Abstract
Volunteer organizations are especially sensitive to the development through critical stages that require certain operating issues be resolved. Jim Evers uses the emergence of the Positive Change Corps (PCC), an organization that employs strength based whole system change approaches to help pre K-12 education and youth communities, to reflect on those stages.
Last year, while working on a manuscript about school reforms, I wanted to know more about the use of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) in schools. I contacted Jim Ludema, co-author of The Appreciative Summit, which offers case studies of AI used in businesses and in schools.
In the interview, Ludema shared his experiences and then suggested that for further information about AI in schools, I should contact AI practitioner, Marge Shiller. From Shiller I discovered that she had helped start an emerging volunteer organization called Positive Change Corps (PCC) for bringing AI to schools.
Brief History of Positive Change Corps
Positive Change Corps (PCC) grew out of an AI introductory seminar that Shiller conducted with David Cooperrider, AI creator, in the summer of 2001. Some of the people attending gathered into an interest group to focus on AI and schools. One member of the focus group, Dr. Suzanne Marotta, Superintendent of Schools, Westspringfield, MA, offered her school system as an opportunity to test AI in a large-scale school system. Shiller agreed to be the consultant to the project, which became an AI Summit that included 650 people: teachers, administrators, students, parents, and community members.
The West Springfield experience led Shiller to see more fully the AI potential for improving schools. In May of 2002, with the help of her colleague, Shelia McCann, Shiller gathered a group of AI practitioners and educators to explore more fully how to bring AI to schools. That meeting led to an agreement to create a corps of volunteers for bringing positive change to schools, thus the name Positive Change Corps.It also led to a second school AI project conducted by Gina Hinrichs, founding member of PCC, and Susan Rhodes-Yenowine, at Sacred Heart School, Springfield, Illinois. As the word spread, those interested began to hold monthly telephone conferences to encourage each other and to share experiences of using AI in schools. By February 2003, AI Practitioner, an international newsletter, devoted its issue to a review of several school-related AI projects in California. Canada, Ohio, Maine, and England, showing that the emerging PCC was viably moving.
Reflections on Realities of Emerging Organizations
Though not an OD practitioner, I have had a life-long interest in emerging organizations and so my attraction to PCC was not just to its impact on educational reform but also to its experiences as an emerging organization. It is the latter that I am addressing here.
Reflecting on emerging organizations from my own experiences as an observer and as one who has helped bring several into existence, I sense that all emerging organizations go through similar phases and face similar realities. They begin in what Alfred North Whitehead (Aims of Education) might call the romance stage-an initial period of inspiration, ideas and enthusiasm, a sense that something needs to be done, and a sense of doing something of value about it.
Founders of emerging organizations will have numerous meetings and many long discussions that usually lead to one of three outcomes: (a) "Let's do it"; (b) "Let's ditch it"; or (c) the interest just dies out. The first builds excitement and hope; the second and third result in frustration and disappointment.
The excitement of "let's do it" can be very infectious. By listening in on the monthly phone conferences of the PCC group, I easily sensed that growing excitement of those already active. It was similar to an experience I had in 1969, when I was a schoolteacher frustrated by the ineffective atmosphere for learning and creativity where I was teaching. Three other like-minded teachers invited me to join discussions they were having about the state of schooling. Not only did I discover that these teachers had visions of what an effective school might look like, but I also discovered that they were thinking about starting a demonstration school. Realizing that such a school would not be acceptable to public school administrators, I joined them in talking about making it a private school. It was a very exciting prospect.
As our excitement grew, our meetings became more frequent and often lasted long into the night. We discussed creating a school that would be void of hierarchy, and one in which everyone mattered: teachers, students, and parents. In a few weeks, we reached the let's-do-it point of our romance period.
What next? When the founders of PCC reached the let's-do-it point, they realized that they needed more people to be involved, and so they turned to the Internet to spread the word to a network of other AI practitioners. The word did spread rapidly, and volunteers readily joined. When our school planning group reached the let's-do-it point, we knew that we needed to find parents who would be willing pay tuition to enroll their children in a start-up experimental school. We turned to holding public meetings, and indeed we did find several parents willing to do so. We were on an emotional high, as I am sure the PCC people were at this point.
