Author: cooloperations

When to stop procrastinating

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Some time ago, after a lot of dithering, I decided to participate in a leadership development program. I had delayed and delayed before finally committing. I was on unfamiliar ground; all I knew I was looking for something personally challenging, immersive, and experiential. I wanted to come out changed.

The stakes seemed high. I would not sign up for anything until I knew exactly what I was getting out of it.

Then I read this quote from Meno: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

The quote was in a piece by Rebecca Solnit. “The things we want are transformative,” she writes, “and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”

From time to time, I make a list of things I’m avoiding, and why. Sometimes there are good reasons for procrastinating; sometimes I just need to get my shit together. Other times, I see I’m waiting for knowledge of the unknowable future, a future that could in fact be changed in unpredictable ways by what I’m thinking of doing. Then I have to picture myself in a year or three, and ask if that future self would regret not having acted, even if things didn’t turn out as I’d hoped. If the answer is yes, then it’s time to go in blind.

Willingly going in blind is like being lost and feeling okay with it. When you are lost, Solnit writes, “the world has become larger than your knowledge of it.” However it feels, sometimes we need to start there.

Positive new-normal won’t just happen, it has to be invented

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Earlier this year, I wrote that COVID-19 has accomplished what decades of scientific warnings have not: A dramatic curtailment in carbon emissions. The curtailment is temporary, but what’s encouraging is how quickly the status quo can change. Yes, we are capable of adjusting our mindsets and behaviours.

Alas, I forgot to add that this change has been forced. The underlying culture has not evolved. When the weight of the pandemic is lifted, human behaviour will bounce back like a coiled spring.

Same goes for any positive effects on universities and the workplace. There’s a lot of excited talk about work-from-home as the new normal, for example, but despite all the undeniable benefits, it’s a mistake to assume this will come about naturally.

Deep change is cultural change. If we want to retain anything positive from this crisis, it will require both direction from above and the active involvement of staff. Until administrative and operational staff are involved in working on these underpinnings, hope and talk will be forgotten as the dominant culture reasserts itself.

I suggest asking a few challenge questions. I admit these are heavy with process, policy, and tools. Hardly the stuff of inspiration, and having these things won’t cause change. But lacking them will certainly hinder it.

  • Is a telework policy being drafted, or revised, based on the assumption that work-from-home is normal? Are we planning to deal with the most challenging aspects of remote work (hiring and onboarding, performance management, alignment on objectives)? Are private-sector examples being studied for lessons?
  • Can we give everyone the tools to be mobile? Are meeting rooms equipped to serve a blend of on-site and remote attendees? Are work-at-home systems secure? Are employees trained to protect personal information?
  • Do we know how to maximize the return on staff travel, tightening criteria for approval, based on an assumption that the default engagement from now on will be digital?
  • Are we thinking about how to retool the measurement of engagement and meaningful cultivation activities in the digital world?
  • Are we adopting new tools and processes to move paper-based approvals to secure electronic signatures?
  • If there’s really a new spirit of pan-campus cooperation now, is it translating into something that will last, such as a university-wide data governance framework?

This disruption feels long because it’s unfamiliar and because we’re still in it. It’s hard to see it as temporary and fleeting. In truth, without taking deliberate action on the underpinnings of positive change, the disruption won’t last nearly long enough to make a difference.

Work-from-home productivity requires more than uninterrupted focus

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If each person on my team had a dollar for every time I stuck my head in their office for “one quick question,” they’d be set up for retirement. That would be pre-COVID, of course. Work-from-home means fewer interruptions (from the boss, if not from the kids), and that has some people feeling they and their teams are more productive now than they were in the office.

No doubt people are finding themselves better able to focus, better able to control how their discretionary time is used. Anyone who suffered in the high-traffic areas of open-plan offices is probably better off.

But how are we defining “productive”? Hovering over the inbox and leaving no email unanswered? Busy does not equal productive.

I feel we’ve done a good job in our shop along most dimensions of WFH. If I had to pick an area for improvement, it would be setting expectations and goals, and reviewing them regularly.

