Scouts and Soldiers in the Social Sector
I have spent much of my career working in and supporting nonprofits and foundations. I am drawn to mission-driven organizations and the people who work in them. I respect their commitment to making the communities, country, and world in which they live better places. That said, the longer I work in the social sector, the more I am struck by a paradox. The same virtues that lead people to dedicate themselves to improving the human condition can produce biases, beliefs, and behaviors that make it harder for them to do so.
I recently read an insightful book that helped me understand this paradox better: The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t, by Julia Galef. Her analysis is not focused on people working in nonprofits and foundations per se. Instead, the book is about patterns and tendencies in how human beings think, in both personal and professional matters, whether they work in the private, public, or social sectors. Alas, many of us make a habit of fooling ourselves much of the time. To break this habit, Galef argues we need to adopt a mindset that gives us “the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.”
Galef invokes military archetypes to contrast two different mindsets. Scouts range widely, scanning for new information, updating their understanding of the landscape in which they operate and the barriers, opponents, and ways forward within it. Soldiers dig in and defend fixed positions against attacking enemies. They push doubts and questions away to avoid shaking their confidence and morale–or that of those fighting alongside them in the trenches. The following table from Galef’s book summarizes the differences between the two mindsets:
While human beings are capable of being scouts, we are naturally inclined to be soldiers. Persistent doubts and second-guessing can be painful – and self-defeating in a crisis. We want to preserve and protect our self-esteem and come across as confident and masterful in the eyes of those around us. It is hard to persuade others (or yourself) to do hard things if you aren't convinced they are possible and desirable. We are wired to want to fit in with the group we belong to, believe and feel as it does, and defend it against outsiders' depredations. Galef is not suggesting that we simply can and should stop being soldiers and become scouts. Rather, she argues, “we would be better off choosing soldier mindset less often, and scout mindset more often, than our instincts tell us to.”
I believe this is especially true for those of us working in the social sector. Feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, ending mass incarceration, warding off encroachments on democracy, and mitigating climate change, to name a few examples, are massive challenges. Those of us attempting to tackle them need a scout mindset to grasp the complex realities we seek to change and the best way to go about it. Unfortunately, the nature of our work leaves us more inclined to be soldiers than scouts.
By definition, in the social sector, we seek to tackle wicked problems for which there are not sufficient government or market solutions – at least not yet anyway. Unlike government agencies or for-profit enterprises, nonprofit organizations cannot rely on the coercion of law or the profit incentive to bring about their desired results. To help foster collective action in what was once called and remains in practice the voluntary sector, we are mission-driven and hype the values embodied in our work. It is hard to beat a righteous cause when recruiting and rallying staff, inspiring funders and volunteers, and mobilizing coalitions. But these imperatives reflect and reward the mindset of the soldier, not the scout.
Moreover, the private and public sectors have some crude yet concrete accountability mechanisms that tend to check insularity and self-righteousness and foster empirical humility. Companies that fail to understand their competitors’ strategies or what their customers want and need are apt to go out of business. Political parties that dismiss their opponents’ appeal and ignore the views of a critical mass of voters are prone to lose elections. For nonprofits and—especially—foundations, the mechanisms of external accountability are sparser.
That said, we can observe increasing levels of self-imposed accountability and a growing reliance on the scout mindset among nonprofits providing direct services to people and communities in need. This shift is being hastened by nonprofit intermediaries, funders, and practitioner networks. They are helping thousands of direct service nonprofits define and measure results, gather feedback and insights from beneficiaries, develop data-driven strategies, and improve their performance. Government agencies are reinforcing these shifts through evidence-informed policies and performance-based contracting with the nonprofits they fund to deliver services. Such practices, and the scout mindset they reflect, are becoming less the exception and more the rule.
However, the opposite is the case among nonprofits advocating for public policy and systems-level changes. In this part of the social sector, the soldier mindset continues to predominate. If anything, it is growing more entrenched. Let me share some hypotheses for why this is the case (please feel free to contest them or offer alternatives in the comment section below).
Part of the explanation is that nonprofit advocates can soldier away and continue to express their point of view even when they run short of the resources they need to succeed. Advocacy work is fundamentally an expressive activity. Just one determined person with a Twitter following or the ability to place an op-ed can engage in it—even if they are making no headway. Indeed, ceaseless and intense advocacy activity can often convey the illusion of success in the face of failure. In contrast, nonprofits providing direct services at any appreciable scale have substantial operational requirements and incur direct and indirect costs as they go about their work. Without sufficient budgets to cover the costs of their operations, the service provision stops. Moreover, in some domains of direct service, e.g., caring for foster youth or preventing domestic violence, the stakes of failure are high and all too clear.
Another reason advocates are more apt to operate with the soldier mindset is that they are engaging in activity that is inherently political and thus rooted in conflict. Advocates develop policy positions and build coalitions to wield power, pass laws or prevent them from passing, determine how policies are administered and who is administering them, etc. In our increasingly polarized country, advocates are naturally inclined to pick a side and join the fray, adding their impetus to the division as they do so.
