Innovation for nonprofits with Leah Kral
4/1/2025
“Once an organization becomes a little more mature and they’re used to working the way they’re used to. They think they know whoever their constituents are, whether it’s people they serve, members. It’s easy to start believing your own “common wisdom”.
When I was inside organizations, as staff, we had all sorts of narratives about who our members were, what they wanted, what they needed… I had to persuade people that we didn’t necessarily always know.”
In episode 120 of Nonprofit Mission: Impact, Carol Hamilton and Leah Kral discuss how to foster innovation within nonprofits.
They discuss six key practices for driving meaningful change:
uncovering hidden needs,
asking courageous questions,
empowering collaboration,
embracing experimentation,
committing to continuous learning, and
building a culture of persuasion.
Through relatable stories and actionable advice, together they emphasize the importance of strategic thinking, adaptability, and creating space for bold ideas to thrive in resource-constrained environments.
Episode Highlights:
[00:10:16] Innovation in Nonprofits
Systems thinking and innovation,
Six key practices nonprofits can adopt to become innovative and effective organizations.
[00:11:34] Practice 1: Be a Fearless Problem Solver
uncover hidden needs and avoid making assumptions.
design thinking as a tool to identify genuine social problems and find creative solutions.
[00:20:02] Practice 2: Ask Courageous Questions
the value of daring to explore unconventional solutions.
Example: Rhinos Without Borders, an organization that solved poaching issues by relocating rhinos to safer locations.
[00:22:52] Practice 3: Empower Collaboration
The importance of bottom-up collaboration,
Example: Mayo Clinic’s innovative noise-reduction initiatives as an example of empowering frontline staff to implement meaningful changes.
[00:26:30] Practice 4: Experiment and Start Small
Pilot ideas to minimize risks and iterating based on feedback.
Experimentation as a mindset that enables learning and adaptation without high stakes.
[00:29:03] Practice 5: Embrace Continuous Learning
Evaluation and metrics as tools for learning, not just reporting.
Engage frontline staff in designing meaningful metrics that enhance their impact.
[00:34:20] Practice 6: Build a Culture of Persuasion
the importance of storytelling and piloting as persuasive tools.
Examples: nonprofit leaders like Fred Rogers and Mother Teresa who overcame initial rejection by persuasively communicating their visions.
[00:39:17] Strategic Thinking as a Permission Slip
dedicate time for strategic thinking, emphasizing its potential to alleviate resource constraints, reduce burnout, and enhance organizational focus.
Guest Bio:
Leah Kral is a consultant, public speaker, and author who helps nonprofits innovate and further social change. Her book, Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results (Wiley, 2022). For decades, she has been providing tailored workshops and consulting to nonprofit leaders and boards across the country. She is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Jamaica 2002-2004), she loves the outdoors and trails in northern Virginia, and enjoys being an active volunteer in her community.
Important Links and Resources:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leahkral/
https://substack.com/@leahkral
Innovation for Social Change: How Wildly Successful Nonprofits Inspire and Deliver Results
Related Episodes:
Episode 6: Uncertainty and emergence in the nonprofit sector
Episode 50: Why more money and more staff is not always the answer
-
Carol Hamilton: My guest today on Mission, my guest today on nonprofit Mission Impact is Leah Crawl. We focus on how to foster innovation within nonprofits and discuss six key practices for driving meaningful change, including uncovering hidden needs, asking courageous questions, and empowering collaboration. Embracing experimentation, committing to continuous learning and building a culture of persuasion.
I particularly appreciated Leah's point that monitoring and evaluation is really about continuous learning, not just reporting. And that for so many, these feel like arduous tasks that actually take them away from their mission-driven work. That as a conference goer said to her, metrics kill my soul. I am currently working with a client to redesign their evaluation system, and I would guess that many in the organization would agree with that person.
They're there to work with families and help them improve their parenting skills. They're there and motivated to do the work with young children to help them build their social emotional skills. Measuring the effectiveness of all that work is important, but it's easy to push aside in the crush of so many things to do.
In addition, a lot of the organization's data gathering has been driven externally for reporting to funders. Yet when we talk to staff about their hopes for an evaluation system that really works and supports their work, they do want to have a better sense of whether their work is having an impact and what impact they wanna learn, how they might do their programs better.
And as we did an assessment of the current systems, we were able to show staff that a lot of extra effort was being put into tracking data in a multitude of systems and tools. And because the data is so siloed, it's hard to get an overall overall picture of the impact of the whole organization.
And because today each program had been in charge of their own data collection processes, each team came up with their own solution. And it's really natural for this to have happened, and it's so common, yet it introduces a level of unnecessary complication that adds to the workload and then doesn't actually produce the results everyone is looking for.
As we move forward, one of the goals will be to pair down and really focus on what exactly the organization wants to learn about each program. Ideally we'll be able to identify a few factors that are in common across programs. Our overall goal is to simplify the system so that the analysis of the data and then the learning from the data becomes a lot easier.
Our goal is to PR to create a practice of regularly looking at that synthesized data and learning from it, rather than just using it to report to outside identities. And with this in place, staff will be able to see the value of gathering and tracking the data in the first place. I worked on a similar project last year to streamline another organization's evaluation system.
A small national nonprofit led a variety of programs to build participant skills in fostering peace. Some they author it themselves, others in conjunction with local partners and others, they offer to their own audience. I. The organization needed to build a system for evaluating all these programs in order to be able to do what we all wanna do, improve the programs, demonstrate results to donors and institutional funders, and in as is Office in the case for this instance, creating an improved evaluation process was actually a deliverable for a grant funded project.
So in addition to updating the organization's theory year of change, we worked on creating logic models for the organization's current youth programs, as well as their training programs for adults. And through research we found that organizations that had already, we found a few organizations that had already created robust evaluation processes for their build peace building programs.
And they shared them publicly so we didn't have to reinvent the wheel. And at the same time, we assess the staff's capacity to consistently implement, to consistently implement evaluation processes and sought ways to simplify the process to not do unnecessary work and to create a streamline program.
We designed a set of survey questions inspired by the work of the partner organization that could be applied to both the individual units of the youth program, as well as the training for adults. And this resulted in them being able to put in processes for building a bigger data set through a streamed Lyme system.
And with this organization could be more readily, could more readily summarize their results and build a data set with a larger sample size. Then if they had just created separate, unique evaluations for every program. This greatly simplified implementation for staff and increased the likelihood of continued attention to program evaluation beyond the specific grant deliverables that prompted the project.
