10 Things Your Org Can Do Right Now To Give the Progressive Movement a Chance to Win

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Like a love affair, just because an organization started doesn’t mean it has a claim on continued existence.

The questions to ask are these:

a) Does the organization make a superior contribution?

b) If we didn’t have this organization, would we start it?

c)  Is there a merger that makes sense? (Word of caution: most mergers don’t work and all require some sophisticated outside help and more time to successfully pull it off than you think)

Implied in these assertions is a willingness to do honest assessments, with everything on the table.  We can never really get to “what should be” or “what could be” if we don’t first look at “what is.” Inertia is a tremendously powerful force.  We gravitate toward the familiar, even when the familiar is part of the problem.  Look at people’s behavior at a two-day conference.  The majority of the people will sit in the same place they sat the first day.

When I was living in New York, my mother, father, and sister came for a visit, their first time to the Big Apple from a small East Texas town. A current student at the University of Texas, my sister was interested in the NIT basketball tournament being played at Madison Square Garden, particularly since UT was in the quarter-finals.

We went to the game, stopping near the Garden to eat hotdogs at a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant.  Texas won the game.  I had to work the next day, but my sister and parents decided they wanted to go to the next game.  They went.  I asked them about the game (UT won again), and then asked them where they ate.  They said they ate at the little hot dog place near the Garden!  They went to the game a third day. I don’t remember who won the game, but I remember them saying that they ate at the same hole-in-the-wall hot dog place—and this in a town of 50,000 restaurants!

Inertia is the enemy.  Innovation is the cure.  We are either creating new power and capacity, or we are falling behind.

7) Think. Over the past several decades I have had the opportunity to work with leaders from a number of different kinds of organizations—unions, churches, non-profits, advocacy organizations, businesses, community organizations, etc.  Once we had worked together enough to establish some candor, I asked this question over and over:  “How much time do you spend doing systematic thinking in a normal week?”  The answer is usually zero, with a few saying up to an hour!  Almost always someone will add, “But I think when I’m driving!”

The more responsibility one has in an organization, the more quality time that leader needs for thinking.  For how leaders think has a disproportionate impact on the organization.  Hopefully, thinking is democratically spread through an organization, but it is the principle job of top leaders.  It can’t be delegated away, because top leaders have a perspective that others don’t have.  They are responsible for the whole.  Therefore, they have to think for the whole.

A weekly commitment to an isolated, electronic-free setting and a specified amount of time are basic requisites.  This is a meeting with yourself—to move you out of the activity-driven present tense, to make sense of the past, and to imagine and plot toward a future.  This is a meeting for muddling, letting things stew, considering and sharpening alternatives, trying on, and testing.

Progressive leaders have an additional problem with creating and maintaining a time and place for systematic thinking.  They live in a world where keeping and appearing busy has a high value, where constant activity proves you are committed.  Progressives tend to value martyrdom over performance, even though they would deny it.  After a while, fear creeps in, i.e. “what if I miss something?”  Leaders based in Washington, D.C., have an exponential version of this problem.  There are multiple events every night that might be good to go to.