How nonprofit advocates are funded also prompts the prevalence of the polarized mindset of the soldier in their ranks. Consider the support for policy advocacy coming from high-net-worth individuals who are “giving while living.” These donors often have clearly articulated views of what the good society looks like – e.g., one characterized by social justice and racial equity or by free markets and individual liberty. Alongside their philanthropy, many of them also spend considerable sums of money supporting political candidates, parties, and groups they favor (and thwarting those they oppose). Even as these donors observe the legal niceties of the tax code governing charitable contributions, they tend to see their political and philanthropic endeavors as a piece. After all, both strands of giving support their vision of a good society. Who runs the government is critically important for realizing it. Given the recurring intensity of the electoral contests to settle this question, it’s no surprise that donors seek to align their charitable funding to serve their political aims.
A different dynamic prevails with institutionalized foundations in which professional staffs and highly developed program strategies drive the funding decisions, though it also reinforces the soldier mindset among nonprofit advocates. Over time, more foundations have come to see supporting policy advocacy as a highly leveraged means of achieving the systems-level changes that are the primary objectives of their strategies. Toward this end, they recruit program staff from among dedicated policy experts and ideologically aligned advocates who then, in turn, fund the activists remaining in the field. Foundations so inclined are also increasingly apt to engage in high-level institutional advocacy themselves, e.g., by issuing and signing public statements on pressing issues they care about. Nevertheless, the tax code bars foundations from directly engaging in legislative or grassroots lobbying and earmarking grants to support those activities. If foundations want to impact public policy, they must find ways to do so indirectly. Hence the tendency of foundation program staff to see themselves as the principals and grantees as their agents in policy advocacy. And like most principals, to guard against shirking, they prefer to have relentless and unstinting agents fighting on their behalf.
Consider the hypothetical appeals of two different advocates approaching a foundation program officer in the same policy domain. The first advocate acknowledges that the political landscape is shifting and uncertain. The policy proposal they are backing is compelling but spotty in some patches due to coalition dynamics. Success is not guaranteed. To get the key changes they want, they will likely need to compromise with their opponents, who have public opinion on their side on a few fronts. But better to try to get half a loaf now and then come back for more later.
The second advocate has no such doubts. Their policy prescription, whose development was underwritten by the foundation’s prior grants, is ironclad. The votes they need are within reach, provided they get the resources they ask for and do not give an inch when the opposition fights back with spurious arguments. Now is the time for seizing the moral high ground rather than compromising with the corrupt status quo. You get the picture. I expect you also have a sense of which advocate is more likely to be funded.
The irony is that the scout mindset is even more relevant in nonprofit advocacy than in direct service work. To be sure, running an extensive food bank system or a city-wide afterschool literacy program is a challenging undertaking. But there are not smart, well-financed opponents that get up every morning and dedicate themselves to keeping families hungry or children illiterate. Not so with advocacy to reduce carbon emissions or eliminate excessive occupational licensing. In contested areas of policy advocacy, there are sharp competitors with resources, ideas, and incentives seeking to outflank and defeat you at every turn. It is thus critical for advocates to understand the shifting political landscape, the goals, plans, strengths, and weaknesses of their opponents, and the prospects and best pathways for success.
Julia Galef’s book is full of tools and tips to help readers develop more corrigible, reality-based mindsets. Nonprofit leaders, especially advocates and those who fund them, will benefit from reading it. I will just supplement her helpful guidance with three precepts I have come to rely on during my two decades of advising and funding nonprofit advocates.
1) We see through a glass, darkly. It is not simply that we could be wrong in our perceptions of what is happening and why in the part of the world we seek to change. The point is that we are almost certainly missing or misconstruing some critical part of the underlying reality. Hence the need to keep questioning, probing, and revising our sense of what is going on. Theories of change are just that – not tablets set in stone but constructs requiring ongoing adjustment as we test, refine, or discard hypotheses about how the world works and changes.
2) No party has a monopoly on wisdom and virtue. This precept is perhaps the most bracing to follow in our hyper-polarized polity. To be clear, it is not meant to valorize nonpartisanship, bipartisanship, lowest common denominator centrism, or both sides-ism. Nor does it presume that parties and partisanship are bad things. Indeed, they are how we establish the majorities needed to govern in a society of free and equal citizens. But party allegiance is a doubled-edge sword. It distorts our perceptions and reason. It tempts us to see only villains, poltroons, zealots, and fools in our opponents' ranks and overlook the presence of these types within our coalition. It is then all too easy to assess the merit of their priorities and proposals and our own accordingly. But we do so at our peril.
3) Engage the skeptics. This precept complements the first two. Want to know what is wrong with your ideas, what you overlook, and your self-serving biases? Human nature being what it is, you and your closest allies are not likely to discern these shortcomings with the clarity needed to rectify them on your own. Instead, ask someone who disagrees with you. Not egregious trolls or sworn enemies, mind you, as they will likely only harden your defenses. Seek out experienced and reasonable people who nonetheless see the world and the imperatives within it differently than you do. Put your cards on the table and, in confidence, have them critique your hand and strategy for playing it. If you don’t know anyone you could trust to do this, you may need to get out more!
These precepts serve in effect as cognitive hedges that help me identify and avoid common and predictable pitfalls in my patterns of thought. They are not fool-proof. I still can slip into an obstinate mindset at inopportune moments. But over time, they have helped me become a more self-aware and reflective practitioner.
