Today is a snow day. I love snow days ~ even in April. I love snow days because snow days are days that I do not or cannot get outside to do the jobs that I would normally do. Snow days are days when I linger longer than usual in a good book - I am reading a few good books at the moment. 'Getting to Maybe' is one of the good books that I currently have on the go.
'Getting to Maybe' is filled with stories about individuals who have answered the call to make a difference by deliberately focusing on what cannot be controlled by intentionally working toward a particular outcome. Perhaps it is the paradoxical and yet practical nature of what the authors suggest that has me intrigued. For the book is filled with stories and strategies about and for moving toward what is possible alongside the premise that we are not in control of what is possible. Perhaps I am intrigued because standing still and leaping forward are how we have been forced to work at the Hope Foundation. Often times, we find ourselves leaping forward without knowing what the outcomes will be. In other words, we have learned to trust and use our intuitions when we see what happens when we intentionally make hope visible and accessible in our lives and the lives of those with whom we interact.
Our Hope-Focused Service-Learning program is one example of standing still and leaping forward before everything and everyone is in place. If we waited for all the pieces to be in place children and youth would miss out on what is possible in their school studies, individual lives and the community in which they live. In fact, it is children and youth who are propelling our work forward.
The authors of 'Getting to Maybe' use the explorer metaphor. It is a metaphor that I oftentimes use to describe our work. 'Getting to Maybe' describes why we need to be explorers, willing to chart our course and let ourselves be guided by forces out of our control at the same time. Hearing and seeing what is happening when children and youth have an opportunity to use hope to become meaningfully engaged in their studies and their communities fuels my hope to continue to find adults to support what is possible when hope is made visible and accessible in the lives of children and youth!!
'Getting to Maybe' provides a road map to what is possible when we think outside the box. At the end of every chapter there is a set of suggestions for those of us who are explorers in new territories. These prompts provide answers and encouragement when we are just about ready to turn back and retreat to the same old ways of thinking, feeling, acting and relating.
As Eric Young, in the forward explains,'Getting to Maybe' adequately addresses how we can move the dial on our most complex and seemingly intractable social problems and how we can be more than just anxious critics of the status quo or wishful thinkers about a better future. 'Getting to Maybe' is a resource that every explorer needs on their journeys to become actual and effective agents for large-scale transformations. It is not a book for the complacent or cynical.
The book speaks to the voluntary sector, business organizations, funding agencies, government and philanthropists. One of the ideas that transcends across the borders of each of these groups is developmental evaluation. At the Hope Foundation we are fortunate that most of our supporters recognize the importance of being able to integrate creativity and critical thinking when evaluating programs like Hope-Focused Service-Learning. To quote the authors, "Developmental evaluators ask probing questions and track results to provide feedback and support adaptations along the emergent path. This can be especially important in the explorative, reorganization phase of social innovation that looks and feels chaotic and is characterized by many false starts, dead ends and trial-and-error experimentation. Only when the ideas have crystallized can a more orderly, more predictable exploitation phase begin, one that takes invention and turns it into innovation. But if the ideas are not allowed to gestate in the reorganization phase, nothing really innovative can be born" (p. 83).
For this reason and many more reasons woven into the 229 pages, I believe 'Getting to Maybe' is a book for anyone who is at all hopeful about the future. I believe that we need complex solutions for the world we live in. 'Getting to Maybe' provides hope focused practices and strategies to solve the complex problems we face individually and globally in ways that encourage us to be both creative and courageous.
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