Category: Local

From “data for good” to “data for impact”

Posted on by NationSwell Team

In order to actually deliver impact through data science at scale, what needs to change across our sector?

At a recent data.org event, we convened social impact organizations, funders, and data science leaders to explore ways to address this challenge. We sought participants’ insights and gained a clearer sense of what it will take for data to be accessed and applied for good.

What follows are three calls to action that emerged from our conversation. We believe that realizing these calls would catalyze a shift toward scalable, sustainable, and genuinely community-driven projects that help the social good sector use data science to realize impact.

Deepen our commitment to understanding the problem

It’s easy to fall for the flash and glimmer of a new AI solution — but we can’t stop there. We have to deepen our understanding of the problems that we are trying to solve, and our commitment to working with the people and communities that experience real challenges everyday.

This might seem like a small shift, but it’s seismic. It pushes us beyond thinking only about the mechanics of a technical solution and instead challenges us to ask how new technology can change the balance of power in favor of people and communities that have been systematically excluded or harmed.

To be clear, passion for new technical solutions isn’t bad. Many problems we face in the social impact sector do require innovation and creativity. But simply having a new approach doesn’t guarantee actual impact. Our metric for success cannot simply be that we delivered a solution.  That solution must meaningfully contribute to reducing suffering or improving equity.  ––

Doing this isn’t easy. It requires technical experts to diversify their networks and engage with humility. True understanding of social issues cannot be done without community experience and  partnership. Creating technology far from the community it purports to benefit rarely works. Instead, we must partner with communities to develop solutions that are responsive and designed to scale in the real world.

Funders play a critical role in shifting the focus from novel solutions to actual impact. Much of the innovation funding ecosystem currently focuses on building new things instead of investing in long-term capacity building and problem solving. As solution builders, it can be easy to lose focus on the impact you seek in favor of amplifying what will be most attractive to funders. Change makers and funders bear a joint responsibility to honor the complexity and context of the problem at hand and continually seek to deliver impact, not getting distracted by a desire to over index on what might be considered the shiny, data-driven technology of the moment. Disciplined focus on what specific problem data science is helping you understand or address at any one moment in time is essential when unlocking the power of this technology. Without a disciplined approach, the use of data science can be distracting and potentially dilute or derail your impact.

So, we must follow the problem. And one of the things we might learn as we follow it is that the problem is not solvable because of a single data science method. For people coming from data science backgrounds and engineering backgrounds, that means that you might actually have to admit that you maybe aren’t the biggest part of the solution. And that reflection, and the maturity around that reflection, is absolutely critical for figuring out what you can do, for figuring out an angle in, for figuring out an approach or an impact model that actually does speak to the real problem. You have to identify what problem it is that you are capable of solving and find true product-impact fit.

While following the problem seems intuitive, it is inherently very difficult. But it’s urgently necessary if we want to advance and truly use data to drive impact — rather than just giving rise to pilots that explore emerging technologies. As social impact officers, implementers, and funders, we must honor the complexity of the problems that we seek to solve, and be committed enough to fall in love with the actual problems themselves.

Build the muscle for iteration

Advancing our sector also means seeing and supporting projects through to the very end, to where people are applying it to their everyday lives or organizations. It is much easier to build a new product and get it to a Minimal Viable Product stage. But then, to deliver on the impact, you have to actually use the product over time. You have to build the muscle for iteration.

Embracing iteration helps to solve one key challenge social impact organizations face: a lack of clarity around the metric for which they are optimizing. In profit-driven business, it’s much more straightforward: Does a new recommender algorithm, for example, increase engagement, conversions, and then revenue?

But for social impact organizations, measurement and agreement on what the key metrics actually are can make this messier. Building a muscle for iteration means you commit to actually looking at the outcomes of deploying a new method, and that you’re able to regularly and reliably measure those outcomes at a reasonable cost. And like building muscle in the gym, this process requires trial and error — and an ongoing commitment.

Funders have traditionally taken a very linear, more short-term approach to supporting solutions — providing resources to get to the end of an initial pilot, for instance — but the messy nature of achieving impact goals demands that we should be embracing a more iterative mindset and approach. Common case studies for success — like BlueConduit’s data driven approach to helping Flint with its water crisis or GiveDirectly’s efforts to use data science to target cash transfers for COVID-19 relief — all reflect an iterative narrative, reinforcing the ideal process of idea, implementation, and success, with funding and governmental support at every step of the journey. However, those seamless journeys are the exception, not the rule.

The reality of driving impact outcomes is more like life: unpredictable and requiring constant course correction. Imagine an exciting new algorithm that promises to solve hunger in a community. We might expect there to be funding to build the algorithm, have the paper written about it, get press published; but, when it comes to working through the application of it with 20 non-profits with different use cases, we may realize that the algorithm will need continuous refining, and that the exercise of testing and refining will take us in new and unexpected directions around how to effectively serve diverse neighborhoods — or, at worst, that no one needs the technology in its initial form, and we’ll have to go back to the drawing board and build something fundamentally different from the initial solution.

That’s where our current systems for funding and support can fall apart. So, we need solution builders and funders to anticipate and embrace the 2.0’s of the project, the 3.0’s, and beyond. Only through the creation of Minimum Viable Products and its testing phase can we understand that component of the problem statement that we can effectively influence, improve, predict, or make more efficient.

Build capacity and human systems — not just new tech

Sustaining and scaling data science for impact requires a deep commitment to capacity building and technical education. This capacity building must happen across the ecosystem, from implementing organizations, through to funders.

At this stage investing in the capacity of humans is probably the most powerful thing that we can do to move along the transformation curve. Because humans and systems are what actually move the needle on solving problems, investments in human systems ensure that innovation happens at scale, rather than just one thing at a time.

Katharine Lucey, who leads Solar Sister, is a perfect example of what you unlock when you invest in the humans and internal capacity behind a solution. With data.org’s support through the Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge, she invested in making sure she had data experts on her team and the budget to support them in the long term. As a result, her work in supporting local women entrepreneurs in Africa who work with clean energy has become a model for how data science can help steer social impact. That evolution is the direct result of investments in capacity.

As another example of building capacity of partners: The Center for Global Action devises a system for locating and measuring poverty. But the step that actually helped people in poverty was getting money to them, and having policy makers who understood this system and could adapt it and move it through. So the CEGA system of data measurements for poverty was important, but only in as much as it enabled a sophisticated, human-driven administrative process that was actually distributing money.

At the end of the day, it will be our subject matter experts who understand the complexity and the context of the challenges faced by the communities seeking to solve problems in their neighborhoods. We have a responsibility to make sure that this type of thinking, learning, and tooling is available.

How do we train more? How do we implement more for more people?

As problem solvers, and funders of problem solvers, there needs to be more consideration of the patience of capital — especially when we’re talking about product-impact fit — and learning around how to fund product roadmaps. We need to be asking not just, “What can the technology do?” but, “How do we train more people? How long can they sustain this work? What else do the people doing this work need? How do we build interdisciplinary teams that have the data skills, technical skills, community insight and subject matter expertise of the problem?”

Funders or impact partners shouldn’t be afraid if any of this sounds overly ambitious or daunting: it’s just a different mindset, and different set of knowledge to acquire. We can all do this together — but to do it, we must change how we build, fund, train, support, and lead the sector moving forward. We must move from being solutions-focused to being problem-focused, from launch-focused to iteration-focused, and from tech-focused to capacity-focused.

These challenges require all of us —innovator, funder, and implementer alike — to contribute. They’re complex challenges, but it’s exactly what data.org was set up to do. For practical information and inspirational ideas to help social impact organizations use data science to solve the world’s biggest problems, check out data.org’s public resource library.

A fireside chat with Joseph Bae, co-founder of ‘The Asian American Foundation’ and co-CEO of KKR

Posted on by NationSwell Team

Greg Behrman, NationSwell Founder and Chief Executive Officer, interviewed Joe about the inception of the organization, the challenges it faces, why this is personal for him, and the impact the organization is already celebrating. This is what he had to say.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell: Thank you so much for talking to us today. Tell us the origin story of the Asian American Foundation.

