Interviewed By FasterCures

Some of my thoughts revolving around FasterCures' Consortia-pedia project

Why are you so passionate in finding ways to accelerate research for cerebral palsy?

The best way to answer would be to introduce you to my thirteen-year-old daughter who was diagnosed with CP about a year after she was born. Everything flows from my personal desires to help her, and then from my more professional interests in management. Ultimately, I'm passionate about accelerating “good work” of all kinds by groups operating in and around the CP sphere.

You created the Consortia-pedia mind map, a great way for visualizing how to develop and manage biomedical research consortia in an interactive way. What impelled you to do it?

Well phrased. A mind map is a visual thinking tool – cloud-based, in this case – that I routinely use to help (me) make sense of complicated stuff. Consortia-pedia is laden with great info. I thought a map might help to engage and expedite other peoples’ understanding of it, and maybe even motivate them to use it. 

Why are you interested in research-by-consortia?

I'm trying, generally, to bring the best of the best management thinking to CP-facing organizations. I recognize research-by-consortia as a promising way for people to come together to address shared problems and/ or enable innovation. I’m interested in how to do those things well.

What challenges in cerebral palsy research do you think could be best addressed by a consortium-based collaboration?

There are currently formal and informal cross-sector networks dealing with CP in its many aspects. NeuroDevNet, a Canadian network dedicated to neurodevelopmental research, is one example. To my knowledge, though, none actually calls itself a consortium.

There are also standalone nonprofits with their own sets of priorities, most notably Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation, CPIRF, which funds cutting edge research. Its priorities touch on at least three of the four consortia “objectives” your work uncovered: basic science, products, and biomarkers (to identify babies at risk, for example).

What's your relationship to those groups and other CP organizations?

I’m a parent living under a CP umbrella. I’m also in the challenging position of being an outsider relative to those groups. So, going back to CPIRF, for example, I’m 100% on board with its research agenda but I’m equally in the dark as to how it’s being managed. 

I want the leaders of all of our organizations to use the best available tools and resources. Consortia-pedia is a great resource for people involved in starting or running complex collaborations. I doubt, however, that our leaders know about it. If my map could somehow play a part in drawing their attention to it, I’d be a happier camper. 

From your perspective, what can biomedical researchers do better?

To arrive at faster cures across the board, we need to do both more and better work. It follows that I'd like for leaders to be open to better ways of maximizing the overall effectiveness of their organizations in carrying out their missions.

Consortia-pedia offers management advice from a strong translational science perspective. There are other folks coming at (the subject of) “collaborating better” from business management and organizational science perspectives who also have valuable things to say. They’re getting to where they’re now able to offer shortcuts and tools that any consortia leader could readily apply -- and so should pay attention to.

That's an example of a way organizations can “open themselves up” to the whole big rest of the world for help.

Do you have another example in mind?

I do.

I'm high on the idea of making much greater use of the experience, creativity, and talents of the many (tens of millions, in the case of childhood neurological disorders and conditions) patients and family members who have personal stakes in our organizations, consortia included. Who knows how many of us might be willing and able to work to advance our favorite missions, and to do so for little or no compensation?

It's becoming easier and easier to connect with parents like me in meaningful ways. As I hope my map shows, we can be more than just potential donors and/or passive recipients of one-way messages.

Why Our Nonprofits Need To Network (With Other Nonprofits)

I have a problem with today’s cerebral palsy (CP) interventions and treatments: they’re barely making a difference. Typically they result in only 4-10% lifetime gains or improvements* and that’s not good enough. I want to see those numbers doubled or tripled -- pronto. 

But -- 

Can anyone tell me who’s in charge of upping the percentages? With whom should I get in touch? 

One might guess that the responsible party is one of the twenty-five (25) or so US-or-Canada-based nonprofits whose mission has to do with improving outcomes as they relate to CP. The fact of the matter, however, is that no single organization is responsible. Nor could it be. The challenge – how to dramatically increase the effectiveness of our interventions – is way too complex. Too many layers and uncertainties are tied to it.

It’s actually a great example of the kind of “wicked” problem that’s best tackled by a network. One of countless such problems our special needs communities face.

Wicked problems don’t have one right solution. They’re solved through trial and error, consensus decision making, and experimenting-and-learning your way to what works. Networked collaboration is the most efficient way to share the associated costs, risks, resources, etc. And our new digital infrastructure can make it all the more efficient.