Cal Newport, writing recently in the New Yorker, says in the modern office, supervisors provide clear goals and leave employees alone to figure out how to accomplish them. This hands-off approach is appropriate for complex and creative office work, he says. Ambiguity and fluidity aren’t necessarily drawbacks, as long as they are balanced by continuous, informal course-correction. It’s this informal communication we’ve lost in the COVID era. (1)

These days, I’m much less likely to do the virtual equivalent of popping in. Not to overestimate the value of my unannounced visits, but these interruptions that contributed to distraction in the office were also the vehicle for a lot of clarification. The interruptions served a purpose, one we should replicate if employees are going to apply their newfound focus productively.

What was once informal (though disruptive) has not been effectively replaced by informal online interaction, which tends to require planning and a certain deliberateness. We have to be more deliberate not just about what we do, but how we do it, Newport writes. As organizations consider extending work-from-home into the future, beyond COVID, it is important that we diagnose these issues.

Newport suggests that our loosely-run organizations adopt some of the project planning tools of software developers, which provide transparency across the whole team as well as removing a lot of the ambiguity around which tasks have been assigned to whom.

“More structure, more clarity, less haphazardness,” he says.

Talk to your team and each individual about your, and their, expectations. Set goals and measures of success to ensure accountability. Regularly review goals and progress. Continuously reclarify at the team and individual level to maintain focus, and modify as needed to ensure progress is actually being made and that team members are engaged.

Remote work carries the promise of focus, but it will remain only a promise unless we ensure people are given a relatively small number of things to work on at a time and are able to go deep on them with a clear sense of direction.

  1. “Why Remote Work Is So Hard—and How It Can Be Fixed,” by Cal Newport, The New Yorker, 26 May 2020

Mind like water

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Every morning, in place of my commute, I go for a long walk. I call it my sanity walk. My way takes me by a small lake. One day, the lake was a perfect mirror, reproducing perfect copies of trees, houses, a dock, and the cloudless sky of thousand-piece-puzzle blue. I took pictures with my phone.

I’ve been around the lake enough times to know that this beautiful stillness is very rare.

My mind, like the lake, is rarely still. Near constant wind disturbs the surface, and my anxious thoughts cloud my brain in a fog of useless, directionless energy like static. Walking allows me to disengage my mind from its thoughts.

Letting go of thoughts is something I feel physically in my head, like a fist relaxing its grip. Then I realize where I am, like a driver on a boring highway emerging from a reverie. My eyes and ears open. I notice the street ahead, and the houses. I notice the rooftops covered with white squares, each shingle outlined with a dusting of snow. I hear a distant garbage truck, starting and stopping. I hear a scratching nearby, a bird rummaging in the dead leaves under some trees. I notice the children’s playground equipment wound with yellow caution tape.

I notice a Nova Scotia flag hung from the railing of someone’s front step. Across the street, I see a length of Nova Scotia tartan hanging from the branch of a tree in a front yard. And there’s another flag, pinned to the wall of a house, encircled by a string of Christmas lights in the shape of a heart.

This is Nova Scotia, a small province where nearly everyone can trace a connection to a victim. Confined to our houses, we are denied the ability to gather as we normally would, and our sadness knows no bounds.

April in Nova Scotia can be pleasant but is just as likely to be windy, wet, and cold. We are serious about insulating our houses. Tiny leaks around windows and doors add up. Someone once told me the total area of dozens of small leaks could be the size of a basketball.

Imagine a hole that big in the wall of your house. You wouldn’t put up with that for long in a cold climate.

The wind that disturbs our minds sneaks in via many little holes: CNN, CBC, Facebook, Twitter. Words have power. A steady drumbeat of certain words – kill, gun, shooter – exhausts and confuses us.

We should feel sad. We should also stay informed. But be careful how you take in the noise of the world. It should be in ways and at times of your choosing, not via alerts and notifications and buzzes and ringtones.

The surface of the water will calm if it’s not disturbed. We can’t always keep the wind out, but we can at least stop inviting it in.

Our resilience in this moment is not a product of sudden changes in routine we adopt now, but of habits of mind we have acquired over years. But now is as good a time as any to re-examine what we let into our skulls.

