Watch the Episode here

Listen to the Podcast here

Many social change organizations struggle to bridge the gap between the values they claim and the actual practices they employ. Achieving true values alignment means they must navigate deep humanity, conflict, and even the shame that arises during transitional periods. In this episode, host Corinna Bellizzi sits down with Genevieve Smith, an organizational effectiveness consultant and founder of GV Advisory. Genevieve shares how her original approach as a “professional bummer,” who facilitates difficult but necessary conversations, has developed over time. She explains how drawing inspiration from preschool classrooms and using tools like the community garden metaphor can help teams get unstuck, build trust, and move from panic to practical solutions.

About Genevieve Smith:

Genevieve Smith is an organizational effectiveness consultant using a facilitative approach to her work with foundations and nonprofit organizations. She collaborates with companies on organizational effectiveness efforts, staff and board retreats, and helps them navigate conflict and grief. Genevieve’s work tends to make the most sense for organizations in transition who have big questions about how to move forward and what to leave behind. You can read about her services at gv-advisory.com.

Guest Website: https://gv-advisory.com

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gvadvisorygv/

Resources Mentioned:

• The Revolution WIll Not Be Funded, INCITE!
• The Success Spectrum, Eugene Kim (of the collaboration gym): https://fasterthan20.com/workout/success-spectrum/
• Creative Destruction, Liberating Structures: https://www.liberatingstructures.com/creative-destruction

Show Notes:

• 00:00 The Evolution Of A “Professional Bummer” In Organizational Effectiveness
• 05:48 Navigating Massive Transitional Moments And Organizational Crisis
• 10:52 The AI Disruption: The Danger Of Polished Plans Over Rough Drafts
• 16:38 Grappling With Wealth And Philanthropy In The Social Sector
• 25:53 Power Sharing Vs. Abdication: Explaining “Power Under”
• 34:51 Tending To Acute Organizational Grief And Leadership Departures
• 39:42 The Myth Of Neutrality: How Everyday Actions Build Or Erode Trust
• 47:53 Getting Unstuck: Practical Tools And Experiments For Staff And Leadership

BUILD A GREENER FUTURE with CARE MORE BE BETTER
Together, we planted 36,044 trees in 2025 through our partnership with ForestPlanet. We screamed past our goal of planting 20,000 trees thanks to subscribers like you!

NEW CAUSE PARTNER FOR 2025-2026 SELECTED!
If you value open dialogue, sustainability, and social equity, I invite you to support our new cause partner — Prescott College. To learn more about this effort and to support the show, visit: https://caremorebebetter.com/support/

Follow us on social media:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/caremorebebetter
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@caremorebebetter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caremorebebetter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CareMoreBeBetter
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/care-more-be-better

—

Getting Unstuck: Facilitation, And The Work Of Values Alignment With Genevieve Smith

The Evolution Of A “Professional Bummer” In Organizational Effectiveness

Welcome, Regenerators. Each episode, we explore the intersection of sustainability, justice and regenerative thinking so that we can build a better future for people and the planet. Our guest was also my second guest on the show. That’s way back in the early days when this show was getting started. Genevieve Smith joined me to talk about being a self-described professional bummer. The person willing to ask the uncomfortable question, when everyone else in the room wants to feel good about the work that they’re doing.

Since then, Genevieve has evolved her practice to help social change organizations get themselves unstuck. She facilitates the conversations that are too big, too tangled, or too full of conflict to move through on their own. This helps the teams that she works with navigation organizational, grief, power sharing, and the gap between the values on the wall and the practices in the room. Join me in welcoming her back.

—

I’m glad to have you here, Genevieve.

Thank you for having me back. Good to be here.

It’s been years since our first conversation. What shifted? What do you think about your work since then?

It’s so wild. Congratulations on the show. That’s so cool. It’s interesting because the heart of the work is the same. When you and I met, I’m still a professional bummer, but I had a lot more fun now. It was a little bit more serious back then, but when I first started my business, I was focused on data and impact measurement in social change or organizations. The professional bummer thing came out of the, “We’re saying we don’t want to be extractive or we’re saying we don’t want to surveil people,” but we’re collecting all of this information that we don’t need and is extractive.

I quickly found out those are hard conversations, but because they feel like, “You’re telling me that I’m a bad person because you’ve said something about how I’m doing my job, but not the best way.” Since the last time we talked on the show, I’ve been following that thread of these conversations of values alignment but also navigating the shame that comes up and the conflict that comes up. There are deep humanity in the frustrating parts of the work, which might be something about values. It might also be like, we’re all working to eliminate poverty or all working to further racial justice. We’re hasting each other.

