Reimagining Non-profit Impact with Heather Hiscox

Designing with Purpose

Heather Hiscox:
I’m Heather Hiscox, I’m the CEO and founder of Pause for Change, and I work with nonprofits, local government and philanthropic foundations to help them address challenges and pursue opportunities using my PAUSE framework.

Julie Lacouture:
Heather, thank you so much for being here. I’m so glad to have you on. So tell everyone about Pause for Change and how you work and who you work with.

Heather Hiscox:
Yeah, so Pause for Change is my consulting practice was really to solve and work on my own problems that I experienced when I worked in the sector. I have the honor of working with nonprofits, local governments and philanthropic foundations primarily across the United States, and I really help them look at challenges and opportunities in a whole new way. So I really challenged their problem solving skills. Where instead of falling into status quo behaviors, really challenging them to use new questions, new frameworks to generate more impactful results in less time using fewer resources.

Julie Lacouture:
And you wrote a book called No More Status Quo, which is how you and I met. I think in the book you pretty much lay out your whole process in the book for anyone to pick up and use. Is that right?

Heather Hiscox:
Yes, that was my intention.

Julie Lacouture:
What brought you to give away everything in your head?

Heather Hiscox:
I think it was just living under my skin for years and years. It was just my frustration and my looking around and saying, am I the only one that is seeing this? Is anyone else frustrated with how leaders are making decisions or how philanthropy operates or how we design programs totally disconnected from those people most likely to use them? Is this just me? So I wrote the book partially in response to that to all those other people asking those same questions in their minds saying, you are not alone at all, you are not imagining things. It is cuckoo.

Julie Lacouture:
What were some of the specific things you were seeing?

Heather Hiscox:
Yeah, a couple different buckets that they typically issues fall into. One was creating solutions, just seeing a problem, freaking out, brainstorming right away, and then the person with the most power in the organization saying, okay, here’s the plan. No one ever talked to the staff inside the organization. No one ever talked to our partners, community members, any other stakeholders to find out what they might need or want or what their biggest challenges were. So that’s one huge chasm of waste and frustration.
I think another one is really about how in our sector we don’t share learning. We work so siloed within our organizations and within our communities. You might have 10 different organizations working on the same cause area or issue and they’re never talking to each other. And because of the competitive nature that philanthropy has created with their grant mechanisms, they’re supposed to hide their successes. They’re supposed to hide their failures. What truly is the role of philanthropy? What truly is the role of local government and nonprofit? And we see them often as distinct and separate sectors, but I really see them in full alignment, especially at the local level.
How do we make more integrative, systemic, systematic, thoughtful, co-designed solutions? There’s a huge lack of co-design, but we see them as distinct and separate and they’re truly not. If they are leveraged and working together, it’s amazing what’s possible.

Julie Lacouture:
I agree with so much of that. You don’t want to be the person on staff that’s the Cassandra, that’s just pointing out problems and getting apoplectic. But the way I always described it, what I could see was, a solution is in search of a problem, right? Sometimes I see that. Or a product in search of an audience. We see that in fundraising a lot too, where it’s like, you made this thing but who was it for? Who was the intended recipient or participant in this?

Heather Hiscox:
Oh, yes. And what we do is we say then we’re the best kept secret. We think that we need to double down on our marketing or brand clarification or improve the website or have new brochures and do more outreach. Maybe you have some of that going on, but usually it’s because your products, your programs, your policies and processes don’t create value. They’re not easily accessed. They’re not creating the most benefit. They’re not delighting anyone. They’re just perfunctory. And you have this sort of sympathetic baseline of at least we tried. At least we tried to offer this and make this thing. But it’s in such utter disconnect from the people that are most impacted by that solution. We’re not going to have the greatest of impact even with the best of intentions.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, absolutely. And I know at for-profit companies, usually there’s a whole set of jobs called product manager and their job is to be the connection between the people that make the product and the marketing department. I’m oversimplifying by a lot. But their job a lot of times is to cross those bridges of who is this for and what does that person want, how will we persuade them to buy it and therefore then what are the product features that we’re offering? I always thought the nonprofit sector could really benefit from that type of role.

