Episode 281: Podcast 300 - Fighting a Failure of Imagination
I'm so honored that you would take a couple minutes of your day to join me, Randall, on this edition. A special one of a round with Randall. Today, as I record this. And at the time that you listen to it, this is episode number 300 in the Around with Randall podcast. That includes 19 special editions where we talk about the great philanthropists, and this would be number 281 of the regular weekly podcast, 20 minutes, maybe a couple of minutes more my Classroom, to talk about the different aspects of philanthropy, nonprofit challenges, one subject try to create solutions.
And as I did it, 200. Want to look at it a little bit differently and give you something more, hopefully aspirational, to think about. Just a few weeks ago, we, if we were paying attention, had the great joy of watching Artemis. And if you don't know what Artemis is, Artemis two in this particular case was the mission with four astronauts to go around the moon really for the first time since 1972 with humans.
And I've always loved the space race, the idea of exploration into that unknown Artemis triggered for me an opportunity to go back and watch one of my 4 or 5 favorite series, called From Earth to the moon was on HBO. Originally, it was produced and really driven by, although it was directed by other people, Tom Hanks. And it's the story of the Apollo missions, although the first episode goes back into Mercury and Gemini, when we were just starting the space exploration in the 1950s and early 1960s.
But what I really was taken by was in the second episode, which is about Apollo one, about something that was said after a tragedy. Apollo one, if you didn't know, was the mission that the three astronauts, Grisham, Chaffee and White perished on the pad at Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Station in a fire, and there was a massive investigation thereafter.
It set back the kind of the planning stages for nearly 18 months as they tried to figure out what happened. One of the unsung heroes, besides those three astronauts and American legends who gave their life, some would say unnecessarily, unfortunately, in all cases was a gentleman by the name of Frank Borman, for which you most people never, never heard of an American astronaut, colonel in the military was part of the review team from the astronauts perspective.
And he had a great deal of scientific background in terms of education, as well as being a test pilot and an astronaut. He was on the review panel, and he was called before Congress. And he has a unique perspective because he's still in the space program. He was going to go up. Congress was trying to figure out what happened, and they asked him, want to know, do you want to do this?
Is this something that you would continue to do you still trust the people at NASA? Basically, in the process, the equipment that you would risk your life to continue? And somebody asked the question in the hearings, how did this happen? And his response is what we want to circle ourselves around today. He commented that the reason it happened, and I quote it was a failure of imagination.
He went on to say that they had always thought about in the planning of the capsule, which is where the astronauts were that sat on the, on the, on the rocket that they, that Saturn rocket could explode, that there could be a fire. But they always thought that that fire would be in space, that no one had ever imagined that fire would take place on Earth.
And so all of their decisions on how to design that capsule, and if there was a fire, how they would handle it, was all based on the premise that it would be above the Earth where they couldn't get much help. It wasn't that the risk wasn't known, the risk was never imagined. And that if we think about this in the world in which we live today, not about the space race, but where are the holes about what we can't think about, what we don't take time to consider that in that moment, Frank Borman was really telling us all, if we pay attention, that failure in that case wasn't a technical one.
It wasn't a cognitive one. It wasn't a cultural one. Organizations, just like the Apollo one tragedy, are based on failures to consider what they don't think about, not about a lack of effort that blind spots cause us to not realize what's possible.
When we look at the importance of space and what we learn from it, but we don't talk about it. Today, I'm hoping Artemis brings back some of this ingenuity. This creative thought is, is that the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs were so ill defined in the beginning. They will tell you if you listen and read the transcripts and the history and read the books and watch the programs, it wasn't that they were guessing.
There was so much science involved, but they didn't have all the answers. So much so that when we think about Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins circling above, but Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon there on July of 1969, that before that, they were so kind of messed up in the sequencing that things weren't ready.
