Please see the calendar for upcoming events.

We live in a time when people are hungry for the truth. A combination of forces, including the inhuman scale of many institutions, the breakdown of community ties, and the promising transparency of new media, have come together to give simple honesty a truly compelling power. Authenticity is an untapped resource of extraordinary proportions.

Civil society organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity. Authenticity leads to trust and trust is the essential currency of our relationships with our stakeholders. Research confirms this: Time and again, surveys shows that we are the most trusted sector, above both business and government. Whether it's in art or advocacy or education or healing or any other cause, we are at our best when we are authentic.

And yet, we can get as caught up in the layers of obfuscation and avoidance as anyone. In our day to day work, we let anxiety become institutionalized and keep us from the power that the truth has to motivate, to teach, and to calm.

With a focus on civil society, this series of seminars will address three key practices of authentic organizations: learning to fail faster and thus learn faster; embracing abundance over scarcity and thereby making peace with time; and being brave enough to make space for the truth in our relationships with stakeholders, staff, and ourselves. The context throughout will be on the practical results of such practices in the areas of greater funding, broader enrollment, and more effective leadership.
 

Civil society is in denial about failure. Some of this is due to the social dynamics of funding. Some is due to the role of boards of directors of nonprofits and philanthropies. And some is due to the powerful culture that produces the dedicated people who do the work of civil society. This denial is profoundly destructive to our abilities to learn, to our effectiveness, to our ability to raise money and attract commitment, and to the souls of our organizations. This seminar will tackle the issue head on and deliver practical lessons, including:

• the three healthy core approaches to failure
• techniques for changing the routine conversational dynamics of failure
• five tools for depersonalizing evaluation processes
• using failure to improve knowledge management systems
• a quick four step evaluation process that consistently turns failure into success
• positive steps for board members, managers, staff, volunteers, and donors

This seminar is right for you if you are involved in planning and evaluation, if you are interested in learning systems or innovation, if you have management or collaborative responsibilities, or if you think the avoidance of failure keeps you or your organization from reaching their full potential.
 

There's never enough, it seems. Never enough money, never enough people, and underlying it all, never enough time. This perspective of scarcity has a profound influence on our organizations, from the board of directors to the volunteers and from the plans and budgets to day to day task lists. Traditional practices, including planning, management techniques, and time management processes, reinforce this anxiety. Escaping the trap of scarcity is broadly empowering, but there are large and legitimate barriers to doing so. This seminar will show you ways to get there, including:

• documenting the damage of scarcity thinking in your organization
• identifying the key structural contributors to scarcity thinking
• awareness-based time management protocols (including the popular GTD methods)
• three awareness-based methods of organizational planning and evaluation
• positive steps for board members, managers, staff, volunteers, and donors

This seminar is right for you if you face a chronic sense of scarcity in your work, if you think that peace of mind is more than a personal responsibility, or if you want yourself and your colleagues to do more than scratch the surface of your goals.
 

The reason trust is such an important resource to our organizations is that it is the fuel for relationships. It is relationships -- between staff, with donors and volunteers, with leadership, with clients or other stakeholders -- that make an organization what it is. Time and again, we all notice the transformative power of moments of complete candor in these relationships. Whether it's a 360 degree performance review, a key motivation shared outside a meeting, or a bit of truly authentic language in an email to supporters, honesty makes good things happen. This seminar looks at ways to scale that up, including:

• ten specific places to start introducing bravery in work relationships
• identifying and building on the existing sources of candor in your organization
• three structural approaches to authentic communication
• building lifetime commitment through listening and transparency
• positive steps for board members, managers, staff, volunteers, and donors

This seminar is right for you if you have responsibilities for internal or external communication, if you are facing obstacles to honesty in your organization, if your colleagues or stakeholders are more complacent than passionate, or if you just think life is too short for less than full participation in the causes to which your committed.