But as the romance buzz continued, a sense of hard work ahead was beginning to temper the buzz. We were entering the reality phase of a planning an emerging organization. We had to move away from just talking about a school; we had to begin actually planning one. As with the PCC group, we needed a name that communicated what we were about; we called our school the Project School. We also realized that we needed to know how many students it would take to make a school go, where we could house it, what supplies we would need, where we could find start-up funds, what educational and legal issues we would have to address, and-most important-what additional commitments of even more volunteer time we could ask of ourselves as we continued the planning. These were not easy issues to resolve, but our mission became the engine that carried us forward.
For PCC founders, their realities were less trying as they remained essentially a virtual organization via the Internet and monthly conference calls. But in recent months, they have come to a challenge from some members who felt the name is not global enough, and they have come to the reality that there are related expenses, even for a virtual organization. The name issue has more or less died out, and the group now has a Board of Directors. They have applied for non-profit tax status so people can make tax-deductible contributions. PCC is in the reality phase of an emerging organization.
What happens in the reality phase falls into what B. W. Tuckman calls forming and storming. Certainly in the forming of our school, there was a lot of storming, as I am sure there was, is, and will be with PCC. But, again, our school group's goal and mission were strong enough to help us work through the storming. I sense the same for PCC. Behind all of the difficult issues, there remains a positive and growing excitement about bringing an organization of value into existence.
Volunteering also gives volunteers a sense of mattering and a sense of hope. Volunteer firefighters risk their lives in all kinds of conditions; teens and adults freely gather to help build homes for the poor though Habitat for Humanity; men and women daily serve as Big Brother or Big Sister to troubled youth; kids and adults of all ages give time to serve in food kitchens for the hungry and homeless; and all ages of workers donate endless hours to political campaigns, environmental causes, human rights issues, natural and manmade disasters, and so much more. It is the sense of mattering and of hope that deeply motivates volunteers.
However, volunteer organizations need much more than an admirable mission and motivated volunteers. One thing they need that is often overlooked is a management structure and a business plan. Keeping any organization solvent is no small task, and for non-profits and volunteer organizations, that means constant and consistent fund raising. Jim Hennessy, retired Executive Vice President of NYNEX (now Verizon), former deputy county executive, former board chair of a community hospital, and currently the long-time board chair of a liberal arts college, says that such organizations need to be competitive. But, he countered in an interview,
A lot of people in not-for-profits are anti-competitive. They think that somehow competition is immoral, or that there's a better way. Yet, I've really never seen any organization, whether it's government, an absolute monopoly, a college, or a hospital, that doesn't have to actively compete for the best employees you can get for what you can pay. And you have to compete for funds, all of the time, often from (Do you mean to say, "often or the same people as others"? the same people as others. Colleges and hospitals compete with other colleges and hospitals for employees, clients, and funds.
Further, as emerging organizations begin to perform, they most certainly need to be ready for the continuing challenges of human dynamics.
Art Kleiner says in Who Really Matters, that in any organization, a core leader group will develop and the organization will go in the direction that others in the organization perceive the core group wants it to go. That certainly was true of our school; most likely it will be so for PCC. We founding teachers had to frequently remind ourselves as well as the students and parents that the school did not belong to us but to everyone. For founders, this can often be a hard pill to swallow. But swallow it they must, or the organization's sustainability will be at risk.
Certainly, interpersonal conflicts will arise; volunteers, especially professionals doing pro bono work, will find that they cannot give as much time as planned, needed, or expected; and the hard reality of the 80/20 rule will emerge: a few will be doing most of the work. For us at the school, our consensus meetings were often fraught with disagreements, sometimes angry ones, about issues that had arisen. Not all of our interpersonal conflicts were fully resolved, but again it was the greater mission of the school that helped keep them in check. We had to constantly remind ourselves, in the midst of conflicts, that we needed to serve the school first, rather than our personal ego needs.
I talked about this behavior pattern with Marty Kurtz, a noted international OD consultant with Guttman Development Strategies, NJ, and a long-time friend and colleague. he said,
OD practitioners know that in the realm of business relationships everything gets played out one on one. If the business relations or the departmental relations are good, it's going to be easier to shift and change. If they are poor, that will add another level of complexity to any OD engagement. If OD professionals don't pay attention to the business relationships, they may end up with a fabulous design for a new system that will never be implemented or will be poorly implemented. The effectiveness of business relations will impact how information is shared, conflicts managed and decisions made.
