THE METTA FELLOWSHIP
December 2017- December 2018
GROUP
DYNAMICS: THE POWER OF THE COLLECTIVE GROUP IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO INDIVIDUAL
POWER: A STUDY IN GOAL SETTING, EXPECTATION SETTING AND EXPECTED OUTCOMES.
AIM: To
document the experience of the first-of-its-kind Metta fellowship and to
develop a process of reflection, insights and support, which provide a basis
for interaction between present and future fellows.
INTRODUCTION
The Metta Fellowship is a first-of- its-kind
group based initiative brought into existence in the year 2017-2018 by NASSCOM
Foundation with partners including Tata Trusts and several NGO's with diverse
aims in the not for profit sector. It is a pilot fellowship with six
participants selected from metro cities over India, including Bangalore,
Mumbai, Delhi and Pune. The fellowship has plans to expand its offering year on
year and build on the pilot program.
METHODOLOGY
In methodology, after initial group sessions involving
all the participants and the delivery of formal inputs that they need as an
introduction to the social sector, the program involves a test ambition to tie
up the individual participants with NGOs for the remainder of the program, in
their respective geographies. The root of the idea is that each participant
will get hands-on experience while the NGO benefits from their subject matter
expertise. But to what extent can an NGO
go to support a pilot trial such as this one where there are no precedents to
fall back on to understand the level of engagement required on their part to
support the Metta fellow in their journey?
Also, another point of view would be that instead
of divergent appointments at several partner NGOs, should the Metta fellows
collaborate on only one project, which is identified prior to the program and
thereby, align them from the start with set expectations and allow them to
understand and operate frameworks and learning from formal educational inputs
and apply them to the case scenario already identified in this project? Would
this be a more reasonable approach? More efficient? A better way to manage
expectations and ensure integrity?
The methodology is a result of several
deliberations that seek to weigh up homogenous participation towards one goal
with a more diverse approach, involving many areas of the social sector and
therefore brings better engagement from all the participants.
TRANSITIONING
LIVES: BRIDGING MANY WORLDS
What makes this year-long initiative unique is
that the participants in the fellowship have some or no prior formal experience
with the social sector, while the selection criteria included a perceived
ability to severe ties with any and all commitments and an ability to fully
engage with the social sector for the period of one year. All the participants represent a slice of life
in which people selected are those whose aims have thus far taken them somewhere
in the direction of their stated goals in the corporate world. But, their
experience has also been perceived to, at some point, conflict with social
thinking, planning and goals and the corporate world, as many know, doesn't
necessarily provide support or bolstering of such goals.
Changing this perception is an ongoing pivot in
all relationships between corporate and the social sector, but the scope of
this paper is to document the micro effects of the macro causes and to
acknowledge that at some point, for all the participants, the reality of having
to contend with the new criteria of the fellowship and the demanding nature of
the same has necessitated a stepping out of their prior ideas and estimates of
personal, social, financial and psychological resources, and stepping into a
challenging new world, which has been a continuously intense
psychosocio-economic experience, within the context of each of their specific
lives.
While all of the participants have contributed to
the social sector before the fellowship in their own ways, as 'guests' if you like,
or as participants or volunteers in something like a 'give at least 10% of your
time or other resources' model, for the first time, through the fellowship,
participants are discovering and contending with the entire social sector and
the possibilities of increasing their engagement to a sustainable 100%. The
social sector is traditionally perceived to be undesirable for the majority,
not a coveted sector after high school education nor for employment in most
middle class households, which tend to aim education and employment towards the
corporate sector. This affects participants
because we are entrenched and sometimes even feel like prisoners of a system,
and we need to work really hard, mentally, psychologically and emotionally, because
we need to break through these barriers of perception towards a fuller and more
complete belonging to the social sector.