Heather Hiscox:
Absolutely. And that’s what I help a lot of organizations figure out. Is they walk in with a challenge and they say, this is their symptoms. We’re feeling a pain. We are as an organization, we’re feeling pain. So what do we do about it? Or they’ll have an idea, a possibility, should we build this? We could, but should we build this? Or the worst case scenario, which I don’t exactly appreciate too much, is when things have really gone off the rails and they’re like, how do we bring this back? How do we resuscitate this program? It’s often very difficult. But that’s usually the three different reasons why people come to hang out and I get to work with them.

Julie Lacouture:
I love that you describe the work that you do as hanging out with you.

Heather Hiscox:
I really invite people with love and care to have support because I was them. I was trying to muddle through the madness. I was trying to figure out how to create impact. I was trying to connect my passion, what I care deeply about, these missions and our communities, with that frustration. So just creating a soft landing place for people to come and feel supported and feel seen and heard, and then have tactics to move forward. Because how I’m different than most consultants is I don’t say to any potential client, I have the answer, I have a package, I have an algorithm, I have a thing. I just say, I don’t know what the response and outcome will be because I’m not your stakeholder, but I definitely have the method that you can use to get to answers most efficiently and effectively. So, let’s go.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, that’s what I love the most about your book is that it is a process. So before we get into that process, what is the thing that you want nonprofits to do after reading this book?

Heather Hiscox:
I really just want them to get started at the very beginning. Not to look at the whole thing and feel overwhelmed with the process and say, oh gosh, how do I do this? They literally can go to the very first step. They can just start to initially think about, okay, what is the challenge? Who’s most impacted? Let’s just write it down. Let’s get focused. And I think we tend to get overwhelmed when we think everything has to be done at once or everything has to be done perfectly. I meet so many people that the number one thing that comes up in coaching calls is just the reassurance that they’re doing it right. That there’s no right or wrong way to really learn, you just have to get started. You just have to listen to the data, qualitative and quantitative and all different forms. You have to listen to your gut, follow the breadcrumbs, just keep building upon that initial learning. But you have to get started to start to make those shifts.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, I think that’s inspiring, to think you get many… It’s iterations, and that’s a hard lesson. There’s two places I’ve learned that lesson in my life and neither have been at work or in school. It has been in athletics and art. You learn practice. You’re going to run drills, you’re going to run this, you’re going to work on repetitive motion so that when it counts, you’ve got it. And with art, I feel like you learn the amount of prep before you touch your canvas, the amount of layers that go into making a painting, those are all iterations. That’s how you get beauty. It’s not you sit down and are like, amazing.

Heather Hiscox:
It appears.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, it magically appears. And we’re not very good at savoring that process, I think sometimes, especially at work.

Heather Hiscox:
Oh yes. I love those examples, especially in social impact. We’re adopted this urgency hustle culture for more capitalistic groups and there’s so many reasons for that, why we have that in the first place and why we’ve adopted it in the social impact sector. But it’s just ridiculous that we’re supposed to get the answer right on our first go. That’s one of my number one criticisms of philanthropy and that the dynamics it’s created with the nonprofit sector is to have this expectation that you are going to write this grant application, you’re going to know exactly who will be served in this tiny amount of time for usually not enough money, and that you’re going to create these measurable outcomes. That’s ridiculous. Especially if you’re dealing with these really deeply entrenched and issues that are part of larger systems that have been around for many years around hunger, poverty, domestic violence, all these major issues. We’re writing these applications as if we know exactly what’s going to make all the difference. It just doesn’t make any sense.
My challenge to philanthropy and to nonprofits is to embrace that this is a learning practice, that we have hypotheses, that we are here to test and we need support and flexibility and care to be able to try something new. And if it doesn’t work, it’s not seen as a failure. It’s just seen as iteration one didn’t quite work, and here’s why. We learned from it. We learned why it didn’t work. Or maybe the first iteration was fantastic and we know why it was successful, and we can build upon that. We don’t get do-overs. We just try to copy best practices. We just try to pour all of our efforts into these giant initiatives. It just doesn’t make any sense.

