I was on a business trip with the Champions Team representing three organizations working in the third sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We chose London and Birmingham as our destination to seek inspiring experiences that intersect with the nature of work of different organizations represented by our team.
A week before the trip, the most urgent question for me was: Am I mentally and psychologically ready to embark on this journey and benefit from it as much as possible or not? Even until the last day before the trip, I was not fully prepared and ready to detach from the projects that had begun to accelerate in pace and the deadlines were approaching with the passing of days.
Despite all this, we launched on Wednesday (November 6, 2019) towards London, looking forward to what would broaden our horizons in the work we do, improve the outputs of the services and products we offer, and contribute to raising the efficiency and quality of the outputs provided by the third sector to various stakeholders we deal with.
The schedule of visits usually started from nine in the morning until five in the evening. The team operated with the visits like a beehive, coming together at organizations of common interest, and the team would split if visits overlapped in timing according to the different specialties of our organizations and coordination with the entities. The business trip did not exceed eight days, but it was filled with benefits, visits, discussions, and the questions posed by the team to the entities, along with internal consultations and ideas that flowed from the well of experiences we heard about. And because the moments and accumulated achievements in short periods need celebration (even at the level of mentioning and publishing them), we visited more than 20 entities in the third sector and held 5 workshops (both internal and external) and met with more than 30 workers and experts in the nonprofit sector who shared their experiences with us over the past years in the third sector in Britain, along with many other hours where team members discussed among themselves during the journeys to and from.
The collective yield of knowledge, experiences, relationships, ideas, and plans that we harvested (as a team) from this trip is very significant, but I would like to mention in this post what struck me the most and remains stuck in my mind, as sharing it will benefit others working in the sector, as well as serve me in the future and act as an incentive during times of waning enthusiasm and the succession of disappointments or feelings of weakness and the ongoing justifications for withdrawal.
Now, I will start listing the points with a simplified explanation for each:
- (Focus + Simple Practical Steps) x Continuous Development = Results with Impact
The most prominent feature repeated by the entities we visited, whether small or large, ordinary or professional, is the focus on a clear community issue and working to serve it through a number of paths and interventions (with different priorities) that lead to tangible results. Imagine that we visited professional entities in social work such as the University of Cambridge and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, and it was clear to them exactly what issues they were working on and the clear interventions with different priorities that lead to the change they aspire to create. I will not address here the benefits of focus as they are well known, but it is important to look at the factors that go hand in hand with focus, which are the rest of the equation I mentioned above. Focus will help in taking simple practical steps, and since a large part of the literature in the third sector is based on practice as a source of knowledge and theory building, it is important to be guided by the general determinants that must be considered in practices and to embark on building an independent experience that fits our context.
The last part of the equation is continuous development, which includes services, products, processes, operations, management mechanisms, and methods that the organization uses to achieve its goals and the individuals working within the organization.
Thus, organizations can achieve tangible results in the long term and feel a kind of internal satisfaction and realization that what they accomplish daily brings them closer to what they aspire to.
- Intrinsic Driving Desire (Very Necessary)
The common reputation about those working in the third sector is that they are individuals who were not accepted into private sector companies and found no option but to take “vacancies” in the third sector as a “job station” unrelated to their aspirations. Since one of the pillars of excellence in any sector is the quality and distinction of the individuals working within it who possess the ability, skill, and desire and experience necessary to steer its direction and develop its contributions. It is important to note that one of the main reasons people in the third sector in Britain continue to give is their internal belief that they were created for this work and that the return they seek is not only related to material possessions (money) but is fundamentally tied to the community they live in and of which they are part. This belief does not come overnight, but it is very important for a person to continue to give their best and face the flood of questions that will crash upon them every month from family and friends. The internal belief and personal drive are usually connected to your personal story and history and what you have faced in your life; perhaps the pain you faced at a point in your life is one of the motivators for your work, or perhaps it is something else.
The importance of internal belief is not only in confronting those questions, collisions, and obstacles; it will also drive that belief to creativity, innovation, and resilience to achieve something significant.
One of the most inspiring stories I encountered was a social enterprise that started with an individual providing a service to social entrepreneurs seeking guidance from successful practitioners and consultants in the job market by organizing advisory sessions between the entrepreneurs and the experts, ensuring the entrepreneur's readiness for the advisory session and monitoring the entrepreneur's performance after the session ends. The network of consultants includes over 20 advisors and practitioners from successful entrepreneurial endeavors across various sectors. The team working in that organization expanded to three individuals who connect, prepare, follow up, and monitor progress.
After we finished narrating their story and reviewing their achievements, we asked them how they managed all those works (here came the shock) and we discovered that they do not have an office to work from; all they possess are personal laptops!
Here it became clear to me that believing in the importance of what you do and having a genuine desire to make an impact will drive you to invent solutions to problems in order to survive, serve people, and achieve your aspirations.
- The “Excessive Idealism”
Which is akin to (the appendix)!
Many projects, ideas, and initiatives come to a halt due to the excessive idealism of their owners, and perhaps the curse of the poet who said:
We are a people who have no mediocrity among us *** We have the chest among the worlds or the grave
Still pursues us!
How often has excessive idealism stopped us and obstructed our projects and hindered our performance.
There is nothing wrong with a person striving to develop their work and seeking more excellence in their performance, but the danger lies in stopping actions within the framework of development that does not lead to execution.
Here, I must relay a phrase formulated by one of the young participants in the trip when he said (We complicate the work and then we sit!) Therefore, it is essential for someone who finds this type of “idealistic excess” in their organization's performance or initiative to not hesitate to excise it and start reaching their goals through simple steps that create maturity and awareness in a cumulative manner through experience.
Perhaps the main reason that led me to write this point is one of the programs we attended at the University of Cambridge, which targets entrepreneurs of social initiatives and provides various types of support for developing their projects, led by workshops. There was a resemblance between us and them in the topics presented for entrepreneurs, but we had a huge question mark before starting the workshop because it took us about 4 hours to present the topic (in the ideal form!) while it was presented at Cambridge in about “one hour” in a simplified and easy manner for the audience, without any complications or convoluted terms that muddle the brain and confuse the minds!
And this practice from a venerable educational institution was a signal urging us to reconsider how we present the topics we provide and simplify them to the extent suitable for starting work and not for a comprehensive knowledge building of a given topic.
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