My project, my goal on any project like this is to make sure that the evaluation works for the organization. It needs to be realistic, realistic about program outcomes, but also realistic about staff capacity to track and analyze data. Collecting less data and actually using it is much more useful than collecting a lot of data that sits in A CRM or a spreadsheet, and nothing is learned from it.
In episode 108, I do a deep dive into what it means to build out your processes for evaluating your impact. Check it out for all of the details of what that process looks like.
[Ad break]
Carol: Leah, so welcome. Leah, welcome to Mission, impact.
Leah Kral: Oh, thank you, Carol. It's a pleasure to be here.
Carol: So I like to start every interview with what drew you to the work that you do. What would you describe as your why or your motivation behind the work that you do?
Leah: I would say a big turning point for me was being in the United States Peace Corps. And this was, you know, years ago, but that was a very powerful experience seeing that level of poverty and at the same time, nonprofit heroes really rising to the occasion. And so that was a big turning point. I knew that I wanted to find some way to work in that sector. And I think another big reason for me would be that, you know, we have all these good intentions. You know, we were very passionate about the nonprofit sector. We care very much about the people we're serving or the missions that we're carrying out. But there's a struggle with the fog of good intentions. And I feel like that's kind of my gift and my calling. Where I come in is, is, you know, walking alongside what I would call nonprofit entrepreneurs and helping them find their way through that fog of good intentions. That's my why I love
Carol: I love that phrase of fog of good intentions, because it can lead in lots of lots of directions that aren't necessarily helpful. But yeah, always, I mostly want to assume that people are always coming from a good place in their intentions. So one of the things that you really focus on is innovation and in nonprofits and in social enterprises. And in fact, you wrote a book about it, innovation for social change, how wildly successful nonprofits inspire and deliver results. And you know, I really enjoyed reading the book, and the topic is definitely near and dear to my heart, because one of my last roles actually inside a nonprofit organization was being an internal innovation consultant to the organization and, you know, facilitator. And so that was a really fascinating experience, but what in your experience are really the most important things for nonprofit leaders to be aware of in order to foster innovation in their organization?
Leah: Yeah, let's see. So I'm a systems thinker. You know that's if you're familiar with Edward Deming. He's considered kind of the father of quality systems. So he was a systems thinker, and that definitely influences how I think about innovation. And so the way I approached the book was really in that same mindset. And so I came up, after writing the book, I came up with, kind of looked at the whole thing and realized this kind of works as a system, and came up with six sort of interrelated key practices that I think are really essential for having an innovative and effective nonprofit. So I can share those with you, but they just kind of summarize the spirit of what's throughout the book. But the first is, like a detective, to be a fearless problem solver, and that's, you know, going about uncovering hidden needs. What is the social problem that you're trying to solve? And then that's easier said than done, getting clarity on that. The second is, ask courageous questions. You know, ideate, you can start small, but dream really big. You know, that's where we're figuring out, you know, be bold. What? What is the thing in the world that we're going to tackle? Number three, when people on the front lines are empowered to speak up and collaborate, break things, breakthroughs will happen. And I've got a lot of stories, real world, nonprofit stories, that kind of illustrate these, these key principles. The fourth is, leave room for experiments, play risk taking and even that scary word failure, because that's really part and parcel of innovation is, you know, we're trial and error. Sometimes we're going to fail, and that comes with the territory. Number five, embrace continuous learning by asking ourselves hard questions. And the sixth is persuasion. Would be really, really good at persuading in the nonprofit world, just in ways. So those, those, to me, those, if I were, you know, advising a nonprofit, you know, those are kind of the six principles underlying the book and also my work.
Carol: So let me kind of take each of those, all six of them, and kind of break them down a little bit more. So the first one is like a detective, you know, uncovering those hidden needs. It is interesting how often, too often, maybe not, at the founding of an organization where usually that springs from somebody recognizing a gap or recognizing a need and then wanting to do something about it. But then once an organization becomes a little more mature, and they're kind of used to working the way they're used work, and they think they know whoever their constituents are, whether it's people they serve members, it's easy to start believing your own kind of, quote, unquote, common wisdom. I certainly experienced that when I was inside organizations. We had all sorts of staff. We had all sorts of narratives about who our members were, what they wanted, what they needed. Yeah. And what was so interesting, and kind of goes to the sixth one of that persuasion piece, was when I was doing this kind of work internally, I had to persuade people that we didn't necessarily always know. So say more about finding those hidden needs?
Leah: Yeah, yeah. I totally relate to what you're talking about. Yeah, we can get kind of caught up in maybe even successes and path dependence. So yeah, there or, you know, have kind of hidden assumptions that we don't even realize that we hold, which may or may not be correct. So to get to your question, the way I structured the first third of my book is using design thinking. And so design thinking has been in the for profit world for a long time. You know, creative companies like Pixar use design thinking to help teams kind of ideate very creatively. And so we can definitely kind of steal and adapt that for our sector. And so what I did, kind of first, I tried it out with nonprofit teams, you know, kind of through trial and error to figure out what, what you know, should we translate or, you know, kind of change up to make sense for our world. But I'll give you the short version of that, getting to your question. So I ended up with four design thinking questions. The first is what's desirable, getting at what problem is it that we're trying to solve? The second is what's scalable, so maybe our small idea is bigger than we think. The third, then is thinking through what's feasible, and then those are the three thinking questions. And then the fourth is, after we've done that thinking, the action part, which is then based on that thinking, how might we design small experiments to test that thinking? So to your question, really, it's that first part of design thinking, of figuring out what's desirable, what is the problem we're trying to solve. And I have a whole chapter on each one of those and lots of really interesting stories. So Graystone bakery is a workforce development nonprofit in New York. Yonkers, New York, they had to make the decision of, as we're working with people in workforce development, what is the problem we're actually trying to solve? Are we trying to help people who are, maybe just for a short time unemployed and are going to readily find their way back to work with just a little bit of help. Or are we targeting the seriously, you know, kind of underemployed, consistently unemployed, maybe some homeless people, you know, the more severe problems with that kind of unemployment. So they were aiming for the second they got clarity on it was a very smart aeronautical engineer was just so passionate about doing this well that he actually lived on the street. He experimented with living on the street for a few weeks to kind of walk in there, kind of very intensive, you know, even more than a focus group, right? All those lessons were then integrated into their program design, which was wonderful. So I think that kind of gets at your question. At your question. You know, good examples of challenging what we might think on the surface and digging even deeper to come up with really innovative, you know, different kind of thinking for program designs, yeah,
Carol: And I mean, we, we, we approach that probably not quite as intensively when we were doing it and we were using design thinking. So, you know, we interviewed people and kind of asked them, you know, what's a day in their life? What's a day in the week? What are the major things that are challenging you? What do you know? What are you seeing? And across a bunch of different interviews, we were able to then see, you know, what were the common pain points, etc. But there was a lot of stuff that came out that, again, you know, kind of wasn't what our commonly held wisdom was, you know, was about what our members' experiences were. So it was, it was really a fascinating experience. And I know other organizations have you know, you might do a site visit. Or I heard of another organization that did that with members, where they said, Just take your camera and walk around and like, tell us about your you know, what's going on with you? So there's lots of different ways to kind of get that information. And you gave a really meaty example, but I, you know, want to make sure that people know that they could. There's more accessible ones as well.
