This week we have a guest post from a friend and fellow Social Sector Titan Eric James. Eric and I met in Liberia in 2004 when we were both working on humanitarian aid operations at the end of the civil war. Liberia at that time was a testing lab for the hardships and also joys of working on an international aid operation. The Liberia response was a weird mix of isolation from any normal environment and also intense togetherness with your work team. Over time, this loaded me up with stress that eventually resulted in burnout. Part of that burnout was related to my team at the time. So it would have benefited me to know some of these mindsets, strategies and tactics back then! The article digs into these issues. Eric began his career in the 1990s with USAID. He was also a paratrooper and did a stint as a peacekeeper in Bosnia. After managing humanitarian relief programs in the field for more than a decade, Eric again elevated his game and launched Field Ready, an organization that is pioneering the use of local manufacturing by making supplies wherever they are needed.
0 Comments
Every week I write a long list of things that I want to complete. These are all wonderfully exciting things to work on, and I always feel lucky when I look at my list. I work as a humanitarian supporting global response operations. Our teams work to understand the situation and bring in aid to places like Niger and Ukraine. But the daily grid is much less exotic. Here is a sample of the categories in a daily to-do list:
There are a few rare times when the universe cooperates and I finish everything on my to do list. But most weeks, I do not complete all the items, and many things get left undone. Performance mindsets strategies and tactics to move through injury, recovery and enhanced practice The yearly Thanksgiving flag football game is a wonderful American tradition in our family where all ages from four to sixty head to the cow field and run the ball. This year I had the football in my hand, turned left while running and heard a pop-crunch as my right knee buckled. That sound was my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) breaking and the tearing of my lateral meniscus. I’m now eight weeks post ACL and meniscus repair surgery. Now that things have normalized, I’m beginning to share the experience and identify helpful mindset, strategy and tactical lessons from the field of human performance that are helpful in moving through this and other injuries. The lessons and experiences of this episode can have some learning and value for other injuries and maps directly to other personal challenges. Although I wouldn’t have chosen this injury, the experience has been an opportunity to practice high performance mindsets, strategies and tactics in a new dimension. Skiers and snowboarders love to practice their craft in the mountains immediately following a heavy snowfall. The light snowflakes form what is known as powder. Although still enjoyable to ride long after the snow is compacted, powder is preferable for skiing. Powder quickly disappears through melting, and compaction as other skiers move over the snow. Powder days are those hours that you can be in just the right place, at just the right time to experience these perfect conditions.
“How do you set up your life and work to be here today?” That is my question to anyone riding the lift with me on my first trip to Wyoming, USA. One was retired. Another owned a moving company. The baggy jacketed 40 something snowboarder wouldn’t answer the question but said he lived on the edge of Snow King resort and was fighting to return the area to community ownership and access. Many are on vacation from the east coast. As a long time humanitarian response professional, I’m someone who likes to look on the bright side. My professional focus for over two decades has been on places and situations around the world where things are not going well, and help from the outside world is required to help people survive and rebuild from natural disasters and wars. My professional career has focused on responding to disasters outside of my home country of the United States. When the COVID 19 pandemic hit the world a few years ago, that type of disaster came home, and my family and I experienced the pandemic in a personal way. It was an immediate experience that is not possible when you are working as an outsider in a foreign country. Decision fatigue is the mental strain and depletion caused by making a decision. Decisions require cognitive processing. Even the smallest decisions can consume mental energy. Decision related stress is not always a bad thing. Positive stress, or eustress, is essential to making us stronger and facilitating growth. In the same way that muscles adapt and strengthen in the days after a run, the mind can also grow, and acquire experience, after a set of decisions or a period of heavier cognitive load. As social sector professionals, we are often working in environments where massive events like an earthquake or a war overtake all good decision making processes, and we are reacting in the moment using immediate feedback based on accrued experience and past mistakes. And yet even in these critical environments, there is space to make the best possible decision based on the information available. Hi folks! The pandemic disruptions put Social Sector Titan posts on hold for a while. The Pandemic changed our family’s work and life structure. I took that disruption as an opportunity to step back from regular posting and adjust to the new way of working and living in the Pandemic era. The pandemic story continues. The virus lives on in different forms and we who lived through that time period survive and move on to the next parts of our lives. I’m documenting and sharing my personal experience to gain mental clarity on last year, and connect with others who might have good ideas about the experience. We also may need to move back into lockdown mode if the virus variants gain force. We will all then need to re-use some of that hard won learning for a second round of the COVID battle. Principles: Running your Social Sector work and life like the world’s most profitable hedge fund11/8/2023 Social Sector critics believe that if our organizations ran like the private sector, our problems would be over. This reasoning is wrong. The high level dilemmas, structures and missions are not easily comparable. Systems, and cultures are not easily interchangeable between these divergent worlds. The exception to this rule is when the high level essence of an idea surpasses the domain where it was developed. When an idea or an approach becomes a macro level principle, it can apply across every scenario. This post is about one of these high level operating systems that emerged from the hedge fund industry but directly applies to our Social Sector work and life. The Social Sector Titan site is a good place to learn about the best mindsets, strategies and tactics to create deep focus and do our best work. But how do we decide what to work on in the first place? How do we decide which social mission to choose as a humanitarian? Or how do we discern what really matters in a noisy world? Are we working on essential things? How important to your overall mission were the things we did last week? Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism explores these choices. I’ve distilled and translated a few of his ideas below for a Social Sector context. The book uses clear concepts and smart graphics to help the reader simplify and focus. Escaping the busy trap and making hard decisions easier What are they doing all day (in the other department, in the other organization)? This uncomfortable question strikes deep for us social sector professionals. Unlike our for profit counterparts, we are constantly worried that our work, organizations and lives are less justified since they are not generating direct quantifiable profit. We fall into these fears and down into the alluring busy trap where we do everything to appear busy (and thus validated) to others. This non-profit must be important/useful/valuable since I and my co workers are so busy all the time. |
Social Sector TitanHuman performance in the Social Sectors. Archives
October 2023
Categories
All
|