The problem with recycling at work - and 3 solutions to breaking the cycle
- Mon, October 10 2011
- Filed under: Nonprofit leadership
I understand the temptation to recycle. I don’t mean the desire to reduce-reuse-recycle plastic bottles or aluminum cans. Rather, I’m talking about repeating the same approaches or messages over and over at work.
I’ve posted more than 1,000 times on this blog, and some days I confess I truly feel uninspired when it comes time to write. On bad days, I wish I could just cut and paste a previous post and call it a day. Only that doesn’t work for a blog. Blogging requires I find something fresh to say - even if it’s just a tiny variation on an old, well-worn theme. I have to find a bit of new each time. It’s the same way with speeches. And work, where it’s all too easy to fall back on how we’ve always done things.
Here’s the problem with giving in to the “recycling” urge: It’s reductionist. Just like the reduce-reuse-recycle concept—only it’s not as good for us as it is for the environment. When you stick to the exact same approaches and messages, you become increasingly narrow in your thinking. You fail to learn. You start assuming there is no other way. You don’t evolve. Your work becomes less inspired - or worse, boring. This is a problem because your audiences and operating landscape are always changing. You have to keep fine-tuning (or sometimes revolutionizing) what you do and how you do it. It’s one thing to identify best practices and build on what works - it’s quite another to get too comfortable and call it in.
If you’re in a recycling rut, here are three ways to break out. If you have other ideas, please share them!
1. Get out of yourself. Do one thing today that makes you shake free of your own thinking and wakes you up to the need to refine your view. Call a donor and see how they’re feeling about your organization. Go talk to someone in line at your shelter. Visit a front-lines staff member and ask them what’s new or different these days. This works.
2. Go read a book outside your field. Or watch a TED talk. I swear by both. There’s nothing like new ideas to shake up your mind and stimulate your own thinking.
3. Go have lunch with a really smart person who doesn’t work at your organization. Ask them what they think of your organization or cause. Brainstorm with them. I also swear by this approach. Most of my ideas come from conversations with other people - rather than my own isolated mind.
Don’t reduce-reuse-recycle. Instead, re-visit, refine and renew.
Comments
Great post! I find myself falling in this repetitive rut all too often, although I am one of the lucky few who has constant reminders around her not to let the rut go on for too long.
Another idea might be that even when talking to someone who is in your field listen to what they’re saying as if you don’t know anything about the subject. This may sound silly, but I’m a true believer that everyone you meet has something to teach - thinking we know everything about something closes our minds to learning anything new that might be presented to us.
“The moment we identify too strongly with a thought, we wear it like a costume and lose ourselves in a scenario”
This was great Katya, thank you! A friend of mine who works in social media always has the line at presentations to not leave your social media strategy to the intern, but REMEMBER to engage in the intern in the strategy. The idea being that social media is important, not just some aside to your marketing/fundraising/programming etc… but also recognizing that the youngest member of your team is familiar with social media in ways others may not be and might provide fresh strategy.
To that end, it always amazes me how many people in an organization fail to engage their interns beyond the simple tasks they’re assigned. I’d say to avoid recycling, any smart manager should be speaking with the newest members of the team and picking their brain from time to time about their observations. Once in a while, you come across a real great idea!
I totally agree with Katya and Patrick
This is a great post.
And, that we need to open up our thinking to invite more choices, ideas and insights into our daily work and in particular to our fundraising. That’s the key to my work at the moment to help fundraisers harness their creative side so that they can diverge their minds and seek possibilities rather than returning back to the past which leads to the ‘rut’ situation.
Thanks for bringing this subject up.
Jensen Calleemootoo
www.lifefundraising.com
I could not agree more with many of the points in this article. It is very important in life to try and maintain a fresh, positive and optimistic outlook and to keep active both mentally and physically. It is so important to test yourself and to try something new everyday. It can be difficult to gain inspiration but I agree with the point you made about, talking and meeting with new people and trying to converse and generate new ideas.
The last idea is a very powerful one. Alongside that is stop and listen and be curious. One of the problems with developing a niche and becoming an “expert” is you can get trapped into thinking that it’s what you know that counts.
New ideas come from being curious about others - what they do and why.
Great advice.
Too often, people with expertise ignore other people with expertise, or, alternatively, ignore those with a beginner’s mind.
How something FEELS can’t be observed from a distance—much less, through statistics/analytics.
14,000 people view a site I manage each month. I understand the behavior of these people by observing it. But the best feedback I’ve received on how to BETTER SERVE those visitors comes from me actually talking with a few of them.
Again, great advice in this article!