Blog Entry

Last month, I had the pleasure of meeting with folks from the Global Fund for Women, whom I met through Angus Parker. Over the past 20 years, the Global Fund for Women has awarded over $58 million to more than 3,450 women’s groups in 166 countries focused on social justice. I was blown away by their intelligence, their devotion, and the impact they’ve already made on the world.

We talked about ways that social media could transform how they interacted with their constituency. As is often the case with any group of smart people, the discussion flowed with possibilities. As we reluctantly began to bring our conversation to a close, the Fund’s Executive Director, Kavita Ramdas, said something that resonated strongly with me. She said, “We have a lot of young people in our organization who are familiar with these technologies. We should talk to them to find out how they’re using them.”

The essence of a smart organization is one that taps its own intelligence first before looking outside. Sadly, this is a rare attribute, and I’m always impressed when I see it, as I did with the Global Fund for Women.

As a consultant, this philosophy puts me in an unusual position, as clients often look to me for knowledge they think they don’t have, when in reality, it’s there. Fortunately, the beauty of having domain expertise in collaboration is that I can be collaborative in helping clients learn about collaboration.

For example, I’ve had two clients who hired me specifically to share some domain expertise. One of them was with the People for the American Way, which was in the process of franchising a successful voter engagement pilot project in Florida (now called Democracia USA) to communities around the country. Another one was with Digital Persona, a biometrics company that wanted to learn more about user-centric digital identity.

Although I knew a considerable amount about both topics, rather than start with what I knew, I started by leading each organization through a process that tapped into their own collective intelligence. And in both of these cases, the leadership realized that the wisdom they needed to move forward was already inside their respective organizations. Their collective knowledge exceeded any single person’s individual knowledge; they just needed to tap it.

Jorge Mursuli, now the Executive Director of Democracia USA, said to me after the project, “I don’t know how you did it, but we couldn’t have figured this out without you.” There are lots of different ways of tapping into an organization’s collective wisdom, but it starts with the decision to seek that knowledge internally in the first place. This instinct is what distinguishes savvy organizations from the rest. Fortunately, it’s an instinct that can be learned.

Categories: Stories