Meet Janice Spadafore
“Leading from the Back of the Building”
Even if you do not recognize Janice as one of the Presencing Institute’s (PI) familiar faces, you have probably encountered her without even knowing it. Janice handles PI’s accounting, budgeting, and grant management. Yet this job description does not do justice to the work Janice does for PI. A more accurate, though less concrete, way of describing Janice’s role might be: without Janice, PI would not exist.
Janice has supported PI since its very beginning. She met Otto Scharmer through her work with The Center for Generative Leadership (later named Generon) where Otto was also actively working on programs. Louis van der Merwe asked her to help him manage this new partnership, in which he was working along with Joseph Jaworski, Adam Kahane and Bill O’Brien.
In 2004, Janice began working with Otto directly, supporting him with his client programs and publishing projects. Up until the publication of Theory U in 2007, she assisted Otto in sending around manuscripts and pulling together new versions of the book. After its publication, new projects started to emerge and they began receiving foundation funding. Janice remembers: “they started paying attention to what we were doing and wanted to provide support.” In 2008, the decision was made to create a nonprofit, named the Foundation for Social Technology, to be able to receive funding from different partners and foundations. In 2012, they changed the branding of the nonprofit, transferring the entity and all the programs to fall under the name Presencing Institute.
Embracing Change
In PI’s beginning, “it was an all hands-on kind of approach.” Janice smiles, then adds: “and it still is, but in the beginning my work was more administrative, helping different programs and projects… whatever was needed.” As the Institute slowly grew larger, Janice continued to work on the operational side, committing more time to the financial aspects.
Due to the more recent growth of the team, “we have a bit more infrastructure than we used to have. We have the Berlin team that’s helping us. We’ve got one or two new people here in the Boston area as well. I feel like the challenges were to kind of let go of some of the stuff I used to do. I used to feel like I had the pulse of everything, whereas now I’ve had to let go of some of that for the good of the system.”
While PI’s growth calls for more infrastructure, the dynamics of the team has been changing. As the team grows, Janice observes that there is less opportunity to connect with specific people on a regular basis. “But with each new person who has come into the system, there’s also a real boost of energy and a new dynamic in the whole global community.” So, in this way, new energy is brought into the team, which allows for flexibility and growth to counterbalance the increasing need for structure. It is an “energizing” change, Janice says. “I like change, I embrace change. I feel like that’s why I’ve been able to stay connected with the same purpose.” This is “exactly why I’ve been really able to sustain the energy around feeling that there is always something new to learn, there is always a new opportunity for maybe improving something that we’re doing or taking on larger-scale projects or moving into new directions.” Janice adds: “It feels almost more like a family than it’s felt like an organization.”
Balancing the Formal and the Fluid
“Things are changing so rapidly,” Janice reflects, “and you need to create an environment where you can really adapt and be open and flexible around ‘Well, this was plan X, but guess what! We might have thought that we were so brilliant when we came up with that strategic plan, but there’s no way we’re getting from here to there!’” Janice laughs. So then you acknowledge that, rethink it, and maybe even start from scratch again. Janice emphasizes: “we all have to realize that we are in this together and it’s not like ‘my idea didn’t come forward’ or ‘this didn’t happen the way I thought it would.’” It is rather a collective effort which includes setbacks and adapting to the future. Janice adds: “I think that’s the pulse that’s important in an organization and especially this community.” It is the “basic DNA of the community.”
It is this ability to adapt to the future while also allowing for a solid infrastructure which is the challenge of any growing organization. Janice remembers: “When I first started out, I was always drawn to very small kinds of start-up companies. I preferred that over large institutions. I just loved the feeling of constant change, of how there were always new learning opportunities. As companies grew, you would get opportunities to play different roles, which always gave the opportunity to learn more. But then, within different organizations, as they would start to grow, they would start transitioning and you’d go to a more structured environment. You’d start having founders being replaced by management.” Seeing PI grow from its very first days to how it is today, Janice does not see this same pattern emerge. Rather, “I feel like my role has always been to not put a label on ‘Where are we going to be a year from now?’ I’ve always felt like my role has been to say, ‘This is where we are today’ and ‘This is going to happen tomorrow, so what needs to be done to move into that new environment?’” In other words: as PI grows, a new question emerges around balancing the increasing need for a solid infrastructure with the flexibility of remaining adaptable to the future.
PI as a Virtual Organization
One key aspect of this flexibility is the fact that PI is primarily a virtual organization. “I feel like the virtual aspect is what has allowed us to become so dynamic and so global,” Janice reflects. Janice described how, in the early days of PI, when she had moved from the northern part of the US down to the southern part, some of PI’s partners were “concerned that a lot of their projects and funding were being spent on a, maybe in their view, non-existent organization.” Janice laughs, “I mean, there was never a building.”
However, after a few years, “people felt comfortable that we were an organization that was really doing great work and managing to exist without a building, without really having the traditional structure.” They realized that, in many ways, “it’s the future.” Even the largest organizations have ‘home days’. “I think they’re catching up with us,” Janice says, “we were ahead of the curve.” As she points out, having a building is not the most important thing, but rather being connected to the right people and your work. After all, when you are “committed to work you love, then you can do the work from anywhere in the world.”
She noted that this question of working virtually also extends beyond the team itself, to the number of people who can be impacted. A lot of PI’s work is centered around free access to virtual programs, so that money and location are taken out of the equation as barriers to access for participants wanting to use the tools PI offers.
Janice remembers the first Global Classroom about 10 years ago: “I think there were 32 people that came together, and it was our first virtual experience where we said ‘How can we create something that is free and does not require people to come to us, so that we can reach everyone that doesn’t have the ability to fund themselves coming to a program.’” Since this first global classroom, the virtual reach of PI has significantly grown, which is evident from the annual cycle with u.lab 1x and u.lab 2x, for example. However, from an operational perspective, funding is the biggest challenge that comes with such virtual and open-access offers.
The Funding Question
As a predominantly virtual organization with a wide reach and mission, the Presencing Institute comes with a unique funding challenge. “We’re not specifically connecting to one focus area for impact. So you’re not saying ‘We’re trying to fund food supplies for just one cause.’ Instead, we’re trying to reach, on a global scale, all of these issues that are present, and ask: What are the tools and resources to bring together all these individuals that are trying to make a difference in specific areas.’” In this way, PI does not direct its attention at a singular cause, but rather attempts to bring together change-makers, from various fields, in order to respond to the diverse challenges of our time.
Janice continues: “So that’s really hard to fund, because you can understand it from the partner’s point of view, where they really need to be able to go back and say ‘this was the impact that we had’, like ‘this much food was distributed’. But that’s not where we are trying to make a difference, we are trying to help all of those different prototypes and all of those missions in order to give them the tools and give them the connection to each other.”
What is On the Horizon?
Janice sees new forms of connecting, expanded community building and partnering opportunities as emerging on the horizon. “Sometimes we ourselves don’t see what each member is doing,” she says. This is one challenge to being part of such a diverse network of global practitioners. Nonetheless, she believes the organization’s current focus on sharing its research and learnings will “help us take the next step to serve the community in a way that is even better than we have been able to do in the past.”
Janice reflects: “If we had started out thinking of ourselves as just a Massachusetts nonprofit or local community within a brick and mortar environment, I don’t think we ever would have morphed into the really interesting and committed organization that we are today.”