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: The origin story is a fascinating one. It starts with Jonathan Greenblatt, who runs the Anti-Defamation League, one of the country’s leading groups focused on anti-hate and discrimination. Jonathan and the ADL have a sophisticated infrastructure set up to track hate speech and violence towards not only Jewish people, but other marginalized and minority groups.

In March of 2020, when Covid first hit, Jonathan reached out to a few leaders in the Asian American community and said, “Listen. I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of our tracking of hate speech, harassment and bias directed at Asian Americans. It’s just spiking through the roof.”  A lot of that was likely because of Trump’s rhetoric around the “China flu,” and blaming China for the pandemic. It really sparked a lot of the negative anti-Asian sentiment across the United States.

But the most meaningful insight that the ADL shared with us was that when you see this kind of spike in hate speech against a community, it is almost always followed by a meaningful spike in physical violence against that community, like we saw after 9/11 against the Muslim American community.

So Jonathan called to tell us that this was likely to escalate and that this was going to happen at scale.  He was nervous for the Asian American community because we don’t have an equivalent infrastructure in the United States to, say, the NAACP for the Black community or the ADL for the Jewish community.   And as he predicted, we started seeing these one-off incidents of Asian American elderly people being attacked on the streets, an Asian American woman who had acid thrown in her face, or people getting spit on in the subway and buses. Stories like these — hundreds of articles and anecdotes shared on social media — were popping up all over the country.

That was really the kernel of this idea for creating TAAF: that we needed to build for the first time an infrastructure to go combat this immediate crisis. There were six initial Founders of TAAF, and we all got together for three days in July 2020 to start planning and debating what the core issues were that our community was facing.  What were our community’s inherent constraints and challenges?  How should we prioritize building a more robust infrastructure for the community?

The most immediate thing we all agreed upon was to basically incubate and fund an Asian American version of the ADL’s Hate Tracker so we could monitor incidents across social media. Our goal was to leverage the ADL’s experience for the next two to three years, to build the necessary expertise and knowledge, train local community organizations, and focus on Asian American hate crime tracking to proactively engage with local law enforcement and the FBI, engage with the media to get the most effective press coverage when bad things happen to members of our community and ultimately support victims of these crimes.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell: How does your personal story connect to the foundation? Why are these issues so personal to you?

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: My experience as an Asian American reflects much of the Asian American experience, whether you’re a Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Indian. We’re 6.5% of the population of the United States, but more than 60% of all Asian Americans and more than 70% of all adult Asian Americans were not born in the United States. So I think a big part of the constraints and challenges our communities face is that we are largely an immigrant community that came to the US in the last generation.  Not only is the AAPI community incredibly diverse and fragmented, but we simply have not had enough time to get organized and develop the social, political and philanthropic infrastructure to serve the needs of the community.

My kids are going to grow up differently. This past summer, I had all four of my kids at home during the COVID lockdown. We were eating three meals a day together. We were talking about what was happening to the Asian American community. All this discrimination. All the violence. And my kids, who were born here, had no idea what the broader Asian American experience had been for the last one hundred and fifty years. They had no idea what the Chinese went through with the Exclusion Act, or what the Japanese went through during World War II, or what the South Asian community went through right after 9/11. So I used lockdown as an opportunity to talk to my kids at the dinner table about our history every day.

A big part of the reason we feel like outsiders is because our kids who are Asian don’t understand our own history in this country. It’s never taught in the classroom or in public schools.  You never hear about Asian American studies. And there’s this “Model Minority” myth in this country which likes to characterize Asians as the successful minority, the poster child for what good immigration looks like. We supposedly don’t need any help as a community, we’re so successful, we’re lawyers and Ivy League grads.

But the reality is the vast majority of our community actually is not doing well. Asian Americans have the highest poverty rates among the elderly in New York City of any racial group.   Our community finds it incredibly difficult to access social services or government relief funds because of language and cultural barriers. So while the Asian American Anti-Hate Tracker is our immediate priority, there are broader needs within our massively fragmented community. There’s no national scale. Organizations in the Asian American community are very siloed. Today, there needs to be a different kind of organization that can help bring together big ideas, that can be a national, convening, organizational voice. That really was our starting point for how we thought about what our priorities need to be.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell: Is your approach informed by experiences of discrimination or difficulty in your professional or personal life?

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: My whole family was born in Korea. We moved here in the 1970s. My parents didn’t speak English, and I went to public school out on Long Island. And I was one of two Asians at the entire school. We did not have the kind of diversity that we strive for now. And, things like playground racial slurs, bullying, all that stuff was common. And immigrant families didn’t really recognize that as a problem — the big focus was on assimilation, on fitting in and now drawing attention to yourself.  Growing up in that timeframe, you really felt like an outsider in America.

My mom is a social worker. She has spent her whole life helping provide access to social services that many Asian Americans don’t know how to access.  She was a counselor for domestic violence victims in the Korean American community because so many of these women don’t know how to access social services, or speak to counselors or therapists. I think a lot of these shortcomings and challenges facing the Asian American community were very real to me growing up and was an important motivation for me to join TAAF.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell: I know that the foundation is young, but what accomplishments and achievements are you celebrating?

Joseph Bae, KKR, Asian American Foundation: When we started, our Board members personally pledged $125 million over the next five years  to get TAAF up and running. Our plan was to do some incremental fundraising, so we went to friends and family and other like-minded non-profits or foundations to see if they would be willing to support TAAF as well. But what became very clear as we started these conversations with leading foundations, philanthropists, and corporations was that AAPI issues were really not on the radar screen for any of these organizations. In fact, AAPI non-profits and causes receive less than 1% of all the funding provided by foundations and corporations.

So we morphed our fundraising effort into something called the AAPI Giving Challenge where we talked to hundreds of companies and asked, “How are you thinking about supporting the Asian American community as part of your DE&I  and philanthropic budgets? Many of these companies have a massive number of  Asian Americans workers. What are you doing for them? What’s your strategic plan to support them?”

We told them, “We’re not asking you for money for TAAF — what we really want you to do is to be able to commit for the next five years a certain amount of money in support of whatever causes within the Asian American community that you decide. But we want a commitment of resources.”

Ultimately, we circled around $1.1 billion for the AAPI Giving Challenge among some of the biggest foundations, corporates, banks, and consulting firms. But if we could raise $1.1 billion in six weeks, there is no reason to believe that number can’t grow to over 10 billion dollars over time. So we’ll continue to reach out and hopefully unlock more resources for the Asian American community.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell: What is most helpful to support your organization during this leg of your journey? What would bring the greatest value right now?

Joe Bae, KKR, The Asian American Foundation: We certainly can’t do this by ourselves. So whatever project or initiative we decide to prioritize, we’d like to be the convener and organizer that brings together key stakeholders and partners to the table.

One example of this is the massive vacuum in public education around Asian American history and studies, which is critical to understanding that Asian Americans are an important part of the fabric of this country.  This requires governors, state legislators, teachers and Asian American advocates to work together. Recent success in Illinois, New Jersey and California are promising green shoots. It’s not going to be easy to get to all fifty states on board, so our educational advocacy efforts are one place that we need partners.

And then there’s cultural narrative, where Asian Americans are stereotyped in a very specific way beyond the model minority myth. We are not the leads in tv shows — we’re usually the geeky tech person. We’re certainly not associated with being great athletes. So we’ve partnered with a lot of content creators on the West Coast and in New York to help change that narrative, to help get the world to see us a little differently.

Lastly, we’re really just scratching the surface on our Giving Challenge. We need corporate CEOs and foundation heads to really start engaging in a conversation about how they can better support their stakeholders who are members of the Asian American community.

Greg Behrman is founder and CEO of NationSwell. Joe Bae is Co-CEO of KKR and co-founder of The Asian American Foundation. For more information on TAAF, visit their site. For more information on KKR, visit their site. For more information on NationSwell’s Institutional Membership, visit our Community page.