The great promise of networked collaboration is that everybody wins. Each participant “gets better faster” by working with other participants. The objectives of all stakeholders are advanced while the larger issue /shared problem is addressed. The authors of The Power of Pull also stress the value of long-term relationships that are often fostered: "As participants get to know each other and find that they share similar ways of looking at their endeavors, they start to trust one another, which prompts even deeper levels of collaboration (and tacit knowledge creation) around the difficult challenges they share." 

Of course, success depends on how well you collaborate, i.e., on how well the work itself is orchestrated. There are plenty of big thinkers out there sorting out the various management approaches being taken, trying to uncover best practices, etc. Here, in closing, are two good examples and potential resources for you:

• The Tapscott Group is actively exploring methods for making collaboration happen both within organizations and via multi-stakeholder networks. 

• FasterCures has been studying ways that networks of organizations are collaborating to expedite biomedical research. Its Consortia-pedia provides an in-depth look at the "research-by-consortium" trend and is loaded with information meant to help guide and inform emerging and existing collaborative efforts.

*  *  *  *  * 

Nonprofit networks are among the most powerful forces that an organization can channel for the greater good.

Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits

*per Dr. Iona Novak, Head of Research at CP Alliance

My Two Cents_07

So far I've suggested that beating CP will require us to manage our asses off, and that it’d do us a world of good to pay closer attention to some of the leading management thinkers and practitioners out there. I've also suggested that nonprofit-serving consultancies could fit that bill.

It's all been very general.

More specifically, what we should look for -- I believe -- are tips, tools, and techniques that will help us magnify our impact, get more bang for our buck, and become bigger up against our challenges. A few years ago, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article posed the question "How can we achieve 100x the results with just 2x the organization?" That's what I want to know. 

My search for answers has taken me again and again to consultants and their takes on: collaboration, constituent engagement, multi-stakeholder networks, "scaling up," and shared leadership. I've become fixated on productivity. I want to see us get a lot more work done through a lot more people. (with special emphasis on parents and family members of the 14-18 million kids in the U.S. with neurological disorders or conditions)

That's the direction I want to head next.

ROUND EIGHT: I Commend You

I don't know these days if people are still handing out kudos, or even props for that matter, but I want to -- to RespectAbilityUSA.

How come?

Based on first impressions only of its Facebook activities, I see an organization using social media for more than just fundraising or marketing communications. I see it using social media strategically, too, for doing important, mission-driven work.

In the past 4-6 weeks, for example, RA has issued at least 4-6 unique calls to action. (I know in at least two cases its calls were answered.) It has invited constituents to: 

• participate in a conference call 

• complete a survey 

• submit photos 

• provide pro bono camerawork, and 

• be interviewed. 

Could this mean it actually gets what it means to "be digital" and why things necessarily start and end with the constituent? 

In any case, RespectAbility's Facebook page strikes me as a good environment for knowledge; a good environment for learning. There's a working community in the making there. And since at this point I can only imagine giving its leaders a "smartie" award for productive Net behavior -- I wish 'em well. 

I hope other nonprofits working in and around the CP and special needs realm take note.

ROUND FOUR: What CP Parents Are For (Part D.3)

How may orgs inside the CP sphere fully realize the potential of collaborative communities?

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE 

For those in the earliest, exploratory, stages of this relatively deeper form of constituent or customer engagement, it might help to think "grassroots." Think in terms of what you can do to expand parents' and families' opportunities to creatively address their own immediate needs. (where they can bring local knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what works in their particular contexts, to bear) 

For example?

I've written about the challenge of having as a parent to juggle so many different health care providers. There has to be a saner way. Since no clear-cut solution has shown itself, however, maybe a collaborative community could help? Maybe said community could look at the pros and cons of -- one plausible solution -- training and churning out more physiatrists? As an alternative, care maps seem to hold promise. (See my Thanks For Asking.) Maybe a parents' working group could form around using and maximzing their potential for our purposes? Both of these seem like the sorts of projects that would be well in line with, and that would advance the missions of, a UCP or RFTS.

