LAUNCHING SHANTI NATIONAL TRAINING INSTITUTE:Why Volunteer Managers Need to Be Lifelong LearnersDr. Charles A. Garfield

The year was 1979 and Shanti had been serving Bay Area clients facing life threatening illnesses for five years. We were one of the first volunteer based organizations of its kind in the nation and over 300 organizations and communities in the U.S. and abroad had contacted us for help in setting up similar services. Already, a large part of my time was spent responding to these inquiries in person and on the phone. I realized the time was right for Shanti to start a national training institute to share our model of volunteer based peer support in a more organized fashion.

I remember the early days of this effort well, sitting in a church basement in Columbus, Ohio listening to the needs of eighteen different volunteer projects modeled after Shanti. Also, I recall speaking about Shanti's new training institute during a keynote speech in Milan, Italy at an international cancer conference. These presentations and those in other venues spoke volumes about the wide interest in Shanti's approach to training volunteers and leading them.

Then, as fate would have it, the world threw us an immense curveball. The AIDS pandemic struck and Shanti put its best laid plans for a national training institute on the back burner and reaffirmed its commitment to direct service. All of us can be proud of this decision to serve our brothers and sisters with HIV/AIDS and the everyday heroism of Shanti volunteers past and present. We can also acknowledge that Shanti continued to share its growing expertise with other organizations and communities throughout the pandemic's onslaught. A large part of my own AIDS work in the decade from 1981-1991 was directed at sharing the Shanti model and training with others.

Now it is nearly 2003, early in a new millennium, and during the past four plus years, Shanti has recommitted to the development of its Shanti National Training Institute. Truth be known, we are far wiser and more competent in training volunteers and volunteer managers than we were nearly a quarter century ago when I first founded our Shanti National Training Institute(SNTI). . We now know that the SNTI is a lasting legacy to the thousands of volunteers and clients who taught us so much throughout our twenty-eight year history, particularly in the time of AIDS. The SNTI will enable us to train the managers of volunteer agencies who serve people with HIV/AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, the frail elderly, the abused, the homeless, and many others. Finally, it will offer the Shanti model in a way that speaks to the best in human beings and to the farther reaches of compassionate community.

The original version of this article was circulated in 1979. It was revised for a corporate audience in 1986 for Dr. Garfield's book, Peak Performers. The current version of the article still captures a major challenge and opportunity facing volunteer managers:

Alvin Toffler, in a passage from his well-known book, Future Shock, says: "Eons ago the shrinking seas cast millions of unwilling aquatic creatures onto the newly created beaches. Deprived of their familiar environments, they died, gasping and clawing for each additional instant of eternity. Only a fortunate few, better suited to amphibian existence, survived the shock of change."

Toffler's book gave millions of readers not only an enduring term but also, in Toffler's own phrases, "a first approximation of the new realities" in the "human side of tomorrow."

Today, volunteer managers are being cast upon unknown shores in far greater numbers than managers were when Toffler first wrote about the shocks of change in the 1960's. The intervening years have, however, produced one major advantage that early creatures didn't have in the days of raw natural selection: Today in the world of work, sink or swim is not the only path to growth. Another path is learning—specifically, the insights that peak performing managers have developed, sometimes hit or miss, sometimes formally, since Toffler's book identified the major problems confronting us in the modern era.

ANTICIPATE, ACT, ADAPT: MANAGING CHANGE
Anticipating change is becoming a permanent feature of the landscape of volunteer managers. Acting on well-considered and innovative decisions is the choice that many people have to make these days. It is the adapting phase that is the challenge in managing change. There are four basic skills apparent in the repertoire of skilled volunteer managers:



1. Being a student forever.

2. Expecting to succeed.

3. Mapping alternative futures.

4. Updating the mission.



The now familiar phrase, lifelong learning, implies a willingness to be sequentially ignorant—to know that having your degree or your title is by no means the end of the game.



Compared to kindergartners, first graders look mighty big and smart. A time-honored Zen parable contains a useful caution for the first graders among us. A Buddhist sage offers tea to a visitor who has come to learn about Zen. The sage begins pouring, fills the cup, and continues to pour. Tea overflows the cup, fills the saucer, and he continues to pour. When the visitor finally rouses himself from the startled silence and asks the wise man to stop, he does. The point of the puddles of tea soaking what had moments before been a clean, elegant, inviting tray needs no words. A cup that is already full has no room for more.



What the most talented leaders have learned is a willingness to be ignorant—to admit there are things we don't know—and to not be afraid to show this ignorance by asking questions. This has helped get the point about lifelong learning across to many of the people who depend on us. This willingness to admit to being under-informed has helped many of us convey the need for "admitting ignorance" to those who report to us. Along with a willingness to learn, high-performing volunteer managers enhance their skill in managing change by cultivating an unusual degree of tolerance for ambiguity. As physicist Peter Carruthers said, people who are making new knowledge live with a special tension. They may feel, as Carruthers does, out of equilibrium. That troubled him when he was young, until he realized that "if I understood too clearly what I was doing, where I was going, then I probably wasn't working on anything very interesting." An ability to tolerate ambiguity helps to avoid over-determining one's goals. When I was growing up, my notion of a goal-oriented person had something to do with fixing one's eye on a distant target and never looking away. Of course, student pilots learn that such target fixation will surely lead them to fly into the ground.



"Tolerance for ambiguity" is close to "expecting the unexpected." It allows a volunteer manager to discover new information as he or she goes along. As they proceed, high-performing managers can adjust goals, always in the direction of more successfully completing a mission. What they are doing is balancing between change and stasis, between innovation and consolidation. They know that, in any event, change is inevitable. They know that linear goals without fluctuation provide a certainty that occurs in theory but not in real life. Much more genuinely certain is a selection of alternative futures, each a projected optimal accomplishment, each taking its shape from changes that are made along the way. A high-achieving manager's willing to keep learning makes possible a variety of steps at many points along a critical path, some of which can make obsolete the old ways of doing things, no matter how productive those ways may have been.



Being a student at every point in the management of change allows one to incorporate as much novelty as is useful in order to make sure one is making progress, and also enough consolidation (or repetition or practice) to confirm that one is actually learning the new facts and integrating them into the overall game plan. It makes use of the manager's openness not just to new bits of information but also to entirely new ways of handling information—new kinds of thinking.



A classic statement of the need for breakthrough in the kind—not merely the content—of thinking came from Albert Einstein after World War II: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking, as we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes."



The new modes of thinking for which Albert Einstein asked do not mean that everything that volunteer managers learned yesterday is wrong, only that from here on, a greater proportion of the issues on which they spend their time will be novel. It means paying attention to learning.



As Toffler observed in Future Shock, the illiterates of the age of information will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn and relearn. Estimates already suggest that volunteer managers starting careers this year are likely to run through five or six major job changes during their working lives. Those committed to lifelong learning, who assume they can master the skills on which they decide to focus, can use each change of career to enhance their skill repertoire and quality of work life. They can manage change, achieve goals, and update the critical path toward achieving a mission as often as necessary. Over time, they learn to anticipate, adapt, act.



© Charles Garfield Group 2000, 2001