I can’t look my colleague in the face. Working with organizations to balance with some organizations I work with called the Touchy-Feely, which is that like conflict navigation. Navigating organizational grief, which I can say more about, but balancing that with practical solutions design, and being able to say, “There is a process that could be easier here.” It’s wild how much of it is not reinventing the wheel. It’s like helping focus and see, a lot of this and you’ve learned so much over the course of your career, over the course of an organization existing.

Let’s go back to that learning, which requires spaciousness and a whole other host of conversation about trust. The heart of the work is very much still the same but now I describe it as organizational effectiveness work. More and more, I borrow from preschool teachers constantly and by the end of my career, I’ll be wearing colorful overalls, probably.

You reminded me of a couple things. One, is that I’ve been a part of a group who is focused on meditating and working through past traumas, through a variety of means that include, in some cases, plant medicine too. Some of the integration work that we’ve done as a group involves playing a silly card game to disrupt our thinking. That type of work is what is needed in many cases to break the ice and get people to think differently and be creative. Even just have a smile on their faces because they’re going to be able to think more creatively when they have entered that more creative sphere. That childlike, but not childish behavior.

When you say you borrow something from preschool, I’m not surprised because it feels like that’s what sometimes needed to disrupt people from their patterns and get them to think a little differently and be accepting of what might be termed as criticism. It could just be like, “This behavior serves you negatively.” What it does is distance your other co-workers and make them not want to work with you as much. How can we fix that? How can you reframe it in such a way that they’ll hear you as opposed to taking it as criticism or an attack on who they are as an individual?

That speaks to me. It also has me reflecting on something else, which is a bigger question I’ve had about when you get called in to work. I have been in an organization that grew rapidly and where it seemed like the company was losing its soul like on a precipice, in a way of no longer living the values that they would hold dear. I wonder if that’s typically when you get the call. How does that work?

Navigating Massive Transitional Moments And Organizational Crisis

Right before we got on I thought this might come up and I was thinking about how to describe it. First, I wrote it down. I loved this like childlike, not childish thing because there’s something also where it disrupts this idea of professionalism, of like, we have to get it right, look at a certain way and behave a certain way, which like does open up a lot more spaciousness. It’s funny and I’ve come to appreciate how often I come into a room. There’s always people who are looking at me like, “Who is this dorky dad asking me to go on a time travel field trip?”

By the end of it, they’re usually the folks who like saying the most creative wild thing. That’s fun, and honestly, it’s also been healing for me because it’s helped me shed a lot of the like, “I’m a consultant and I’m smart. I look this way. I have all of these degrees,” which I don’t. I never said that I did, but this is like posturing a thing that happens in this work a lot. I appreciate that. I usually get the call when folks are in. Sometimes, I get a call before, but it doesn’t happen super often.

Power Sharing Vs. Abdication: Explaining “Power Under”

It’s usually when people are in the middle or at the very end of a really big transition. The call is usually something along the lines of, “We think we need this thing, but also, our founder and CEO who was here for 30 years just left or is about to leave or our board chair just switched over. Our senior leadership is all gone and now we have a completely new type of leader. We don’t know what we need.” It’s often that big transitional moment.

I’ve been getting calls too from folks who are saying things like, “We just lost a staff member who passed away suddenly. We’re also experiencing a lot of movement grief just because so much funding has dried out for social justice work.” It’s a plethora of things, but folks rarely know exactly what they need which is perfect for this work. We had a big leadership change. Now, we’re thinking about, “What does leadership accountability look like at the organization?”

We know this is an opportunity. We’re used to working this way. We’re pretty sure we need an org restructure, but we’re not totally sure. That gives us space to say, like, “That might be the answer. First, let’s tend to some of the tension under the surface, some of the wackiness.” It’s usually when people are a little bit in crisis and definitely in transition

I know that you’ve described your work as helping organizations answer questions that feel too big to answer. I can think about a moment like a fearless leader that has been in that seat for 30 years, vacating it. Any number of ways would make that a big question like, where from here? How from here? What does a question like that look like or even sound like when it’s coming from the organization’s work?

What are we going to do? Sometimes, it’s a question and sometimes it’s a series of very panicked sentences like, “I don’t know where this thing is going to go. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Being able to work with folks around like, “What do we do next,” is way too big of a question. There’s a difference, too. The folks I work with are often trying to work collaboratively across the organization. When an executive director comes into a room, panicked and says, “We’re not doing enough to help all our local nonprofits who are losing funding. I don’t know what to do.”

That colors the room. It influences the room and even if staff do have ideas, they’re like, “You’re super freaked out. Your job is to be the smartest person here. I must be simplifying it in my head, so I better be freaked out.” That doesn’t always happen but this is the domino effect of panic getting diet, which is very well placed. People come by those feelings incredibly honestly. That’s why working through the care piece of it first, to be able to say, “What are we afraid of? What’s the stuff that we need to tend to? What’s the other stuff they can’t figure out later on? What are the ten questions that are underneath what we do?