So for the Metta fellows, who come from a wide
and deep understanding of the corporate sector, the social sector is a teeming,
new world with its own unique origin, its ethos and strengths upon which it
structurally stands, and participants begin to re-find its main philosophical
influences, its flag bearers, milestones, visionaries and champions over history
and in the present tense, all over the world, while integrating into their own
understanding, at a rapid pace, its achievements, and getting a sense of what
is possible, through engagement with the formal education component at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences,(TISS)
and NGOs in the social innovation space and by using other resources available
to us, as part of our own further research and learning, which we do from a behavior of 'acquired prerogatives', more than ever so before.
INHERENT
CONFLICTS AND INTEGRITY MAPPING
For a lot of the participants, self-support and
taking care of their own income source is a pressing and real concern, since
the fellowship has a stated provision for a small stipend, it does not account for all their expenses of
living and in most cases, their sole income is supporting their families too,
including education, groceries, medical expenses and bills for themselves and
their family members. With a goal like 100% engagement in the fellowship and in
the social sector, it becomes imperative to secure this self-support firstly
and foremostly, while balancing goals and keeping the integrity of the
fellowship intact.
As you can imagine, the whole exercise comprises
of unending daily challenges including fundamental viewpoint shifts, basic
organisational and logistical challenges, communication challenges and at times
internal cohesion problems. There is a sense that people may be on different
pages sometimes, and since a lot of work or 'actions' run on purely personal
initiative, this may result in protracted process assimilation. Sometimes, behaviours
may be seen as being adjacent or constructive from the ground up, and at very
grassroot levels and while they are central to the purpose, an unfortunate
consequence is a sense of isolation in 'figuring things out', as opposed to
already knowing what is to be done.
Other experiences include those of missing processes,
like a lag in sharing information, problem-sharing and solving them together,
since people tend to think they have to solve them on their own from a behavior of acquired prerogatives, which challenges our core use of our own
resources. Individual problems may not always be need to be solved by everyone,
however, the problems of the individual are also problems of the group and the
solutions to these problems also belong to the group and this is a big key shift in the mind-set and
heralds an arrival of sorts, which brings deeper entrenchment in the social
sector.
This could pose challenges for the fellows and
partner NGOs since they tend to operate in constraint and tend to expect a lot
from a little. For the fellows, the experience is an operation in a reality in
which a constant comparison abides between at least two distinct worlds- the
corporate profit-driven sector and the social not-for profit sector. The use
and non-use of time, energy, education, skills, competence and money resources goes
through a very interesting and engaging sieve, one that exposes where these
resources may be getting misused in the one sector and where, it can be directed
to flow, in the social sector. The process of the Metta Fellowship impacts
these areas of need, and brings change and transformation and fully expects the
individual to take those actions that are consistent with these learnings, insights
and guidance. This, in turn brings the experience of the individual’s actions to
impact on the plural for positive change in both corporate and social sectors and
culture and society in general.
In contrast, people coming from the social sector
education background with prior experience in handling a project come with a
lot more knowledge of frameworks, precedents, what works and doesn’t, growth
hacks, skills and a level of competence consistent with such exposure, that
would make the process seem a lot easier.
For instance, nowhere in any of the educational
backgrounds or resumes of the six participants will we find any of these
industry specific exposures but expectations may override basic acknowledgement
of this fact, and set people up for failure. Is it even okay to be able to say
for instance, 'I really don't know about
such and such, since I haven't actually worked for any length of time on a
project involving such and such.' Is it even okay to have people take
cognizance of the fact that this is an entry level question trying to be
answered by the best of people's mid-senior level capabilities. This can be challenging
to them in and of itself. Their personal inquiries could still only amount to
guesswork and cannot be compared to those coming with more experience, know-how
and current competence in the sector. In this sense, overselling of the
participant's skill sets to the partner NGOs could backfire if expectation setting
does not address this in an efficient way. It may require a one-to-one buddy
system with the NGOs, it may require a rethinking of the roles that can
reasonable be expected to be played by the participants, which would need to be
mutually agreed to, on an ongoing basis.
Therefore, cumulative individual and collective participation
and shared growth over time could be considered a metric of success, in which integrity
of the fellowship is maintained by building the bridge between the corporate
and the social sectors and the Metta Fellowship enables and facilitates this
process which will also extend beyond the duration of the Fellowship itself,
for each individual and batch of participants.