MISSION DRIVEN

Another general starting place would be to ask (as a leader of an organization) what stands between where you are now and where you want to be: What are the key challenges or opportunities your organization needs to be work on, and could community collaboration be applied as a way of delivering value? Could it be employed to move projects forward?

Projects?

Projects that have been started but not completed. Projects to which you've committed but not yet planned out. And also... 

"Look into" projects. Per personal productivity guru David Allen, "One of the most interesting, subtle, and underutilized distinctions is whether a possible action or project is one that should be moved on, or whether it can simply be started at a later date, or perhaps not moved on at all." Here's how he describes his own look intos: 

My personal Someday /Maybe list is quite a bit longer than my active list of projects. It includes some ideas on one end of that spectrum that I would consider in the "fantasy" category -- like taking a canoe trip down the Mississippi River. On the more "realistic" side, it contains projects like scanning my old photos for digital storage and rewriting a segment of our Web site. Nothing in this category has a specific next action attached to it-- that's a defining characteristic.

I'm curious to know how many of our CP-facing-organization leaders keep a formal, up-to-date Someday /Maybe list?

Here are three (3) would-be projects of my own that could conceivably be tackled by collaborative communities:

• keep abreast of how other diseases or conditions are being chipped away at and beaten (from a management perspective) 

• map the relevant, ongoing CP-related research in one place (could be a wiki, or a mindmapping, or a database project) 

• How about a wiki or mindmap covering all the therapeutic and other interventions being offered around the globe, along with their various providers? This recently published CP Alliance and Notre Dame research analysis, A Systematic Review of Interventions for Children with Cerebral Palsy: State of the Evidence, would be a terrific jumping off point. 

Projects can originate from every part, i.e., from every level, of an organization, and can address the most mundane to the most sublime of intentions -- even an individual organization's missions, visions, and values. Even the direction our multi-stakeholder networks* seem to be heading together. 

At least a couple of visions seem to be coalescing around expediting CP-related research, medicine, clinical trials, etc. I'm all for them, but I'd also remind leaders that their visions are no more than human-made, mental constructs. They're sets of ideas that, bluntly, and not to be discouraging, score a zero percent (0%) on the "how they favorably impact my daughter's life today" test -- and that are also subject to being wrong in whole or in part. The only way to find out is to test, test, test them. If we want to be social-scientific in our approaches, we should be transparent. We should expose our thoughts about the future -- today -- and invite as much commentary from as many smart people as we can. 

Who's to say what a collaborative community made up of lots of engaged CP parents and others...working together online, making said planning and visioning their own, taking it to heart...could or couldn't contribute?

* alliances, consortia, partnerships and the like 

ROUND THREE: What CP Parents Are For (Part C)

The next questions for leaders of CP-facing orgs become: How can you capture the passionate participation of CP parents? How do go about making better use of their know-how and know-what to get much needed knowledge work done? I'll suggest a general answer or two herein. In Part D, I'll get specific.

*  *  *  *  *

The Net. The Net. The Net. 
Need I say more?

When I say "the Net," what I really mean is our whole digital infrastructure. And I tend to make a simplistic distinction: 

On the one hand, I think of technologies and related practices that have to do with accessing and attracting resources. They're what most people probably think of when they think of social media. I more or less associate them with online communication and selling or fundraising. As for their roles in finding expertise and getting things done? They enable organizations to "selectively" tap into the world's intelligence, i.e., to find in the masses exactly the (small number of) knowledge or other resources they need.

To really drive performance rapidly to new levels, however, it's argued by the likes of too-many-management-consultants-to-try-to-name that organizations need to provide people with tools, resources, and incentives to mass collaborate. (Instead of social media think social production.) Here it's the use of "collective" intelligence -- the pooling of many small and incremental community contributions into useful bodies of knowledge -- they're touting.

Our own CP nonprofits provide us with examples of the latter. Two that jump right to mind: (1.) Michele Shusterman's / CP Daily Living's use of a Change.org petition platform in attempt to get United Cerebral Palsy (UCP) to change its name* and (2) Reaching For The Stars' use of blogging, e-mailing, and online contact forms -- in combination -- to enlist parents and physicians in successfully securing language in the 2013 Appropriations budget for specific Cerebral Palsy research funding. My "A Tale of Two Hope Machines" series also covers some of UCP's successful forays.

More about tapping into selective (Part D.1) and collective (Parts D.2 and D.3) intelligence to come.