Learnings from our ‘Selflessness in Practice’ event on caregiving

Posted on by NationSwell Team

That’s never been truer than it is now, two years into a pandemic that demands so much of our physical, emotional, and mental energy. According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control gauging the toll of the pandemic on caregivers, 70% of adults in caregiving roles reported adverse mental health symptoms like depression and anxiety.

But organizational leaders can make a difference if they begin to see the workplaces they lead as a place to create systems to support working caregivers.

In a NationSwell conversation with caregiving expert Dr. Jean Accius, Senior Vice President of Thought Leadership for AARP, NationSwell member Paurvi Bhatt, and MSNBC’s Rich Lui, author of the new book “Enough About Me,” these leaders and experts highlighted the unexpected ways that  workplaces are well-positioned to provide caregivers with compassion and dignity, and how performing small acts of selflessness can chart a course towards making our own lives more satisfying.

Here are some of the most compelling insights from the digital event:

Model compassion towards the caregivers in your workforce

Compassionate conversations about caregiving start with a business’s leadership. Shifting the tone at the C Suite-level by raising awareness and conversations in meetings can help employees to have the courage to talk about it directly so that the middle managers feel more comfortable and empowered.

Don’t just support your caregivers — learn from them

Caregiving is a transferable skill set — and your organization stands a lot to learn by amplifying and listening to the voices of caregivers. The ability to narrate, to be an advocate, to multitask and laugh through hard times are all qualities that could benefit organizations and society more broadly, and are all qualities that the leaders of the future will need to embody.

Familiarize yourself with the business case for supporting caregivers

Beyond the ethical imperative to support caregivers, businesses and organizations can also look to the data supporting clear financial incentives to provide for caregivers at work.

With an estimated 60% of caregivers reporting that they’re still working while providing care for their loved ones, jobs that provide tangible benefits and support to working caregivers, including employee resource groups and generous leave policies, are better positioned to retain talent and maintain a healthy bottom line.

Create a work culture that normalizes caregiving

Lui said that creating a culture of care in the workplace starts with the prevalence of caregiving — even among employees who might not outwardly seem like they’re struggling.

“Think about the next conversation through a lens of care, and when someone needs some help, open the door to conversations in order to change the culture from the ground up,” Lui said. “If you’re in a meeting, chances are at least three of the people in there with you are going through some kind of challenge with caregiving.”

Conversations about mental health must go hand-in-hand with conversations about caregiving and physical health. The more we can normalize the mental health journey associated with caregiving, the more we will normalize all conversations about health.

For more insights and learnings on the subject of caregiving, watch our event.

The true impact of how you lead lies in your ‘leadership score’

Posted on by NationSwell Team

What if, in attempting to measure impact, we began to think about leadership as a different type of score — a musical score — where emitting the right chords has the potential to attract the most talented people, assemble teams who outperform, and inspire confidence and commitment, particularly during a time when cultivating trust online and via social media platforms is increasingly essential? A musical metaphor is particularly apt when you consider how virtuoso musicians evolve their performance expression over time to suit different audiences, incorporate evolving trends, and tap into new creative energies. But in addition to being expressive and adaptable, a good musician — like a good leader — must also embody an additional set of qualities that are easy to remember for their important function in the process of music-making: range, rhythm, representation, and reach. 

A musician like the Grammy Award-winning American singer and songwriter Brandi Carlile, for example, has adapted her musical repertoire over the years by keenly observing the routines of other performers, including Elton John, Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, and Mavis Staples. While always maintaining her identifiable voice, Carlile’s singing range has acquired more resonant pitch, elucidation, and interpretation over the years. She’s gained competence across many rhythmic genres including country, rock, R&B, gospel, and improvised syncopations.  Whether she’s a soloist, singing a 3-part harmony with her bandmates, or jamming with a stage full of musicians of all backgrounds, these representations allow broad audiences to “see themselves on the stage” and thereby feel a deeper emotional connection to her music and its meaning. Her intentional collaborations with varied artists like Alicia Keys, Dave Mathews,  Indigo Girls, Pearl Jam and symphony orchestras have expanded her reach from small coffee houses to sold-out concerts in premiere venues and across video streams worldwide, creating community and cultivating new audiences as she goes. 

In reviewing the body of work leading up to my TED talk and coaching programs developed for leaders of various demographics in the private, public and non-profit sectors, I see these four elements as positive impact indicators that consistently show up in the repertoires of the successful leaders with whom I’ve worked over the past three decades.

These leaders demonstrate an expressive range by using tonal variety and oratorical force to create a soaring energy that fosters unexpected connection and creates an aura of intimacy that pulls people in. They successfully utilize rhythm by adjusting to new contexts and different paces and pressures seamlessly — their expansive set of experiences and interests allows them to presciently see trends to manifest successes while also fluidly navigating setbacks. Good leaders understand the importance of mobilizing their followers through representation — the diversity of the people that they surround themselves with in order to uncover and achieve atypical, trailblazing outcomes — and also make it a point to have others’ contributions explicitly represented in the final product and forward path. Finally, impactful leaders have a reach that is defined not by the number of people who report to them, but rather by how many people they convene with convincing influence and uncompromised ethics. They expand this reach by seeking “outside-your-usual circle” partners who cooperate to make more happen than each party could on their own. 

These four elements — range, rhythm, representation, and reach — provide a structure that we can use to better gauge the impact of our own personal leadership styles. We can start to understand these four principles more clearly when we look back on the exemplars who came before us — those who have left an indelible, soul-piercing mark on us through brief encounters that continue to shape our beliefs and values years later. Reconnecting with an exemplar’s imprint reminds us of the essence of our best leadership expressions, and the recollected memory also serves as a prism by which we can retool our current leadership approach to meet the moment we’re facing. 

In conducting this type of heartfelt, insistent scrutiny on myself, I frequently draw on memories of my own Puerto Rican maternal family elders, who provided formative, grounding examples of leadership that continue to inform what I value in myself as I continue to evolve my own leadership practice today. My mother Crimilda’s range made her the dynamic diva at any party. Her mastery of cadence and intonation in her voice made her a captivating narrator. Whether teaching students, leading family holiday cheers, reciting heartfelt poems, or holding a congregation in reverent prayer, my mother’s vocal range nuances enthralled listeners. She recited Latin American poems with gestures, facial expressions and vocalizations that always upped the energy in the room whether from tears of sadness or joy. At times of crushing tragedy, she would interject humor to unexpectedly good effect whether in person or on the phone. My heartiest laughter was evoked by my mother.

My younger aunt, Alicia, was situationally, rhythmically confident. When we were growing up, she would let me accompany her to outside-our-neighborhood bodegas to try egg cream sodas and flavored bubble gums — delicacies to us, not available at home. In the library, she paraded me to multiple floors of books from different genres. Her career path was eclectic, and she pursued and excelled in jobs across domains as different as publishing, community service, media, politics, and collections. She was a fast learner and moved seamlessly from executive assistant positions to leadership roles, to producing and policy making. In conversations today, we still explore off-the-beaten path topics.

My older aunt, Titi Mary, is central to our family, and mouthwatering smells from her delicious sancocho, pasteles, and pernil bring a motley representation of people to her kitchen table. The spread is dispensed with family folklore, conjuring up those beloved members who have passed, as if channeling and infusing their energy within us. She pulls people in, even when aggressively confronted by others’ imperfections. Her compassionate and cheerful manner is like a big, inclusive “abrazo fuerte” to others who in turn, tightly embrace her. In her 80’s, she is still bonding so many to her and each other. To taste her cooking is to savor her love.

And finally, my grandmother, Sol, was a shy, unassuming woman, but her reach was proactive and long lasting. As a single mother, transplanted from Puerto Rico to New York City, she linked up with her siblings’ families to expand the resources and caregiving available to her children. My grandmother’s impact was direct and measurable — her children attained more in life than many would have expected given dire social and economic beginnings. Grandmother Sol, which translates to Sun,  showed that one’s indirect reach is both illuminating and generative when the gain is communally beneficial.

