The Rut is a Path

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

― Martin Luther King, Jr.

It took a week to get the thethreesss urls (.com and .org) to point here. Technology is amazing, but what a time suck. I live to be in flow, but one thing I've learned on sabbatical is that we can learn as much if not more from being stuck, what George Leonard in Mastery calls "loving the plateau."

One of the great ideas I've had on sabbatical is called "The Visible Universe Project." It's kind of a Google Maps for time. I pitched the idea to a Google manager, who said he liked it and suggested that I develop it with a bunch of grad students, prove it has traction, and come back to him. That not what I wanted to hear. After putting everything I had into launching United Visual Arts, raising start-up capital while simultaneously quadrupling the revenue of the nonprofit I was also running (City Without Walls), and proving the concept behind my patent-pending defEYE® frame, including validation by the Museum of Modern Art no less, I felt like I already had way too much skin in the game. One of the many aspects of my stuckiness is needing to close UVA by year's end, despite having created something beautiful that has yet to see its day in the sun—other than a brief stint in MoMA's holiday catalog featuring a Marilyn by Warhol.

If you look closely at the image of the "Visible Universe" above, there's a pink curve that shoots off the top of the page in the center in a way that's different from all of the other data structures I plotted since the beginning of time. This is Moore's Law, or what Ray Kurzweil calls "the law of accelerating returns," predicting a singularity like the Big Bang that started it all billions of years ago or the Big Freeze that may end it billions of years hence (all also visible above). But this technological singularity could happen within a mere generation: a single, affordable, handheld device with computational powers many times greater than all the human brainpower on earth. This has been called a kind of "event horizon," beyond which predictions are impossible. Now THAT is a deep rut!

A friend of mine asked me to review chapters of a book he's writing about fundraising. From my years in the non-profit world, nothing seems more deadly than the work of development staff; they feel all the pressure and none of the rewards. My friend and his book, however, have allowed me to see otherwise: effective fundraising is the secret sauce behind all great social enterprise. With enough cash, you can accomplish almost anything; without it, mostly wishful thinking. One of his insights is that effective fundraising depends first and foremost on effective leadership. Now THAT helps me see beyond the rut.

My main feedback is that he needs to transform himself from a social-media curmudgeon into an apostle. Whatever the limitations of using these new media for fundraising today, it's all about relationships, and no matter how small or significant, every relationship in the future will be so mediated. As Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale (via Web 2.0 herald Tim O'Reilly) says, you've got to get in front of that parade. The most important "ask" in today's rapidly changing marketplace, as I learned today from Michael Schrage, is "who do you want your customers to become?" These changes will arise through storytelling, about which, even McKinsey & Co. recognizes, nonprofits (and screenwriters) can teach us a thing or two, and social media will be the primary vehicle for their transmission throughout society.

Hmmm. So let's put this all together: leadership, fundraising, and social media, with storytelling as the glue. A path appears from being present in the rut.