CASE STUDY: Living the
examined life under the Metta Fellowship has brought to the fore, an ongoing point
of concern for Participant A who is challenging the dogma of privilege and the
abuse of the same in the corporate sector in an ongoing matter concerning
workplace sexual harassment and bringing justice at an individual level which
in turn impacts the social sector since this justice and attendant resources
will flow back to NGOs which support the rights and rehabilitation of
minorities who are the victims of the abuse of privilege, like men and women who are harassed in the workplace, rape survivors
and child abuse survivors.
(Case studies from other participants to about
the impact of being a fellow in their lives, to be added here- in the form of
videos, testimonials, etc)
THE
INDIVIDUAL AND THE GROUP: A BEHAVIOURAL OVERVIEW AND ITS COLLECTIVE IMPACT
It is important to understand why and how changes
in behavior or behavioral markers in individuals also affect the whole group
and moreover, how these behaviours associated with 'social sector thinking'
reflect a change in fundamental value systems. It is important to
recognise this as a process and continuously log learnings and insights, which
would give us behavioral markers that will indicate helpful alignment and
create internal cohesion and integrity. For this purpose, this pilot group is a
focus group, which will collect data and derive insights from the data to
create better working models for the present and future.
There has been a mention of at least two behavioural
consequences of engaging with the Metta fellowship in the document so far, that
of 'acquired prerogatives' and of 'personal initiative', and this part
deserves more attention and documentation, since this a first of its kind
social experiment and it could be useful to orient subsequent groups and make
available a sort of guide of 'what to
expect' and serve to validate their experiences, both positive and
negative, which at present is very much is the form of a collection of abstractions,
facts, insights, experiences and conclusions of an observed reality as it
happens, in the unique way that a Metta
Fellow undergoes them.
Researchers and speakers in the social innovation
space have pointed out that burdening decisions with 'moral duty' results in more immature decision-making than when
people come from their own studied ethical autonomy. The Metta program could be
an experiment that successfully creates a supportive environment to develop and
follow the voice of this kind of empowered ethical
autonomy.
THE WAY
FORWARD
Sometimes, the overwhelming psychological size of
challenges dwarf the many small steps taken towards overcoming those challenges
which make it seem as if failure is more likely than success, since
multi-dimensional factors that are not always in our control are at play. But
it would also seem short-sighted to indulge this view, since evidence of
impactful and positive progress, even if a bit slow, along the road is also not
ignorable. It is commendable.
In comparing individual viewpoint with the
collective, we sometimes ask ourselves, will I fail? Perhaps. But can we really fail that badly?
The odds say NO because together,
the collective enabled by the fellowship and its network is one of
extraordinary strength and one of the great daily success of the fellowship is
in enabling the power of the collective to be engaged variously and fully in
the lives of each of the individual members, by activating their conscious participation
in the empowerment itself. This is both deep and complex but also at heart, very
simple. Bringing people together and motivating them in the context of social causes
brings out the true spirit of engagement within themselves which in turn brings
out values that firmly and centrally cause them to become agents of change and
inspire others in the process.
Given that
Sustainable Development Goals
(previously, the Millennium Development Goals) signed and ratified by most
countries of the world form the underlying context of all social sector
initiatives across the world today, we need now more than ever to come together
and be a part of the solutions, especially NOW, since these goals are active
and are taking full cognizance of the impact of our multi-dimensional real-world,
real-time developments on the timelines
attached to these goals.
Additional references:
PROGRESS- an Experimental Short-film.
Synopsis: A man walks through the woods with a square building block projecting ideas of 'progress' as he understand it. One of the blocks begins to invade his space and he realizes there is more to nature than he would've thought.
Concept Note: The ideas in this film show how the obsession and the ambition for progress in our fast developing world is often careless and blind about its impact on the environment. Will we realize that the power of nature is omnipresent and will stay alive no matter what, in time?