The Lem, the LM, the lunar module wasn't ready to go through its testing, so they had to redo Apollo eight, nine and ten in terms of their sequencing to get, you know, the idea of getting the Lem ready to go and be able to fly, as well as docking multiple ways. That exploration was about strategic structured risk. If we make these changes, what do we gain?
What do we lose? What are we putting on the line? But that risk brought us results. This is also something we don't talk about very often. When we think about NASA, that NASA's innovations have been estimated to save from a health care perspective, 450,000 lives with some of the things that they created, that it generated $5 billion in revenue from products, discoveries, technology that we didn't even know existed but had to be created, that it produced $6 billion in what I would consider cost savings based upon the fact that they were able to be creative and not be so long locked into such a narrow path.
Think about the things that came from the space race of the 1950s. 60s and 70s microchips started with this process. Where would our world be without that? Think about the first large scale kind of engineering of on board software airplanes used to fly by people holding it. This changed this. And by the way, also the remote ability to do it.
Much of the astronauts connection in terms of communication and the technology was a connection to Houston. Houston, we have a problem to the Johnson Space Center and that there were people on the ground able to control certain aspects. They had great pilots and astronauts above to do a lot of the work as well. Think about the advancement of materials, heat resistance when we talk about the reentry process and lightweight composites that we take for granted today, we also have the difference in telemetry, excuse me, and remote monitoring that we just think about the aura ring or the Apple Watch.
That was that telemetry and remote access I was talking about. Now it's just second nature militarization. Do you know that your iPhone or your Google phone has more technology in it than the capsule that landed, that went and landed on the moon? You're the life on more than that whole thing. How about water purification and the ability for us because they need they couldn't take that much water.
We have to learn how to do this. Battery and power management, human factors and ergonomics. How do we get people to be all of these things derive from this idea of creativity, of the idea of imagination. And yet the tragic moment of Apollo one was all based on the failure of it. How does this all apply to nonprofits?
I spend most of my time now working more strategically with this chief officer, the CEO of organizations, the board, talking about the trials and tribulations of their finances, and then the shifting nature of donors and how they're trying to solve complex problems.
Nonprofit organizations are about optimization of what limited resources they have, and then being able to apply them into solutions. This parallels the work that goes on that if we don't look to what we can't see may sound strange, then what we end up with is limited options. Regular, normalized, very traditional paths that don't maybe overcome the challenges that we're actually trying to beat to serve our community in a more meaningful way.
Things in philanthropy could be things like overreliance on traditional pipelines. We're under investment in digital new ways of looking at technology. Core arguments around the constraints we put on resources and its boundaries that we place upon ourselves and our thinking.
All this is to say is, is that there is a case for trying to overcome what Frank Borman said in front of that congressional panel, or hearing about not allowing failure to be the reason, or to be quantified by the fact we had no imagination. As I try to do in every podcast, I want to try to think about this, especially in number 300, around why, and then five things you can do to create more opportunity to see what may not be seen easily.
Really, this is about how to succeed. That the broader insight to all of this is, is that we need to challenge some basic things, or at least be willing to think about them. I never imagined that I would do 300 of these podcasts. It's not that I didn't think that that there might be some, but I have found doing this every week to be very joyous.
But on top of that, I never dreamed, never even thought about, never imagined the following that they seemed to have had, which I'm humbled by. Stunned around the world. And I have had to do some things just to keep moving forward on some communication and how I use it to have a little more access to where people are listening from.
And it's all over the world. It's Vietnam, it's Indonesia, it's Africa, it's China. It's obviously throughout the United States, it's throughout Europe and European countries. It's in Russia. It's in the Mediterranean. I'm stunned. And it's regular, which means there's value in what I'm doing here, which I greatly appreciate. The question becomes, what do I do to make it work?
Well, that gets into being creative, entrepreneurial, allowing Hallett philanthropy to be imaginative. And here are the five things I think you can use that I need to try to use more effectively in the work that I do in supporting my clients, as well as teaching in my podcast, my blogs and other things.