Julie Lacouture:
Let’s tell everyone what the PAUSE method is. So you said after you read the book, I want you to just get started. Just start using the process. So PAUSE, P-A-U-S-E is an acronym and each one is a step. So will you take us through PAUSE?

Heather Hiscox:
Yes, thank you. So it is an acronym and PAUSE is because that’s the number one advice I kept telling every single person, is just slow down, hang on a minute, can we just stop to think? Because we don’t have time to think critically integrating new knowledge, we’re not communicating with each other. So pausing is so essential. So I really wanted to reinforce that.
The first P is package the challenge. Do we even have alignment on what we even want to work on? So many teams would come to me and I could ask five different team members to write down the challenge and I would get five different answers. I thought this is not going to work because we have to be in alignment. What is the actual challenge and who are all the different stakeholders impacted? And let’s pick one to start with. We cannot create one size fits all solutions for everyone, we really have to get focused on what does value look like for them.
Then with A is assess uncertainty. So let’s sit in the fact that we are biased, that we only see the world the way that we see the world, and let’s get ready to be empathetic. This was a key step that I didn’t have in the early part of the framework, and I learned was absolutely essential. But let’s name what we don’t know. Let’s identify what we do know and say, okay, we’re pretty smart, and then let’s look at all the stuff we do not know about our challenge and stakeholder.
And then how that lends itself straight to the U of understand stakeholders is that we turn our unknowns into questions. So I teach teams about the benefits and harm of empathy. We talk about informed consent, how to write great questions, how to actively listen, how to pull out key insights that emerge, how to notice body language and all those different levels of that. So we do one-on-one interviews with stakeholders to really understand their challenges, what they’ve tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t.
And then only then do we start to brainstorm. When we get to S, which is the fourth step, which is really atypical, we then start to brainstorm and we do it abundantly and everyone has shared power to brainstorm and come up with different ideas of what actually will make a difference. I have a matrix that I use to help people prioritize. They choose one. And then what’s also very different is we try to break the solution. We don’t treat it as precious. We try to rip it apart into its assumptions. What must be true for this solution to actually create value for that specific stakeholder. And we design really quick rapid tests to test it, and we go do these little tests and then we make evidence-informed decisions.
So that’s the E of PAUSE. We make decisions based on the qualitative and quantitative data. We learn how to influence and communicate with leaders, and we learn how to keep making next steps and decisions of moving forward based on the data that we collect. So that’s what teams learn to do very rapidly and they get to practice by doing and make huge learning advancements and whatever challenge they want to focus on. And that I reinforce it with coaching support.

Julie Lacouture:
That’s really great. It reminds me of how I learned how to do strategy, which was in business school. I think it’s IDEO has a method where you pose questions. It’s always about the question. Define that problem specifically, and the definition of the problem can set you on a great trajectory. So I really love your method.

Heather Hiscox:
Thank you. It does have components, like you talking about IDEO, of human-centered design thinking, of course. But those frameworks were never created for social challenges.

Julie Lacouture:
Exactly.

Heather Hiscox:
That’s where I started was looking at those methodologies and lean startup principles of rapid experimentation, lean experimentation. How do I adjust those to the ethos and feel of non-profit land? It’s very different and it keeps evolving and changing. So how do we really root the work and justice and equity and love and care and responsibility and accountability. It’s all the things that really are not included in some of those other frameworks, but how do I bring my team members into full awareness?
And then the other piece that I also think is essential that’s missing from all of our learning journeys is reflection time. I include that as a part of the process of thinking about how are you being changed by your learning? Not just, oh, I thought it was this and now it’s this. What are you noticing? What are you recognizing? How are you different as a result of this experience? So that’s what I also want to deeply involve and ingrain in the groups that I work with.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it because a lot of the reasons we… All of the things you said at the beginning of this conversation about the frustrations you had with the sector come from a place of, I usually see it as a boss told me this once because he was like, everyone here is nice. Don’t get frustrated with them. But what you’re seeing are their coping strategies. This is what they act like when they’re coping. So it might not be the prettiest and it might not be the kindest sometimes, but it’s stressful here and this is them coping. He was very empathetic about it.

