20 Years - 20 Insights: Part 3

A month back, when the second wave of the pandemic was at its raging peak, I was immersed in organizing several relief activities as part of my work at Tech Mahindra Foundation. And then, the vicious virus struck – putting a grinding halt to my efforts. The initial feeling was of dread, not just about getting down with COVID but also about being unable to participate in all the discussions that we were working on. However, an insightful article I had read saved me from this feeling of dread overwhelming me: it talks about how we can convert our FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) to JOMO (yes, Joy of Missing Out). I knew I had to step off the treadmill, and instead of worrying about what I was not being included in, and which mails I was not marked on, I chose to step back and not worry. Indeed, the joy of missing out is something we should purposefully include in our work schedule – after a few months on the treadmill, it makes so much sense to step off once a while, and take a few deep breaths. Consider this as a bonus insight in this series of articles.

During my MBA, the subject that had fascinated me the most was Organizational Behavior. Over the years, the topics of OB – Motivation, Leadership, Collaboration, Change Management, Organizational Culture – have continued to be of immense interest. As I had shared in the first article in this series, I now have a fair bit of experience working in several social sector organizations, working with many more, and giving birth to two of them. This experience forms the cornerstone for the insights that I talk about in this third article in my 20 Years - 20 Insights series.

The previous article dwelt on the primary stakeholders of the social development sector – the communities towards which our efforts are directed. In this one, I turn to insights related to social development organizations – the vehicles through which we carry out our work. And the first of these insights got triggered at a conference in New York that I was a part of back in November 2006.

Insight #11: The Four P’s of a successful organization

The conference was an American India Foundation offsite, and I was among those representing the India office of AIF. On the agenda were a number of interactive sessions by luminaries in the social sector, including those who had successfully straddled the corporate and the development worlds. One such speaker was Mr. Victor J. Menezes, the former Chairperson and CEO of Citibank, who was on the Board of AIF as well as several other philanthropies. In his erudite address, Mr. Menezes spoke of the four P’s that are essential ingredients for any social organization: Passion, Purpose, People, and Processes. He used an interesting analogy to explain this – if your social organization is a car, he said, then Passion is the fuel, Purpose is the steering, People form the driver, and Processes are the brakes. The car can run – and reach its destination – only if all four are available, and working in unison.

Ruminating on the four P’s, I have derived a few more insights – the ones that follow – and I have also written about this earlier in this article published around five years ago. And yes, with the pragmatism that has crept in over the years, I have realized there is an essential fifth P as well in the mix: Paisa, or money. More about this in my next article in this series.

#12: Passion vs. Processes

Organizations that ride high on passion typically tend to falter when it comes to processes, and those that are too bound by processes are scarcely able to generate enough fervor to stay relevant for long. The two are often at loggerheads, pulling the other back. Hence, striking that elusive balance where you have the right blend of both is critical for a development organization, or perhaps for any organization. Even the best ones find this tough to achieve as the forces that favor each of the two tend to disregard the value that the other brings to the equation. This can be addressed by having proponents of both Passion and Process in the foundational leadership of the organization, people who have the astuteness to respect and acknowledge the contrary POV. If an organization is able to encode the power of passion and the value of processes in its DNA – without letting one of the two ride over the other – a fine balance between these two contradicting forces can be achieved.

#13: Passion is like fuel - it needs a refill periodically

A supremely insightful episode came during my stint at Pratham over 21 days of extensive travel. Over these three weeks, I visited as many as nine locations in North India where Pratham had its operations, spending two days at each location. These included large cities such as Jaipur and Lucknow, and small towns such as Saharanpur in U.P. and Munger in Bihar. Some of these locations had been on the Pratham map for several years, while others had been added more recently.

Each location functioned as a fairly autonomous unit, bound by the glue of an activist’s passion that runs in Pratham’s DNA. What became starkly visible to me was that some of these units had managed to sustain the fervor over the years by reigniting and stoking the passion through proactive interventions, while the others, where no such interventions happened, the element of passion was a flickering flame, nearly extinguished.

The younger units – those which had been in existence for three years or less – had the exuberance of a start-up around them. This vigor usually lasts only for around two years on its own steam, after which it tends to wane, unless the leadership proactively intervenes to sustain it. The older units, where such leadership was often not available, clearly had their mojo missing.

The periodic re-ignition of zeal and enthusiasm is essential to keep the organization charged up, and can be done by the infusion of new ideas, innovative projects, and energizing activities. However, this is not to say that in such organizations Processes can take a back seat – processes, simply put, have no substitute.

#14: The Mantra for Scale

My sixth insight (in the previous article) spoke of the tussle between the scale and the grain in the social sector, and how finding the equilibrium between these is the holy grail for us working in this sector. Now that I have spelt out the key ingredients for success for social sector organizations – the 4 P’s – I can hazard a mantra for attaining scale while keeping intact the focus on the grain:

Define your Purpose, Build the Processes, and Find the People. Bind these together with the adhesive of Passion. Then, Follow the Purpose, Trust the Processes, and Respect the People. And keep stirring the Passion Pot.

#15: The Difficulty in Coming Together

An insight that had come fairly early in my journey, and with some sense of dismay. I realized that social sector organizations find it extremely difficult to collaborate meaningfully – despite good intentions, coalitions and alliances have seldom been able to sustain themselves to make a significant impact in social indicators.

This is something that the sector can learn from its more competitive counterpart: the world of business and commerce, where instances of organizations coming together to attain a shared goal are far more common. Mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, co-branding and innovation networks are terms associated with the corporate sector, but practically unheard of in the social sector.

The reasons are not far to seek – businesses have end goals of wealth creation and profit maximization that are easily quantified, and the inclination to collaborate can be a strategic move as a means to these ends. A “Compete vs Collaborate” analysis can be pared down to an excel sheet for a business, but in the case of social entities where the end goal is the creation and augmentation of social value, such analysis does not come easily. In the absence of an objective and concrete reason for coming together, the move towards joining hands is driven by good intentions, and because it makes for good optics, but scarcely anything more. Hence, most such moves fail to sustain, and in many cases, wither away fairly quickly. A pity, because if there is a sector where collaboration should be the norm and not the exception, it is the social sector.

End of Part 3

Part 4