Moving forward regardless of the system's "issues"

Systemic forces concern almost everyone who works on the issues and the challenges associated with poverty. It doesn't take long before you reach the place where these forces are very easy to recognize.

I talk frequently about systemic matters here.

I will continue to do so.

That said, what do we do in the meantime? In that long meantime before those forces and policies are overcome or replaced by better and more just rules and approaches?

What do I do today with what I have within my control?

When Jim Collins first published his best selling business book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't (2001), I grabbed it and enjoyed reading it. As I read, it became clear to me that much of what he reported on how forprofit companies become truly great over a long period of time had all sorts of parallels and applications for the nonprofit world.

Now Collins has published a monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great (2005), intended to accompany his earlier work. He applies his learning to what he observes from working in the non-profit or "social sector" since publishing the longer work four years earlier.

What follows is his answer to what non-profits should do in the face of difficult systemic realities.
I am encouraged by his words, because he does not dismiss my concerns over systemic matters. At the same time, he calls me to work on carving out organizational excellence in that space we call the "here and now."
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I've conducted a large number of Socratic teaching sessions in the social sectors, and I've encountered an interesting dynamic: people often obsess on systemic constraints.

At a gathering of nonprofit healthcare leaders, I innocently asked, "What needs to happen for you to build great hospitals?"

"The Medicare system is broken, and it needs to be fixed," said one.

"Those who pay--insurers, the government, companies--are not the consumers, and this produces a fundamental problem," said another. "Everyone believes they are entitled to world-class healthcare, but no one wants to pay for it. And 40 million people have no insurance."

The group poured out a litany of constraints. "Doctors are both competitors and partners." "Fear of lawsuits." "The specter of healthcare reform."

I put them in discussion groups, with the assignment to come up with at least one healthcare organization that made a leap to sustained and superior results. The groups dutifully went to work, and most came up with at least one solid example. Next, I said, "Now go back into your groups, and for each of your positive cases, try to identify an organization that faced comparable circumstances--location, demographics, size, and so forth--but that did not make the leap." The groups went to work, and for the most part identified candidates. "So," I asked, "how do we explain the fact that some healthcare organizations made a breakthrough, while others facing similar (if not identical) systemic constraints did not?"

. . .It might take decades to change the entire systemic context, and you might be retired or dead by the time those changes come. In the meantime, what are you going to do now?. . . You must retain faith that you can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality. What can you do today to create a pocket of greatness, despite the brutal facts of your environment?

. . .I do not mean to discount the systemic factors facing the social sectors. They are significant, and they must be addressed. Still, the fact remains, we can find pockets of greatness in nearly every difficult environment. . . . Every institution has its unique set of irrational and difficult restraints, yet some make a leap while others facing the same environmental challenges do not. This is perhaps the single most important point in all of Good to Great. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline (Good to Great and the Social Sectors, pages 29-31).