Heather Hiscox:
Yeah, and it’s coping strategies and we have to step back and hold the entire sector accountable to say, how do we get here? How is this all created? What are the dynamics that are going on? Who are the power players that are creating these guardrails that we think these forms that we have to fit into? Well, who says… And I love what’s happening now of people questioning professionalism and failure and where we can work and how we work, and just asking bigger and bolder questions about what are we doing, what are we even doing? Not just running around eight to five, getting lost in the inbox and all our different project management. But sticking our head up and really having these larger conversations and noticing these larger issues is essential.

Julie Lacouture:
I read something about the Einstellung effect. I’m probably saying it wrong. Have you heard of this?

Heather Hiscox:
No.

Julie Lacouture:
It’s the bias of your past experience, basically. So it’s like you have a propensity to solve things in the way that worked for you in the past, but also teams have a propensity or a bias to get very attached to an early solution or a best practice. And I read it like, oh, yes, we do that.

Heather Hiscox:
Oh, definitely. And I talk about habits and the habit cycle. There’s a cue, there’s a reaction and a reward. And we as leaders, organizations, individuals, we have habits in the way that we address challenges. But normally we see something and then we just freak out and we go straight into problem solving. We forget all the other nuances to it. We just go, okay, solution. Panic. There’s something wrong. I feel icky. That floods our bodies when we choose a path forward because uncertainty feels awful. But when we go, all right, team, here we go. Plan A, step one, step two, that feels good. But what it does is it gets our brains confused, we think that having a plan equals impact. We think that execution equals actual change and it doesn’t. Sometimes it is just a massive waste of time with no one paying attention. Then we look back and go, why do we even have this program? Who are we even helping? Or why are we banging our heads against the wall?

Julie Lacouture:
So something for our people that are listening to this and feeling, oh my gosh, yes, this is what it’s like where I work. Can you give us a success story of an organization that got themselves out of this?

Heather Hiscox:
Yeah. There’s one story that I love. I think it’s so interesting how quickly they reach success. It’s the United States Swim School Association, and they’re a form of nonprofit, and they were hearing and noticing again and again from their members that onboarding new staff was really painful, was really tricky. Because there’s in the water training, which of course is essential, but there’s all the out of the water training about all the rules and regulations and responsibilities. To do that again and again it’s just exhausting and really time-consuming. And then there’s questions about the fidelity, is everyone really receiving the same training?
So they said as an organization what if we put together these learning modules? And they had some of them complete, some of them not so complete. What if we package those together and offered them as a benefit to our members? It was totally an MVP, a minimum viable product. It was not beautiful. It was just the basics. And they charged an introductory fee, I think it was $99. They offered it at their annual conference and they sold $30,000 worth of subscriptions instantly in an hour. So I love that example because it shows when you really understand the pain of your stakeholders, you really understand and test elements of the solution. They tested which modules were key, which were essential to satisfy every state guideline in all the different states across the country, all these different elements. People were like, yes, you heard me. You understand my daily life. You get it. Let’s go. A 100% I’m with you. So I love that example.
And then just today I had a coaching call with a team and sometimes the changes, it’s big in terms of earned revenue or a new program that’s very successful, but it’s also in the learning, the individual learning. And this one team member was saying that, she said it was a paradigm shift. It was an entire shift in her mindset around empathy. That when she works in the disability community and really fights for the rights for disabled folks, and normally she comes to these conversations ready for battle with a sword and shield just ready to fight because that’s really what her experience has most often been. But she said for the first time, I have empathy for the person on the other line. I’m realizing they weren’t ready for my call. They may not know, and it’s not their fault. They may not have the answer. And I look at them totally differently.
And to me that was a huge win. It’s a huge celebration to shift her thinking. The challenge they thought was a challenge they’ve learned was actually not the challenge after they started talking to people, or they learned that while that challenge is way too broad, it’s more nuanced. We have to get more specific. We have to get more focused on a different stakeholder. It’s wonderful. So a lot of it is like these accumulation of little wins and the learning and the success isn’t always launching something. Sometimes it’s saying, we’re not going to do that. We know that’s not the right fit for our organization. We know that’s not the right type of program or way to go about it. And then shifting and pivoting to something that actually will create change.

