New year, new way to go.  Right?

Decades ago, early in my career as a consultant to nonprofits, someone said to me: Remember, some people love the problem more than the solution.  I have had to remind myself of this countless times over the course of my career. Just because an organization/individual calls you in doesn’t mean they really want things to change. They aren’t ready to mourn the loss of the problem, preferring to be able to keep pulling it out and appear to be trying to move forward. In other words, they want to indulge in the problem. This can be a deceptively positive approach and doesn’t put you in the position of having to say that horrible—and deadening whine:  “But we have always done it this way (and we prefer it like it has always been).”

But what if you moved away from focusing on problems and thought differently?  Borrowing from two different ideas—deficit- versus asset-based language and the idea of possibility-creating (The Four Pivots)—it can happen.  First, in the nonprofit sector, our historic tendency has been to talk about the deficits in a society, a group, an individual.  For example, some classic language that has been used and/or is still being used:  disabled, homeless, poor, vulnerable, distressed area, impaired, crime-ridden, and the list can go on and on.  What is interesting about deficit-based language is that the descriptors suggest that the “wrongs” are inherent in a society/group/individual, instead of the result of circumstances which the society/group/individual has experienced/been exposed.  Clearly, problem solving from a deficit mindset will result in different proposed solutions than would coming from an asset-based mindset.  For example, if we think of a community as under resourced instead of poor, we might think about the resources that need to be brought to that community—jobs, education/training needed to do those jobs, better access to transportation so that jobs can be sought outside of that immediate community, etc.  Thus, the problem solving can look for comprehensive and systemic solutions.  If, however, we think of the community as poor, the solutions will tend to think about the poor individuals’ needs, such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  This leads to band-aid solutions, which are absolutely needed, but should be a short-term solution.  Band-aid solutions perpetuate the work of and need for nonprofits; they don’t address the cause of the deficit.

1. So, Shift one: Move away from the problem and the negativity that describes the problem.

2. Shift two: Pivot (yes, the pandemic made us all tired of that word, but we cannot afford to disregard the action of that word) and engage in possibility-creating, using asset-based language to describe that envisioned solution.  I’ve always loved Jim Collins’ concept of big, hairy audacious goals (BHAGs); if you stick true to his concept, it pushes you beyond the band-aids and to the wide beyond of dreams and possibilities.  In fact, BHAGs are to creating possibilities as the 1990s are to the 2020s.  Truthfully, though, thinking without boundaries—the boundaries of the scarcity of resources—is a huge challenge for those of us working in the nonprofit sector.  In fact, I’ve rarely seen it done well.  Why?  Because we always reign ourselves in.

3. Challenge for 2024:  stop being the one to put up the barriers to achieving the success you say you want.  Dream the possibility and then determine the best tactics for getting there.  Let others try to stop you, push you back or down.  But, please, don’t be the one holding up the STOP sign.  We are not Sisyphus suffering a punishment; we are humans driven to help others.   We have the power to get that boulder to the very top of the hill—and have it stay there.  To do so, though, we must change how we think and focus on solutions rather than the problem.