.  Quite a contrast to the “finger pointing” and provides the opportunity for people to step out and re-commit to the promises they previously made.

Almost three months ago, James Cameron, got involved in trying to help clean up the runaway oil gusher in the Gulf.

Is truth stranger than fiction?

What could Movie Director Cameron’s involvement with an oil spill tell us about addressing some of our big problems in business, problems in the world?

Is it possible that the world of “fiction” offers us some answers to our most troubling questions, dilemmas?

Maybe, someone could write a decent script / movie for problems like Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, The Koreas…runaway profits at Goldman Sachs after they bankrupted AIG…

Go ahead: I’ll wait.

The Annual Employee Performance Review: both boss and employee respond with an “Ugh!” to this event.  How could we justify getting rid of these archaic and unproductive exercises?

Does the process help boost organizational output, increase throughput?  Doubtful.  Does it make the employee feel good?  Unlikely.  One would be motivated to ask the logical question: “Why do we keep doing them?”  I would say: “It’s a bad habit for which we…yet have no replacement.”

“First, they’re dishonest and fraudulent. And second, they’re just plain bad management,” writer and UCLA professor Culbert says in a radio interview the week of July 6.

Tough talk from (what looks like) a not-so-friendly-looking guy.  (I wouldn’t want a Review from the likes of him!)  But, he’s right: performance reviews don’t do much to get out in the open the challenges in the business nor facilitate a discussion of the possible solutions.

Employees come to the process anxious about its impact on their pay or career.  Supervisors, managers are given a limit of how much the pay can be increased and, that small view, becomes the focus of the discussion: what did you do well? — and, of course, that becomes the employees shield — and how much more money am I going to give you.  Which, of course, the boss knows before he heads into the Review.

People want their work to matter, to mean something.  And, the annual Review doesn’t facilitate such a goal.  The process is devoid of humanity, in many cases.