Julie Lacouture:
That’s amazing. Now what about for the people that are sitting there and thinking, I would love to do this, but we have some really set in our own way ways here at my organization we have some roadblocks and they might be government, they might be a constraint on resources. It might be a person. What do you do then when you might be the only one ready for change?

Heather Hiscox:
Yes, great question. It’s still the same answer I gave before about getting started. Some people think, well, if I’m all by myself, can I actually do this? Could I read the book and influence what happens even though I have all of this other stuff going on? And yes, you can. Because getting focused will never hurt your work, that’s always the good thing. Getting stakeholder centered is always important and fantastic. Identifying what you don’t know is powerful, and it shifts the entire energy and conversation from disempowerment to action. Of saying, okay, now I have a pathway. Now that I know what I don’t know, I have a way to move through it. I have a way to get answers to these questions.
And I’ve honestly never had a leader, even those that are most command and control, hierarchical, very overbearing, ever deny or reject the learning from even an individual or team that has done this work. Because they say, wow, okay, yeah, you’re right. There are things we haven’t been considering. And oh, okay, you just talked to 20 different stakeholders to learn more. That’s fascinating. That’s really important learning that you gathered. Or Yeah, you’re right, there are a lot of assumptions built into this. Let’s go test it.
Some of you could be listening to this and thinking, yeah, I’m going to just say to my boss that everything they do is full of assumptions. But you can show by evidence, by testing some of these early ideas in different ways, you really can influence the outcomes. I’ve had entire organizations that were ready to launch massive PR campaigns with millions of dollars and teams already assigned, they paused them and they stopped them based on learning that they had. And some of them actually saved them from some PR scandals. They would’ve been horrible. And there’s always a time to get started. There’s always a way to learn and start to influence the outcome. You just have to get going and trust the process.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, that’s great advice. And as somebody that has managed people, I can say… And it’s sometimes hard to identify this when it’s happening. Whenever I’m working with staff or whether I’m managing staff, you’ll get someone come to you and they are at the end of their rope. And I think from a manager point of view, you can go one or two ways with it. Oh, this person is complaining about something or this person needs me to fix this thing. And both are stressful situations, but to be able to give that person the tools to say, yeah, I hear you. You’re upset. You are indignant about this thing that needs to change, but here are the tools. What is the actual problem? Who are the stakeholders? Channel that into this, come with a solution.

Heather Hiscox:
Yes. I’ve had teams within organizations like siloed departments that don’t like each other, have not shared words. They’re like, opposed-

Julie Lacouture:
Heather, this is the first I’m hearing of this ever happening in any organization. What are you talking about? Yes, of course.

Heather Hiscox:
It’s such an interesting dynamic of we don’t talk to that department. It’s like, what? How do you serve the people? It always takes me back and I should stop being surprised, but it’s odd. And really just doing empathy interviews, I’ve had a couple teams say, okay, I’m going over. I’m crossing over to the other side, as if there was this massive act of courage. Which I get, it could be hard. And just by having the questions of how are we making your life harder? How are we making your life easier? In what ways are you considering how you could redesign the way that we work? What are strategies you’ve tried? What are ideas that you have?
What’s fascinating about every time we’ve ever done that is the teams are usually in a lot of alignment. They say, oh, I could actually fix that for you. I didn’t realize that we were causing a delay in X, Y, Z process. Or, wow, that idea is something we’ve been batting around. Okay, interesting. Some of your goals for how to better serve X, Y, Z are things that we would also really be interested in considering. And it’s just broken down those walls, just having a handful of conversations and then word starts to… They came over, they asked me questions, they wanted my feedback, they cared about me. They said they’re coming back for more and we should give them a shot. The power of empathy and how that connection can really reunite folks.