In these vignettes, I am attempting to conjure the temperaments of these family members in order to illustrate that an imprint left by a great leader stays with you for the duration of your experience. It internally transforms you. Although our own expressions of these values will always be unique to us, fine-tuning our leadership score is a process of study, reflection, intention, and practice, and there are good questions you can use to score your own leadership playbook. 

When thinking about range, ask yourself what you’re trying to communicate, and if the mood you’re creating is appropriate to the moment. Is your language poetic or platitudinal? What brings your stories to life? What props or digital tools/platforms increase the emotional and rational resonance of your message? Do your messages invite people to join you or coerce them to comply? How do you know people are feeling confident they can contribute to the mission or strategy? 

In considering rhythm, reflect on how many different communities, cultures and institutions you’ve interacted with, and how many functional disciplines you’ve traversed. How many growth, turnaround, and crises contexts have you led in? How varied are your information sources? What analytical or intuitive algorithms inform your decisions? What new publications, music, recreational activities have you discovered? Are your selected podcasts, websites, and video streams reinforcing or expanding your views? Who are people that you are curious about and want to get to know better?

When scoring yourself on representation, ask yourself to reflect honestly on the diversity of the people around your leadership table and in key influence roles: 

  • 1. During major gatherings, who shares the stage with you? 
  • 2. Who speaks for the organization when engaging with external audiences? 
  • 3. What is the diversity of the characters featured in the stories you tell? 
  • 4. In your meetings, how much time is your voice heard compared to others? 
  • 5. How often do you say the names and contributions of others who enable what you’re trying to achieve?

And finally, in measuring your own reach, reflect on who you would follow if you did not have the title that you do. How do you describe the benefit of collaborating with you, and what would cause you to lose credibility? How many partnerships are outside your organization? How are you augmenting the capabilities of others? To what extent do your partners’ followers follow you? How open are you to new ideas and challenges from the broader followership? What are non-negotiable values or principles when establishing your partnerships? How will you address any fallout if a partner you’ve collaborated with suffers reputational damage?

Returning to the initial question of how you measure your leadership impact, it’s not that quantitative outcomes don’t matter — they just don’t reveal enough about your actual leadership, or about what makes you, specifically, someone to believe in and commit to. Determining the musical score of your leadership is based on more subjective indicators, like the lasting feelings you evoke and what people choose to take with them and incorporate into their own systems and processes. Describing Brandi Carlile’s impact, Brittney Spencer, an early-career musician, once said: “Brandi’s level of musicality makes you want to bring your best game in her presence. And her generosity is the kind that spikes other people’s capacity and desire to give. She has an understated magical ability that compels others to show up as their best, most authentic, and most innovative self”. That sounds like an excellent, highly impactful, leadership score to me.

Tuning your musical leadership score culminates in amplified, not imagined, impact. Perfecting your leadership score is not about you as an orchestra leader directing everyone else’s performance; it’s about you as a performer, tuning your self-expression in ways that lift and inspire those around you to elevate a vision with their own contributions.

Roselinde Torres has been a trusted advisor to private, public, and nonprofit sector leaders enabling them to imagine and achieve their leadership ambitions. Her TED talk “What it takes to be a great leader” has received around six million views. She serves as a Trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society and has been a Nationswell Council Member since 2015. The author is grateful to Familia elders for their ever resonant scores, Brandi Carlile for multiform musicality, Brian Carson, Phil Cook, Caroline Mak, Brianna Provenzano and Anthony Smith for bettering this composition, and Tammy Conley for resounding belief.

The people-focused company: Why age diversity matters more than you think

Posted on by NationSwell Team

The good news for business is that the balance sheet equation of “assets minus liabilities equals equity” can be influenced by the assets inherent in an age-inclusive workforce.

A multigenerational workforce yields a stronger pipeline of talent, strengthens business continuity, and helps companies close the labor shortage gap. Studies overwhelmingly show that age diversity has a positive effect on creativity, innovation, strategic thinking, and the ability to collaborate on complex decision-making. Between 2007-2009, while the S&P 500 declined by 35.5%, companies that were more age-diverse posted a 14.4% gain. And after the Great Recession, recovery by age-inclusive companies outperformed the S&P by nearly four times.

In more recent history, age discrimination against workers over age 50 cost our economy $850 billion in 2018. In other words, discrimination stifles economic growth, which hurts all of us. The economic contribution of the older population could increase by $3.9 trillion annually in a no-age bias economy. 

A multigenerational workforce isn’t just good for business and the economy, it’s good for humans’ well-being. Studies show that working past age 65 is linked to better health and longevity, and workers in age-inclusive companies report more satisfaction across the board.

Create a new set of assumptions

As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic writes in the Harvard Business Review, “No matter how diverse the workforce is, and regardless of what type of diversity we examine, diversity will not enhance creativity unless there is a culture of sharing knowledge.

Knowledge kept in silos can spell the end of an organization. Shareholders and stakeholders in public and private organizations must ask about and ensure the organization is fostering a culture of contributing ideas and having their knowledge shared across generations to achieve a greater purpose.  

Organizational inclusion planning must be implemented with the goal of age diversity in mind. Organizations also must look at their knowledge infrastructure and internal communications to ensure paths to innovation.

Change is constant in business, and innovation is not just for products.  For years, we’ve been saying that performance matters and leadership matters, and that continues to hold true. What also holds true is that, when you measure performance as what you achieve — instead of what your job title is, — it creates a ripple effect that satisfies shareholders, benefits customers, and meets the needs of employees.

It’s time for a new set of norms and assumptions in 2022, one where we evolve are already evolving diversity, equity, and inclusion to include access. People of all races and ages must be given access so that there can be equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Action steps for impact

There are four things every leader must build into their firm’s strategic plans to foster multigenerational workforce success:

1. Know that business is personal

If we’ve learned nothing else in the past two years, we’ve learned that it’s not businesses that drive results — it’s people. Systems can be automated and work styles can evolve, but the inherently human traits of ethics, intrinsic motivation, empathy, instinct, and discernment drive and maintain business success. These are skills that only improve with experience and age. Tech can make products and outcomes derived from those human traits more efficient, but it can’t replace it.

2. Prioritize age and experience inclusion

Employees age 50 and over are key drivers in the success of multigenerational teams. They contribute to expanding the breadth and depth of knowledge sharing. And, they value applied learning, create encore careers, and thrive in entrepreneurship and small business job creation. Employers, business leaders, community leaders, and grassroots movements must incentivize policies and programs that eliminate ageism while doing away with the perception that a job candidate is “overqualified”.  

3. Focus on the three new Rs: Recruitment, Retention, and Reconnection

2021 was all about the Great Resignation and Retirement, as millions of workers left their companies in search of what’s next. The companies that will succeed in the future are the ones that will spend 2022 ushering in a new era of the Great Recruitment, Retention, and Reconnection. These companies will source and recruit employees of all ages, races, and cultures to drive innovation and be rewarded for their work.

4. Change is the only constant, so break the rules and change big

Even well-established organizations with household names need to stay fresh, flexible, adaptive, and innovative. By building workplace culture that embraces and encourages change and integrates experiences and expertise across multiple generations, successful organizations will not only meet customers where they are, but will elevate them to where they need to go next.

We must hold businesses accountable when it comes to diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. And we must educate ourselves on inherent and learned age bias and ageism practices so that they, too, can be eliminated from the workplace.

Delivering increased and impactful shareholder ROI depends on a variety of economic measurements, all of which can be enhanced and strengthened by an age-inclusive workforce. Recruiting, retaining, and rewarding intergenerational success pleases stakeholders and increases an organization’s equity and value.

Move slow and fix things: Re-imagining the data for good sector

Posted on by NationSwell Team

“How do we [as a sector] scale things?” Danil Mikhailov, Executive Director of data.org, asked attendees at the beginning of the event. “How do we determine whether the impact of funders such as data.org and others on this panel is inadvertently causing issues, and how we might behave or fund differently to support the sector for the long term?”

