GOOD NEWS: Everything Flows
Good News: An enewsletter for donors and nonprofits
on strategic planning, governance, fundraising, and executive leadership.
Everything Flows
It is said that evolution happens over generations but natural selection happens quickly. Recently reading Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch on the advice of an old friend, I came across this passage that I thought was worthy of consideration by my donor and nonprofit clients:
“Of course in the dry season the birds are only changing their behavior, not their beaks. Their diets diverge as their stocks of food are depleted because so many individual birds stop trying to do everything and concentrate on what they do best, according to the beaks and bodies they were born with. Changing your behavior is much quicker than changing your anatomy.”
A fitting reminder that if we change our everyday behaviors then larger organizational shifts may follow.
Three more takeaways from The Beak of the Finch as you consider next steps for your foundation or nonprofit:
1. Direct and Intense Competition May Be Necessary
“In the struggle for existence one variety or species must often squeeze another. It is both beautiful and terrible, an agent of creation and destruction, like the flaming sword at the gates of Eden.” In the struggle for survival, sometimes direct and intense competition is inevitable. “Whenever two alike species breed side by side on the same island they are thrown into competition. If the island has only one niche for them, then either the line of the sharp beaks or the line of the small beaks is driven to extinction: one species outcompetes the other.”
My clients populating their board rooms with directors coming from a for profit business background tend to see the world this way. While a mindset grounded in the hard realities of bottom lines and efficiencies is needed and useful, it is not always the best way to establish board room, employee, and direct service cultures. For profit professionals can also learn from nonprofit strategies that have a different approach to building a sustainable and thriving business model.
2. Better to Adapt Than Perish
Not all change stems from a survival of the fittest kind of death match. “But if the island is tall enough to offer one species a new niche, a path out of the race, that species can evolve its way out of the competition. Then it changes in character. The beak bends, melts, morphs, changes shape, through evolution by natural selection, until that lineage of birds is freed from the dreadful war.” Has your organization undergone such an adaptation? Should it? Odds are that the world is changing around you so rather than engage in a winner take all contest with other similarly situated organizations, why not assess the landscape and determine how your best organizational attributes can inform your next iteration?
Knowing the difference between when to change and when to lean into your greatest strengths and out compete your competitors is hard. But recognizing the necessity to respond to an ever changing environment isn’t.
Think about carving calendar time and budget to regularly lift your head up from the day to day needs of your organization so that you have time to reflect on the past and plan for the future.
3. The Only Constant Is Change
Whether in direct competition or calibrating to a changing world around you, Heraclitus had it right: everything flows. Nature is fluid. “As more and more ecologists and evolutionists watch life up close and long term, they see that categories are not as fixed as they imagined. More and more naturalists are shifting their efforts from the study of pattern and structure to the study of process and motion, watching change through time. This fluidity of nature suggests that as divergent pressures are repeated year after year, animals and plants around the world are even now evolving differences in physique and taste that will make their guilds diverge farther and farther.”
Whether you realize it or not, you and your organization are constantly changing. External environments are generally too powerful to be overcome by the force of individual personalities and the determination to hold back the tide. Embrace change. Get comfortable with the discomfort that change can bring. With enough experience, you might even learn to enjoy or even crave change if you don’t already.
In addition to applying to many of my clients’ journeys, these principles also apply to my everyday life as I make professional and personal decisions about where I’ve been, am, and where I want to be in the future. Not always easy but so necessary. I hope you will continue to examine and evolve as you chart your course to meet your organization’s needs and aspirations.
Stuff Steve Is Watching, Listening To, and Reading
Hell's Garden (31 minute watch)
"After nearly four years at sea, twice as long as Darwin had signed up for, The Beagle arrived in a remote Spanish colony - The Galapagos. It would have been the dream of most any naturalist to explore these islands. But when Darwin arrived, he was more exhausted than excited. If Hell had a garden he thought, this is what it would look like. The black volcanic rocks felt as if they'd been baked in an oven. The plants stank. He didn't see a single beautiful flower. The Darwin that arrived here was not the great theorist that we know today. He was a 26-year old collector, collecting almost at random any kind of plants, animals, rocks. He didn't even know the meaning of what he was collecting until much later." HHMI BioInteractive YouTube Channel
Watch Here
Cool Change (5 minute listen)
"There's lots of those friendly people, they're showing me ways to go. But I never want to lose their inspiration. Time for, a cool change. I know that it's time, for a cool change. And now that my life, is so prearranged, I know that it's time for a cool change." Little River Band
Listen Here
The Beak of the Finch (5 hour read)
"Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch tells the story of two Princeton University students - evolutionary biologists - engaged in an extraordinary investigation. They are watching, and recording, evolution as it is occurring - now - among the very species of Galapagos finches that inspired Darwin's early musings on the origin of species. They are studying the evolutionary process not through the cryptic medium of fossils but in real time, in the wild, in the flesh." The Pulitzer Prizes
Read Here