I'd say we're just scratching the surface as it relates to taking advantage of the hidden talent out there. And I don't think it'd be unfair to there's way more social media than there is social production. The latter is difficult. Choosing projects that are worth pursuing, having well-formed purposes, clearly articulating the benefits to community members to contributing, etc. -- these are tricky propositions. 

If our orgs passionately want to improve and get better, though, they'll want to explore and master all of the above. 

*359 supporters have signed to date

PRE-FIGHT: Let's Glove Up

Here's how my pea brain's mind's eye sees things:

ON ONE HAND

We have various organizations and institutions, for and not for profit, that are committed to fighting the Cerebral Palsy fight and improving outcomes as they relate to CP. 

To me, they look to be doing bang-up jobs: pounding away at key challenges and opportunities; landing their share of punches. Becoming...thanks largely to advances in fields like genetics and robotics and brain science...encouraged and emboldened -- even to the point of believing that theirs-and-ours is a winnable battle. Even in the previously inconceivable sense that CP will someday be both preventable and curable. 

I'm excited along with them. 

I'd be a lot more excited if I knew that their various visions were about to be realized, say, this week. Even a year from now would be a more than acceptable time frame. 

Unrealistic? Could never happen? 

Maybe. 

Who's really to say? 

At a bare minimum, I don't think it's too overly whacky to suggest that big things could conceivably happen in the CP arena sooner rather than later and that, furthermore, we all ought to open our minds' eyes -- wider than they are now -- to what's possible. 

ON THE OTHER HAND

Over the past few years, I've immersed myself in enough management writing to have at least a feel for who the more influential thinkers are and what they're thinking about. What interests me most is their work on helping organizations get smarter and better, faster. (much of which is intimately tied to disruptive technologies like cloud computing, social media, mobile, and big data)

How're they doing? 

They're figuring things out. They're making discoveries. They're experiencing some wins. 

Many of them are fired up about what's possible, too. 

I'D LIKE TO RECOMMEND

We in the CP sphere should take greater advantage of what those management gurus -- those business brainiacs -- have to offer. 

Why's that?

Because CP has been kicking our butts. 

No offense to any one individual or CP organization, but -- we need help. All the help we can get. Why fight with one hand tied behind our back if we don't have to?

The good news is that the products of those folks' energies and efforts are more widely and readily available than ever before. They're there for the taking. So, too, are the opportunities for making personal connections. Accessing them, and attracting them to us and our "defeat CP" cause, should be straightforward.

We'll have to strive as a group, however, to become more:

1. OPEN

At the risk of exposing my own biases and nincompoopery, I am (via this post and this blog) putting myself out there in hopes that someone will come along and help me become a better / smarter CP fighter. Our orgs need to follow suit. To "get back," we need to give. We need to offer up our challenges and opportunities, our responses and results -- the whole of it -- to critical thought and commentary. 

May be worth taking under advisement:

• We should resist believing we're on the right track and therefore in no need of new and different ways of thinking or acting. The truth is, our mental models, e.g., our strategies and roadmaps and visions, are laughably small relative to the enormousness of our challenges. 

• Like CP itself, the problems we face are complex. In the words of David K. Hurst, "good questions are (often) better than good answers." Wisdom begins with an admission of ignorance. 

• A lack of funding doesn't have to slow us down. Money's just one of many resources we may acquire, mobilize, leverage, etc. 

• Keep this in mind: “There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.”* The staff at SUBWAY this month is wearing t-shirts that read "Make Us Better / Take Our Survey." If the biggest corporations are looking every which way for better ideas, we should probably be doing the same.

2. FINDABLE/ LOCATABLE 

I hope to be able to use this blogspace to make our leading CP organizations more visible to leading management thinkers -- and vice versa. My little mission is to facilitate connections. Very-best-case outcomes, to my way of thinking, would involve collaborative problem solving and co-creation activities between both sides. (both "hands") To that end, I invite participation. 

So, for example, to:

• Cynthia @ Reaching for the Stars: If you want to share your views here about what you believe it'll take to build "a foundation of hope for children with cerebral palsy"; if you want to name your pains; if you want to go public with your lengthy "things to do" list -- either directly or indirectly through me -- you're more than welcome to!! 