Leah: Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't have to be, you know, living, you know, on the street for two weeks there. Yeah, there are things any of us could do just simply asking good questions, asking good questions, yeah, in meetings, and checking our mental models. I included a story in the back of the book. I think it was in the s when, you know, American car manufacturers were assuming certain things about what American Americans wanted in their cars. And the Japanese kind of kicked our butts because they're like, we're not going to assume that all Americans care about a styling we're going to think, you know, after you know, we'd studied the market, that maybe Americans care about having an affordable car or a smaller car, gas efficient car. So it was, you know, those Americans not asking questions, right, that that caused a problem. So, so, yeah, just simply asking good questions can be a great way too.
Carol: Yeah, and that example gives you an example of how. Sometimes being an outsider to a culture can really give you insights. So, you know, you talked about the people at the front lines and asking good questions. But I could also imagine, you know, like, including, I don't know your your interns on this so that they have fresh, fresh, you know, they don't, they don't know all of your assumptions yet, and they can ask kind of, quote, unquote, innocent questions that really reveal a lot.
Leah: Yeah, another example along those lines. So Aravind Eye Clinic is a very innovative eye clinic in India. They're kind of a non profit for profit hybrid, but their goal was to make cataract surgery like they kind of mcdonaldized their process to make it very affordable for the very poor in India. They're really successful. But one of the things they wanted to do was think they were trying to reach rural poor in India, but they just weren't getting them as clients. And they were trying to figure out what they were. Why weren't people coming to them? And it was finally this humble, little old lady sitting in their waiting room that was like, Well, I can tell you why they're not coming there. They can't afford to get here, you know. So listening to their, you know, beneficiaries made them realize they should experiment with mobile clinics, you know. So that's a great example of that.
Carol: Yeah, those insights can come from unexpected places, but you have to be paying attention. So your next principle is asking courageous questions. So say more about that. And kind of the idea of starting small but dreaming big.
Leah: Yeah, I like the story of, sorry. I was just sharing so many stories. They're just popping. I love the stories. The stories bring it to life. So asking courageous questions, there was a story of rhinos Without Borders is an interesting one. They are a nonprofit based out of South Africa, and they were working on the problem of endangered species, rhinos, herds of rhinos in South Africa. And they were having terrible, terrible problems with poachers. Poachers have resources, you know, night vision goggles. You know, they're coming into the animal preserve in the middle of the night, and, you know, killing rhinos and endangering the herds is just terrible. So, struggling with this, struggling with this, and I just, I love to picture their problem solving. I wish I could be like a fly on the wall as they were discussing how to solve this. But one brave soul came up with this kind of wild idea of, you know, what if we were to, you know, relocate the herd out of the country to a, more, you know, difficult place for where poachers find it difficult to get to. And what a CR, you know, just totally outside the box. Very courageous question. You know, these animals are just massive, right? Just the cost of, but they heard him out. They took it, this courageous question, seriously. They actually looked at the cost of old security apparatus they were, you know, paying for, but not really working very well, versus the cost of transporting, you know, a small herd of rhinos to Botswana. And they found, you know what, this is actually a reasonable idea. Let's do this as a pilot. And they did, and it was successful, and the herd grew, you know. So I think that's a great story. Bravo, right? Not just to the person with the wild idea, but to the culture of that organization that heard that idea out and actually thought the writer decided to experiment. I think that's great.
Carol: Yeah, it's easy to say in a brainstorming session. You know, all the ideas are okay, wild ideas are okay. But if the culture doesn't support it, you know, then taking that a little bit further, they're gonna, you know, they're just gonna end up being a post on the wall, yeah. So that that brings to what the next thing that you talk about is, well, I think we've, we have been talking about is really empowering people, up and down the the kind of all the layers of the organization, and probably beyond the layers of the organization, to really speak up and and feel comfortable. You know, sharing what may be may seem like a really wild idea. What are some of the things that really help with that piece? So
Leah: I mentioned that the first part of my book is all design thinking, and it's that the first third of the book is really meant to just, you know, it's fun, it's empowering. It's lots of thought exercises to help surface those ideas. Then the middle part of the book gets into organizational design, maybe a little less sexy, you know, than the design thinking, which is very fun, organizational design gets more into, you know, what are all those things that need to be in place to make sure that innovation is part of our everyday DNA, including workplace culture, or, you know, who gets to make decisions in the organization, and why Are we top down or bottom up? And so that gets at, you know, what you're asking about there. And one of the stories with that, I think, of Mayo Clinic, probably one of the most innovative, maybe the best, you know, nonprofit hospitals in the world. And it was really interesting researching how they did that. You know, just a lot of very intentional things. Structural processes and systems. And to just give you a short story of that, I love how everyone in the organization knows their organizational values, and one of them is that the needs of the patient come first. And they take this very seriously. They train people on it. They incentivize them to carry out these practices. And so one of the stories was that the mayo night staff were thinking hard about our patients really getting a good night's sleep, which is very important to the healing process. Of course, hospitals have been historically really bad at helping, yes, and so the night staff came up with the idea. They were there's bottom up empowerment to do noise studies at night. And so they carried out some noise studies, and then came up with some solutions to make things quieter, including the quieter wheels on food carts, lower decibels on overhead, and paging things like that. You know, that's fantastic, right? And I think that really brings it home, that, you know, people carrying out the work on the front lines, they're going to be the ones with the best ideas, you know. So this idea of really empowering, bottom up collaboration, it's, it's going to be worthwhile.
Carol: Yeah, I feel like one of the simplest tests for whether you've got a healthy culture or not are, yeah, are people willing to take risks and share their ideas? And if not, you know, or what's the cost if they do and or make a mistake, all of those things you know, being a culture that acknowledges that people will make mistakes and then learns from them, versus punishing people, you know, I think is so key. But yeah, are people willing to share their ideas and ask or ask questions to all staff?