Julie Lacouture:
But it’s also what I hear you saying is it’s the power of first person research, right?

Heather Hiscox:
Oh, yes. I’m not a huge fan of the focus groups or surveys. I think that will point people in a direction, but those are in disconnection. Focus groups gets you a little bit more connected to folks and listening, but it’s hard. You get a mixture of humans in a room and it’s hard to disentangle the passion, the data points, the what even happened. You get a sense of it, and I think it helps point us in a direction that can lead us to the one-on-one interviews to make the most valuable and the best use of time and effort from anyone. But yeah, that’s what I have found to be the most powerful. In a couple of hours you could talk to a significant handful of people, like four to five folks and really get some insights that can really start to guide your focus for next steps, but also people tend to love it and then they want to do more of it.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, absolutely. And I’d argue that focus groups and surveys take just as long, it’s just a little more hidden work so you don’t see it. And I’ve seen so many surveys that I look at them and I’m like, but what data did we actually get here? What did we really find out? Because the only thing that we really found out came from the open-ended interviews and wouldn’t it have been so great just to talk to them anyway, or the open-ended questions.

Heather Hiscox:
Yeah, you get 67% of people said they were somewhat satisfied.

Julie Lacouture:
Oh, fantastic.

Heather Hiscox:
[inaudible 00:35:56].

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah.

Heather Hiscox:
Or you have a lengthy report that no one has time to ever read. So it just-

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah but [inaudible 00:36:00] what would I look like if I was somewhat satisfied? Would it be just like a nod or would I be-

Heather Hiscox:
Exactly. You want to get those people that are delighted and the people that are pissed. What’s the good? What’s the bad? Let’s do better.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah. I will get into with folks, sometimes they’ll talk about we have to do a survey, then we can get a big enough sample size. And I was like, that’s true if we were trying to do scientific research or a sociological study. But we’re not actually trying to do that. We are trying to do more the comment box at your restaurant. If someone was mad enough to write out a comment or happy enough to write out a comment, that person is different from everyone else that just came and went. So it’s okay to weight that a little more. It’s okay to not be… I don’t know. I feel like I’m talking out of school here, but it’s okay-

Heather Hiscox:
No, you’re so right. And I almost feel like that’s a stall tactic, a fear response. We can’t go out to talk to people. No, it’s too scary. People think we’ll create expectations if we talk to them. Okay. That’s why informed consent is key to say, we’re here. We don’t know what’s actually going to happen. We don’t know what we will do with this. But you are the expert and you’re amazing and we really treasure your feedback and we’re going to see what we can do. And it’s not anything we’re going to do something right now. And so you start to counter that claim and then we don’t have time, you can just get started. And that’s the number one question I get from people is what’s the total number of interviews I have to do? And there is no magic number.

Julie Lacouture:
[inaudible 00:37:32] you’re like…

Heather Hiscox:
Right? Sometimes you can get it in 20, 25, sometimes it takes 50. I don’t know. It really is until you hear the same thing over and over again and then you feel like you’ve exhausted this first round of questions, this first round of people of learning. And then you go back and you say, wow, now we have eight new unknowns that came up for some of those questions. Now we have this other direction. And it just shapes what you do next. You don’t have to, again, create this long, deep and wide study. You’re trying to get a sense of what’s going on to guide the next piece.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah. And that’s the same as market research for a company. That’s what you would do. You would do it until you started hearing the same thing over again, and then you would stop. And I think sometimes that can be reassuring for people because, yes, your business friends do it this way too.