Kurtz continued,
I have spent enormous amounts of time with teams who are in violent agreement. They are saying the same thing but the relationships are so poor that they believe that they are disagreeing with one another. If I ask three people what the core of the business is, the manufacturing person will say that it's getting product out of the door that is high quality and in a safe manner; the quality person will say that it is getting quality products out of the door in a safe manner; and the safety person will say that it is safely getting quality products out of the door. And they'll argue about it until the cows come home even though they're saying the same thing.
Finally, Kurtz cautioned that volunteer organizations need to be ready for resistance to their services.
Being a volunteer is often thankless. If the people you're trying to work with don't want to be helped, you're immediately helpless. OD is a very difficult arena. Often the resistance comes from suspicion about who brought you in and why: people need to know who you are, who sponsored you and why they should listen to you. OD facilitators and consultants, volunteers or not, need a strong personal dynamic that answers those questions.
Kurtz said,
Best-case scenario is when the player who brought you in has a certain amount of positive influence and authority, and the worst-case scenario is that the player who brought you in has an aura of negativity. In the former, you still need to communicate (effortlessly) your purposes, your role (What it is you're there to do.), your outcomes, your processes, and your objectives for each step of the way. In the latter, you may be (a) cast as a sympathizer to victims of the negative authority and people will want you to commiserate with them, or (b) you're cast as a secret agent or minion of the negative power player. OD practitioners should never underestimate the use of themselves as tools, and the AI volunteers going into schools should come in as experts in facilitating an intervention but not as experts in education.
My review of realities is not complete, and is not meant to be; rather, it is a sampling of those T have encountered as an observer, researcher, and a participant. What I have learned from OD professionals is that volunteer organizations need OD management tools as much as any other organization. Though our school lasted twenty-years, we might have done even better having had these tools.
As to PCC, though it is a virtual network of professionals bringing a refreshing new promise to our schools, it is not yet an organization in the full sense of the word. It will have to face many of the organizational realties described above, and more. However, because PCC is AI based, and because many of its AI professionals are also OD professionals, some with experience in bringing an organization into existence, I am certain that PCC will grow and will be open and ready for these realities. Beyond its exciting and admirable mission, I feel that it is PCC's stated commitment to be sustainable-and all that that implies-which may well be the key determinant of its future. And, finally, because AI people often use the following quotation from Margaret Mead, that, too, gives me confidence in its usefulness and its sustainability: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, that is the only thing that ever has."
[Sidebar]
"Positive Change Corps (PCC) grew out of an AI introductory seminar that Shiller conducted with David Cooperrider, AI creator, in the summer of 2001."
[Sidebar]
"That meeting led to an agreement to create a corps of volunteers for bringing positive change to schools, thus the name Positive Change Corps."
[Sidebar]
"They begin in what Alfred North Whitehead (Aims of Education) might call the romance stage-an initial period of inspiration, ideas and enthusiasm, a sense that something needs to be done, and a sense of doing something of value about it."
[Sidebar]
"But as the romance buzz continued, a sense of hard work ahead was beginning to temper the buzz. We were entering the reality phase of a planning an emerging organization."
[Sidebar]
"Volunteering also gives volunteers a sense of mattering and a sense of hope."
[Sidebar]
"Art Kleiner says in Who Really Matters, that in any organization, a core leader group will develop and the organization will go in the direction that others in the organization perceive the core group wants it to go."
[Author Affiliation]
Jim Evers has had a three-fold career as an educator, trainer/consultant, and writer. Now semi-retired, he currently works as a freelance writer and is working on two books: a collection of on-the-job challenges servant leaders have faced, and a book on why school reforms usually fail and how to prevent failure.
Contact Information
www.jimevers.com
[Author Affiliation]
Note: Much of the PCC history came from PCC member Debbie Morris. PCC can be contacted through Gina Hinrichs at hinrichs@geneseo.net. Marty Kurtz can be reached at mkurtz14@aol.com. Jim Evers can be reached through his web site at www.jimevers.com.
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