Leah: Very much so. And that has to come from the top, you know, from the board level or executive level. Yeah, and I've worked with one of my clients, they have a board where we know, going into the board meeting, we must bring stories of failure, and they're going to expect it. If we walk in and just, hey, everything's just glossy and fabulous, and we did everything right, we'll be in trouble. And you know that comes from the board. They're savvy people, and they're looking to tell us about your trial and Aaron, tell us about how you took risks. And I love that that's set right from the top, and that filters, and you see it in the organization, it's wonderful.
Carol: And then the other part of it is that you don't have to risk big for the beginning. And I think the nonprofit sector, even with pilots, they seem small, but they can be pretty resource intensive. So what are some other ways that people can experiment and start small with ideas? Yeah, I have
Leah: a whole chapter on what experiments look like, you know, in the nonprofit sector, with examples and stories. But I let's see, to answer your question, I think just thinking in terms of experimentation with whatever you're about to set out to do, if it's something new, think of it in terms of an experiment. Right off the bat, you know, when I was starting to write my book. I, you know, I thought of it as an experiment. I started with an outline and a focus group. I am thinking of doing this. I'd love your feedback, you know, what? What you know in this outline, do you think sounds right, and what might make it a flop, you know? And just, I think you could just have a mindset and approach your daily work, even small things you know, that you may not think of as experimental, but maybe it's just a shift, you know, and how we're thinking about and if you start thinking that way, you know, then you might start articulating to yourself, okay, here are the parameters that might make this fail that I'm going to be watching for, if that makes sense. But yeah, I've got all sorts of stories, a lot of fun stories from different nonprofits about what different experiments might look like that are, I think, really fun.
Carol: Yeah, and the example you just gave, it's also, you know, at the beginning of a project, opening yourself up to feedback and so kind of, you know, showing what's behind the curtain a little bit, and getting people involved early, so that, you know not to not to have it. I've seen things where people do that so much that they lose their original intent, but being able to kind of build on people's ideas as you go, rather than waiting for a big reveal. I think, you know, that's another piece that I think is important when people are thinking about innovation.
Leah: Yeah, some of them in my chapter, I talk about failing small, failing fast, you know, which can save you money in the long run. You know that failure word sounds so scary, but by breaking something into smaller pilots or experiments and learning that it doesn't work, you may have just saved the organization a lot of money, right from going down a really bad path and investing too much in something that wasn't going to work. So I think it's, it's worth it financially to approach things as experiments,
Carol: Yeah, and it's often that failure may, you know, may not, be kind of a yes or no, oh, we're not going to, we're going to stop this. It may be like, well, that approach didn't work. But let's, let's, you know, turn a little bit See, see if we can do it this way, and you just keep modifying, and then sometimes it'll be like, No, this really was a flop. And we just so that one another , one of your principles, is embracing continuous learning by asking yourself the hard questions. Can Say, say a little bit more about that. I feel like most people think they're doing that already, yeah,
Leah: That's really a Metrics and Evaluation in disguise. I've got a whole chapter on that, and it's such a rich topic. You know, there's so many ways we could do metrics wrong. I was speaking on this. I had an event at a conference where I was presenting on Metrics and Evaluation. And really a person I knew in the audience, he's like, he raised his hand. He's like, Leah, with all due respect, metrics kill my soul. I love you. So the wrong thing, very harmfully. We can measure the wrong thing, you know, all these things we don't want to do. So I, you know, recommend nonprofits to be transparent. Like, share these things with your team, because they know it right? Your staff know it when we're doing those things and wasting folks time, you know. So I think it's so wise to be transparent. You know, as you're discussing how you want to measure, evaluate, to not be top down or not force metrics, you know from maybe the donor. You know donors sometimes can impose metrics that don't make sense on us. So empower that, like the mayo clinic staff, right? Empower the folks on the front lines who know the work, know the clients, to come up with the Metrics and Evaluation that you know informs the programming so that we can get better at it. So those asking hard questions, like, what are metrics supposed to do for us? And to me, it boils down to it helps us to answer. How do we know if what we're doing is working? That's why we do it. Right? It's not numbers for the sake of, you know, data. For the sake of data, you know, it's a lot of time and work gathering that information. And in that chapter, I've got a lot of stories of good, you know, metrics that actually are useful feedback loops and help us answer, you know, hard questions, but also examples where they were disastrous. But my favorite one, let's see if I can tell this very briefly, but there was a foster youth foster care nonprofit in Austin, Texas called life works that just did a beautiful job. I tell their story in the book of how they were actually doing. All right? You know, they were having results and what looked like an impact. And in their reporting, it looked like they were helping young people. But they started just asking those really hard questions. They were taking a hard look. They're like something in our guts. Just tell us we could do better. We're not sure what. So they started getting really intensive about asking those questions, designing metrics. And through that process, they really got great clarity that they didn't have before about the real purpose of what they were trying to do. And they realized, as they kind of applied that lens and those questions to all of their I think it was different program interventions that they did, they were making wonderful improvements, but, yeah, it's too long of a story to really give it justice, but it's in my book, and I think they're just a great case study of exactly what evaluation and metrics should do in helping us ask questions about our work.
Carol: Yeah, metrics don't always have to look like what people think of. I was talking to a fellow consultant, and we were talking about, you know, what are those metrics of success for us? And one of them was like, Well, the one of the questions I'm going to start asking myself is, did I have fun today? So, you know, there's, there's all sorts of ways that you can measure success, and are we doing what we want to do? Is it working that aren't, you know all about numbers and statistics, and those have their place as well, right? So, yeah,
Leah: I had fun today. That's great, yeah, but there should just be a logic to it, you know, you know, figure out what I'm doing working, you know? And I love that, yeah,
Carol: when I'm working with clients on their evaluation design, I often, you know, as we're walking through kind of the program as it's built, it's part of it is trying to help them uncover what all their assumptions are, which, you know, most of the time, they've been doing the thing for so long they've, by definition, they're not thinking about it. And so then, you know, to try to articulate those assumptions and then start designing some questions around, okay, so if we assume that x is going to produce y, is that actually happening? And again, back to it, is it actually the problem that we need to be solving? Very much. And then the act of persuasion, I feel like I definitely ran into this as a kind of innocent when I was doing that work and was very excited about innovation and excited about design thinking, excited about all the things we were doing, and, you know, forgot that that communication piece that we need to be keeping people engaged. Age throughout the whole process so they understand, you know, the why and the through line.
