One of my great frustrations about the discussions and debates in philanthropy over the nine years I have been in this job is the tendency of those writing about philanthropy to posit false dichotomies. So of all the excellent passages in the Monitor Institute report I blogged about on Friday, entitled What’s Next for Philanthropy, this one may have been my favorite.
“We hope that the years ahead turn out to be a time when the best philanthropic leaders reject the ‘either/or’ thinking that has characterized so much of the past 10 years, too often devolving into silly debates and artificial polarities.
Perhaps this is already occurring. The distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ philanthropy is fading, we’re glad to say, as it’s slowly been dawning on ‘old’ philanthropists what is new, while gradually occurring to the ‘new’ philanthropists what is not new. Convictions that were once trumpeted confidently are now more lightly held. That’s good, and speaks well of a growing sophistication and maturity that can shape the years ahead.
As we all ask ourselves what will be needed, we find ourselves agreeing with our colleague Eamonn Kelly, who argues that the wisest leaders have to learn to reckon with what he calls ‘creative tensions.’
In philanthropy, this means, among other things:
- Feeling the urgency for short-term results and having stamina for the long-term
- Holding onto autonomy and looking for every opportunity to coordinate and align with others
- Insisting on rigor and evidence and taking risks despite uncertainty
- Adopting strategies that maintain some top-down direction and letting go enough to unleash bottom-up energy
- Looking for solutions that combine great analysis and unbridled creativity
- Understanding that execution is important because we know what works and that innovation is important because what we already know isn’t yet enough
- Rejecting false dichotomies is the philosophy that underlies the next practices we outline here. And it’s one way around many of the barriers to change that have held philanthropy back from reaching more of its potential.”
Phil Buchanan is President of CEP.
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Thanks Phil for starting off the week with this call to consider more complex frames rather than the either/or that tends to be default. I often wonder if this limited mindset is somehow rooted in the age of maturity of the US. I find my friends and colleagues from other cultures are much more easily able to grasp and hold on to multiple frames and the dichotomies and contradictions that seemingly exist between them. Perhaps we are on the brink of a developmental milestone?
Jara, I sure hope so. I worry, though, that our culture is only moving in a direction of more polarization and that, as others have observed, this may be one of the downsides of some of the technological changes we have seen in recent decades. The good news is we can find and connect with like-minded people and perspectives more easily. The bad news is we get narrower and narrower views of the world and are exposed to fewer and fewer alternate perspectives. I am not sure how we combat this, but I really appreciated that the authors of the Monitor Institute report are at least making a valiant effort to articulate that we need not accept the false dichotomies because they are, in fact, false.
Anyway, thanks, as always, Jara, for your comment.
In an effort to help explain how the non-profit sector functions, I have a diagram that I developed last year to highlight the differences between the for-profit and non-profit sector. It’s being used in some college level non-profit courses and if anyone would like a copy of it, please send me an email to BillHuddleston “at” verizon dot net with NP diagram as the subject, and I’ll be glad to send it to you.
Regards,
Bill Huddleston
The CFC Coach
http://www.cfcfundraising dot com
Phil, while I agree with you and have highlighted the “creative tension” concepts in the Monitor report myself, I also worry that philanthropy has a tendency to obfuscate important trade offs between different approaches.
Too often, funders hold what may be mutually exclusive, or at least conflicting beliefs (we should provide extensive non-monetary support to our grantees AND we should empower grantees to make their own decisions! We should stay true to our own internally designed strategic solutions to social problems AND we should be members of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and celebrate the idea of general operating support!)
A “dichotomy” is when you split a single item into two non-overlapping elements. In the real world, life is messy and there is often much overlap within ideas and beliefs. So I agree that we should reject false-dichotomies. Yet, the Monitor report talks about “creative tension”, the idea that there is real, meaningful tension between different approaches. So I think it is just as important for us to reject attempts to ignore the tensions in philanthropy.
Reject dichotomies and embrace the tension of living in the messy real world?
I so rarely feel any “tension” in the room when I attend philanthropic gatherings. My own attempts to create “debate” in philanthropy is often met with criticism from people who feel that I’m creating unneeded tension and that in fact “the two sides have much in common”. Well, of course they do. But they have real differences as well.
