Throughout many eras, people have used different technologies to tell their stories. We have painted with everything from chalk, to tempera, to gold. And we paint with our words. At work, language can illuminate intent or mask it. Our choice of words can lead to new understanding or deliver an exercise in duplicity. The first order of business, as illustrated in today’s stories: seek to understand before dominating the conversation with what we think.
The earliest evidence of illuminated manuscripts in Europe and the Byzantine Empire date from the 7th century CE. Manuscript production quickly became an important craft. As Christianity was a central part of medieval Western European and Byzantine life, devotional books were commissioned by religious organizations, churches, and nobility. In Islamic Spain, classical works from Greek and Roman traditions were produced in addition to religious works; thanks to the work of these early Islamic scholars, critical knowledge was preserved and expounded upon.
In the beginning, it was tough because people are not used to moving that fast. Our prior cadence was not that fast. We did not have a bias for action. Decision making could be overly cautious at times, resulting in inaction. We now have a disciplined, risk-managed decision-making process that emphasizes prompt action based on best available data.
What I like about the transformation effort that we’ve put in place is that there is a consistent methodology around how to identify an initiative, how to value that initiative, how to validate it, and how to implement it. It’s like exercising a muscle. We didn’t know how to do it at first. But we’re becoming more fit, and little by little, we’ll get pretty good at it. And we hope to transition this into a successful second phase of our transformation effort next year.
Scanlan: One of our main nonprofit principles was always to really focus on microeconomic sustainability. So, you build things that then are accretive for the community, not a crutch that, if you take it away, they don’t have a job anymore. …It’s a moving target, so what I really need to focus on is staying close to the community to understand what they are telling me, not what I think.
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