If we lift up an individual's dreams and ask what they want to do to bring those dreams alive, then the organization becomes a vehicle through which people can work to realize their hopes. Each person can ask some unusual questions: How does this organization fit into my life? How does it serve my aspirations for myself and for the world?
This is the spirit of the founding of an organization, isn't it? In the early days as a group emerges, the founders give shape to their personal dreams through the vehicle of the new organization. They work to bring into being the kind of world, or corner of the world, they want.
As time goes by, it's easy to lose that founding passion and unthinkingly adopt the opposite view: that individuals exist to serve the organization. Collective priorities start to dominate, often in the form of good ideas developed by a small group for other people to carry out. Those others (volunteers, donors, staff) are expected to fall in line and do as they're told.
Somewhere along the way, the flame of personal passion and voluntary action may start to flicker.
The ideas we've explored in these pages hold promise to keep the founding energy alive, even as an organization matures and new people join in.
How?
You already know: By letting people pull themselves into the future, fueled by their built-in desire to contribute in a distinctive way to the good of the whole. By fostering more passion than control, more personal fire than self-sacrifice.
And by focusing first on higher ground: the world each of us wants and the cause that can be a vehicle to advance that desire.
That higher ground of individual desire, so clear in the beginning, can become fuzzy as the routines of organizational life limit the choices we see available. The early desire to change the world often turns into a more modest wish to balance the budget and keep the doors open, a minimalist survival mode that misses the larger "why." That's understandable, especially since it's become fashionable to adopt bottom-line business practices that sometimes discount the idealism and fervor that fuel the social sector's higher aspirations--and lives in people ready to do things.
When we move our attention back to the world we want, and to society as a whole, we rekindle that passion and enterprising spirit. When we lift ourselves up out of our daily routines, we bypass the organization's habits of talk and thought, the "it can never happen here" and "we don't have the resources" conversations. We gain more license to be creative, to dream boldly, and to act with more conviction.
Oddly enough, our "wishful thinking" at this larger scale can then begin to manifest itself in our day-to-day organizational lives.
I learned this through my experience with the Cathedral Foundation, the organization devoted to elders that we encountered earlier. You'll recall that the Foundation turned its attention to creating a new framework for aging in American society. The cornerstone of this effort is an interview protocol that elicits stories of personal experiences with older people, drawing forward the person's highest hopes for growing older.
In the early stages of this work, some of the Foundation's staff were interviewed. Each person had a meaningful, and most unusual, opportunity to consider the personal significance of the Foundation's work. They reflected on their experiences, their lives, their hopes and dreams for themselves and others.
Soon after these interviews, something completely unexpected happened: the Foundation was able to stop relying on temporary agencies to fill in its nursing schedules. This was a big deal, I learned, as such low absenteeism is simply unheard of in the field, and temporary nurses are very costly. This development had a measurable positive effect on the financial bottom line. And surely the quality of nursing care benefited from the increased continuity of staffing.
Here's the most surprising part: Only the central leaders, as far as middle managers, had been interviewed. No nurses had participated directly, yet they were feeling the effects of the changed atmosphere in their workplace.
Our ideals for the world, once given voice, naturally begin to sing more clearly in our everyday work.