And I am sure today will be likewise.
I was in meetings yesterday morning with folks from foundations, financial institutions, and innovative entrepreneurs discussing ‘capital for a cause’. It was amazing meeting people who are bending their universe with energy, advocacy, persistence, and risk taking. There are people tackling dementia care, health care, sustainable agriculture, and investors seeding early stage enterprises with unrestricted capital and years of advise.
It was most interesting for an impatient imperfectionist like me to hear of the remarkable patience that all the players have and the long view that they are living. They are bending their universe 1 degree at a time (rather than the bend it till it snaps approach I might favor). I learned and practiced the lesson of relentless incremental change 10 years ago but seem to have forgotten it so the morning was also a powerful learning experience.
It is a bit distressing to hear of the hurdles these players go though because of distrust. They need to craft unreasonable evaluation schemes and short term metrics that verify their immediate success while working in long term variable time horizons. Balancing anecdotes and data, social impact and financial returns, values and stakeholder expectations keeps them on their toes but it would seem to me that they could magnify their impact if they had considerable more autonomy.
Maybe we need a trust exchange instead of a security exchange.; A place where we can all invest in people that we believe in and let them do the risky, community benefit work in an environment where they can make enough mistakes that they learn better approaches every day.
Make Today Remarkable, by giving someone enough space to learn from their mistakes,
B