• John Seely Brown and John Hagel @ Deloitte Center for the Edge: You wrote in The Power of Pull (2008) about "Harnessing Pull to Change the World," and specifically about mastering pull "at the individual and institutional level to achieve much broader impact in economic and social arenas." I welcome either or both of you to use this forum to teach us how to beat CP. Feel free, in other words, to stop by and solve our problems for us!!

There's also a Twitter component to this. It'll be devoted to more of the same (as above) but revolve around a particular, pick-up-the-pace goal. 

I want things to move faster. Way, way faster than we're generally envisioning now. Using a (crude?) boxing analogy, I hope to be able to look at the next year as if it were a 12-round fight -- with an intention of knocking CP on its duff by the end. As Chief Inciter, I'll report on how the fight's progressing and do whatever I can to influence things in our favor. My tweets and interactions will be directed at the level of the organization, but anyone's more than welcome to follow along @KnockOutCP.

CLOSING

`A la Ralph Waldo Emerson, David Weinberger writes in Too Big To Know (2012): 

We thus do not yet have any good idea of what cannot be done by connected humans when working at the scale of the Net. 

We truly don't know what can or can't be accomplished. 

So...

Why not get ready to rumble?

Round one's set to start on June first.

*quote attributed to Silicon Valley icon Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems)

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 9.0

The Power of Pull, initially published in 2010, just now out in paperback, is one of my favorite books of the last few years. In this section, I'd first like to overview it broadly-shallowly-quickly and then relate two of its big ideas narrowly-deeply-deliberately to Red Treehouse and UCP. 

Here’s how I see things unfolding:

9.1: OVERVIEW /KEY CONCEPTS

Thesis. “To get better faster at whatever it is you do, you’ve got to be supported by a broad array of complementary people and resources from which you can pull what you need to raise your rate of performance improvement.” 

Three levels of pull. Pulling is about accessing (searching), attracting (making serendipitous connections), and achieving (collaborating). The last set of practices entails participating in what the authors call creation spaces -- which are akin to Gartner’s collaborative communities. 

Success formula. Use pull techniques to: (1) define compelling trajectories for change, (2) provide leverage to the passionate individuals who are attracted to these trajectories, and (3) amplify the impact of these individuals. 

9.2: SHAPING STRATEGIES

"By grasping how pull works we can build institutions that can act as platforms to catapult change, and maybe even transform the world in necessary and far-reaching ways." 

Should UCP pursue a shaping strategy, i.e., should it attempt to reshape the CP arena on a global scale? Based on the BIG SKY PROJECT vision of the future for people with disabilitiles, is UCP already moving in this direction?  

Inquiring minds want to know. 

9.3: KNOWLEDGE STOCKS AND FLOWS

The authors contend that the sources of economic value are moving from "stocks" of knowledge to "flows" of new knowledge, and that we must "accelerate a shift to a very different mindset and to practices that treat knowledge flows as the central opportunity and knowledge stocks as a useful by-product and key enabler." 

What are the implications for UCP and Red Treehouse?

I can say already that the implications are huge. Our new ways of knowing impact everything these organizations do. In posts 9.3+, I'd like to look closely at UCP's Public Education & Outreach (PEO) efforts -- and then use that as a springboard for exploring David Weinberger's new book about "networked knowledge" (Too Big To Know) in section ten.

A Tale of Two Hope Machines, 8.5

Practically speaking, will it matter much if UCP and Red Treehouse don’t get a handle on social media? If they never master community collaboration? If they decide not to take all the steps Gartner would have ‘em take to reach the FUSING – or even the FORGING – stage? That takes a lot of work…

Why not just take a pass? 

To Ronald McDonald House of Cleveland: Red Treehouse is just one of your several initiatives and you only have a small staff to support it. Even still, I'd venture to guess you’ve had success growing your network of families, professionals, and organizations this calendar year. Social media's played no role. Why bother even dipping a toe in at this point ? 

UCP: You’re one of the larger health nonprofits, but you’re not some Fortune 500 giant in some crazy-competitive industry. Your reputation's secure. I’m sure donations are steady. Besides, your top priority is your network of affiliates: their work is mostly hands-on, face-to-face, and local. 

   

Either or both of you could opt out gracefully. You could “blame the tools, conclude that social media lacks business value, or assume your organizations simply aren’t ready.” In UCP's case it’d be simple as pie to say that it’s given Twitter (and the like) the old college try but decided to pull back the reins.

