Paddling the boat upstream – finding the special contribution YOU can make

I learnt something important today, about myself, and validated one of my recommended processes at the same time.

I had a session with one of my favourite clients. Mary-Ruth Mendel is the founder and chair of The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, a growing and successful NFP delivering much-needed services that teach marginalised Australians to read and write.

Mary-Ruth had been processing things in her head over Xmas and New Year, and had come up with a picture in her head of where she thought the organisation was right now – in a boat being paddled upstream, through some rapids, until it could get to calmer waters. She knew who was paddling the boat now, and what kind of paddlers they were. She also knew that there were not enough paddlers to get the boat safely to where it needed to go. What she didn't know was what kind of paddlers she needed to get into the boat.

I have been through more corporate restructures than I care to remember, successful or otherwise. I've heard innumerable formulations of job titles. I know that neither structures nor titles are worth much without intention behind them.

The useful discussion we were able to have centred firstly around the need to identify what kind of skills the organisation was going to need over the next 2-3 years to achieve its mission – what kind of paddlers. We then talked about various executive structures that were used in the corporate world, what the executives did, and what they might be called – where the paddlers would sit in the boat to get the most effective forward movement from their blades driving through the water.

I've blogged before about the power of debriefing (http://davidrowanwhite.blogspot.com/2010/09/power-of-debrief.html), and we debriefed our session when we were finished, using that methodology. What had been helpful, Mary-Ruth told me in the debrief, was for me to "translate" the picture in her head, expressed through her language, into lingo that would be more compatible with successfully recruiting the right people into the organisation's executive team. She also saw how the roles of the current executives, the people now paddling the boat, could be clarified and agreed upon. I was able to do this, she said, because I was "bilingual."

I have thought about the concept of being a "translator" before, but it has been in the context of making complex legal language and structuring more easily understood by non-lawyers.

Now, I am indebted to Mary-Ruth for highlighting the potential for a wider view of translation, and the value of being sufficiently bilingual to bring some of the experience and the lore of the corporate world into the not-for-profit sector.

More importantly, it confirmed for me that part of the Law of Dharma which says "find the special contribution that YOU can make". You may not always realise what that special contribution is, and some external perspective can help you to find it.

Finally it reinforced the power of debriefing to extract lessons from any situation. The bilingual concept would not have emerged without Mary-Ruth and I asking ourselves that simple question: "What worked really well from what we just did?"