There might be something about knowledge retention. There might be something about org structure, interim leadership or leadership training and transitions. There might be something about capacity and skills mapping, but we can’t get there when somebody’s super freaked out. We got to tend the freaked outness first.

The AI Disruption: The Danger Of Polished Plans Over Rough Drafts

A major disruption and a lot of this type of work has come from an unexpected place. I never saw technology as potentially replacing people in this role. If you have people using ChatGPT as their counselor, what happens when an executive director is afraid to say they don’t know the answer in a group? Are they turning to ChatGPT or are they turning to AI to try to come up with some of these solutions? The question asked in a different conversation, I’ve heard that some are. I wondered how that impacts your work.

It’s interesting because in some spaces I’m not seeing it at all because the use of generating AI would be counter to the organization’s mission. There are some organizations like this for the first time, because for my work it’s taken a little bit longer for AI to start to touch the edges of a lot of my work. Not long ago, I walked. I facilitated a big retreat for a foundation and in my recommendations for organizational effectiveness that we’re doing together was, “I don’t think AI can touch this.”

This is super normal. It can be hard to navigate conflict or have rough draft conversations, their work out loud or disagree with each other. They were doing exactly that. They were turning to Claude or ChatGPT to audition what they wanted to say in the room and then saying the more polished idea in the room, which the compassionate side of me, the compassionate facilitator or change part of me is like, “None of us want to feel stupid.”

If we’re in a group where there’s a lot of critique and it’s hard to work openly. I got a workshop for my thing and it’s the same as 5 or 10 years ago, folks not working out loud. I have a PowerPoint deck that is completely polished. It’s been a lot of coaching around like, part of our culture work is saying the draft thing. It’s like saying half of the sentence and saying half of an idea out loud and learning how to work together on that. This summer was the first time I ran into that.

I’m hearing it and that could also be a great more challenge in a way because as you were leaning into this conversation. If you come to the room with a two polished plan, in the middle of a crisis, then people don’t feel like they have the opportunity to give feedback. It feels like it’s something that’s being done as opposed to something that is inviting comment then buy-in can suffer. This is getting back to organizational theory, like what it takes to manage people and move through change.

It is helpful. At least all your so-called commanders or managers or whatever you call them within your organization. If they are able to come in and be open and honest with feedback, if you are inspired that type of culture, then you’re going to get a better plan in the end. Certainly, one better than what ChatGPT or clock could come up with.

I think so. My big thing about it is like if we put data centers and exploitation aside for a moment, which is a funny thing. My big thing about it too is like it doesn’t make our assumptions or our thinking clear. It’s hard to communicate like, “Why does the organizational chart look this way or why do job descriptions look this way?” How did you come to this decision? So much of the work that I do is rooted in like, let’s map. Often, I use a community garden metaphor framework, unifying theory that my dear friend and colleague Gabby Fitz and I have been working on for a while. She runs Think Twice Consulting. She’s wonderful.

That’s a lot of knowledge mobilization work with social change org. We use this community garden metaphor. Before we can plan or design the garden, we’ve got to have a good sense of what the climate is, what the season is, and what the local weather is because not everything grows in the same season. Not reactive is right for the same season. Across an organization, leadership is going to be experiencing an organizational season which might be like this moment of organizational change completely differently than line level staff or associate level staff.

Being able to like align on where we are, because I feel like we’re in a spaceship. An operations associate might feel like they’re in a horse-drawn buggy. If we’re making decisions from the spaceship level, that’s my big thing too with how quickly everything will look through something like ChatGPT. It’s like, “What was the thinking behind this? Where are the assumptions? Have we tested them?” I know that they can frustrate folks sometimes. I often tell clients when we first start working together like, “You’re going to get tired of me asking what you mean by that, but we’re going to get real specific and it’s going to feel slow.”

Now, you work primarily in the not-for-profit sphere at least presently? When we initially talked, you were trying to cast your net a little bit broader. What has that taught you?

Grappling With Wealth And Philanthropy In The Social Sector

I was a year into the business and I just moved to New York City. We were mid pandemic. I was like, “I do what?” That panicked question that a lot of executive directors are asking. I started thinking, is it possible to do this work with non-social sector or non-philanthropy organizations?” I don’t think I gave it a super honest college try. I don’t know if I’ve run that experiment in a rigorous way. We’re going to find efficiencies and our work but that’s not the point of the work. My own political education has grown and continues to grow in my own anti-press practice.