Number one scenario expansion. Have you ever thought about looking at your nonprofit environment? And by the way, if this could be for profit do and creating different tracks for what might be future states, even things that are maybe a little unrealistic or very unrealistic, and then asking what would be the reasons these would happen, and what would we need to continue to solve the problems that our missions drive us toward?
This one's hard because you have to think about the outcome, meaning a complete change in the way we deliver what we do. I'll give you an example from history. If you were in the 1880s or 1890s, you're not going to find a lot of people that say, yeah, let's imagine that there are no, there's not a need for horses and wagons, and we're going to have another type of invention or vehicle that doesn't need a horse that moves us around in different ways and more locally, not like a train from long distance.
Or how about the trains sitting there and looking at going, what happens if something happened where like people could get from place to place faster? Those are two examples of the car and the airplane unimagined in terms of how you would describe them, but that maybe something isn't needed or it's going to change. How could you look at what you do in that way?
If you're in food, could you look at it and say, what happens if the way in which we get food changes? What happens if someone creates some type of and I think of Star Trek or, or Star Wars where there's like a food producer in every how would we handle that? Or that there's one kind of food that is nutrition enough to feed millions.
Or education. Think about the changes that we have where you don't actually go to class. If you do it online, what can you do to create 3 to 5 scenarios that are about expansion and how you serve that in each one of those circumstances? Number two is constraint removal. So remove core assumptions. In pure fundraising. It could be well we don't do events anymore.
We do. All our major donors aren't around. How would we deal with that? One that I think of is the changes right now, which I don't think we have answers to. But I'm going to give you something to think about is annual giving. We've mailing and emails. And what happens if GoFundMe becomes the future of annual giving? How would you handle that?
Maybe it's changes in the way we provide health care. An interesting conversation today in this all relates back to how we fund things around delivery of health care. Should everybody be wearing an aura ring or an Apple Watch where they're where their results are sent back to? Either, you know, some type of care provider, your primary, your, I don't know, think about the changes in health care that we didn't even think about ten years, 15 years ago, that we would have surgical centers that are taking business out of hospitals or in education, that we have a lot of people that don't want to pay big dollars to go to campus anymore.
But we have all these big buildings changing housing. There's a phenomenal number of stories around doing housing at absolutely fractional cost of what we think of traditionally with one of two options. Number one, there's a company in Texas that's doing it around concrete, and it's kind of 3D printing with concrete. There are others that are building out prefab houses, like they ship in like pieces of the house and put it together.
It's it can be done in, you know, reduction of time by 50, 60, 70% and at a cost at pennies on the dollar. How does that affect how we how we house people? Or if you're a nonprofit that does that, you design options from those constraints. Can you build out number one scenarios? And number two, can you remove the constraints that we seem to be bound by to create what Frank Borman talked about the answer to a failure, failure to imagine of imagination.
Number three is external pattern borrowing. So what am I talking about here? Go look at other industries. How does technology industry with its fast moving, you know, changes affect a food insecurity nonprofit. And I don't mean what technology can be used. I'm talking about how they change minute to minute to serve the needs of their clients of the industry.
Maybe you want to look at and I this was I'll give credit to the book check checklist manifesto and the authors Gawande that he took what's happening in airplanes, the ability for them to know exactly what they do when there's an emergency or a circumstance, and there's checklists about everything. You see it on television, two pilots sitting there, and they go through a checklist.
We have to do a, B, c, d, e, f, g, h, I all these things so that we know exactly what we're doing in circumstances into the operating room. So we have less strange, unknown results. Maybe it's consumer behavior, I don't know. But translate patterns of what organizations do outside of our nonprofit industry in into things that we might be able to learn from, to create those scenarios, to remove constraints.
Don't worry about the tactics. Worry about the patterns. The third or fourth excuse me, is structural dissent. Can you identify someone in your organization who literally their job from a strategic doesn't mean they're contrary. It's part of their role is the person who, or maybe several people in one's assigned in each meeting to challenge everything in a plan.
