Cultivating a Space of Stillness
I’m on the Advisory Board of a wonderful start-up organization called MatchNice, the brainchild of three super smart, super nice young people, who have created an online giving platform that maximizes the power of your “donate” button by creating an impact-centric giving experience for your donors. Take a look. Their monthly newsletter always ends with each of these three entrepreneurs giving their take on some random topic. So fun!
In the most recent issue, the topic was creativity. Pooya Pourak, the CEO, said that his “greatest source of creativity flows from cultivating a space of stillness.” There are the words that for some reason have eluded me for a while: a space of stillness. It perfectly says the place executive directors (all leaders) need to visit on a regular basis.
Sadness and frustration envelops me as I listen to the laments of executive director after executive director talking of being overwhelmed and stretched too thin to the point of breaking, of putting out fires one after another and often feeling like they are in a Groundhog Day loop, of staff who don’t know how to problem solve on their own and seek the executive director out for everything and anything, and more. Sometimes I feel that I, too, am in a Groundhog Day loop as I say again and again, in so many conversations, stop enabling your staff to depend on you, redo your orientation and job training processes to be explicit about their independence, expectations, etc., use RACI (or MOCHA or whatever set of tool initials you prefer for decision making/project management help), block time out on your calendar—that you guard as you would a meeting with a donor—for replenishment, the pieces of your job that bring you joy, reading, thinking, whatever you need, and the list goes on. Heads nod while they listen to me, but I know that as soon as we part, what they see as the unfixable reality of their jobs will take over, and they fall back into their “normal” pattern, and everything goes out the window.
At Think Good’s February Breakfast Club, Deb and I talked about the horrific admonishment that funders foisted on nonprofits and, sadly, too many nonprofit leaders have embraced: do more, for more, with less. One of the things we discussed are the ills that living by such a mantra causes: diminished quality of service, decrease in impact, setting staff up for failure, high staff turnover, low staff morale, and the list can go on. A consequence that is rarely noted, but should likely top the list of concerns, is the loss of the opportunities (and time) for creativity—that generative thinking that allows for innovation and true problem solving as opposed to merely kicking that can down the road. When everyone, including the executive director, is stretched to the max, trying to do the impossible, there is no way anyone is able to “cultivate a space of stillness.” The very thing—creativity—that could help us get out of the Groundhog Day Loop and find real solutions to the problems that repeatedly hogtie us remains elusive and beyond our grasp.
I can hear the chuckles at the very suggestion that leaders should carve out the time to create—and use--that space of stillness. Who has the time? But it is short sighted to not make the time—because it is important. This is the stuff that populates Quadrant II in Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix, the one that gets labeled “important, but not urgent.” What a bad misnomer! That quadrant should be the one labeled “important and urgent.” Thinking creatively about an organization--the issues that threaten it, the challenges it faces, the opportunities there to grab--is essential if an organization is not just to survive but thrive. Fortunately, we have choice. We can either chose to love the problem more than a real solution or we can choose to find that space of stillness and find true solutions, ones that address the sources of the problems rather than merely applying band aids, and that allow you and your organization to really move forward.
Your call.