One Street News

October 2009

Vol. 2, Issue 10

1. Organization Emergency Response Manual
2. Meet the New One Street Board Members
3. Resources Highlights – The Six Ps of a Healthy Organization
4. Hot Topics – Meetings Don’t Count as Work

Organization Emergency Response Manual

By: Sue Knaup, Executive Director

At One Street, we hold great pride in our specialty of helping leaders of organizations overcome emergencies through our on-call support system. This is an unusual specialty – most agencies that assist organizations, focus on test-tube-sterile steps towards perfection. But try to call any of them for help when you are in crisis and you’ll hit an impenetrable wall.  

This is why we founded One Street the other way around. Any leader of any organization that is working to increase bicycling who calls or emails us for help will receive immediate, personalized attention. Through our experience helping leaders of organizations out of crises, we have developed a proven system of response that starts with careful questions and discussion with the leaders before we offer advice.

After years of keeping confidential records of these emergency response episodes and upgrading One Street’s response system with each new discovery, I have finally given in to our need to publish a guide based on this system. But this will not be another guide about perfect organizations! Instead, I am writing this manual for anyone who knows that active organizations are not perfect and wants to coach leaders out of emergencies.  

I have not found any manual within the world of organization development that would serve well as a model. That’s why I am fashioning this Organization Emergency Response Manual after the Emergency Medical Services response manuals used to train paramedics. Hey, it works great. To demonstrate, here is an excerpt from our manual:

 “An organization, much like an organism, depends on complex systems all reliant on the others. The people, policies and programs of an organization all must work in unison, much like the circulatory system, respiratory system and nervous system of a human, otherwise the entire organism will shut down and could die.”  

In fact, the chapters align nicely as well: Your Job as a Paramedic an Emergency Response Coach, Patient Assessment, Response – Life-Threatening, Response – Non-Life-Threatening, etc. I even have a chapter for infants i.e., new organizations. Each will be filled with the warning signs and appropriate responses we’ve learned, never revealing the identity of the organizations or leaders we’ve helped. At One Street and throughout the manual, confidentiality is our strict rule.

I began writing the manual as an inside training tool for One Street staff and Advisors. But as I discussed it with people outside the bicycle advocacy movement, I realized that this manual is needed for any organization working for positive change in this world. So I have expanded its scope accordingly and am developing the book proposal for a mainstream publisher. If you have suggestions for mainstream publishers, independent preferred, please call or email me with their info: 928-541-9841 sue{at}onestreet.org.  

And if you find yourself in the midst of an organization emergency, never hesitate to call or email us for help! Response is what we already do. You can also find nutritious organization development resources on our website at: www.onestreet.org   

Meet the New One Street Board Members

We recently welcomed two new members to the One Street Board of Directors:

Paul McKay – bicycle advocate and bike event entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia, but works worldwide. Paul is one of the founders and was the first executive director of Bicycle Victoria, one of the most successful bicycle advocacy organizations in the world. He now focuses on helping local leaders create massive bike events to help get more people riding, mostly in Australia and South Africa. He even helped create a social bike event for rural farmers in South Africa recently.

Reidar Olsen – has been an active leader for bicycle advocacy in Norway for many years. He served as SLF’s (the Norwegian bicycle advocacy federation) President and also served as the Treasurer of the European Cyclists’ Federation. Reidar’s specialty is progressive education which he has helped develop through his career in education and as the principal of one of Norway’s most progressive elementary schools.

Paul and Reidar have served as One Street Advisors since our founding, offering their expertise and ideas to help build our organization. We look forward to working with them in this new capacity over this next year as One Street reaches towards greater gains for increasing bicycling around the world by helping local leaders who are already hard at work.

Resources Highlights – The Six Ps of a Healthy Organization

Hot Topics – Meetings Don’t Count as Work

When leaders of organizations call us because their organizations aren’t progressing, we often discover the misconception that meetings equal work. Too often, when we ask what they have done to move their programs and projects forward, we hear: “We’ve been meeting every month for a year” or something similar. This is a Hot Topic because most leaders facing this problem don’t like to hear our response:

• Meetings don’t count as work.
• Meetings are torture.
• Never subject your program volunteers to meetings.
• Only leaders (a strange type of human that has a built-in resilience to meetings) should ever be subjected to meetings, and even then, meetings must be kept to the minimum necessary to discuss changes and decide on actions to move forward.
• Meetings do not cause anything to move forward, only people taking action steps moves things forward.

Blaspheme! This is crazy talk! Without meetings, no one would know what is going on!

Calm down and think this through. If “what is going on” is actually going on, then you can write down this important information and deliver it as a report to everyone who needs to know this information.

But they never listen anyway to what I have to say! Why would they read a report? 

Now we’re getting at the problem. If your meetings are so un-fun and boring that attendees aren’t listening, then you are not using your meetings well anyway. Deliver status quo information in written reports, change your meetings to only adjusting or changing your current direction, and all your team members will engage. Not only that, they’ll read your reports because they’ll need that information in order to offer pertinent ideas. When everyone has the opportunity to offer pertinent ideas for progress, meetings actually become fun!

Leaders love to help make change. Leaders are innovators and need to know that their input has been plugged into improving their organization. And there’s the other key to successful meetings – always note the input from each leader in your written reports and show how their input has been implemented. This will feed their enthusiasm to engage in pertinent discussion, offer even more ideas, and then offer to take the actions necessary to move the new ideas forward. 

With these changes, you will enjoy significant acceleration in your organization’s progress, not because of meetings, but because you and your fellow leaders will create the action steps needed for success. Then your program volunteers can skip the meetings and get right to work.