The Crunch of Continuous Improvement and Community Voice
One of the reasons I love a collective impact framework is the beautiful tension one finds around every corner. Just when you think you've nailed something and there's some progress to be had BAM! Another social complexity hits you like a ton of brinks.
Let's talk today about the corporate-meets-community phenomenon of: Continuous Improvement.
Of course, this is essentially a sub-set of topics stemming from the idea of progress or measurable impact, both troublesome concepts in their own way. Both come with a corporate (think banking) frame of data-driven decision making. It's really a very simple equation:
What ends up happening in collective impact organizations, typically social change agencies serving real people dealing with something who have committed to using data to make decisions, is that they juxtapose a new, "harder" way of accountability based on "data," data itself that is not typically as reliable either as we think it is or at all, and people who have likely been roped into doing something extra probably because they care. It's a recipe for unhappiness. The set-up is essentially what would happen if you gave volunteers a grade at the end of a project or put the neighbor down the street on a work plan when their grass gets out of hand.
The corporate, data-driven paradigm does not fit neatly over the rules for dealing with volunteers which, coincidentally, could also be the rules applied for dealing with cats. I'll talk more about data conundrums in other posts. But the point of data is to get us somewhere...but in collective impact it inevitably puts us in the position (because we ask it to) of using it as assessment information. Because of that, someone--in many cases volunteers--get put in the hot seat to explain things or answer for something. This does not make them happy in any regard.
So how do we ever drive improvement in an organization manned largely be well-intentioned community members with a variety of buy-in levels and expertise in the area?
No easy answer here. In fact, maybe no answer here. I don't know that this is something that can ever be solved except to say the best way to deal with it is to avoid it altogether. A failure of volunteers or a need to course-correct spells an issue with leadership and planning at the higher levels. Should we ever expect volunteers to strategize. I know it's not my first inclination, only because when I show up to something as a volunteer I'm clear on my role for the day: accept my free t-shirt, do some work, where can I find the chips? Rarely, if ever, do I show up as a volunteer and expect to lead something.
So maybe we need to ask ourselves a better question about the role of community voice: is it volunteering something or is it as a leader? Because if it's the former, we had best have a very solid plan for what we need and want them to do. And a very big bowl of chips. Otherwise, we run the risk of having to critique (and maybe even fire) volunteers and that feels like a bad idea completely, if only because that's seriously bad will.
And if in the end we need those volunteers to lead, we should let them do that and call them by that name. Because leaders have to express a vision...and let's face it, buy the chips. And that's something else altogether.
Let's talk today about the corporate-meets-community phenomenon of: Continuous Improvement.
Of course, this is essentially a sub-set of topics stemming from the idea of progress or measurable impact, both troublesome concepts in their own way. Both come with a corporate (think banking) frame of data-driven decision making. It's really a very simple equation:
Reliable Data + Strategy = ProgressOf course, banks and major league baseball share one very important thing in common: they have an unending bank of data that just continues to grow with each atm transaction or at-bat. Those interactions are designed to collect scores of data which, conveniently when mined, can help you decide just about everything. They can do this because, with each growing year, their data becomes more and more reliable. The same data, collected the same way for a hundred years is incredibly reliable which allows trend data to be reliable for informing strategy. (I had to resist the urge to use puns here...a gold standard for data, data you can bank on, a data homerun...active digression). But for those of us in an industry full of social circumstances governing each transaction, the equation starts looking like the square root of a fraction. Said more plainly, it's complicated. Why? Because each "transaction" looks like baseball data would if you were collecting baseball stats on cats playing major league baseball or using the atm. Nothing in nature can control a cat. Thus, the more variability of experience, the more circumstantial details one must consider in context, the more data complications one will have to acknowledge.
What ends up happening in collective impact organizations, typically social change agencies serving real people dealing with something who have committed to using data to make decisions, is that they juxtapose a new, "harder" way of accountability based on "data," data itself that is not typically as reliable either as we think it is or at all, and people who have likely been roped into doing something extra probably because they care. It's a recipe for unhappiness. The set-up is essentially what would happen if you gave volunteers a grade at the end of a project or put the neighbor down the street on a work plan when their grass gets out of hand.
The corporate, data-driven paradigm does not fit neatly over the rules for dealing with volunteers which, coincidentally, could also be the rules applied for dealing with cats. I'll talk more about data conundrums in other posts. But the point of data is to get us somewhere...but in collective impact it inevitably puts us in the position (because we ask it to) of using it as assessment information. Because of that, someone--in many cases volunteers--get put in the hot seat to explain things or answer for something. This does not make them happy in any regard.
So how do we ever drive improvement in an organization manned largely be well-intentioned community members with a variety of buy-in levels and expertise in the area?
No easy answer here. In fact, maybe no answer here. I don't know that this is something that can ever be solved except to say the best way to deal with it is to avoid it altogether. A failure of volunteers or a need to course-correct spells an issue with leadership and planning at the higher levels. Should we ever expect volunteers to strategize. I know it's not my first inclination, only because when I show up to something as a volunteer I'm clear on my role for the day: accept my free t-shirt, do some work, where can I find the chips? Rarely, if ever, do I show up as a volunteer and expect to lead something.
So maybe we need to ask ourselves a better question about the role of community voice: is it volunteering something or is it as a leader? Because if it's the former, we had best have a very solid plan for what we need and want them to do. And a very big bowl of chips. Otherwise, we run the risk of having to critique (and maybe even fire) volunteers and that feels like a bad idea completely, if only because that's seriously bad will.
And if in the end we need those volunteers to lead, we should let them do that and call them by that name. Because leaders have to express a vision...and let's face it, buy the chips. And that's something else altogether.
Comments
Post a Comment