Leah: Yeah, I was so surprised as I was researching. I didn't expect to make a, you know, a chapter on on persuasion, but it just kind of bubbled up as I was researching, looking at stories like Fred Rogers, mother, Teresa, and being very surprised that, you know they we know they were nonprofit superstars and all the things that they accomplished, but when they originally pitched their ideas, they were turned down. People said, No. I mean, that cracked me up. You know, Mother, can you imagine getting to the pearly gates and saying, Yeah, St Peter, that was me. I'm the one who told Mother Teresa the idea was a bad idea. So like all of us, right? Might have a brilliant idea, but you people are going to say no, and that's just going to happen no matter how good your idea might be, right? So we have to persuade people that it is a good idea, a great idea. And you know, we're just often so resourced. Then, you know, we have our ideas to compete with, you know, there's many nonprofits, many programs out there, so we really have to be persuasive. And it, you know, not just fundraising, right? It could be we're trying to persuade superstar talent to come work at your nonprofit. Or if you're at a large nonprofit, like I was with a staff of people, sometimes it's convincing the team down the hall to support your program, you know. So there's a lot to it.
Carol: Yeah, I was in a, not, not as big an organization as that one, but, you know, relatively big. And so, you know, a lot of the persuasion that I was having to do was internal, right? Like, you know, I want to do cross functional teams. We never did cross functional teams for the projects. So there were a lot of ways that we were trying to do things differently. And so each step of the process we had to persuade people that it was worth their time and energy, and, you know, got the output that they wanted. So,
Leah: And I think we talked about experiments a little bit earlier, but sometimes that can really help you persuade us to pitch something as, okay, we don't have to spend $ million on this. Let's look for a way where maybe we could spend $, on this and just treat it as a small pilot. You know, there are risks involved. We're going to monitor those risks. Here are the things we're going to measure and watch for, and if our indicators make this look like it might be worthwhile, then we can start thinking about investing a little bit more. So I think that experimentation can feed into your efforts at persuasion. Absolutely.
Carol: I mean, I talked about the interviews that we did, and one of the things we did was when we had all the information, rather than just sitting in our small team and analyzing and looking for the themes, we brought a whole bunch more staff, including senior staff, to the meeting to look across and help us to distill the information. And that way we kind of, you know, it gave us a chance to kind of highlight what we were doing. And, you know, have more people get a better perspective on that particular segment of members. And then also, you know, help them remember what on earth we were doing, this little little side project that was going on. But yeah, having kind of bringing people all the way along and again, kind of helping them look behind the curtain so they see where the thing came from,
Leah: with buy in and alignment as they saw what your struggles and what you were wrestling with. And yeah,
Carol: exactly, exactly. And it makes me think, I feel like we see a lot more of this kind of small experimentation in the for profit sector now with, you know, pop up stores and, you know, people starting a food truck before they they used to just go straight to a restaurant, and now they're trying the smaller thing, or, you know, the the incubators, where you have, you know, a common kitchen where a lot of different people are experimenting. I mean, that's just all around food, but there are other examples where people are, you know, trying out something on a smaller scale. And I feel like, you know, a lot of the digital tools make that a lot easier than it used to be, very true. So any final thoughts before we wrap up around, you know, innovation, nonprofits and kind of, what makes it work?
Leah: Oh, wow. I think we covered, we kind of covered the spirit of the book and our conversation. So, yeah, it's just, it was a wonderful experience, doing the research and interviewing folks and gathering those stories. What I've as I've been out talking about the book and, you know, meeting nonprofit innovators, if a lot of them don't see themselves as entrepreneurs or innovators, you know, and they completely are, you know. And there's so many stories from our sector. Martin Luther King, you know, Fred Rogers, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, a lot of these big, well known nonprofits like, say, AA or Mayo Clinic, all started small, right? With just, you know, maybe a passionate founder, a handful of founders, just the start of an idea, maybe no funding at all, right? And a lot of us are in those shoes. So I just think that's very inspiring, right, and that we should think of ourselves as innovators and entrepreneurs, because the work of social change is hard work, and it is good work. Give yourselves credit for that.
Carol: Well, right? And just the innovation that people have to do every day to make that, you know, the small, whatever amount they have just stretches a little bit further, is for sure. But at the end of every episode, I ask each guest, what permission slip or invitation would they give to nonprofit leaders to help for them to have my tagline, to avoid being a martyr to the cause, but also as they work towards cultivating a healthier, more inclusive and more innovative organizational culture, I
Leah: I would say making the time to be strategic will pay for itself in the long run. So, you know, like that first third of my book, you know, where you're taking teams through all these design thinking questions, which, you know, the executive director might read that and say, oh my gosh, we don't have time. Are you kidding? We're putting out fires left and right. It's me. If you give yourself permission and make the time, you know, to really go through that thinking and get clear on it, it's gonna save you time in the long run, and all these things we wrestle with like burnout or being spread too thin, or being pulled in or being resource poor, right? That making the time to do that intensive, intentional, strategic thinking is going to help you with all those problems and make you less likely to be a martyr to the cause. Exactly,
Carol: exactly. Well, amen to that. All right. Well, thank you so much. Leah, it's been great, really appreciated the conversation.
Leah: Oh me too. Thanks so much for having me on Carol.
Welcome Tip, thank you for being a guest on the Mission: Impact podcast. We're excited to have a conversation today. Just so people have a little more sense of how you're coming to this work, what drew you to do the work that you do?
Tip Fallon: Oh, that's a great question. I'd say a few threads that come to mind. But one is just my personal experience of growing up in a community in a neighborhood where we observed those with more privilege and access and resources in the community versus those with less, both at the very local level but also at a global level. My mom and family on her side, the family lives in a more rural part of Thailand, so just at that global level, from a very early age I was really noticing the inequality that exists and how communities and people are really impacted by that. Not only that individual lack of access, but the loss to the greater society when such great talent and passion, those people don't have access to bring their fullest gifts to the rest of the world. So I'd say that's probably the underlying driving draw for me to be doing this work.
Carol: One of the things that you've written about is the sense that when you're working in a system - I have to stop myself and qualify some organization development jargon along the way - systems are, any human system when you're working in an organization, a network, a group of people coming together. You see effects, and one of the things that we've talked about before and you've talked about is the sense of people not being able to show up as their whole selves and what gets lost in organizations when people have to put on masks and and that's at so many different levels, but certainly when folks have targeted identities, identities that aren't accepted in the in the dominant culture, and I'm curious, how have you seen that show up?