Heather Hiscox:
That I’m working with right now and they thought that the challenge they want to work on was they’ve had a big shift in leadership. They had a bit of drift, which happens to quite a few organizations. They wanted to get realigned to the original intent of the organization, get reintroduced to the new leadership, and their assumption was that all of their stakeholders were going to be angry, upset because that was some of the word in the community. There was some negativity on social media and other places, so they were ready for it. Every single person they interviewed, they talked to 28 people on their first round of interviews, every single person was like, I don’t care about all of that. I didn’t really know the mission, but now that you re-explained it, I’m delighted in that I like the organization even more. I don’t really care who runs it. You seem nice. What are your goals? Okay, I’m on board. Let’s go.
They wanted different types of engagement. So now on round two, they’re starting to do some early tests and additional empathy interviews around what does engagement look like? What does that mean? What are your ideas around engagement? Can you rank some different ideas and explain why, yes and no, these are more or less attractive? And then once again, they’ll be able to look at those insights and say, wow, people really want educational courses or workshops or training your classes, and they really want it in these top five topics and this is what they want to get out of it. That’s a way different way to go about the work than just assuming everyone’s mad at you.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah. Wow. And how long could you sit with that before you did nothing?? before you called them stalling tactics. I’ve heard them called hiding strategies, of ways in which we hide at work, ways in which we put off doing the thing that’s risky or hard or new or different. And I think that falls into it too. The assumption that this is the best we can do or everyone’s mad or it will bother them if I reach out or I could never get enough to be scientifically justified.

Heather Hiscox:
People are usually delighted to be connected with. They’re usually like, wow, you want my opinion? You want my feedback? And because we do an informed consent work, because we talk about ways to remunerate people’s time, ways to be prepared for resources that are ready to help people right then if they do have a challenge. We don’t just go out and, blah, we’re doing an interview. We’re very thoughtful about the question construction and the ways that we’re connecting with people. Because to me, we’re doing relationship building and we don’t do relationships haphazardly, we have to be really thoughtful.

Julie Lacouture:
That’s so great. Heather, before we go, I wanted to ask you if there’s any trends you’re noticing in the sector in general?

Heather Hiscox:
Oh gosh. It’s so interesting. I’ll say where I get my pulse on the trends is through the talk show that I host. I host a talk show called Possibility Project, so you can look at any episode on possibilityproject.org and it’s on any of your favorite podcast app as well. But what that is supposed to do and why I love that space is it’s a spot for frustrated changemakers to come and to have these hard conversations about things we must change in the sector. And so that’s where I really, I find out what people are thinking. And we invite not the usual folks that get invited to every single podcast, every single show. We have people from all different parts of the sector, mostly nonprofit, mostly philanthropy, some social enterprise and a little bit of government here and there. But some of the topics that really have me thinking is right now people are talking about equity and the big push, so many people were adopting DEI strategies and then now there’s the recidivism of that and the backlash of that. I find that fascinating about how are we navigating those conversations within our organizations, with our donors and communities. What’s the accountability with all of that behavior? Super fascinating.
I love that people are asking bigger questions around philanthropy and around the sector and how nonprofits function and work as well. I’m seeing more and more of that, of people stepping out and having those conversations, which is really helpful because I think it makes people feel seen and heard and they can feel supported to challenge those same structures.
And then the third part that I’m really seeing people talk about a lot is burnout. It was always happening, but I think COVID for all of its blessing and curse brought that more and more to the forefront and organizations are trying to be better to support their staff members, or not, and they’re facing the consequences of not doing that with migration of staff. And people are looking for different things when they look at the culture of the organization. I think that’s fascinating. What’s happening generationally in the social sector, what the workplace really looks like right now. I am just so intrigued by what’s happening at the individual level and the collective and organizational level, it’s really interesting.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, I feel like that’s happening in a lot of places too. Now that we’ve named burnout, we can talk about it. Thank you so much for being here. It was such a delightful conversation. I hope everyone goes out and checks out your book, looks at Possibility Project and follows you on LinkedIn to learn more about your work.

Heather Hiscox:
Thank you so much. It’s always fun to talk to you. I always learn so much and we have a great time.