"Getting Real": Honest Conversations and Their Role in Successful CI Work

By training, I'm a measurement person but implementing a CI framework makes you the most well-equipped "jack of all trades" socially.  Despite all of the elements and machinery imagery, CI is fundamentally about relationships and working through the kinks of those that keep us from our goal of social change.

People--how they think, feel, and act--are EVERYTHING in determining whether your initiative makes it or tanks it.  And as we all know from every other facet of our lives unless we're monks living in caves on a mountain somewhere: relationships are hard.  Our most basic tendencies, our basest emotions, sometimes our worst moments play out in front of others.  And that's just talking with our family over a meal or watching a Little League game.  Now add to that the pressure of "progress" or "change" or "children's lives;" quickly one realizes you're the carbon and not yet the diamond.

Things will get real before they get beautiful.  Or you will fail.

Honesty: A Necessary Value in Collaboration

My own personal bias is toward honesty--blatant, real, slap-you-in-your-sad-face honesty.  I love the grittiness of living in the grime of real.  I am not typical.  Many, many people run fast away from it--it's uncomfortable, they feel needlessly responsible for it, they feel rightly responsible for it. Whatever it is, reality is not a welcome home. One is not better than the other but one does complicate progress.  Hint: It's not living in the grime of reality.

Story Time:

Our collaborative right at this moment is going through "the change;" we've existed long enough to say "years" now and not all things are rosy and awesome.  Rightly, most of our leadership team realized some organizational course correction is necessary.  Now, change is most people's Waterloo, especially at work when you just want to check some boxes and go home.  That's not how social change work goes, let alone systems' change work which, at its core, is about changing yourself. And in change, people get emotional--hurt, angry, frustrated, upset, annoyed.  It's the Vietnam of feelings.

So, we're in the midst of many meetings in which we're having to negotiate between people who are calling for this change and those driving their heels in and saying, "I will not."  No one's going down without a fight.  It's understandable, I suppose.  They've worked on things for awhile and didn't really have to answer for them...and now they do...and that's a hard shift.

In the midst of these meetings, I'm watching people throw up faulty rationales and facts like crazy to fight for their little acre of work their homesteading...and it's exhausting. Here are just a few things I've heard that make me bristle a little because I just know they're not really true:

• "We have data to support this activity"
• "People love this" or "we had resounding support from the community"
• "We can see the outcome, we don't need to measure it"
• "This is what people want...we have data to tell us that"

In all of these cases, I see a half truth.  Audience clapping could be considered data but not valid for our purposes, nor useful in telling us how much. 10 people showing up to something might be resounding success...for somebody...I guess.  2 people saying "this was awesome" could be construed as the data we need to direct a strategy.  Even on the best day, these are flimsy.

So what's happening here?

Leaders Empower, Not Enable

Can I be honest?

What's happening here is a lack of leadership, not just of the leader but of every person who's willing to accept these as plausible arguments including those making the arguments.  So maybe, the real answer is "navel gazing."  This might be an example of losing the forest for the trees: we've gotten so far down the line of an activity that we've lost the fact that the activity that used to be a means to another end is now just the end.  We've lost the bigger picture, we've lost the greater vision, and now we're trying to justify sub-par activities so we don't have to change.  We're enabling ourselves to make excuses so we don't have to come face to face with the fact that, in that last instance, we could've been better and we weren't.  And we lack integrity if we can't admit that.

What causes this to continue?  A lack of leadership, specifically a lack of ability to hold ourselves and others accountable to a standards based on our values.  Accountability, when we boil it down to its essence, is just the ground rules for operating.  Are we doing what we say we're going to do? Are we aligning our behavior with our values?  And how do we know and track that we are? In collective impact, we enter into relationships in which we fully accept that "we are our brother's keeper" and our brother is our keeper.  When we drop the ball, everyone suffers for it.

How can we expect change and not just any change but massive social change if we allow these non-truths to guide us?  

Once again, honesty here tells me to say we cannot.  And in fact, maybe lack of change is directly tied to a lack of honesty (in data analysis we'd call that a "positive correlation").  Where there is dishonesty, change will be hindered. It's antithetical to our strategy of collaboration unless the system itself is predicated on dishonesty.

Then you have capitalism.