Vicki’s Reflections

Generosity Day

by Vicki on February 14, 2012

Saturday afternoon I ran in to a Safeway to pick up a few items. On my way back to the car, a man called out to me. I wasn’t certain what he said at first, but after he spoke a few more sentences I got the gist – he was without money and unable to get himself home. He appeared to be highly intoxicated.

He then clearly said, “No one will help me.”

I weighed my options. I didn’t think he was going to be able to get himself home without significant help, I didn’t have money on me to give him and I didn’t feel safe bringing him home myself.

I decided that some words of encouragement were all I could offer that day.

I left feeling as though I’d made the wrong decision. I’m still not certain how I could have been most helpful to him. But I feel I let someone in need down.

Fast forward to Monday morning when I found Sasha Dichter’s blog.

What brought me to his blog was a comment on Twitter about his “generosity experiment”. He too experienced a situation where he wished he had responded differently to a request for help.

As he describes,

The experiment was an intuitive, gut reaction to an incongruence I felt between my commitment to creating massive social change, my work with philanthropists to support this mission, and how I saw myself behave in the face of acute need right in front of me.  The “Experiment” was just that: a chance to test what it felt like to live with a totally different orientation.  It was a commitment to take a door that was too closed for my taste and open it wide.

If you follow the PROVOKE blog regularly, you might be wondering why we’ve decided to post on Tuesday versus Friday….it’s because along with being Valentine’s Day it is also Generosity Day 2012.

In the past year, many of the projects we’ve have had the opportunity to work on revolve around tough social problems that require a shift in thinking from the “me” to the “we” (i.e., we are all interconnected and in this together).  We feel that the intent behind the concepts of generosity and giving are an important piece of the puzzle.

So go ahead and live Sasha’s advice for today:

Today you can give yourself permission to be outrageously kind, irrationally warm, improbably generous.  I promise it will be a blast.

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Head versus Gut

by Vicki on February 3, 2012

For the first 25 years of my life, I was taught to solely rely on the facts. To ground and then develop my thoughts and my writing based on data, statistics, and peer reviewed literature.

Good practice involved reading entire bodies of research and then regurgitating what I read through my own lens. Referencing each and every assertion I made with precision and detail. This is still my go to method of working, and the role that I actively fill at PROVOKE, the “prover”.

I first started working with PROVOKE when I was in the later stages of my PhD. At this point, I was a complete stickler to ALWAYS having well-supported ideas (meaning if I didn’t have literature to back me up, I wasn’t going to offer my point of view).

Joining with PROVOKE was a culture shock. The recommendations we provided to clients were grounded in literature, research, and data, but there was a clear element of a sixth-sense to our work. Everything wasn’t black and white and some of the problems we were tasked to solve didn’t have answers that were found in journal articles. Thinking out of “the box” was required. It was the first time I was really pushed to exercise the right side of my brain – to take knowledge further by connecting disparate pieces for an entirely new thought.

Early on, I remember asking,

How do we know for certain that what we are suggesting to our clients is right? What makes us so sure?

The answer:

There is no 100% certain answer. There is a range of possibilities and we need to use our facts and our instincts to find the best option.

The answer really had me really considering the nuances of problem solving and it was very uncomfortable for my highly disciplined academic self.

At the time, this response caused me considerable anxiety and it still does in the early stages of projects where I can’t see the true question we are trying to solve let alone the answer (Trudy tells me that is part of my charm, to play the “yeah but” role). But I saw time and again, that this approach worked. Clients were more than happy, they felt informed and confident and their results were stellar.

What I have truly come to appreciate about PROVOKE’s methods is that the strategic combination of:

Our heads: the factual, precise, data driven, rigorous methodologies

AND

Our guts: what we feel, sense, believe, respond to

allows us to develop solutions for our clients we would otherwise never reach.

Have a tough question or issue you are grappling with in your organization? Take the time to cognitively think through the issues, but also listen to your gut.

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“I just have a couple questions”

by Vicki on January 20, 2012

Anyone who knows me well knows I like to ask questions. I have a very high need to understand – situations, people, feelings, motivations, behaviors, bodies of literature. You name, I want to know about it.

To some, my questions might seem prying (or even down right annoying). My brother has actually said to me, “You get one more question. That is it.”

But my intent isn’t to pry or make anyone feel uncomfortable. I am just naturally very curious about my environment and the people and creatures in it.

Perhaps that’s why this manifesto on curiosity struck such a cord with me.

The Future Belongs to the Curious from Skillshare on Vimeo.

At Skillshare they are:

…on a mission to reawaken the slumbering curiosity and that rampant drive in everyone. To act as an enticing reminder that we are all natural-born learners and teachers — from day one to twenty thousand and one. We want to push everyone to discover their passions and be brave enough to chase them. Skillshare exists to make everyone the greatest possible version of themselves.

Our vision is to democratize learning by empowering teaching. To build a world where you can learn anything from anyone. Powered by an endless cycle of learning and sharing passions. We will turn every community into a campus. Every address into a classroom. And every inhabitant into a student and teacher. Skillshare is for the doers, not the academics or the theorists.

We are building the new world of education. From now on, there will be no passion left undiscovered, no personal potential left unfulfilled and no skill left unshared. In short, we’re here to change the world by increasing the global passion index.

The future belongs to the curious. The ones who are not afraid to try it, explore it, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out.

Their website provides a medium for people who want to teach to post classes of their choosing and for learners to take the classes (only in the US at present). The classes are all in the “real world” as they believe that learning should happen in communities with face-to-face interaction.

I think Skillshare’s offering is brilliant – a grassroots way of connecting those who have knowledge to share with those seeking to expand and grow. All the while creating social connections and community.

And as for me and my questions….thank goodness for our clients. They come to PROVOKE because of our curiosity and the manner in which we unleash it to solve their challenges and identify their opportunities. A perfect match!

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Willpower

January 6, 2012

There’s a really interesting piece by Greg Walton and Carol Dweck on the social psychology of willpower that I want to share with our readers this week – especially those of you who may be struggling with New Year’s resolutions! The article presents the findings of research conducted both in the lab and in the [...]

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Engaging your Audiences

December 16, 2011

The other night I came across a post written by Christine Carter. Dr. Carter is a sociologist and happiness expert at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. The post in and of itself is interesting. It is written through her lens as a mom and focuses on the Occupy movement – why it matters, why [...]

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