Becoming

I just finished reading Michelle Obama's recent bestseller, Becoming. It's an overview of her life, divided into three parts: growing up and establishing herself as a Harvard-educated lawyer; getting together with Barack and the early years of his political career and their dedication to social change work; and finally, their eight years in the White House.

In no particular order, here is what touched me especially:

Feminism and Politics
I followed closely her account of the anguish she went through juggling three different personas: as the mother of Malia and Sasha, as an accomplished nonprofit administrator, and as the wife of a successful national politician. While Michelle enjoyed some unusual opportunities by virtue of her position as FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States), she also set aside her own career to support that of her husband, and to pick up the parenting slack necessarily resulting from how little Barack could be present as Dad given all the demands on the President's time.

Michelle not only did this with grace, but she did it at a time when women continue to struggle to be accepted as coequals on the world stage. Reading about all the balls she was keeping in the air, I was reminded of the first cover of Ms. magazine:



While this image (and this topic) was in Gloria Steinem's spotlight 47 years ago—and progress has been made—the struggle continues.

Administration and Implementation
As an experienced nonprofit administrator I have a personal relationship to the dance between program development and effective organizational guidance and oversight. While I readily acknowledge that this doesn't tend to be a very sexy topic (there aren't many who aspire to a career in nonprofit administration), it caught my attention that before Barack pushed all of his chips into the center of the table in 2007, both he and Michelle were sitting on a number of nonprofit boards in the Chicago area—and this on top of their having two young daughters and full-time jobs. I could hardly imagine how they did it. 

I recently turned down a request to consider serving on a nonprofit board because I didn't think I had the time to do it justice. I was already serving on one, and didn't think I had the bandwidth to stretch to two. What a wimp I am!

In my experience there is a tendency for nonprofit boards to be little more than a rubber stamp for a dynamic executive director, and that's not a good model. For the one board I'm on, I'm actively trying to strengthen the organization's understanding of what a strong and engaged board looks like, and that's about all of that that I can handle.

Hope Versus Nihilism
Becoming brought out the ache attendant to contrasting the optimism and decency of the Obamas with the self-serving boorishness of Trump. I had forgotten how good it felt when Barack won in 2008, and was saddened to realize how much I have become inured to the steady outflow of soul-diluting sewerage generated by our current President.

It did my heart good to be reminded that power and venality are not always conjoined.

The Ascendency of Social Media
Michelle points out that the iPhone first burst on the scene in June 2007, just three months after Barack had announced his candidacy for President. As we all know, the smart phone was an instant success, and Apple sold 3 million in 90 days. By the time the Obamas left the White House, Apple had sold three billion.

Social media exploded exponentially on their watch—to the point where today we have foreign policy being dictated via Trump's pre-dawn twittering thumbs. Scary, but that's the way of the world.

When Committees Get Ahead of the Group

I was recently working with a community that had been together for several years but was struggling with the right relationship between committees and the plenary.

Like most intentional communities, the group had committed to making decisions by consensus. Unfortunately, also like most groups, the community had not bothered to get trained in consensus or to define clearly how it would work (uh oh). I have sympathy for how they got there. Members had mostly led successful lives (how else would they have been able to afford their units?). How hard could it be to work things out with like-valued people?

Sadly, living cooperatively is harder than it looks, and good intentions and a healthy bank account are rarely sufficient to get you to heaven.

Let me explain how they'd slid into the ditch.

In consensus all the power (the ability to decide things for the group) initially resides with the plenary (meetings of the whole), and you don't move forward in the presence of a principled objection (by which I mean a proposed action or agreement is deemed bad for the group, contradicts an existing agreement, or is crosswise with a common value). While groups sometimes run afoul of what constitutes legitimate grounds for blocking, that wasn't where this group was struggling. Their issue revolved around how power was distributed.

While consensus groups start with all the power being held by the plenary, it's generally not a good practice to keep it that way. If the group has more than a handful of members (eight?) it's almost always better to delegate some degree of power (the ability to make decisions that are binding on the group) to managers and committees. If all decisions must come to the plenary for final say, it becomes a choke point, and members are all too often forced to sit through conversations about matters they really don't care about—when they'd rather be washing their hair or watching reruns of Downton Abbey.

This leads to problems. First, there is meeting fatigue (why are we spending so much time in plenaries?), which leads to a drop in energy and diminished meeting attendance. Simultaneously, it undercuts the morale of committees when all their work must be funneled through the plenary, which is under no obligation to like what committees send up. If all the power is retained by the plenary then why join committees, which only do grunt work? If committees struggle to get members and are demoralized, then the plenary has to pick up the slack, which puts even further pressure on community meetings as the sole place where action happens. It's a vicious cycle. 

Over time, plenary attendance may shake down to the point where only the battle tested and diehards are coming to meetings and resentment builds over the imbalance of who has their oar in the water when it comes to governance. Yuck!

The community in question was foundering over three things:

a) The mistaken notion that it's inappropriate in consensus to ever delegate group-wide decision-making to managers or committees. (While only some of members held this view, it was sufficiently prevalent to hamstring attempts to authorize committees to make decisions without the plenary sprinkling holy water on it.)

b) The inability to develop a sense of trust among members that everyone in the group was generally well-intentioned and can normally be relied on to think and act in the group's best interest. (Note that this is not the same as expecting everyone to think and act just like you—which you'll never get.)

c) The lack of open conversations about how power is distributed in the group: how it actually is, how you'd like it to be, and what's possible. To be fair, this topic is a hot potato for almost all cooperative groups and few handle it cleanly—so I'm profiling a typical group, not a defective one.

Now I want to switch focus to committees trying to operate in this environment, and the dilemma they face. On the one hand, they want to be useful and get things done. On the other, they don't want to be accused of power mongering. When the plenary is not used to giving committees meaningful work, teams may be left to feel their own way into what their role should be. 

During my visit, two different committees brought forward work for the plenary's consideration. In both cases, the committee had done its homework, having made a concerted effort to listen to what community members wanted (not just what committee members wanted), and to develop proposals that reflected that input. However, because committee conveners were taking the lead in bringing things forward, there was suspicion that the committee had gotten ahead of the community and was pushing water uphill. Some members felt that they were being sold rather than solicited, and there was a tense undercurrent.

The good news is that this is fixable. Here's how:

1. Clarifying consensus ambiguities, with a particular eye on delegation
The community needs to address head on the pros and cons of committees being authorized to handle issues in their bailiwick within boundaries established by the plenary. In addition to resolving questions about the theory of delegation, the group stands to benefit substantially from being much more diligent about delegating effectively. If the license for committees is ill-defined there's plenty of room for mischief and misunderstanding. If the plenary expects good work from its teams, it needs to set them up for success by making crystal clear what's expected.

When operating within the traces, committee initiatives need to be celebrated, not eviscerated.

2. Talking openly about power
While this isn't easy, it's doable and necessary. The community needs to develop a common understanding of what power is (influence), how its distribution is situational, how its distribution is always unbalanced, and how it's neutral in and of itself.

While power can be toxic when used to benefit some at the expense of others; it can be medicine when used to benefit all. The community urgently needs a common vocabulary about power.

3. Trusting the process
You can't expect community to bloom in an atmosphere of mistrust. After you do the work of cleaning up the ambiguities about how you want to operate (the previous two steps), members need to extend some grace to each other, allowing room for healing and good will to prevail.