From the lake, I return to my desk better able to lead and to serve. I do not have a still mind, and I never will. My brain hums with anxiety at the best of times. A calm mind is not a goal to achieve, but a lifetime habit, a gentle discipline that never ends. It enables me, us, to stand and face the wind.

Pivoting to hope

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Tigers living in the Bronx Zoo have been found to have COVID-19. I read that news on my phone late at night and asked myself, “Wait, you mean cats can get this?”

Is it helpful that, minutes before going to bed, my last thought of the day is that our neighbours’ roaming cats could be spreading the virus from house to house?

No, it’s not helpful.

The news has a seductive quality. Keeping up on developments feels necessary, even responsible, but the tiger story convinced me that it’s corrosive as well. From now on, I will tune in to the public health updates and do my best to tune out the rest.

Or at least tune in to the positive. The curve is flattening, even descending, in some countries and regions. This is not reason to become lax, but is evidence that this crisis won’t last.

It may be time to start talking about that with our teams. To this point, I’ve been stressing that we are in this for the long haul, because I wanted people to act quickly to make their home workstations comfortable and safe, and not to hoard (and, potentially, lose) their vacation days.

Some of us have family members who are in danger. I don’t want to minimize anyone’s genuine anxiety. For the rest of us, it’s time to devote some mindshare to the post-COVID future. When I get a chance to do so, it’s a welcome relief.

So implement your new CRM, plan for your next campaign, pursue professional development for you and your team, talk with donors about their dreams, work on strategy – and push on.

Since this thing began, we have been absorbing the idea that the way ahead is uncertain. Well, everything has always been uncertain, hasn’t it? What is certain is that this will end. How we think and behave now will decide whether we arrive on the other side exhausted and depleted, or invigorated and ready.

When the novelty of work-from-home wears off

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Our sector is undergoing a massive work-from-home experiment. The experiment is universal, but for our sector the change is especially dramatic. Whenever some of us get a chance to think (between one videoconference and the next), our minds turn to what this might mean for the future of the office.

No question, work-from-home is technically possible. A few weeks in, it is clear that cloud-based software and videoconferencing are passing the test. If there’s a drawback with remote work, it isn’t the tools.

However: consider what the current experiment means for its human subjects.

Everyone has moved offsite in a matter of days. People are now socially isolated, without normal supports. They may be forced to be productive in limited space shared with children, parents, roommates, and spouses who may also be working from home. Distance is impeding asking questions, sharing information, and getting to know others. On top of that there’s worry about an unrelenting crisis with personal, local, and global effects, with no end in sight.

If this work-from-home experiment were a real experiment, it would be ruled unethical.

The pandemic will subside, and with it, the need to isolate and the general anxiety that wakes us at 3 a.m. (However, if people weren’t already somewhat anxious before the crisis, they weren’t paying attention.)

Other effects remain to be discovered.

Remote work might be normal in the private sector, but I question whether it translates perfectly to mission-driven organizations. A mission-driven organization requires inspirational leadership and engagement around shared purpose, not just hitting numerical targets. To say that the higher education and non-profit sectors need to get with the times and embrace private-sector models of work would be classic bizplaining.

We should also recognize that the likelihood of having adequate home-office space breaks along the line of income and reporting level. Implemented poorly, across-the-board work-from-home would impose disproportionate costs on lower-income workers. Implemented fairly, work-from-home might be costly for organizations.

Certainly, the best thing for our students would be to be back in classrooms and labs. The common campus experience levels the field somewhat for students from different economic backgrounds. More fundamentally, a university without physical proximity is not really a university. An experience based on engagement with the world balanced with an encounter with the self does not translate to digital. I am not convinced this is opening a new era for learning.

It may, however, be a new era for administrative offices. I’m intrigued about the possibilities of more flexible work arrangements that benefit people and organizations. Employees skip the commute while organizations free up some space – it sounds win-win.

We may be still be blind to the downsides, though. Let’s get through this first, and take careful notes.

Advancement birds of a feather must flock together

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Cardinals are frequent visitors to my neighbourhood. Male cardinals are bright red, but I know them mainly by their distinctive calls. They are hard to spot because they stay so high up in the trees.

