A couple weeks ago, a handful of KONU colleagues and I had one last team huddle for 2022. We crowdsourced questions with which to reflect on the year, and took turns sharing highs/lows, joyful and meaningful moments, what we said “yes” to and what we said “no” to, our most memorable mistakes, and more. In the interest of staying accountable to my own learning and development, I’m writing to share some of my reflections from 2022 with KONU.
Alongside my colleagues, this year, I’ve supported clients working in cutting-edge scientific research, hospitality, public school systems, federal government agencies, and, especially close to my heart, Jewish nonprofit organizations. KONU's focus is on building capacity for individuals and teams to make progress on sticky, complex challenges—climate change, deep hxstories of colonization and racism, influencing and managing amidst bureaucracy or structurelessness, partnering across difference, and so much more. My best days taught me a lot about the value of centering curiosity and connection, and holding a learner’s stance in this work.
It hasn’t always been easy. A few of us were implicated in a client project in which we noticed participants weren’t really sinking into the learning experience. We ended up diagnosing a rather significant oversight from the contracting phase. (One of my grad school professors once told me, “90% of what you and a client need to know about each other, you learn in the contracting phase.” Yet we didn’t pay close enough attention to the signals emerging in this one). Unfortunately, too, we realized—perhaps too late—that we hadn’t truly built a safe, shared container for mutual learning with our client contacts. So when we encountered the aforementioned challenge, we weren’t equipped to adapt together, and the decision was ultimately made to sunset the project.
I also held a lot this fall while my teammate Andy was (mostly) out on parental leave. In many ways, I’m proud of how we prepared for this season. We made space to ensure smooth handoffs with our client partners and involved other members of the KONU system in building up support structures for me while Andy would be out. We also danced well together in adaptable, sometimes-improvisatory ways once Andy came back 1.5 days per week to co-facilitate virtual programs with me. And still, it was a lot! I found myself working early mornings and late nights with the increased workload and feeling lonely in the distance between knowing that others wanted to help while also feeling that accessing such help would itself be difficult (“so much contextual catch-up!”)
Now, I’m sitting with questions and ideas for experiments around how smallish organizations can absorb the shocks of capacity transition while honoring—and protecting space for—sacred transitions such as new (or new-again) parenthood. What expectations need to shift or be challenged among ourselves and with our client partners? For future parental leaves, might we experiment with the team members staying on “practicing” the roles they’ll hold in the parent-to-be's absence while they are still working, so there’s time for mentorship and feedback before the rug is pulled out from under?
Both this season and earlier in the year, one of the not-so-helpful patterns I noticed in myself was asking for help too late (or what felt like “too late”). There are lots of hypotheses I could offer as to why that may have been so—being a new team member trying to prove myself, the gendered tendency of women/femmes not wanting to “burden” others, individualism as a pattern of white supremacy culture, embarrassment that I wasn’t finishing things in as timely a manner as I sensed other colleagues could, and so on. Whatever the reason, I’m committed to working that edge in 2023. While the big goal is to ask for help and invite collaboration earlier—namely, as soon as I sense I do or might need it—I’m keen to identify and test my worries and assumptions that may be getting in the way of that, with help from the Immunity to Change framework.
In case it isn’t obvious yet, something I cherish about KONU is our collectively shared commitment to ongoing learning and development—for our clients, of course, and very much for ourselves! This year, KONU has supported me in pursuing coach training through Coactive Training Institute. (I finish up in February—ping me if you’re interested in working together!) Just a couple weeks ago, too, I participated in a certification program that enables me to facilitate the Organization Workshop from Power and Systems. Created by Barry Oshry, a pioneer in the field of human systems thinking, the Organization Workshop is an immersive experience designed to help participants see common—and often difficult—conditions and patterns of behavior in organizational life, then explore new and more powerful possibilities. Oshry’s work acknowledges the challenging conditions of “burdened Tops,” “oppressed Bottoms,” and “torn Middles”—which track to organizational hierarchy and other, more shifting contexts, too—while identifying choice points that enable more system-empowering results. I reference Oshry's work frequently in my facilitation and consulting practice, and getting certified as an OW facilitator has been a years-long dream of mine, ever since being an Organization Workshop participant in grad school with Ilene Wasserman and Jeffrey Branch.
As I look ahead to 2023, one of my top intentions is to bring more humor and playfulness into my facilitation practice, while maintaining focus on the work at the center. (Humor can be a tool—and it can also be a mechanism for work avoidance!) I’m also teaching Nonprofit Management at Temple University again this spring under the departmental leadership of Jeffrey Doshna, and I look forward to developing new ways for my students to engage in praxis alongside local nonprofit organizations.
Through this transitional year, I feel profoundly grateful to work alongside colleagues who both challenge and support me. Co-designing and co-facilitating, sparring about podcast production (check out KONU’s “On the Balcony”!), practicing productive disagreement, co-creating a staff retreat in which two spirits of our organizational system were named*, practicing case consultations on our real work challenges, and so much more—it’s been a beautiful ride, y’all. Michael, Netaly, Tim, Liz, Andy, Judit, Josh, Ariana, Pascal, Ashley, and Dörte—it is a joy and an honor to work alongside you.
See you in 2023, world!
*Psst, ask me about Thor and Sh’babble, and creative ways to play with polarity management.