New Futures Circle

Southridge School, an independent school near Vancouver, B.C., was founded without a big gift, without a wealthy patron, without a feasibility study.

“If we’d begun by analyzing the ‘feasibility’ of founding a new school, we probably would’ve stopped dead in our tracks,” says Debbie MacDougall, one of the school’s founders.

“We wanted the school, so we just kept finding ways to bring it to life.”

Here’s a peek into a conversation I had with Debbie MacDougall about the founding of Southridge (one of many conversations I’ve had with her, as I worked with the school over the years and then enjoyed Debbie’s participation in my leadership program). I think you’ll find it well worth a listen.

[HTML1]

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, leading thinkers on business strategy, echo Debbie’s thoughts from their experience in business:

“Where fit is achieved (between resources and ambitions) by simply paring down ambitions, there will be no spur for such ingenuity and much … strategic potential will remain dormant. Tests of realism and feasibility must not be prematurely applied.”

If that’s true in business, it may be even more true in the social sector.

After all, the resources available to us are not a “given” that we can calculate in advance.

We’re working with the built-in desire to contribute, to invest ourselves in society, to make a difference. We can strengthen that desire by giving people a chance to bring to the surface hopes that they long to see realized.

So why let our initial hunches (or fears) about feasibility limit our imagination, vision, and enterprise?

Instead of trimming their dreams to fit their seemingly limited resources, Southridge’s founders trusted themselves.

They focused on what they had going for them and what they wanted. They tapped into their own deep stores of will and desire. And they stretched their aspirations far beyond their apparent resources.

This school doesn’t build a fireplace or tell a consultant to “think big” because it’s “loaded” with big bucks. That’s what makes its willingness to invest such a powerful example.

When Southridge admitted its first students, it was $18 million in debt.

I like to call it a “reverse endowment.” Some might call it risky, perhaps even foolhardy. But stretching toward the dream has worked.

While steadily paying down its debt, Southridge has managed to keep its tuition among the most competitive in the province, and its academic rank among the very highest. In fact, as early as its seventh year, it was named the best school academically in British Columbia.

Am I saying we can simply forget about being “realistic” and completely ignore the obstacles in our way, or the possibility of abject failure?

Well, I’m sure tempted.

Instead I’ll suggest that we can let questions of feasibility take a back seat for a while.

Doing so gives you room to make absolutely sure that you’ve taken into account all the things you have going for you: every single one of the useful circumstances that surround you, the entire inventory of the assets and strengths of your organization and its people. And that you’ve fully appreciated them, thereby increasing their value.

The confidence resulting from such a stance can attract audacious investments, as people come to see how your organization advances the kind of world they want.

At the same time, you can begin to let go of the notion that your organization’s potential for success is limited by forces in the world, community, or the field in which you operate.

Jim Collins, writing in Good to Great and the Social Sectors, observes that he encountered an interesting dynamic as he began to study the social sector, where “people often obsess on systemic constraints,” when instead they could move forward with what they can do to advance the kind of world they want.

If you do find circumstances that seem daunting, or perhaps even opposed to what you want in the world, you might see what happens when you ignore them. They just may turn out to be less important than you thought.

Or you might allow them to do what they did for Debbie and her fellow founding board members: evoke a sharp response and redouble their commitment.

Best,
Jim

(The text that follows the video of Debbie was adapted from my forthcoming book, written with Pam McAllister, What Kind of World Do You Want?)