The social sector is where I tend to live, but it’s interesting because foundations like the folks providing a lot of the funding, philanthropy is so weird. There’s so many different types of foundations but it’s also an interesting conversation about wealth. Ultimately, so much of the wealth that’s sitting in endowments in foundations was created through private sector usually incredibly harmful profits. Some of the money is real old and comes from land theft and enslavement. That’s a big conversation in parts of the field. It’s like, have we tended to and grappled with where the wealth comes from and what that means for the work? What does that mean for proximity to that wealth?

I was like playing with that idea and I turned around and dove even deeper into the social sector. A lot of old money in those foundations. I also find it a bit frustrating that in many endowments, they essentially are only spending their profits. The money that might be sitting there always grows. They’re only spending through some of the profits, not all of it. They might have a billion dollars. I’m just throwing a big number out there, but they might have that much.

Even some of the endowments for universities are like that, too. They have a significant endowment and they don’t ever want to dip into its prior balance. They’ll only be spending the surplus from that year. That means that wealth generates wealth. This is a problem that results in the transfer of wealth from the lower echelons of society to the higher too. We’re stuck in that mess. I understand and I appreciate where you’re coming from in that.

I also recently interviewed Wayne Purcell on this show. He represents a not-for-profit for essentially animal welfare. We were talking about the barred owl versus the spotted owl. What the government has a third plan is to kill 450,000 barred owls in the Pacific Northwest over the course of the next few years because they’re usurping some of the territory of the spotted owl. The thing is, they are almost the same size. They look very similar. They have the same testing sites.

If you’re eliminating enough of the trees in the area that you’re going to be reducing the territory anyway. It was all related to timber, basically. One of the surprising moments from this conversation is that some very large not-for-profits in the Conservancy space including Sierra Club were all for the plan. I’m looking at this from the outside and going, “How is this company living their values?” There is this reality within the not-for-profit space too or non-governmental organizations where they get to a certain size and they stop acting as much like a not-for-profit. They start acting more like a for-profit business in certain capacities.

In this case, I wonder who from the timber industry got to the Sierra Club, which is what it feels like. I wondered if you could comment on that type of a challenge, how we understand as the public, when we choose to back a company. When we choose to give our hardened dollars that are frankly usually coming from the lower echelons of society and not from these large endowments. How do we choose who to partner with so that we might help these organizations who are doing great work survive times like now when they’re funding has disappeared?

That’s a big one. It’s so wild. It’s important to start with a comment or several answers/more questions in response to that. Nonprofits are in a tax code and I’m not a tax code expert. Nor am I fundraising. I’m not an advisor to philanthropy. I don’t spend time and be like, “Here’s where I think you should give your money,” because I have a lot of opinions on that, which is mostly like mutual aid organizations that are outside of 501(c)(3) tax code. That’s the important thing to remember because one of the things and this happens both like with the general public, but also with nonprofit staff.

We expect nonprofits to do the work of liberation and they can’t. I love nonprofits. I’ve dedicated my whole career to nonprofits. No shame. There’s a great book called The Revolution Will Not be Funded. There’s a lot of attention that I see in an organization around values alignment is also a misunderstanding or a misalignment of expectation of what work can give you. Tons of great work and tons of important work gets done by nonprofits.

Sometimes, we expect them to be like the perfect being and have the perfect beings or the perfect entity and have the perfect beings who are completely infallible running these organizations when nonprofits are incentivized to behave in certain ways because of funding agreements, because of the tax code, and of so many different things. There’s so many organizations who can do incredible work and should be doing that work.

This is completely my own opinion but I do think we tend to expect way too much from these organizations. These organizations were not built to see the world and they can’t by nature. In philanthropy, being one of the more violent arms of capitalism. There’s a lot we can do. There’s a lot of resources we can move and I’m saying this is somebody who works with philanthropy. I, for one, think philanthropy shouldn’t make this.

That would be great because that would mean that we were taxing wealth. This amount of wealth is barkers. As you mentioned in the intro, building a better future. What would it look like if the wealth to create philanthropy just never existed? What if we just never got there? We had some other series of arrangements for needs to get met.

That’s a pretty radical idea, my dear.

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable saying that out loud. The people who hire me know that.

Essentially, you are saying well should not exist. We, as a society, put people on a pedestal much like we put a religious icon on a pedestal, and that is a problem. The first patriarchal, hierarchical ideas essentially lean in that direction. There are those that simply say, “The sheeple needs someone to follow,” but a decentralized way of sharing power could be at the center of something like this. Let’s talk about power, understanding it, sharing it, and seating it, which I know is something you talk about. You help organizations understand that their power exists, how to share it, and how to see it, and how to let go of some of it. Ultimately, why is that work so hard for us?