That may be changing. A few days ago, I was in the middle of an email when a cardinal landed right outside my window, less than two feet from the ground. As human activity on my street has lessened, birds are coming down to ground level more often.

Or maybe it’s because I’m at home that I notice birds. Maybe I’m just better at noticing, period.

I notice other things. It seems the birds of the Advancement flock are also exploring their changed neighbourhoods. But the experience has not been the same for everyone.

When this crisis hit, frontline staff suddenly found themselves with calendars cleared of travel and events. Never ones to sit on their hands, they turned to tackling neglected to-do lists, or reading the huge volume of quality content on philanthropy and engagement in times of crisis, or becoming thoughtful and far-thinking.

This reflective hiatus for frontline staff will be brief, and in fact it may already be over. Conversations with alumni and donors must resume – different venue, different topics – and priorities for annual appeals are shifting toward direct aid for students in distress.

For support and operations staff, the experience has been quite different.

The rush to get everyone set up for working from home is over. We’ve discovered that the tools and technology were already there, like a safety net, waiting for us to arrive. (Our friends in the private sector could have told us that.) A few venerable business processes have been swept aside, temporarily, to suit the new reality. As a result, the physical move wasn’t as painful as we might have predicted.

What now? Operations staff never had empty calendars. The meeting load has in fact gone up: Leaders and managers are communicating with their teams remotely while the need for collaborative project work goes on. The opportunity for reflection never happened. We are busy just keeping up.

Temporarily, then, half the flock is on the ground exploring new territory, and half is still up in the trees.

The volume of meetings should abate, and a kind of normalcy will return. It will be a different normal, however: Advancement shops are gearing up for engaging with committed supporters during what will be a protracted health and economic crisis. What does a “face-to-face” visit mean now? How do we shift to rich digital experiences in place of events? How do we measure meaningful engagement? What processes need to be retooled, not just temporarily, but for all time?

The descriptive phrase I hear from colleagues is “business as unusual.” In such times our most important task is keeping the flock together.

Careful which rules you bend in the new work-from-home world

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Suddenly every office worker in the world is doing their jobs from spare bedrooms and kitchen counters. Universities are having to rework processes on the fly, and some venerable rules are falling away in order for critical business to continue. As your institution figures things out along with the rest of us, the urgency can lead to needed change – but be careful your pruning isn’t sending the wrong signal.

Early to go will be hand-signed approvals for everything from expense claims to purchase requisitions to gift agreements. Universities that have been slow to embrace digital and cloud solutions are having to accept scanned and emailed copies in place of originals. They’d be in a less risky place today had they accepted secure digital electronic signing earlier. Presumably universities will not revert to paper processes when this is over. Probably a good thing.

Pressure to streamline has its downsides, though.

Mass dislocation of workers means a lot of personal and sensitive data will end up stored on personal computers, laptops, and mobile devices. Consumer-grade personal devices have long been present in the business enterprise, leading to heightened risk of data breaches. The work-from-home tsunami has accelerated the risk, as hardware gaps are addressed with even more personal devices.

Now is the time to insist on adherence to policies for protecting personal and confidential information, not cut corners.

Everyone is trying to adapt and do their work. I get it. We moved a staff of 73 with little or no history of remote work (aside from fundraisers) into their homes over the course of three days. Logging into a VPN and a central file store can seem like a nuisance. So much easier to drop the file in C: drive.

But the more data sitting outside your institution’s system of record – whether on people’s hard drives or as email attachments – the greater the chance that a lost device or a successful phish will lead to a data breach. Breaches can have negative consequences for alumni, supporters and others. They also damage the university’s reputation.

A few days ago there was a story in Slate headlined “America Is a Sham.” The subhead asserted, “Policy changes in reaction to the coronavirus reveal how absurd so many of our rules are to begin with.” The fact the US Transportation Security Administration has waived the 3.4-ounce limit for liquids and gels for hand sanitizer only is proof that the rules are arbitrary, nothing but security theatre. (1)

True or not, I don’t know. Either way, you send a signal to users when you let things slide for the sake of convenience. Choose wisely.

Note

  1. “America Is a Sham,” Slate.com, 14 March 2020

Business continuity is not business-as-usual. It’s taking care of people.