Hear hear! And the more tension the better since that’s when the conversation gets interesting and real consensus is created, not through the soggy middle ground that so often typifies phulanthropy. The Monitor report is a good case in point, highlighing “innovations” only within a narrow frame and ignoring others, dismissing counter-narratives and pretending that debates are outmoded or simply “silly.” In fact huge chasms are opening up inside philanthropy between very different perspectives. I don’t think that’s a bad thing so long as the different positions are talking to each-other, and therein lies the problem. Why doesn’t CEP host some conversations like that?
I hear you, Sean. At the (significant) risk of sounding like I am just doing exactly the kind of “both and” that you are concerned about, I do think both phenomena occur.
Sometimes, we act as if there aren’t tensions when there are. Sometimes, we act as if there are tensions where there are not.
I think the former tends to happen when we are together – when we feel a kind of social pressure is to agree. I agree with Michael, of course, that debate is healthy and frankly have been frustrated that our attempts to spark it at our conferences haven’t always worked because people seem to want to find common ground when there isn’t much.
I think the latter happens more often in writing (or on cable news), when people are proposing some “new way” and trying to drive attention to their ideas – and so feel a need to explain that the “new way” is far better than the old, “broken,” way. Sometimes that’s true; often, it’s more complicated than that.
This is, in part, what my colleague Ellie Buteau and I wrote about recently in the Chronicle, which you then blogged about, Sean and a number of folks then commented on in a good, healthy, debate. We wrote, “It seems that purveyors of new philanthropic formulas for making a difference are everywhere. Offering anecdotes and snazzy adjectives modifying the word ‘philanthropy,’ they extrapolate from a success story or two, promising that their approach—fill-in-the-blank philanthropy—will allow foundations and philanthropists to finally show progress in solving our toughest societal challenges.” We quoted Michael Mauboussin, author of Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, who argues that “the right answer to most questions that professionals face is, ‘It depends.’”
I guess what I am saying is, let’s recognize that in life, and especially in this work, things are often more complicated than they seem. So that’s why I hope our colleagues at Monitor Institute are correct when they write: “Convictions that were once trumpeted confidently are now more lightly held. That’s good, and speaks well of a growing sophistication and maturity that can shape the years ahead.”
well, yes and no Phil! If the correct approach is that “it all depends” we would have to apply it to your last para too. Why would it universally true or good that “convictions that were once trumpeted confidently are now more lightly held”? Which convictions would those be and in what situations should they be preserved rather than discounted? I think that’s the core of the conversation we need to have.For example, what about the conviction that citizens of a dremocracy should be meaningfully involved in all debates and decsions that affect them, including decisions about philanthropy?
Thanks for your comment, Michael. I said I agreed that “it depends” is the right answer to most questions professionals face — not all questions.
My point is simply that, too frequently, things get posited as mutually exclusive when that is not necessarily so. For example, a common idea is that a focus on effectiveness –on clear goals, well-implemented strategies, and relevant performance indicators — is in conflict with other things we value: passion, humility, empathy, listening to and involving those on the ground, and the list goes on. My view is that, on the contrary, these things can — and often do — go hand in hand. Our publications and case studies (not to mention history) are replete with examples of this. Obviously, Michael, as I think you know, I do not believe all convictions should be lightly held, nor, I am sure, do the authors of the Monitor Institute report! I think the context for that quote, if you read my original post, is clear — and unrelated to the kind of example you give above. Thanks for weighing in.
Thanks Phil, of course those things “can” be married together with trade-offs that many would classify as acceptable, but I don’t think that’s the point. In the real world the key question is “do they?”, and that question opens up a whole field of interesting – and differing – answers. There are no important questions that don’t involve trade-offs in time, resources, goals, priorities, methods, values, interpretations and so on, so that’s where trhe locus of the conversation needs to be. Sorry to labour the point, but so often it gets lost or ignored.
I hear you — and I just don’t buy it. It is usually passion (and emotion/frustration) that motivates people to get more strategic and assessment focused. We know from our research that it’s the most strategic foundation leaders who listen most to grantees and those they seek to help. And yet people assume there is a trade-off there. On the contrary: I think some of the things that are seen to be in tension actually cannot survive without each other.
ok, we’ll have to agree to disagree then. As you say, “it all depends……”
As I read through the thread to date, I kept coming back to the notion that our comfort or rather discomfort with complexity reinforces false dichotomies as well as a whole host of tendencies and practices that get in our way of sustainable change. Then I am reminded of the stage/age of this work and our of culture and it makes sense although it is still frustrating.
The following quote summed it up nicely for me:
Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension. Joshua L. Liebman