The pedestal thing is a big wealth and our culture at least here on the stage. We have this worship of the rugged individual and the hero narrative. The bootstrap narrative of like, “I did it on my own. This is what greatness looks like.” Rather than like, “There were generations and generations and entire communities that made this happen,” whether they wanted it to happen or not. That’s part of it.

When I was a young girl, I had this feeling that all power is that. I’ve worked more with leaders and the nonprofit sector tends to have the excuse femme in women. A lot of femme leaders are scared of their own power because power is bad. It’s like, “I should share all of my power. Everything should be collaborative,” without that collaborative skill necessarily. What’s been surprising about the power work, is part of that is helping people see.

Power is not inherently bad. Power is a tool. If we understand where the power comes from, how our own philosophies of what power and leadership look like, we can leverage our power in responsible ways hopefully. I’m still in my own journey of understanding all of the different types of power and sources of power. What’s been helpful is not only thinking about power over, power with co-power but also thinking about all of the different sources of power. Whether it’s dominant culture like, “I’m a White femme and I present to you very feminine.”

That gives me a certain amount of power in some rooms and it takes away my power in other rooms. If we’re part of the dominant religion, or able bodied, or have an invisible, or chronic illness. All of these different things. Income and class is a big one here. Understanding all of those or trying to understand all of those, that’s a lifelong thing. Something that I’ve been exploring has been this idea of power under which is a woman named Kai, who is also a practitioner. I can’t think of her practice name, but she introduced me to this idea.

We talked a lot about power over and what tends to happen is leaders want to share their power. They want to cede their power or funders want to see their power. They say, “Here’s all the money. Here’s some of the money. You figure out what to do with it.” That’s often well intentioned but how people tend to experience that is an abdication of power.

It’s like, “I need you in the room. I need you to help me work through this.” This idea where they’re a lot of folks trying to give up their power or step back or being in a listening mode. When they remove themselves entirely from the process, the process just holds. This idea of power under isn’t super interesting and super helpful for my work in 2025. It’s hard because it’s personal.

Help us understand what power under means. Give an example, because people might be confused. I’m still a little confused.

Thank you for asking. Power under my looks, say I am a CEO who wants my organization to be highly collaborative and to co-build a lot of things about the organization with me between org structure to job descriptions to process and because I want to be collaborative, I have staff have all of the conversations about it. That, on its face, is generous. It’s important. It’s important for staff to have space without leadership.

Without me in the room, being able to say, “Here’s what’s possible. Here’s what’s not possible. Here’s my feedback. Here’s what we can do together.” If you’re part of staff, you might come to me and say, “Genevieve, we figured it all out. You let us answer these questions for a couple months and now here’s our plan.” I, being the one with the relationship with the board, being the one with a picture into organizational finances and a picture into legal requirements. I might say, “It’s not going to work.”

That is a good example of something like, “I wanted to share my power but I took myself out of the equation.” I didn’t want it to be power over, so I overcorrected and it ended up being covered under.

They didn’t have the contexts that they needed to arrive at the right plan essentially.

We do this thing where, whether I’m the one with the wealth or I’m the one with the most power in the room. There’s this over correction of like, “I won’t be a part of it.” That’s also not helpful. It did involve understanding, but does that make sense?

It sounds to me like, if I was just summarizing this, it would be like under-powering the people you have power over by being absent.

Yes.

I also think there’s like healthy ways to go about that process where you step out of the room and then come back. Again, it’s the same story of if the plan is to bake. You need it to be set like an early jello before it gets completely solid and sliceable. It’s like, “We got all the ingredients together. Here’s what we’re thinking. Can this work? Could we stress test this together? Where are we?” Bringing that further integration with, “Financially, we’re dealing with this dress and here’s something the board has been sharing with me as a stress point for the financers of this business.”

If we don’t answer that at the same time, we might be left without a company. Something as plain and simple as that. If we look at it as getting the ingredients together and enabling and empowering your team to come with the seeds of what the plan will be. You can then inspire creativity without essentially quashing their ideas too early while they’re still in that brainstorming mode. That’s the typical thing that I see with a leader that is a little too controlling of their teams. They will back down a couple ideas that come up. That may not have been the best thing, but they might have been the precursor to the next great idea. Since you put them down, they’re not going to openly share the next thought.

Exactly. It all plays into psychological safety and trust. With these power dynamics, if we take it up a level from the organization, that also happens with some funders who say, “We want to move away from the funder making all of the calls for the organizations who are the ones who know their community. They’re a part of the community.” Again, there’s that like, “O kay.” You can’t get a hold of them. It’s not happening everywhere.

