Last week, @markpetersen tweeted, “Talking about how to successfully shift culture in nonprofit orgs. Is it possible? Or shd they just die, and start over?”

This morning, @kirkbartha responded, “@markpetersen economic crisis put zeitgeists into overdrive non-profits can’t manage, creative & collaborative coalitions of interdependence”

Now I’ve yet to meet Mark, but today I unloaded these fluid, cryptic and convoluted comments on his blog regarding this tweet about the culture of nonprofits:

“(quote) Take this fire hose with a grain of salt, a drop of olive oil, a nibble of bread and a splash of wine.

I’ve been caught by two words in recent leadership readings: In Linchpin, Seth Godin gets uses a cipher like “artists”, and I’m at the point in Charlene Li’s Open Leadership where she speaks of “covenants” … both words are huge for the potential of future global change agents.. they are artists crafting covenants, or they are fearful maintainers of a crumbling status quo… We must craft new words (explosive, direct, simple, anarchistic, beautiful, and godly)… and the word “godliness” is eusebia literally translated “good spirituality” – there is a good spirit to be rediscovered, a zeitgeist for every era, every curve in the road ahead.

Over the past two years, in both profit and non, in governmental and socio-philanthropic, in Church and military industrial complex… there is a dialectic gaining critical mass, a thesis and antithesis with no synthesis… the UN will tell you dialogue does not equal compromise, there are non-negotiables we call values, precisely because they speak out something of great “value”… and what exactly are our values speaking out, fortifying, protecting? Most “values” (which end up wedged obtusely into marketing platforms) come off plastic and tinsel precisely because of the medium of marketing, which is basically propaganda used to leverage the attention of others… leveraging trust so people give… leveraging pennies in our directions… it’s a hairpin trigger, but eventually it all comes down to the money, or nothing gets done, no one gets paid… no missions get mandated, on and on (Ask someone out of the blue to show you their books and they look at you like you’ve just walked in on them naked in the shower). Transparency? Authenticity? case studies of Harvard Business School, or the bare essentials of kingdom come?

What if the only way forward is unprecedented humility, mutual reciprocity and interdependence? What if marketing doesn’t matter half as much as it used to? What if everyone is getting sick of our numbers never matching our words? What if we’ve actually been writing a lot of cheques our businesses and organizations have not been able to cash for various reasons? What if we’ve been forced to say one thing and gone on to do another, for a little too long, a little too independently? Oh, our year end reports tell the whole story!? No, sorry, they never do… we wax and gloss very well, covering cracks.

Before the economic crisis, businesses and orgs alike grew lax in the wrong places… they relaxed in places they were allowed to relax in, and they leveraged scaffolding, accidentally created babel…. competed for investors and donors like tuna fleets clearing the sea. If one had the right exec summary and exit strategy, then voila, a nibble now and possibly a nugget later. Great visionaries turned inside out by “practical” structures

Well, what happens when critical mass goes the wrong way, and a star implodes into a potentially dangerous black hole, and the critical mass is no longer out there, but in here… that boundary, that threshold where even light can’t escape gravity is called the event horizon… the scriptures are prophetically circular, telescopic, retrograde and full of imagination on these very event horizons of history… we’re on the verge of something, but what? If we cross the event horizon we don’t bother asking any more… in the meantime, fight with all our might to get clear… how?

Three very important values for the future: humility, mutual reciprocity, interdependence… Governmentally, we see it in England… we’re hearing repeated rumblings of future coalition in Canada… the fear-based knee-jerking of “we can’t let someone else lead us so we have to get our heads together and get to the jeweled crown first!”…. the point is, everything has already changed and blue and red don’t matter when the crisis outweighs party distinctive. Like how the war measures act supersedes the parks act… If Canada goes to war, national parks are secondary… just an example, other examples in the forms of questions: what do carbon credits and eco-psychological profiles have to do with a volcano in Iceland? will a hurricane in the gulf wash away BPs embarrassment? On and on it goes with the dialectic of pain and healing, the DNA of emergency response “culture”

I once handed Stephen Harper a book full of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s teachings. Why? Because I know we need to fulfill the UN Millennium Development Goals, but not at the expense of the Sermon on the Mount… and the HOW? is a dialectical tension, the painful contemplation of a cross suspended between two kinds of kingdoms. Joseph went through the pain and led Egypt. Jeremiah went through the pain and prayed for the blessing of Babylon. Jesus went through the pain and saw greater faith in the Centurion.

We can’t bank together until we lay our books before each other… with strong legal and financial models we can do it together… and if the org’s can’t do it, the younger generation will do it for them, because they don’t need bureaucracy, they need the right app… and they’ll get it done, each one pooling in their pennies and dreams… it’s already happening right before our eyes.

enough for now…(unquote)”