The Origins of EJ
“All in all, we just keep repeating our mistakes. At EJ Idea Lab, we’re using our experience to create better ways.”
We often say people make communities. A true, but incomplete sentiment. People will always organize, and those organizations inevitably inform and impact every aspect of our communities. We first organized for survival. We’ve organized to try and understand the spiritual and the unknown. We organize for and against things and people. To delight and entertain each other. Governments, good and bad, form and evolve, same as systems of commerce. We create groups aligned to our interests and values. Organizing is part of the human condition, but over time, the ways in which we sort ourselves should naturally be evaluated, adapted, and sometimes reimagined.
Over modern history, massive organizations have constructed the systems around which nearly all our lives revolve. Those organizations also developed unwavering ideas and practices regarding what and what not to value, whose interests they should serve, and how they operate. Unfortunately, those values, interests and operations simply don’t benefit most individuals or communities. None of this is new, but in recent years, there’s been somewhat more – if mostly performative – institutional acknowledgement that the tried and supposedly true leave a lot to be desired.
What we’re left with are feeble systemic changes. Instead of reimagining, we deflect and distract. We do things like “diversifying” the workplace, without updating performance criteria, HR policies and benefits, and ways of working to reflect that diversity. The most destructive polluters on the planet encourage individual consumers to recycle (minimal impact) while ignoring their own climate pledges (potentially maximal impact). We forgive student loan debt without ensuring that higher education will be affordable in the future.
No matter how much organizations evolve, we continue to assume that growth, scale, and maximizing profits should be the goal of any project, organization, or business.
We also rely heavily on non-governmental organizations, nonprofits, and small businesses to support the social health of our communities – while employing imperfect methods and models to fund not-for-profit organizations, and supporting and implementing policies and social norms that undermine small businesses.
All in all, we just keep repeating our mistakes. At EJ Idea Lab, we are using our experience to create better ways.
My own career began in the nonprofit arts and expanded into broader nonprofit management and consulting. In those years, I became increasingly exasperated at the pressure to constantly increase the bottom line, knowing full well that the bottom line wasn’t necessarily the problem. The problem was the focus on money – without the systems, tools, and resources in place to use that money to its full effect. (Generally not due to irresponsibility or incompetence, rather the modern philanthropic model necessitates that many nonprofits operate in scarcity mode. Another conversation for another day…)
The point is, I was observing, learning, critiquing, and drawing conclusions about my role in all…this. In my exasperation, did I want to continue doing the best I could do with the tools I had? Or did I want to alter my course, develop my talents and imagination, and hopefully return one day to grow, scale, and maximize the efforts of organizations affecting change? I decided (unsurprisingly) I wouldn’t stand by.
At the time, I couldn’t conjure up an immediate solution. But I can always come up with a decisive action plan. My first step would be a career pivot. I brushed up on change management and organization development from my graduate days and got myself a new job, setting off into the great unknown that is Big 4 consulting. Corporate at its most corporate. The change must have seemed illogical and counterintuitive to any observers. I was bargaining on being able to observe, learn, critique, and draw even more conclusions about who we are, how we organize, and what’s going on in other industries that’s applicable to creating healthy small businesses and nonprofits.
This is the first post in a two part series. More on where EJ Idea Lab came from and where we’re going can be found here.