These are extreme cases but it’s been interesting because when we open up a conversation about power, we’re often thinking about power over mostly. That’s often what comes to mind. To be able to pick apart and say, “Power is everywhere.” Everybody across the organization has some level of power like more junior staff might have primarily obstructive power. Which means they might not be able to like advocates if at the C-suite level, but they can sure dig their heels in and make sure something doesn’t happen, which happens a lot in social change organizations because a lot of folks come from organizing our advocates.

Execution and implementation are essentially halted.

If they don’t like it’s not going to happen. It’s an ongoing conversation always. It’s something that I always think about too with my own power as a facilitator and a consultant. I also hold a ton of power when I come into different rooms. I’m coming in and out of rooms. It’s something that I’m consistently thinking about too. I try to open up those conversations with the staff that I’m working with and be able to have that. We’re not just talking about your power dynamics. We’re also talking about things like, “If I’m messed up or if I overstep or if I’m being domineering or any of these things, how do we have that conversation and work through it?”

Tending To Acute Organizational Grief And Leadership Departures

Now, many of the situations in which power comes up are also during regime change or when an organization is confronting organizational grief, like the loss of a founder. A founder can just suddenly no longer be with us. That is something that’s hard to plan for, especially if they happen to be fairly young like the hit by a bus idea. Anything can happen and probably won’t, but if the organization hasn’t prepared for what happens when and if, it can be incredibly disruptive to an organization.

They can almost seem like they’re a bit adrift. Nobody knows who holds the power or how to reconnect and rebuild in this moment that is also grief stricken. I wondered if you could take that as a thought experiment and share this territory that you work within and how you might work through something like that.

If it were to happen or preparing for it to happen?

If it suddenly happened. You have a sudden loss of a founder of one of these organizations that might have 100 contributors at the company. There are people who have obviously shared power but now they’re fearless leader is suddenly gone.

I think about starting that in a couple ways like parallel. It’s like tending to the incredibly tender moment of grief and that everybody grieves differently. Some folks may have been close to their founder. Some folks may have been hired last week and have no idea what’s going on. They feel like they’re grieving wrong because like, “This is weird.” There’s the performative stuff that comes up when an organization loses a person. Being able to not necessarily diagnose or assess that, but being able to make space for it.

Not in a way that’s like all 100 people have to go through grief council but making sure our folks are getting what they need with boundaries too because the organization can’t tend to every single thing a person needs. With the folks that I work with, I would imagine this is true of many founders, but a legacy of incredible activism and incredible advocacy, like big wins and different movements or in different policy wins.

Being able to look at that through the lens of like legacy is crucial. That’s the emotional piece of it. There’s also the piece of like, “Who’s running things? What’s going on? What decisions need to be made now?” I love community agreements, but being able to have community agreements to be able to say, “We all care for each other and we know this is a tender moment. Do we have permission to shift into what’s the admin that needs to get done? What’s the compliance stuff that needs to be done?”

Make sure like nothing falls through the cracks, but not in a callous, we’re not thinking about this person a way, but the details of that admin work that needs to happen. From there, thinking about the big question that we talked about earlier, “What’s next? What can you make sure not change at all? What can you stop?” That’s a big question that I ask folks. What can you pause? In the garden metaphor, it’s the compost.

It doesn’t mean you’re not ever doing it again, but what are the things that you can afford to pause and take a breath, focus on the essential work? Can you all align on what those things are? Guaranteed, people are not agree on what those things are. The other thing that I try to attend to is we can’t control how people are feeling and we don’t want to try, but a lot of fear and uncertainty comes up. Is it going to happen to my job? I don’t know if I can ask my manager because my manager is close to the founder and they’re breathing.

Being able to say things like, “Here’s what we know and here’s what we can communicate to you.” There’s some stuff we don’t know or we have to work with the board. Having that stability throughout a moment like that is crucial. I think about it in phases like the acute grief moment, the transition like fog frankly that folks might be in. They will be like, “A year from now or eighteen months from now, what is the organization going to look like? Can we start to move more strategically? That’s off the top of my head how we think about it.

The Myth Of Neutrality: How Everyday Actions Build Or Erode Trust

I wanted to go back before we close to reflect on this comment that you made in our first interaction when you leaned on this concept of nothing being neutral. Has this idea of all for you or shown up differently in your work since that connection?

It’s evolved in terms of its gotten deeper. I still believe that nothing is neutral like the way we move through the world, the way we move through space. At that point, it was about how we manage or don’t manage our data and knowledge all matter. At this point, nothing is a neutralized idea. Some folks roll their eyes and they think it’s very precious. It isn’t about overthinking or being stressed out all the time about, “Everything needs to be perfect and I have to be the virtuous something,” because that’s also buying into the raging individual. I can change everything about my own culture.