Tip: One way it shows up in a pretty pervasive way - and by that I mean that so much of it is internalized in us - so just for example, even in nonprofit organizations who may be providing social services or direct support in the community in in one sense, but they sit within a larger society right? So in this larger society, if we talk about whether it's patriarchy, or racism, or xenophobia, or any of those things, but even sometimes just the capitalist mindset and the individualistic mindset that promotes a belief of scarcity, that there's only so many grants, only so many dollars, only so many resources to go around. Then when you layer that to the structural beliefs that there is one ‘white and right’ way to be successful, or smart, or have the best ideas, or whatever it is; it just gets very competitive. So I think a lot of times we default to 'let me wear the mask because, as I know, at least I may be able to survive in this space, and maybe be able to foster some relationships with that and get my agenda across,' and what I find is sometimes, that mask, there's a permeable boundary between the mask and us, sometimes it seeps into us at an unconscious level, and we end up - myself and others - sometimes perpetuating some of the mask wearing in our organizations. So for me, a big piece of work is in some of our training, we use the term use-of-self but just [asking], how am I showing up? Not just what are my intentions, but what are the impacts that I'm having on my peers, my colleagues, those who might come to my nonprofit for services, on funders, on the community at large?
Carol: Can you give me an example of when - you talked about how we internalize all of those beliefs, the cultural assumptions in how we're supposed to show up, you know, what the word professional means, all of those things. Can you give me an example of that?
Tip: I'll try to think of a very concise yet relatable example. so this one organization that I worked for, there was a black woman, and she just felt like she wanted more out of her role. She said, ‘I started in this position, but I've got these ideas about programming, about strategy,’ and she was in more of an admin or executive assistant role, and through some of the team development work there was, just a sense of, ‘well, she doesn't have the degrees,’ or just culturally and visually, how she showed up wearing her hair, with more natural styles. Even using age, there was still a little bit of othering that happened. So even in that culture - and this is just my assessment and analysis, some of the people in positions of decision-making power were people of color, or black women there as well - but there's a generational divide as well. So even there, there's a little bit of tension, just generationally.
This is a big generalization but sometimes those who are younger coming into the workforce now, have a little bit more latitude and say, ‘hey, I want to wear my hair or keep my skin, or even my clothing and appearance, or even my language in a style that seems authentic and natural to me.’ and it's 2020, like, we shouldn't be afraid to talk about this. So, ‘hey, supervisor, can you call some of this stuff out? Because I don't really feel included.’ Then in this example, but also I see this broadly, a supervisor - and sometimes they are the older generation - might say, ‘hey, I've gotta negotiate my boundaries with these funders or these community partners are XYZ and I'm trying to toe that line. And, we're going to get more bees with honey, if you will, so let's not rock the boat’ or whatever the addages are. So in that example there was some of that language of saying, ‘hey, that's that a little bit much for the appetite and the culture of that organization.’ so what we see in that situation is, is someone who says, ‘hey, this is what being authentic means to me, and because I don't feel I can be authentic, you the organization are not getting my best thinking, you're not getting my ideas about what's happening within this organization that I only have a purview about.’ and the system is losing out, the clients and beneficiaries are losing out as well.
Then you have others in the organization who are essentially, trying to survive in a way, are like, ‘these masks are also a survival tool.’ We need them to survive. So my sense is that if I were to go to the next question, my mind is: ‘what do we do with that?’ So another thing that draws me to the work is finding space of connection, of asking ‘what are our shared goals?’ and helping us to get out of either-or thinking. So for me, it's how do we soften for a second and talk about: what would an ideal look like with some of the best of both worlds in there?
Carol: I think one of the things that we bring as consultants - which is so hard for organizations to do in our ‘always urgent, hurry up, gotta be busy. Never enough time.’ culture is just that sense of slowing down and taking a step back and thinking about ‘where's that common ground,’ or ‘where's that middle ground?’ between, ‘you've got to totally code switch, and blend in with the white dominant culture’ or you're completely showing up in that authentic way. Is there a middle ground, or is it one or the other we need to do? Even having a chance to have that conversation and think about it differently can be so challenging, that time factor. How have you seen that show up in your work?
Tip: One thing that I'll share for the listeners - and I want to caveat that these are thoughts that sometimes I practice when I'm being my best self - but the inquiry that I offer to leaders, and to myself, is that we say we don't have time to to find a middle ground, we don't have time to do some deeper coaching, I don't have time to do one-on-ones, I don't have time to think about ‘how am I perpetuating a high quantity but low quality culture,’ we don't have time for all those things; but we have time to spend about 30, 40, 50, 60% of our week solving the problems that were created by our lack of thinking about those things. So, if that's how we're spending a lot of our time, then at least to me, I think the logical solution is to muster up some of that internal discipline and say, ‘I'm tired of this cycle,’ because it's not like this is a cycle. This is a process, or a pattern at this point. These are often not isolated incidents.
So I'd offer a couple things: first and foremost is compassion, and understanding the system, and I think admitting to ourselves that we live in a very oppressive hierarchical system where we have to do a lot of things to survive and keep some of our basic needs met. So A is just offering compassion to ourselves that we don't have an ideal choice set in front of us. Holding that compassion, but then also just thinking: where can we make a little bit of time to deepen the inquiry into what you and I sometimes call the double-loop learning. So not just solving the thing in front of us but trying to get to the root. Let's solve the pattern right after the fourth, I don't know, 20-something black woman leaves this position after 17, 18 months in a row. I'm like, ‘Okay, now it's clearly a pattern.’ Let's not just throw this position description back out there on the web, but let's look at the system. How did this happen, how did we get here? Then try to work upstream. How do we do the preventative work so we can actually reduce turnover, reduce burnout a little bit, and do better work and feel - like you said - more whole in the work.
Carol: The nonprofit sector certainly mirrors the rest of the culture in terms of who shows up in what levels of leadership and on boards and there have been calls from major institutions in the sector for years to work on the issue, and yet the needle hasn't really moved much in terms of diversifying and I think a lot of it has to do with this notion, especially in predominantly white organizations [that] it's just about diversity, it's about numbers, [the attitude is] let's get at least one person, one person of color, one person with some diversity factor beyond white and men and women, but then that underlying factor of how is the culture supporting that person to be able to be successful and really contribute in a meaningful way? Have you seen how organizations, any places where organizations have taken steps and been able to do some meaningful work in changing that dynamic?