In early 2021, data.org worked to create a landscape map to surface and categorize the various players in the data for good space. That project, led by data.org Fellow Jake Porway, endeavored “to bring clarity to the conversation by going beyond mapping organizations into arbitrary groups…[and advancing it by] creating an ontology for what Data for Good initiatives seek to achieve.”

Now, in the second half of the year, data.org is building from the findings of the landscape map. The organization is surfacing key provocations and insights to partners and funders that it hopes will catalyze a paradigm shift towards community-led, long-term projects that will support and sustain the social good sector using data to realize impact.

Beyond new, shiny things

Angela Oduor Lungati, event panelist and Executive Director of Ushahidi, a global nonprofit technology company based in Nairobi, shared that in her experience the bulk  of social impact funding tends to go to “new, shiny things.” As a result, there are communities in the developing world that are not reached by those efforts.

“I recognize that emerging technology is very fascinating and it obviously offers excellent opportunities for the ecosystem,” Lungati told attendees. “But we need to keep in mind that there are many parts of the world that cannot access and reap benefits from some of the technological advancements that we’re all pushing for. The fourth industrial revolution — things like AI automation and the internet of things — are emerging simultaneously, while aspects of the third industrial revolution — digitization and internet connectivity — are yet to spread and mature in many parts of the developing world. It would be very helpful to have funding priorities that don’t limit organizations and implementing partners to very specific tools and technologies to achieve their impact.”

Lungati called on funders to lean on the expertise of grantees and implementing partners to make that happen.

“​​Create a model where you can co-create your funding priorities. That way, the people you’re looking to support will be able to offer insight into their content, tech, and their support needs,” she said.

Katherine Lucey, Founder and CEO of Solar Sister, an organization that empowers women entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa to bring clean energy to their communities, said that if funders continue to chase the “front edge of what’s new and what’s sexy,” organizations like hers will not get the funding they need to support underserved and systemically overlooked communities.

“The challenge with this is, as a real practitioner…we are exactly the kind of organization, and our women entrepreneurs are the people who get left behind if we’re not careful,” Lucey said. “As we see so much happening in this data world, we can see people making incredible leaps and bounds of how to use and apply data, but when we look at how we bring that to these rural, grassroots businesses, there’s an enormous gap — and that gap is infrastructure. It’s access to the data itself. It’s access to the technology that they need to access the data.”

Lucey called on funders to consider the whole breadth of the ecosystem.

“So often the resources go into that front end of what’s new, what’s leading-edge, and what pushes the industry forward,” Lucey said. “But if we don’t also remember to look backward, and look at the breadth, and look at the very last mile and look at those who don’t have the same access, we’re not going to move the entire ecosystem forward, and we’re not going to move the entire system forward. We’re going to only stretch out that front end.”

To reach that last mile, Neil Myrick, Global Head of the Tableau Foundation, shared that it will require extra investment, rigor, and focus to engage with those who haven’t already been reached.

“At Tableau Foundation, our role is to leverage the momentum of the company and build the bridge that carries it through to people who wouldn’t normally be reached by that effort,” Myrick said. “Last month, Tableau had our annual customer conference, and the company pledged to train 10 million data people over the next five years. At the same time, Tableau Foundation pledged a $5 million initiative to help ensure that underserved women and girls around the world were included in that. If you want to reach that last mile and people who have not yet been reached, it takes extra funding. It takes intentionality and focus to get there. And so that’s been our role — leveraging the momentum of the company and building the bridge that carries it through to people who wouldn’t normally be reached by that effort.”

Beyond pilots

Myrick said the embrace of long-term, unrestricted funding was a key part of how Tableau Foundation shepherds organizations past the pilot process and towards impact. That approach, he said, means grantees could actually use the funding to meet specific needs that did not pertain to the grant, such as acquiring or hiring help to implement the other parts of their data infrastructure. It also means organizations can receive additional and continued support as they mature to the point where they’re capable of receiving additional funding.

“Building data culture and data infrastructure is a very long-term commitment,” Myrick told attendees. “Our grants are typically a minimum of three years. Our funding is all unrestricted. The first three years really help the nonprofit kind of get their feet under them, but they aren’t necessarily like hitting that hockey stick of data uses in the first three years. Most of our long-term grants have been anywhere from three to six years — and it’s taken into year four and five for some of our nonprofit partners to really hit that hockey stick where data’s become a core component of their overall work.”

“We have a strategy for investing in pilots, but when we invest in the pilot, we have a discussion about where we go with this when it’s successful,” Myrick continued. “And we have a plan for how we’re going to actually invest beyond the pilot before we even do the pilot in the first place. Because our funding’s multiyear, grantees have the sure footedness of our support to count on. And that’s really been an important part of our strategy, and it’s worked quite well.”

Move slow and fix things

Michelle Shevin, Senior Program Manager at the Ford Foundation, maintained that the status quo for social impact funding is shepherding us towards a “fragile future” and called on funders to embrace systems containing “friction” like stakeholder engagement, ethics processes, and, perhaps most importantly, oversight and regulation.

“Just as we’ve seen with digital technology over the past 20 years, moving fast actually does break things,” Shevin said. “If we’re positioning data science and data-driven technologies as something that can be part of moving toward a less fragile future, I’d argue that perhaps counterintuitively, we actually need a lot more friction. We often hear an argument that positions forces like regulation as a counter to innovation, but in reality, sources of friction are necessary in data work. This can look like data sheets for data sets or model cards, or authentic engagement with impacted communities, or ongoing ethics processes. And yes, it could look like oversight and regulation — these are actually critical to sustainable impact and innovation that scales, so perhaps these are even the most important parts of trying to do good with data.”

The unusual suspects

Shevin stressed the importance of engaging and centering impacted communities as a “central” source of this friction.

“It takes social scientists, and people with lived experience, and data scientists working together to actually move more slowly and fix things,” Shevin said. “They could be artists, activists, hackers, or anthropologists, and they all share a commitment to public interest values like equity, accountability, justice, and these public interest technologists are committed to really prioritizing those values and their work.”

“I’d love to see more opportunities to co-create agenda and priorities,” Lungati said in agreement. “Consider the unusual suspects and make them part of the process. Let’s have a conversation around what the issues are and what our needs are or what the needs of other people are, to then guide what the foundations or philanthropies are thinking about investing in.”

Centering those voices and collaborations, Shevin proposed, might lead us to contemplate a new “north star” for innovation and progress.

“If science and technology projects are focused narrowly, and if they’re happening amidst unabated and unmitigated inequality, and climate change, and natural resource extraction and ongoing de-wilding of critical ecosystems, we risk getting stuck trying to point the technology at the symptom instead of empowering people toward a structurally different future,” Shevin said. “We actually need a different north star for innovation and progress as a species. Something, maybe, less focused on economic growth and value extraction, and more focused on interdependence and mutual care. I’m really energized by the idea of making space for different possibilities for the future, and to get there, I actually think we need to slow down.”

Rhythm and shadow

To close the event, Mikhailov asked the funders in attendance to be mindful of the unintended consequences of their grants — and to place as much of a premium on rhythm as one might do on speed.

“Be aware of your shadow,” Mikhailov cautioned. “Be aware of the power you have as a funder when you inadvertently cause harm in the system that you don’t intend — through setting targets or KPIs which lead your grantees to do things that you don’t intend. And as a practitioner of tech as well, I would say worry about rhythm more than speed. It’s not about how fast you get it. It’s about rhythm, and rhythm is different from speed, because it’s about your relationship with one another, as in dance or in sport. Ask yourself, ‘How do you as a tech creator build a relationship with the users of your tech, with the communities who will be affected? And that rhythm is more important than the speed.”

Produced in partnership with data.org. To watch the full event, click here. To learn more about their work, visit data.org. To learn more about the challenges of overreliance on pilots in the social impact sector, read Danil Mikhailov’s op-ed on NationSwell.