When it comes to things like grief, when it comes to things like organizational structure and conflict, the way we navigate those things matters. Those are opportunities to build or erode trust. There might be some books or something I haven’t read that would change my mind on this. I don’t think things have a neutrality during transition, especially. These are moments to build or erode trust. This idea that nothing is neutral, and we can move with kindness. That’s a professional bummer idea and brought up to be like, “We say we want to move this way but we’re moving this way.”

My work forces me to be so honest about my own stuff, which can be frustrating sometimes but it’s good. An addition to it is that it’s not the same as nice and they’re we can move through these hard moments with kindness. That doesn’t mean that we’re hiding in this politeness or respectability or passive aggressiveness because I don’t want you to get mad at me because I can’t handle that. What does compassion and care look like in these more rough moments?

Where do you see organizations still hiding behind neutrality?

There are so many organizations that are still saying things like, “We’re not political, so we’re not going to jump in on that one.” I will say the organizations that I work with even if they’re board feels that way, like they might be in a rural conservative area. They feel itchy about funding an organization that supports trans youth.

The staff that I work with have done a great job of saying, “It’s not political. These are kits. These are kids that need help.” That’s how we move forward. A lot of folks in leadership, and with deep proximity, close proximity to wealth, some are still hiding behind neutrality. My big thing is, you can call it neutrality but that’s all what it is. You’ve made a very clear choice. I don’t end up working with a lot of these folks.

There’s a couple of examples that come to mind from recent history, one of which is Dolly Parton. Dolly Parton just passed. She was able to uphold a public perception of neutrality even while she supported incredibly progressive thought by giving books to underprivileged children, millions of books away.

Standing with the queer people that she employed and choosing to never speak ill of anything in the trans world, just as an example. She did live her values. Yet, people learning about how she might have been critical of some of their politics have taken that very negatively. It’s a very interesting thing to me that you can know a person in one way, but not know them at all.

Especially these highly public figures. I am a huge Dolly fan. That was very big news. This is the other thing about our own relationships to power. I don’t know because I can’t speak for her or for her context, but making a bunch of assumptions, that’s a good example of getting clear on who I am, how am I going to use my power, and this is the thing that I tell organizations all the time. The founding donor was super anti-immigrant so doesn’t want to fund immigration justice. That sucks and your staff is pissed, but that’s donor intent. That’s the organization you’re with, so just say it.

When we’re facilitating that conversation, that’s much more spacious, but that’s a big thing too. Name it and move on and be clear about your rationale. This is the thing too with expecting institutions to answer a lot of these problems. They’re boundaries and if you’re wringing your hands about that boundary, let’s change it. Going back to the power thing. That’s something that I end up talking about at organizations a lot. It’s like, “It sucks that we can’t do this.” I go, “Who makes that decision?” Often, it’s staff.

It is pretty incredible. I do this, too. We got stuck in routine and these pathways, but projecting my own thing on Dolly Parton. There’s something there about getting super clear on who you are, how you’re going to use your power, how you’re going to use your resources and sticking to it. Also, I’m not playing a savior because it takes all of us.

If any star could have become a billionaire, it would have been her and she chose not to be. There is a deep ethic there. Something that people don’t understand if they’re just coming from the outside. I have tremendous respect for Billie Eilish for calling that out. If you’re a billionaire, why?

It’s so much money. I have my own things like money stuff. I think a lot of us get weird about money, I certainly do, but I can’t stop thinking about where the wealth came from and how much damage, whether you personally or the institution that you work for, has to do to make that much money.

It was built on the backs of other people and that’s the reality.

Quite literally. I’m so grateful for being able to learn from a lot of indigenous folks in my life around, “What’s wealth? Let’s be clear about this.?” What actually is wealth? Its community, land, health, and relationships and it’s, I know who to call if things go South. Philanthropy shouldn’t exist.

Getting Unstuck: Practical Tools And Experiments For Staff And Leadership

I didn’t expect this conversation necessarily to take this turn but I also think it’s clear that nothing is neutral. We can rest with that. I want for you to be able to provide people with some closing thoughts. Namely if they are in an organization that feels like it’s stuck. Let’s say they’re not in a position of power to be able to hire you but they might be able to execute their own influence and a direction that could make the world at their company just a little bit better. What would you say to them if they feel stuck or if they feel like they’re not able to step into their own power? Also, if you were that business leader and frustrated, it seemed like you were seeing that you were stuck. How would you advise them to potentially start the road to get unstuck?

Two sides of a coin. For staff, first, make sure you know what you’re aligned in the sand because what tends to happen is like, “If only they would listen to me or if only they can make this change.” That can lead to burn out. Being clear about what you’re on threshold is around pushing on it. Being able to ask questions. One thing that’s helpful comes from Eugene Kim, who runs Faster Than 20 and does a lot of collaboration work.

