I spent last weekend in Santa Fe at the 2010 Public Innovators Summit organized by the Harwood Institute. The summit is designed for people in public work. In this case, mostly people from non-profits. The summit brochure pronounces “the deeply personal, even spiritual, part of public work” and “reflect, connect, rejuvenate”. All a bit ‘touchy feely’ for us corporate folks – right ?
Summit sessions were incredibly broadly defined with no defined objectives or deliverables, no meeting leaders, and no slide presentations. And people didn’t generally precede their remarks by defining themselves according to a job title and organizational membership. It took me the first evening to find my place and let go of my corporate training – job title, company, objective and timescale for delivery !
But as I relaxed into the fluidity of the program I found myself realizing that our normal corporate work style, so good for delivering a defined objective in a required timescale also has the potential to blinker us to other routes and numb our senses to a critical nuance.
It was liberating to be in such an unstructured environment and healthily disruptive to my thinking. I left feeling a little unsettled and I need to work out how to reconcile my learning from the summit with my day job. But I have learned that corporations and non-profits face a lot of common issues and that I don’t need to end every meeting with a conclusion and an immediate action plan. Some dilemmas need to percolate
If you have the opportunity to get away from the office and attend an event with a broad civil society purpose, a lot of time for open discussion and a stimulating and diverse group of participants, take the chance and try it. I hope like me you will come away with some new thoughts about your role, some new tools and a lot of new perspectives.
I was unsettled, too. I think it was because it can be hard to apply what we learned to the everyday day of work.
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