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Many classrooms at universities across North America will be empty come Monday. Staff in advancement shops, though, will report for work, either in person or remotely. Some will wonder, does fundraising and engagement go on through such a crisis? Why are we even here?

It does go on, and it should go on, even if it’s over the phone or by email. The conversation will be different. Now might not be the time to ask, but it may be the time to connect, to commiserate, to seek advice – to deepen the relationship. Your most committed supporters remain committed, even if financial support is not what’s uppermost in their minds.

(There is so much useful advice out there. I don’t intend to promote one vendor above others, but do check out BWF’s whitepaper: Tips for Remote Relational Fundraising. It has practical and timely advice for every advancement function.)

Fundraisers need supports and tools to do their jobs. Relationships need to be managed. Business continues.

“Business continuity” sounds like a cold and heartless expectation for these days, but really it starts with not only ensuring the team is safe, but ensuring that everyone feels safe. It’s about communicating openly and honestly, and exercising flexibility and understanding in dealing with fear and anxiety.

Priority number one is ensuring the health and safety of your team. Nothing else comes close in importance. Follow the directives of health authorities and the leaders of your institutions. No exceptions.

The rest is up to you. Do it poorly, and all the social distancing and technology for remote work you’ve got will fail to deliver continuity. People need to know their work is important, but they also need to feel secure. And if they don’t feel secure, they should be free to express their fears and be taken seriously.

Your university probably has mental health supports for employees. The most immediate support, however, comes from managers and leaders. Not in terms of providing mental health supports that only a professional should provide, but in understanding and respecting the anxiety of employees (who may be worried for vulnerable family members), communicating honestly about our shared stress, and being flexible with work arrangements when possible.

If a business continuity plan is in place, it’s a given that something significant has happened. Never say it’s “business as usual,” because your people know that it isn’t.

A long view on COVID-19

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Josep Pla i Casadevall was a Spanish journalist and author who wrote in the language of his native Catalonia. A while ago, I picked up a translation of his journals from 1918-19, when he was a student in his early 20s. The university he was attending was shut due to the influenza pandemic, so he whiled away his days and nights at home and in the cafés of his home town.

When Pla’s university reopened in early 1919, he returned to Barcelona and reunited with friends and fellow students. He wrote in his journal, “We greet one another with the usual noisy glee but keep our distance, as ever – a distance that seems so small, yet is perhaps quite considerable.” (1)

While I was reading Pla, COVID-19 arrived. Even as I digest our university’s evolving plan for responding to the pandemic, I know that this event will not be anything like the so-called Spanish flu. The current pandemic is serious, but the world has changed. Governments and organizations, including my own university, are taking decisive action to slow it down and prevent disaster. Individuals are making behavioural changes to keep their families and communities safe. Disruptions to routine will be severe, but brief. Millions of lives will be saved.

It is too early to eulogize this virus. But the lesson I’ve already drawn from this event is that humanity is perfectly capable of mobilizing against any threat. Despite abundant evidence, we are not our own worst enemies. We harm the earth, we are xenophobic, we make bad choices at the ballot box – yet we manage to engage in collective action for the greater good.

Remember climate change? That thing we seemed too mired in inaction to deal with? Measures unthinkable in normal times have already come to pass. By choice or force, nations and individuals alike have altered behaviours and made hard decisions.

COVID-19 has accomplished what decades of scientific warnings have not: A dramatic curtailment in carbon emissions. The curtailment is temporary and will be undone when life returns to normal. What’s more interesting to me is how quickly the status quo can change. How people’s mindsets and behaviours can change. Yes, we are capable of swift, coordinated action, informed by science and motivated by concern for our fellow citizens.

Universities are founded on the idea that human progress is possible. But progress is never inevitable. It requires work. Some of that work takes place in the university. Climate change can be addressed through gentler measures than we are employing against COVID-19, but they must be sustained over many years.

We can do this, if we absorb this lesson of hope in humanity. As I dust off our unit’s business continuity plan, it is this, more than anything else, that tells me why business continuity is important.

Notes

1. “The Gray Notebook,” by Josep Pla, NYRB Classics, New York, 2014, pp. 320-321