Putting pilots under the microscope

Posted on by NationSwell Team

There is a tendency in the data for good space for investing in the pilot of a project without seeing the project through. This tendency, which has us investing only in the short term with no thought or plan for taking projects forward, is called pilotitis. Pilotitis is pervasive across the social impact sector. It leaves us with projects that are orphaned or abandoned, and wastes our money and time.

Pilotitis comes from human nature. We embark with good intentions, with pilots that are designed for entirely good reasons — solving a problem, testing hypotheses, using a promising new technology, and seeing if you can be agile in your pursuit of a solution. 

But as you move out of the pilot phase and start actually pursuing your goal, you suddenly start to find difficulties getting the financial support you need. That’s because the people who invest in social impact projects tend to get caught up in pursuing short term objectives. You might find that you and your funders will launch digital interventions together, you’ll get a great headline that generates buzz, you’ll celebrate that hype — and then your funder moves on. 

And if this happens to you over and over again, chances are you’ll move on, too. Welcome to pilotitis. 

At its worst, this tendency is not only wasting time and resources — it actually kills better work. If a number of projects are competing for attention, resources, or influence, often the shiny, short term ones win out because the teams behind them can invest all their energy in the things that make it shiny: the marketing, in the push, in making the first launch successful. You don’t need to take the cost of putting in long-term infrastructure, support and maintenance contracts — all the boring, long-term things that you’d need to make it work. 

This isn’t just a theoretical problem —there are famous cases of pilotitis that became so hairy, national governments have actually had to intervene. In 2012, Uganda had so many pilots of mobile health tech that the whole system was fundamentally overwhelmed: Every hospital, every public health body in Uganda had three, four, sometimes five approaches — often from very well meaning, global north charities and philanthropic bodies — saying, “We can invest this in this app, or in this way of doing things.”

They had so many pilots that it actually hindered Uganda’s ability to run the basic health service in the country. So the national government put a moratorium on the development of any more mobile health projects.

I suspect the cycle is in tune with new technologies. Back in 2012, when the Ugandan government made its ruling, it was the age of the smartphone. The promise of new mobile technology and apps created this feeding frenzy, this excitement. And this hype is a big part of what instigated this problem. Today, all the hype is around artificial intelligence. This new era of pilotitis in our sector will be around AI, the next big data science.

We’ll likely never cure pilotitis completely. It’s human nature. What we can do is minimize it, and make sure it doesn’t disrupt too much. 

If we want to do better, we should start by finding something that excites us in the unsexy act of longer term maintenance and support of good projects. Not everyone in my sector — and the people who fund my sector — knows about the Ugandan case study, so we need a better education about the consequences of getting it wrong. We also need to make it easier to fund the long tail parts of the work that makes it successful long term, like support, maintenance, documentation, testing, community building.

Pilotitis leads to duplicative work: in some cases, ten or twenty of the exact same type of project getting just a little bit of funding. To solve that, we need better relationships between funders. Our funders need to collaborate and cooperate with one another, they need to be transparent about what they’re funding so that they can identify duplicates. They need to start saying, “Instead of us each funding a slightly different version of the same thing, let’s all unite around one technology, and maybe even open source that tech so that others can benefit.”

At the moment, the sector works a lot with one-to-one programs. You get funding to do a great thing with data, and great, that project works. But there is no learning across projects, and the projects don’t build from one another’s successes, failures, breakthroughs, and findings. 

If you want to cross a river, pilotis will have you throwing stones in the water until you have enough at the bottom to be able to wade across. That could take years — if it ever happens at all. We need to be artisans. We need to work together to architect a bridge. A bridge will use far less stones. A bridge will help us get across the river much faster. 

Collaboration is key. At the moment, data.org is launching the Epiverse program for epidemiology. One of the drivers for that, for us taking up this challenge, is that in the world of epidemiology, often the tools to create the models are made locally, within the team. This means the same tools are recreated again, and again, and again at each university. We’re helping the field take a step back, allowing us to invest as a community in open source tools, properly support the maintenance these tools require for long term sustainability, and then make these tools available for free to the community. 

To solve big problems, you need multiple disciplines involved. There is no app that can solve climate change. There is no app that can solve the COVID-19 pandemic. Some problems are just too big. So many of the important problems in our world are too big to be solved by a single discipline, which means you need to work across disciplines, bringing together experts from the physical sciences, social sciences, technology, industry, the social impact sector, policy and government. Interdisciplinarity is the commitment to investing in, and working with, people across these disciplines, creating partnerships and connections that have expertise and fluency in more than one area. 

It’s a powerful tool towards helping to fight against pilotitis because if you don’t understand the subject matter, or hold just one narrow view on the problem, you’re more likely to be mobilized by the flashy rather than the effective. 

We saw a lot of examples of taking the narrow view on the problem at the very beginning of this pandemic, when there were hundreds of attempts by tech startups to build apps to diagnose Covid. But a report from the Turing Institute found that the majority of these apps didn’t work because they didn’t involve a single doctor in the development process. They didn’t take into account the kind of nuances that only a professional knows — and once again, we have another high profile example of a proliferation of pilots that get abandoned. And this is where interdisciplinarity can help. You need interdisciplinary scholars and professionals working within teams to make them more sustainable, to help them go beyond the pilot, to be implemented and to be successful.

Just like you need doctors to help out the techs building COVID-19 diagnostics, so the reverse is also true: getting technical expertise into the decision making process of what gets funded is very important to help mitigate against pilotitis. But that’s easier said than done: Many funders don’t have in-house technology and data experts with the skills and expertise to advise on funding proposals.

In a way, data.org was set up to try and fix that. One of the jobs we have is working with multiple funders as their out of house tech experts. We provide our partners with the tech expertise to help them guide investment into their products. Bringing experts into the decision making process will invariably steer funders away from focusing too much on pilots that don’t go anywhere, placing the focus where it actually needs to be: on sustaining long term projects that actually solve problems.

So this is the data.org prescription for curing pilotitis: don’t be seduced by the hype, invest for the long term, collaborate across funders to unite around shared, open solutions, and build interdisciplinary teams, where technologists and subject-matter experts work through the world’s complexity together. With this approach we can achieve the agile learning and growth that a promising new pilot provides, and build on that momentum for maximum and sustained impact.

Danil Mikhailov is the Executive Director of data.org. To learn more, please join us for an event on advancing the “Data for Good” sector.

The business case for increasing investment in the 50-plus

Posted on by NationSwell Team

Change is constant in business. There are always new ideas, new products, new ways to work better. That’s how it should be. Businesses and non-profit organizations get themselves into trouble when they think they have it all figured out. Comfortable companies get complacent, and those that grow rigid risk ruining their reputations as thought-leaders. By contrast, organizations that embrace change stay innovative and agile. 

That is what we have seen over the last year and a half. Rigid companies that resisted change suffered—revenue plummeted, employees resigned, and some even went out of business—while businesses that adapted quickly survived and in some cases thrived during the pandemic and gained new strategies and tools to use for the future. 

That is not to say that there were no bumps along the way for the organizations that navigated the rough seas successfully. The pandemic caught many of us off guard (even though the scientific community had, in fact, warned us something like this could happen). 

We do not want to be caught off guard again. One giant trend is coming, and in many ways, is already upon us. Every company, board director, and leader should ensure their business has a strategy to seize its possibilities for growth. 

That trend is the unprecedented aging of the population. With life expectancies on the rise and birth rates declining, the growth of the older population is steadily outpacing that of younger generations around the world. People aged 60 and over already account for more than one billion of the world’s population; this age group is expected to double—to over two billion—by 2050. Not only are we aging, but in many places, we are living longer than previous generations. In countries where people are aging well, more than half of children born today are projected to live to see their 100th birthday.

What if leaders miscalculate, underestimate, or even worse—ignore this major demographic shift? Businesses that miss out on the aging population will be in crisis, and the risk to organizations and their bottom line could be catastrophic. 

That said, crises can be opportunities—but only for those leaders who are prepared. What do businesses need to do to be prepared? 