Maybe the wizzes at Gartner don’t know what they’re talking about. 
Maybe social media isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. 

In fact... 

*  *  *  *  *

JOHN KOTTER -- Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at Harvard Business School, author of 18 books, co-founder of Kotter International – THE GREAT JOHN KOTTER DOESN'T SAY A SINGLE WORD ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA in his piece about staying competitive “amid constant turbulence and disruption” in last month's Harvard Business Review. 

What he does say, instead, is that the organizational structures we’ve used in the past “are no longer up to the task of identifying hazards and opportunities soon enough, formulating creative strategic initiatives nimbly enough, and implementing them fast enough.” And, organizations need to come up with better ways of continually assessing their operating environments and reacting “with greater agility, speed, and creativity.”

His general solution, or antidote? Involve “more people than ever before in the strategic change game.” Do it in a way that’s economically realistic, i.e., that gives you the biggest bang for your buck. 

Specifically, Mr. Kotter introduces in the article his concept of the DUAL OPERATING SYSTEM: two separate operating systems running in concert, with the second one – a.k.a. the network – employing an agile structure "and a very different set of processes to design and implement strategy.” The job of the network...is to use volunteers (employees and others) to “liberate information from its silos and hierarchical layers and enable it to flow with far greater freedom and accelerated speed.”

Although he doesn't explicitly say it, I take it as a given that he’d be OK with using social media as a means to those ends. Social-media-enabled collaboration is inferred.

*  *  *  *  *

I find the similarities between Kotter’s dual operating system and Gartner’s COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITIES (“a communal structure within the enterprise”) to be remarkable. Both start with the proposition that organizations are being forced to “evolve toward a fundamentally new form.” Both stress the importance of getting smarter faster…

Even their pitches and promises are alike. Namely: Those organizations that get their acts together now (i.e., the ones that take the consultants' advice) will see immediate and long-term success. They’ll be more profitable. They’ll produce better goods and services. They’ll be more competitive. 

They'll win. 

Hmm. 

I wonder how those sorts of messages /promises would be received by the respective management teams at UCP and Red Treehouse. Would they resonate? Inspire? Excite? Would they compel either or both org. to keep exploring social media? To keep learning through trial and error?

I could see where they might miss the mark. Where they might be too removed, too abstract, and too much in the P&L language of business as we've known it --

It's partly because of that that I now want to move away from Gartner (and Kotter) and head in the direction of a trio of thought leaders who make similar and complementary recommendations, who offer their own unique twists, and who in many ways, IMHO, do a better job of getting to the simple essence of things.
 

The guys I have in mind -- John Seely Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison -- are big-time business consultants in their own rights. Surprisingly, though, they talk less in terms of "beating back threats" and "outracing the competition" and more in terms of using social media to: DO more. HELP more. ACCOMPLISH more. Success, to them, boils down to the choices and passions of each and every individual with a stake in a given organization.

*  *  *  *  *

It's a personal thing.

Our "new digital infrastructure," as they say, gives us unprecedented opportunities to live up to our potential. Individually and institutionally. If we passionately want to improve and get better faster at what we’re doing, i.e., if we care, we’ll explore and master the new tools and techniques. We’ll move outside our comfort zones. We’ll connect and join forces with talented others who have similar interests.

What advice would they give UCP and Red Treehouse? Being all you can be does depend on your getting a handle on social media. It does matter. Lip service isn’t enough. Dipping one toe in isn’t the answer. Real human commitment is. 

To me it's even more personal. MY DAUGHTER AND OTHER KIDS LIKE HER ARE COUNTING ON YOU to make the smartest possible uses of the resources (you're privileged to have) at your disposal. That's what this social media thrust is about. 

I'd like for you both -- I think it'd behoove management at UCP and Red Treehouse -- to hang in there and learn what the authors of The Power of Pull have to teach: how small moves, smartly made, can set really big things in motion.

*  *  *  *  *

Go fail. And then fail again. Non-profit failure is too rare, which means that non-profit innovation is too rare as well. Innovators understand that their job is to fail, repeatedly, until they don't.*

*from seth godin's BLOG, dateline November 30, 2012: "Non-profits have a charter to be innovators"