He’s got a tool called the Success Spectrum. It helps us define failure of a certain initiative. It helps us to find minimum success, which is that all of these things have to happen for this not to be a failure and then target success, which I find helpful when folks are stuck and feel like they’re not a lot of power. Being able to say things like, “Let’s get clear on what would be cool if it happened, but I’m not going to lose my job over it.” I know what the expectations are. Often, when we get stuck, we’re not in alignment. We might be using the wrong words. Somebody might be saying, “We’re not an organization.”

Another person may be saying, “We’re a paying organization.” You might be saying, “I don’t know what this organization is.” Being able to align on that stuff is helpful and asking those questions like, “What needs to happen for us to move forward?” For leadership, honestly, leave the building and go for a walk. If you’re having conversations with staff, do it in a beautiful place. That might sound super touchy feely and super very superficial, but it’s part of why I push all of my retreat work to be outside of an organization’s office because similar to the play thing.

We’ve got to get outside of our usual environment to be able to start to see what’s possible. The last thing I’ll say on this, get a little Sci-Fi about it. Get a little weird. Do what I in trouble. Put on stand for that and say, “I know this is crazy but what if?” Give each other permission to say they bonkers things out loud for half an hour and then come back to reality and see what that unlocks.

A fun experiment that I took part in an entrepreneurship class at Santa Clara University. It was to create the worst company in your specific sphere. Flip it on its head. What would the worst company in our space look like? Throw all the negative thoughts out there. It helps you see, first of all, that you’re not that bad. It can get you thinking creatively because you’ve just created something that’s this awful, terrible place to work. It might reveal a couple spaces where you’re not too far from that terrible. You’re like, “We need to put some attention on this particular area because we might look a little bit like that peg.”

I love that and it’s similar to an exercise I do with folks. Where it’s like ten minutes. What are all of the counter-productive behaviors that if somebody was starting an organization like yours? How are they going to make sure that they fail and in the next ten minutes we go back to that list. Which of these do you guys do? It gets a lot more quiet. We then say, “Pick 3 to 5 things you’re going to stop?” There’s also this idea of like, “We’re going to fix it all at once.” I love that.

We could talk more about all of these things. One thing I will want to come back to is that reading list that you give us, The Revolution Will Not be Funded. Who is that by?

That is compiled by an organization called INCITE!. It’s so good. It’s a hard read for people working in the nonprivate sector, but it’s helpful.

Hard reads are often what we need to work through sometimes. If there’s also any other tools that you like to recommend, I think you mentioned another playbook you like to use.

The Success Spectrum is a good one and then the exercise I described is called the Creative Destruction, put together by Liberating Structures.

Are there any other spots you’d like for people to engage with your work?

I don’t think so. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I’m always happy to make new friends.

Thank you so much for joining me. This has been my absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me.

—

Frankly I have always enjoyed my connection points with Genevieve. I feel like she gets me thinking a little bit differently, too. That’s often what you need when you’re working through a challenge. You need to understand a different perspective. You need somebody to collaborate with who can help you attack a challenge from a different angle, offer a different perspective or even get people around you thinking a little bit differently.

I encourage you, if you are confronting change or if you have a need that seems like Genevieve could fit, reach out to her. She’s simply a joy. Before we go a word about the show’s cause partner, Prescott College. This is where I’ve just completed the requirements for my PhD. I got that lovely email in the mail saying the degree has been conferred. It’s done, signed and sealed and not yet delivered. I’m waiting for the actual diploma to grace my walls.

They have been doing this business for 60 years. They’ve supported the growth of future leaders in a co-learning very experiential environment helping individuals navigate exactly the complexities that Genevieve works with every day. I’m proud to support them. I do provide them with a monthly $60 donation in honor of their 60th anniversary. If you’d like to follow suit with me, you can find details at CareMoreBeBetter.com/Support or simply go to Prescott.edu. Thank you, readers now and always for being a part of this pod and this community. Getting unstuck usually starts with one on his conversation. Perhaps someone like Genevieve. Go have it. Thanks.

Important Links

• Genevieve Smith on LinkedIn
• Org Effetiveness & Facilitation For Social Change Organizations
• Nothing is Neutral: How To Talk Across Political and Cultural Divides with Genevieve Smith – Previous Episode
• The Revolution Will Not Be Funded
• The Success Spectrum
• Creative Destruction
• Touchy-Feely
• Think Twice Consulting
• Inspired and Enraged: Wayne Pacelle on the War on Wildlife – Previous Episode
• Sierra Club
• INCITE!
• Prescott College
• Support – Care More Be Better