Tip: Short answer, yes. So some pockets of that and, in short, they seem more like the exception than the norm when I think about the nonprofit sector in aggregate, so much of it is is down to the individual level, right, so much a bit of what I see is frontline managers, mid level managers, or EDIs/CEOs who, it's just in their blood, if you will, they just have a drive and they show up to work and say ‘I'm going to look out for my people, especially those with marginalized identities no matter what, and often that means a lot more labor for them, But that's where I see a lot of it. One of the trends, for example, of trying to challenge even the underlying ideologies of our current nonprofit sector is when we see foundations, they may have different terms for it, but doing the spin down strategies, so if we have a cycle where the very rich set up our endowments, foundations and give whatever it is 4% or something that a year out, where we're still perpetuating a very highly dependent relationship. So when we say, ‘hey, let's interrupt this entire cycle, and take ourselves out of that.’ What would that look like to me? That's a great model or symbol of just starting where you are, if you're adding a foundation, what structures and ideologies are you perpetuating? I think the bottom line question is just: what are you willing to give? What are you willing to commit to with respect to how you use your privilege in the system to interrupt the system?
Carol: Trying to do those things, any either organizational culture change, or - and we're talking organizations embedded in systems that have been built, not for millennia, just for the last couple hundred years - in terms of the nonprofit sector - certainly in terms of race, structural racism, etc. it goes way further back than that, but one thing that you wrote recently that I thought was such an interesting perspective is, ‘if you've ever thought an organization or culture is dysfunctional, I invite you to consider that it is functioning perfectly as it's designed.’ Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that and how you’ve seen that show up?
Tip: My sense is when most folks hear that, even if they're hearing it for the first time - and I don't credit myself for that, I've heard that from a few different angles, from our OD training and so forth - but I think a lot of people, especially marginalized identities, just see more of a nod of acknowledgement, like ‘yes, that's good verbiage to describe what we're living in and existing in,’ and for people who can see the systems yet, I don't know what to say to elaborate on that, except I think for me, what's helpful is just a framing - not only of responsibility, but of opportunity, and in one of the posts I wrote a little bit later, [I said] that organizations and cultures are not things that fell from the sky, so we need to remember that people - maybe not us, but to your point, people maybe generations ago, made some decisions, and many of them very oppressive decisions towards entire groups of races of people that created a lot of these structures and organizations and hierarchies that we're living in. So then for today, what are our decisions? What are the ramifications, not just today, but to borrow from indigenous, mindsets and ideology, multiple generations down the line? Because we're creating cultures today that will last well beyond the 5, 6, 10pm that a lot of people work. So it's both I think, a comeback to compassion for ourselves that we didn't make a lot of choices like we are products of history in a way of what we're living in, but we are also the creators of history. We're creating the history that those people will live in in the future if that makes sense. So it's an invitation to be intentional about the cultures we're creating both actively, but also passively, when we show up. So where were those choice points, and I think at the end of the day, we’re just hoping to find peace, [at least] for me and I know for others who have to make a lot of compromises in terms of their values and how they'd like to show up. It's just what's in our locus of control that we can change, [and] sometimes we talk about culture or systems, and it's big, it's complex. [You think] ‘how could we ever change this stuff?’ For me, the micro stuff matters a lot to write those moments where we feel seen and heard and validated by a colleague, by a partner. I think those things really fill the tank. I think they give people hope in humanity, that no matter what happens during the day, if you've got a really good connection with someone, that can keep our tank full as well. So just being intentional from the very micro, how are we listening to one another, to the macro ‘what policies are we putting in place,’ ‘what are we not challenging,’ and what are the ramifications of those decisions?
Carol: What's one of those micro moments for you recently?
Tip: Good question. One micro moment for me that I try to practice when I'm being more intentional is this concept of ‘to whom do we give our time’ and as a consultant, and as somebody who - basically just go down the column of privileged identities - I hear sometimes from clients like, ‘oh, you must be so busy, I know your time is very valuable,’ all these things, and after I get my ego tickled, then there's this question of, ‘hey, so I don't want to take up a lot of your time.’ and I hear a lot of that, and not so many words. So for me, I was just chatting with a client and an ED about just being a thought partner and how to go about something on a piece of work that I may not even be bidding on or even be providing for them. So for me systematically, I know [that] as a woman of color, trying to navigate that space - how time is just such a luxury for me having a lot of privilege, like I know, that's one small thing. [I know that] I can give whatever it is two, three hours to to just make space for her really just to air out her thoughts and be heard and get some clarity. The feedback that I got was just like, ‘hey, I really appreciated that.’
Then working with her, I see that that’s a behavior that she manifests with her team - and just in a work-life balance or, for example, really holding to 40 hours. I know I’m elaborating a little bit on this, but as in how do I practice it, I think about ‘who do I give my time to?’ and trying to be more intentional with that, but then at the organizational level, how do we treat people's time as well. So this ED, who I'm thinking of, has a younger staff working for her and I think some of the mindset there is when you work for an organization like this doing a lot of direct support with their clientele. It can be really, really long, strenuous hours and sometimes there's an unspoken expectation that work is almost non-stop, and so for this ED having the courage and insight to say ‘Hey, no, if you're not being paid these times, I do not expect you to work. I expect you to have work life balance.’ They even structure things that are just team-building things. I forget how they bill or codify those hours, but they're structured as “non-productive” tasks to just tend to the human needs that we have. So I think that's also a great micro-way to show people that, hey, you can show up and yes, we have a lot of work to do. It's very, very important, and its deeply impacting people's lives and your life. Right, how are we treating each other in this journey? Like, can we slow down, listen, connect with one another, at least some of the time if we're going to be this busy and this hyper productive?
Carol: I think there's so much in the sector that you talked about, the scarcity mentality earlier, and that time scarcity, or it's such a huge cause. We have to martyr ourselves to the cause, or just give all and, the folks who were serving have it so much harder than us. But that sense of I think it's, as self care as a real thing, not self care, as going get a pedicure where people can, can start to put in those boundaries.
And what's so important is, as you said, is to make it explicit, and not have it be implied, and then, of course - [and this part] is even harder for many executive directors - to not only say it, but do it themselves and model it so that their staff knows that's really allowed. Those micro-moments, it just made me think about a conversation I had earlier today where I was doing, what in our work as a pretty simple thing of talking to a number of people getting ready to do a facilitation around a leadership transition; and the woman at the end of the call said, ‘oh, I feel better after talking to you.’ It wasn't like I did anything special, I asked her a couple questions that probably were out of her day-to-day and made her think about things in a different way. Just having the time to talk through them having the time, that full attention just makes a difference. It was interesting to hear her say that.
So, making changes in any of these things, and when you talked about where you've seen it being done well, it's embodied in an enlightened leader, which unfortunately isn't very replicable. It can be really overwhelming to think, how do we even start to make our cultures or organizational cultures healthier? You know, does it have to start at the top? Are there things that individual staff, and volunteer board members can do to start walking the organization towards a healthier, more inclusive culture?