First, awareness and understanding

As organizations face immediate and unprecedented economic challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic, it is a critical time to recognize the growing aging population as part of a strategy for economic recovery and growth. The truth is, this is an opportunity—a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity. Older adults are consumers, taxpayers, workers, and business owners. Many also add massive value through volunteering and serving as family caregivers. The purchasing power of older adults generates significant tax revenue, creates jobs, and creates stability in other important areas, like health care, housing, and transportation for essential workers, families, veterans, and small business owners, all of whom were very hard hit by the pandemic.

Business leaders, therefore, must embrace longevity. Here are three reasons why:

It’s good for businesses.
If the 50-plus population comprised a country, its economy would be the third biggest in the world (after the U.S. and China). People aged 50 and older have massive purchasing power, which creates jobs and opportunities across all generations, grows revenue, and fuels and sustains businesses of all sizes. According to AARP’s Longevity Economy Outlook, the economic contribution of the 50-plus population was worth $8.3 trillion in 2018. Fifty-six cents of every dollar was spent by someone over the age of 50. By 2050, their economic impact is expected to more than triple to $26.8 trillion, and 61 cents of every dollar will be spent by someone over the age of 50. Businesses that are ready to catch this wave will sail right past their competition.

It’s good for governments.
The 50-plus population (which make up 35 percent of the U.S. population) is also a major source of revenue for federal, state, and local governments to provide the services and infrastructure businesses and communities count on.  Nearly half of federal revenues in 2018, or $1.4 trillion, came from the 50-plus cohort —a figure set to nearly quadruple to $5.5 trillion by 2050. We see a similar picture with regards to state finances. The 50-plus cohort is responsible for almost $650 billion in state revenues today. By 2050, its contribution is forecast to approach $2.4 trillion. Business and public leaders can work together to invest those resources in our communities to grow a stronger, healthier economy for everyone.

It’s good for individuals of all ages.
As people live longer, many will either want or need to continue working. Studies have shown that working past age 65 is linked to better health and longevity. Not only that, studies show that age-inclusive companies report higher worker satisfaction across the board, and satisfied workers are more committed, creative, and productive. That is not the only way they add value. Older workers also contribute experience to multi-generational teams, participate in encore careers, and lead in entrepreneurship.

Next, take decisive action

It is clear why businesses should embrace a strategy for the longevity economy. Each and every business stands to gain from tapping into the opportunities of the 50-plus market. To maximize that longevity dividend, though, we must act now. Government leaders, business leaders, non-profit leaders, and each of us as individual leaders have a role to play. For example,  private-sector leaders and product developers must think past outdated stereotypes when creating solutions. And advertisers must authentically represent the full spectrum of living as people age. We must all work together to test and develop new approaches to learning, earning, living, and connecting with each other as we live longer lives. 

Change is constant in business, and innovation is not just for products. Even long-established organizations boasting household names need to stay flexible, adaptive, and innovative to seize new opportunities. By building a workplace culture that embraces change, we can continue to meet our clients and customers where they are while setting the pace as thought leaders in our fields.

Finally, a radical thought

Your customers are aging, yet there is no longevity crisis. There is only a longevity opportunity, which benefits businesses, communities, and governments. And that opportunity is just waiting for you to embrace it. So will you?

Age at the nexus of workplace equity, innovation, and creativity

Posted on by NationSwell Team

And yet, human workers are in demand and that demand is ever-growing. Related to that is another significant change: Workforce demographics are quickly shifting before our eyes. Today’s older workers are healthier than the older workers of previous generations, and many older individuals are eager to keep working and contributing. Simultaneously, declining birth rates have led to fewer people entering the workforce.

Yet despite the need for talent in the workplace, age remains an equity issue, even though many employers have not historically thought of it in that light. According to June 2021 data from the Bureau of Labor Studies, 55.3 percent of job seekers 55 years of age or older were long-term unemployed, compared to just 36 percent of job seekers ages 16 to 54. Too often, the older worker gets discriminated against and overlooked, perennially facing their own unique challenges and costing our economy billions in lost productivity.

If you’re an employer seeking to satisfy shareholders and outperform expectations, you might want to steer away from such tendencies. Whether you’re a nonprofit or corporate employer, you have clients and customers, and those clients and customers are aging like never before in the history of the world. And so to respond to your customers, it’s imperative that you understand them.  

In other words, how we adapt now will have a lasting impact on the success of both employers and employees for decades to come. Our research shows that employers that invest in a multigenerational workforce will have a competitive edge over those that do not.

A formula for equity built on logic

Many global business leaders already get it. In the 2020 Global Employer Survey of OECD Countries, 83 percent said a multigenerational workforce is critical to business growth and success. But the understanding may be somewhat limited, and many of those same businesses have a way to go: 53 percent of the executives surveyed do not include age in a diversity and inclusion policy. 

In our post-COVID environment there’s a long to-do list — and a long to-change list. One critical element to any lasting change is the ability to harness a powerful force that lies at a certain nexus—of creativity, innovation, and, yes, equity and inclusion.

The Equity Formula

Why the latter?  Because innovation requires inclusion. It’s a formula of logic: If innovation demands creativity, and creativity demands inclusion, then innovation calls for inclusion.

In other words, focusing on age equity unlocks myriad opportunities for workers and organizational leaders alike. Yet, while the formula should be easy to understand, there is still some reluctance to solve it.

How the Equity Formula works

Too often, when evaluating the strengths and potential contributions of a job candidate, someone asks the preferential question, “Will they fit in with our culture?”

Though workplaces may think they want a culture fit, the homogeneity that comes from hiring people who look just like you, work exactly like you do, and come from similar backgrounds tends to hamper the innovation necessary to increase revenue — to say nothing of the historical inequities it likely perpetuates.

By contrast, diversity and inclusion make us smarter. It stimulates thought and expands the minds of those who want to help solve the problems they didn’t know existed. Decades of research shows that socially diverse and inclusive groups are more innovative than homogenous groups. Diversity and inclusion acknowledge the importance of novel information and perspectives, leading to more informed decisions and solutions.

Yet, despite increased attention on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, one critical form of diversity that needs more attention from organizational leads, hiring directors, and human resource teams is age diversity. 

Of course, it’s not a matter of simply getting a more diverse team in the room and calling it a day. Giving the full collection of diverse voices equal airtime is critical. Valuing all contributors and their input equally allows everyone the opportunity to offer insights that drive real value.  Inclusion efforts must have at their foundation the creation or realignment of a “speak up” culture. Employees who are empowered with the ability to be creative are four times more likely to contribute to their full potential. Multiply that by a whole staff, and the creative and institutional power compounds from there.

As you look at your teams, your workplace, your customers and stakeholders, and how your executive leadership and management run your business, ask yourself:

  • 1. What are we trying to build or do and how can we ensure alignment between our annual and quarterly goals and the inclusion of who does the work to reach those goals?
  • 2. How do we ensure inclusive diversity of all kinds for this project, team, initiative, group structure, or outcomes-based goals and responsibilities?
  • 3. Are we finding ways to bring different voices, levels and years of experience, thoughts, ideas, and expertise together in a way that will turn creativity into innovation?
  • 4. When turning creativity into innovation, do we have diverse voices and experiences as well as a mix of leaders, managers, and front-line staff at the table to make informed, actionable decisions?
  • 5. How have we embedded responsibility and accountability for diversity and inclusion at all levels throughout the organization?

Remember the Equity Formula: Innovation demands creativity, which in turn demands diversity and inclusion. To be successful, companies and all organizations must include age as a workplace equity issue, for age is a critical component to diversity. It’s not just the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do.  Inclusivity creates an atmosphere where great things can happen, and where market-growth opportunity can be explosive.

Nuts and bolts

To build and maintain an age-inclusive workforce, businesses need to focus on three main areas:

Lay the policy backbone to support your multigenerational workforce.
Starting with your company policies, ensure that diversity strategies include age, and that measures are in place to ensure policy translates to organizational and hiring practices. Implement processes to reduce age bias in sourcing and recruitment as well as the interview and selection processes. Further reduce workplace prejudice by offering manager and employee trainings. Engage in strategic workforce planning to reduce skill shortages down the line. Focus on long-term retention by offering employees services such as career planning, long-term financial planning, and phased retirement programs. And utilize team-based performance systems to enhance productivity and collaboration on multi-generational teams.