But that won't work. Here's why. Have you thought about all too often we're looking for uniformity or unity in our outcomes, and I'm generally okay with that. But how did you get to that? Did you have somebody who was a contrarian in the meeting who, by design, is questioning everything? Think about your planning. If you had someone who could literally place negativity around that plan or this plan, how would you overcome it and force a group to think about things differently?
That would help in terms of thinking about not being so dependent on the past, forcing adoption of change, and to create scenarios that we can't even think about. Frankly, it's one of my favorite roles. It's kind of what I do in consulting. You're doing X, but you want to do better. Here's how. Here's how we can do that.
If we fight these basic things you've been doing in the past that don't work. The fifth and last is what I think of as prototype thinking. Try lots of small things. Jason Jennings is a famous author who talks about, and I use him in my strategic planning process that I do with clients around the idea of small bets that you take as many small bets as you can.
And that's what this really is all about, is that it's fast. Small, imperfect ideas lead to greater options, and it may be only 40% of something works, but it's a great 40%. Let's get rid of the 60% that didn’t and go from that new 40% level to get to higher levels of success. Treat imagination in this process, these small little bets, options, opportunities as something you build normally that they're regular, that we ask our employees to do, how do we be creative in what we do every day, and not wait for someone to tell us what we've got to do something about it.
If you do these five things, if you really create scenarios 3 to 5 kind of futures, that what would we do? You remove the constraints or the ideas of things that we think of as core. But we have to now adjust that. You look to other industries and creative thought processes and the patterns that they use, that you have someone who is always trying to dissent a little bit respectfully around, hey, if we didn't do that.
How would we adjust? There's someone who's really trying to challenge what's going on and what we do. And the fast is the last is excuse me, is fast, quick, small bets to see how we can move forward. If you do these five things, you will reduce what Frank Borman talked about, about the failure of imagination.
And in doing so, the greatest risk that we have is not failure. I think that's what Frank Baum was trying to tell us, its failure to see what's not actually visible, because if we can't adapt to it.
If imagination defines the boundaries, then leadership should be about expanding our sights about what might be. And I think the stagnation I see in a lot of nonprofits in trying economic times and changing economic times, is failure of imagination. And what I would really like is not for nonprofits to look back when they're either changing massive in their mission or failing altogether, and never knowing who Frank Borman actually was, saying, well, if we just didn't imagine that, we might have been able to fix it.
Push your envelope. Be willing to try something new. Don't accept the status quo. And that's how you'll have the kind of outcomes NASA did that we live with every day that make our lives better. And what is the meaning of philanthropy? Love of mankind, the value of nonprofits, making the world a better place. That's what we're truly interested in.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at HallettPhilanthropy.com two per week right to your feed. I'm also stunned by how many people are reading those, to be honest, and from where they're reading them. Hallettphilanthropy.com/blogs. And if you'd like to reach out to me with this edition or any other, it's podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com to tell me what you think or if you’ve got a subject. Let me know. We live in these times where I think nonprofits are undervalued, but always more needed than it serves as that gap is always talk about between the for profit world and the idea of free enterprise, which wants to do things only for profit and government, which isn't that efficient in between its philanthropy nonprofits, we're trying to fill those gaps.
We have a responsibility, if we can, to think about how the missions that we believe in could look a little bit different in execution to serve what might be coming in the future. Which brings me to my all time favorite saying. Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen. And then there are those who wondered what happened.
And what I can tell you is those who watch what happened and wonder what happened. To have failure to imagine the possibilities some of the time. But people who make things happen challenge the status quo. They're willing to look at it outside the box. Sometimes that's hard. That makes you maybe you a contrarian, but what it does is provides organization with less invisible challenges, less invisible hurdles that you might have to overcome.
I'll look forward to seeing you the next time right back here on episode number 301. As we continue our journey to learn more about the nonprofit world, one subject at a time. But next time, right here on Around with Randall, make it a great day.