Tip: I just see so many many examples of that. One of the caveats, if you will, is that even when I talk about nonprofits, that’s no monolith, right? There are so many sizes, types, cultures within nonprofits, large, small, based on the geographic region, and the demographics within the organization. So yeah, I've seen so many things. What excites me about the work is, to use some of your example, sometimes there's so much power in just asking different questions. Whether that comes from an external, or somebody who's internal. What if we did explore this? I think so much of why cultures feel stuck, like there's so much inertia in them, and sometimes it's just a function of time. Like, ‘well, it's always been this way, this is the way it is.’ all it takes is just a small thing like, ‘well, what if we tried this?’ some of my questions are, when someone has an idea like that, what's the best case scenario? What's the worst case scenario? What's a more likely middle ground that may emerge, and taking that small risk? So yeah, whether it's a small staff-level implementation of a leader who says, ‘hey, I want to spend an hour every other week just connecting,’ or [if it’s] more organic, if you will.
I've seen a lot of groups - organically or more fluidly - connect with one another based on shared interests. Sometimes those things get formalized, sometimes they don't. I think just talking about policy, for example, if you're on a board, if you're an ED, I really recommend a policy audit once in a while and looking - starting with your bylaws - to HR and employee manuals, and just looking at it from that lens of equity, like, who gets privileged in these processes? How do we make all of our decision-making processes more accessible?
So one example on a board I was working with around pay and they said, we want to hire this position. It's not going to be full time, but we wanted to negotiate the pay in this range. So we think about well, who are we excluding from that by default? I mean, even for volunteer-type boards and organizations, right? It's You know, we're usually talking about people who have some disposable or discretionary time or financial stability to step into these roles and different organizations, so if we have the assets, how can we use that to pay people for their labor, whether it's on a board or leading an internal initiative or an ERG (employee resource group) like that. So how do we make those structures and policies as equitable and accessible as possible? Look at those policies, look at who gets a privileged look at who gets implicitly excluded when you're searching for positions and things like that.
Carol: I think it can be challenging when you're in that dominant privileged position to even see how those things are impacting others because it works for you. Right, the system was built for you. And so then, that comment you made at the beginning or through that, that the cultures are all created by human decisions. When you're someone who benefits from that, and the culture is built for your person, it's hard to see that it’s just the way it is. So I think sometimes that's where the value of bringing an external person to help you walk through and point out how some of those policies might impact folks where you might have a blind spot.
Tip: it's a great example. One thing I see organizations doing, especially those that are working around racial justice or community organizing, if it's a white led organization, they'll find a black, indigenous, and POC-led organization as a source for accountability. So getting that feedback, seeing more of that in organizations, that puts a litmus test on some of our areas where we don't have that awareness. We're just not seeing the water that we're in. I heard a quote at a conference the other day that was, ‘organizations often talk about adding color to the water, [about] diversifying, but few people want to talk about the water itself.’ So well, why don't we actually talk about this toxic water that we're already in.
Carol: That we are all in and is toxic to all of us.I think it's what's important with that accountability and I think too often has been taken for granted as ‘let's have a partnership and let's do community engagement.’ and to not acknowledge that sometimes if folks aren't intentional or careful about it, those can really become extractive relationships. So how is that organization community-based, Organizations led by people of color indigenous people being adequately compensated for the labor, the emotional labor that they're doing to help that predominantly white organization be mindful of those blind spots. So I think that’s a huge growing edge for the field.
Tip: There's the saying that racism is white people's problem right? Like that's where it should be solved, sexism is actually a men's issue that men actually need to work on, so yeah, it's the privileged groups’ [problem].
Carol: I'm sure people have been saying that for years, but I feel like it's only beginning to become acknowledged. Just barely breaking through, people realizing that.
Tip: That's a very, very complex piece of work, it's like - and I've met black people who say, ‘I choose to work with white people because they need it.’ [I’ve met] a black person that says ‘I don't trust white people to do their own work.’ ‘I want to be in there,’ and vice versa. Some people of color, black people, indigenous [people] are like, ‘nope, no way.’ There is no adequate compensation that can be provided for that level of labor. Even equity seems like a word that we can toss around, but what would it take for real equity and justice? Yeah, I think just a much bigger question. I think those are really great points of ‘yeah, how do we really be mindful, really be intentional?’ and what are the external structures and what's the internal work we need to do when our egos get in our way, when we get defensive, when we get fragile in those times, that's where the hard work is.
Carol: We've been talking about some heavy topics but I want to change up the pace of things a little bit. I have a box of icebreaker questions, and I've got one for you. I'm gonna play this at the end of each episode, just to ask one of these questions somewhat randomly and not necessarily related to everything we've been talking about, but maybe it is, we'll see. So if you could create one holiday, what would you create?
Tip: Hmm, wow, if I could create one holiday off the top of my head, I'd say mindfulness day.
Carol: How would we celebrate mindfulness day?
Tip: It'd be a day to not be “productive,” spending a little bit of time and self reflection and connecting with others. Just surfacing what's inside of us, all the stuff we carry around and giving that some space to breathe. People's practices will be different of course, but for me, some of the hope is ‘how can we dream the type of life and communities and systems we want to live in.’ Whether that's in a group or individually. I think just a day to be mindful, not only embracing the current moment, but really envisioning the best type of future that we could live in.
Carol: With that in mind, what are you excited about what's coming up for you that you're working?
Tip: One of one of the big, bigger things I'm working on is A collective is what we're calling it now of practitioners, consultants, I guess generally people who are passionate about creating more inclusive cultures and organizations. So right now there's a group of about 10 folks from across the country soon to be international and we are exploring, like, why aren't cultures actually changing? Why isn't a representative token DEI enough? What does it really take to generate buy-in and to provide effective strategies and interventions across those levels of organizations to shift not only numbers, but also the tenor, the deeper culture in an organization. I'm very excited about bringing together people who are passionate about this, who see the issue and who recognize that we need a deeper approach to doing this work. So I'm excited about moving forward.
Carol: All right, awesome. How can people get in touch with you or find out about the work that you do?
Tip: Sure,[my] Linkedin is Tip Fallon, that’s one place to find and follow me. [My] Twitter is@TipFallon, and my website where you can contact me is fallonconsulting.net.
Carol: Thank you so much. I appreciate having you on and I really enjoyed our conversation.
Tip: Likewise. Thank you.
LISTEN + SUBSCRIBE
APPLE PODCASTS ● SPOTIFY