Make jobs attractive to a diverse talent base and workforce.
Consider the needs of your diverse workforce—from work-life balance to flexible work/telework schedules and flex/leave policies for employees who are caregivers. (Many workers age 50-plus are.) Potential employees place top value on visible signs of an employer’s concern for the physical, mental, social, and financial lives of their workers.

Maintain and develop employee skills across generations.
To maximize a multigenerational workforce, companies must have a comprehensive program for not only developing employee skills, but also ensuring those skills get sharpened and stay up to date so that all generations of workers, from younger to older, have equally relevant skill sets. In addition, trainings (individual, group, and team), mentoring, and reverse mentoring are all proven methods to strengthen the skills of an organization’s diverse set of employees. And in the case of mentoring, both the mentored and the mentor learn from each other.

Growing body of use cases 

Studies show that an age-diverse workforce strengthens a company’s resilience especially in times of crisis, missed earnings targets, and economic downturn.. And at the level of both the individual company and the broader economy, it elevates productivity, unlocks markets, sparks innovation, and boosts GDP. Meanwhile, in the public sector, snapshots from countries around the world reveal exciting progress in supporting their economies and doing what is right to ensure diversity and inclusivity, particularly as it relates to age.

In Japan, employment opportunities for older adults are a key component of the government’s national strategy to revitalize the economy. Significant efforts have been made to assist job placement and extend retirement age.

In Singapore, as Minister of Health Gan Kim Yong has noted, the country created its Action Plan for Successful Aging years ago. The government works with employers and unions to enhance senior employability and inclusive workplace policies.

In the U.K., the 2010 Equality Act protects workers from age discrimination in all aspects of their employment. In turn, older adults are either prolonging retirement or re-entering the workforce in new fields through entrepreneurial support programs.

COVID-19’s wake up call

Adapting to a new world of work, a demand accelerated by COVID-19, requires us to take deliberate action in fostering greater equity and inclusion to address systemic shifts in the workforce and future-of-work trends like automation. There’s no better time than now to rewrite the rules and build a new normal that embraces the benefits of a multigenerational workforce.  We need to think critically with an age-diversity state of mind about how diversity that is inclusive of age, race, gender, and culture will come together to define the new world economy.

NationSwell Council Members Reimagine the Future of Work for Our COVID-Disrupted Present

Posted on by Anthony Smith

For many of us, the COVID years will be a time of reflection, a time when the disruption of it all provided an impetus to re-examine things we had been doing for so long that we had stopped questioning why we ever started doing them in the first place.

For many of us, that reflection focuses on our work: what we do, where and how we do it, and perhaps most significantly, why we do it.

Our NationSwell Council community members are no exception to this period of reflection. My fellow leaders are at the vanguard of innovation in the modern workplace, meeting the disruption in COVID’s wake with the pragmatic solutions our workforce needs in order to bring about our best future. 

I talked to my fellow Council members about what they’re doing to bring the future of work into our present. Here are the expert insights they’ve shared.

Acknowledge that many of your employees have gone through a personal reset and are re-examining everything, including work.

In many instances, the reset began on an individual level — almost as if we all became aware that this crisis was too important to waste. We started questioning ourselves: parents, forced to homeschool their children, started rethinking how and what their children were learning; people who, pre-pandemic, routinely travelled on business, learned to appreciate family meals on a regular basis; workers who hardly knew their neighbors and rarely saw them now wave at them out windows and across porches. 

For the first time, many people became much more present in their own lives.

“I think it’s an outgrowth of the fact that we had a really profound year,” Brad Kelsheimer, CFO of Lumina Foundation, said. “People have come to a more realistic grip with mortality. And so part of my reset is asking myself, ‘Who is the authentic me?’ And I’ve encouraged my team at Lumina — both my executive colleagues and also my team that reports up into me — to think, similarly, about what we learn about ourselves during this reset.”

From there, leaders can take the insight from their employees’ lived experiences and allow them to choose how they and you will co-create the future of work together.

“This feels like the very first time that all of us have been asked what we really want as workers,” Lexi Paza, Deputy Director of Real Estate and Operations at Tides, shared. “And the buildings, I mean, the physical plants that I manage, they now have to match and meet the person on what they want, and not the other way around.”

“We as people have been asked to bend to what the spaces in which we do our work can provide,” Lexi continued. “And for the very first time, I feel the power structure has reversed. Someone can say, ‘This is my safety. This is how I’ve been working best the last 18 months, because I was able to create an entire world around me. Can my workplace now match that?’”

“There’s now a thoughtfulness to the real estate, to the design, and to the health and wellness aspects of the physical workplace — and that’s all very new,” Arsha Cazazian-Clement, Director of Global Real Estate for Shearman & Sterling, shared. “I don’t think any companies felt forced to actually engage on a one-on-one basis with each employee to figure out how they work best. I think this past year has really shaken everyone, and employers are starting to realize that we are all individuals. And if you want talent, you have to understand that not all talent does the same thing, or thinks the same way, or is cut from the same cloth. If you want to innovate, you have to figure out how to support them.”

Listen to what your employees are telling you about what they need across all aspects of the workplace. 

One of the most significant upheavals has been the reversal of who has a voice in shaping the new world of work. In the past employers dictated where employees worked, what physical environment worked best for them and what role best suited the organization.

“I used this as an opportunity to springboard the conversation about how we actually design around people and what they want,” Arsha said. “It might seem obvious that we should design our offices for the humans who work there, but in most cases, that’s not usually what has happened. The dollars talk first.” 

“To design for humans, we really got entrenched in data; we started to appreciate the value of data,” Arsha continued. “And in order to extract that data, you first have to provide a safe haven for people to share their thoughts and ideas. We charged middle management with helping to obtain that genuine, sincere feedback that we were really hungry for so we could then bake it into our new space search, and bake it into the deployment of a workplace strategy that had been quite traditional over the past two decades.”

Continue making decisions from a place of shared humanity. 

To build community in the new world of work, be deliberate and intentional about recreating the best of what employees created at home while making sure to give them what they missed by not being in an office.

“We can all leverage this once in a lifetime opportunity to be more intentional about how we gather at work, ensuring it’s more fulfilling than simply cohabiting an office space or transacting on tasks,” Lucie Addison, Learning and Improvement Lead at Einhorn Collaborative, shared. “Our grantee partners have taught us ways to create moments of connection — everything from a two-minute question to kick off a meeting to sharing a moving experience together. Indeed, it will be more important than ever as we all navigate big changes. The challenges of the pandemic will not all melt away when we come back in person. The more connected, compassionate, and human we can be, the better equipped we’ll be to put our energy into the most mission-critical work. During times of uncertainty and change, relationships are what tether us.”

By focusing on the shared humanity of your workforce, you’ll build more cohesive teams — and emerge a better leader in the process.

“I definitely think that the pandemic has helped us be better leaders; it’s really emphasized the need for creating a strong unified purpose on the team and for being really clear,” Ron Martere, Vice President of Steelcase, said. “I think there’s been such a roller coaster with everything, and every industry has been affected. Coming back, there’s a need to build strong teams that are unified in purpose, that have clear expectations, that can deliver results, that understand not only their role but also what role their role plays in the overall organization’s success.”

The pandemic humanized workers and the workplace more than ever. Accept that you will make decisions that need to be changed. However, if you continue to give your employees a genuine voice in how they can thrive, your community will emerge stronger. Create a great work experience for your people, and they’ll want to come because they know they can learn there, they can get their work done better, and they can be more productive. They can feel that shared sense of purpose. You don’t do any of those things to your work environment, you’ll find it difficult to retain employees against the allure of other workplaces who are building for a human-centered future.

In reality, the future of work is now — and we are creating it together. The more voices, ideas and insights we bring to this conversation, the richer the dialogue and the options. Please reach out to us to be a part of this important ongoing conversation.