You have to pay attention to detail and you have to give it your maximum effort. The victory! Let's go! Let's go! Welcome to the Only Easy Day was Yesterday, the official Navy Seal podcast. Navy Boot Camp is the first place Special Warfare recruits will receive unique training. It starts early with what they call dive motivation. This is where Special Warfare candidates perform their morning workout. I'm Daniel Fletcher. Today I speak with dive motivator Seal Master Chief Steve Drum to get some personal advice about recruit fitness from mental performance and focus to the physical standards test. Well, first of all, thank you for taking the time to sit down with us. I know you have a busy schedule. Your words of wisdom will be really appreciated. I think really nice insight for people that are going through this process. Sure, my pleasure. Tell us a little bit about what you do here on a regular basis. Your main priorities and responsibilities briefly, that would be a great start. So within our commodity, we have all of the Warrior Challenge program. So Seal, SWIC, Diver, EOD, and Air Rescue. And so what we do here is we facilitate a progressive workout schedule to consist of roughly 26 workouts. About half of them are going to be progressive swim workouts and the other half are going to be progressive run workouts.  And it's all just to get you further comfortable in the water. It's all to get you some more mileage and time on your feet, okay? But it's important to note that we're here to facilitate these workouts, but dive motivator training here is subordinate to the overall training that you receive at Boot Camp.  Official Naval Special Warfare and NSO programs officially start when you graduate Boot Camp. That said, we're here to make sure that you're as prepared as you can for the next phase in the pipeline. So we're here to give you not just the workouts but give you mentoring.  That you're able to get along and you're able to buy into the mission that we have here. You're kind of a bridge in terms of the fitness piece between people taking their initial PST and then arriving at Bud's if they make it that far, is that fair or is that not accurate? We're going to make sure that when you show up it's a different animal than when you were probably taking the PST back with your mentors and your coordinators. And this is why we always advise that you have a good cushion when you show up here at RTC. When you say cushion, you mean a baseline fitness level?  A, you're going from unless you worked a really difficult job right before you shipped, you're going to go from a minimal amount of stress, plenty of sleep, good nutrition, and maybe some of these guys two workouts a day and you're going to come over here and you're not going to get the sleep. You're not going to get the high quality food. You're going to be stressed. We try to give you a minimum of three workouts a week, but sometimes the training schedule, again, the other mandatory testable events, your firefighting, your live fire training, all of your other drill, that's going to take front and center. Your last week of training here at boot camp, you may get one or sometimes zero workouts. But we'll do everything in our power to make sure that we're bridging that gap as you asked, bridging that gap between showing up on the street and making sure you are getting time on your feet, that you're going to be training outside on the track when the weather supports it and you're going to be getting into the large pool and getting longer swims. You're going to get introduced with fins if you haven't done that already. You will be in a good place when you show up to go across the street. It's very critical that they understand boot camp is not just a speed bump. You are here to be basically trained sailor and that's very important because as you learn how to take information from your recruit division commanders, you process that information and you execute it to 100% adherence to the instruction. If you can't do that, then we can't really use you in the SEAL teams or any of the other programs. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And for most, you need to join the Navy and to do that, there's a lot of fundamentals. Your piece is more getting your feet wet, so to speak, in terms of physical intensity and kind of trying to maintain fitness level.  They're not here to come and just work out. Right, when you get here, you're going to learn how to march. You're going to learn how to fold your clothes and make your bed. And we're not just doing that. You're not folding your clothes and making your bed just to do it. You're doing it because even in the SEAL teams, when we start talking about free fall, jumping on oxygen and building rigs to throw out of the plane and all these type of things are very sequence oriented. And they're very detailed and they have to be done 100% correct all the time. And so, you wouldn't want to skip the boot camp training if you could. You want to go through it because it's only going to help you be better at making it through to your ultimate job, your ultimate goal. Right, I think that we've made that clear with some of the other people that we've spoken with. We get home a lot. It seems like that's a common thing for people to think they're just going to breeze through this process and try to get to buzz. And this isn't really that important. And I think it's important to reiterate that even coming from your side in the fitness area, that's a top priority of yours to make clear. Yes. So we've heard from people, recommending people, aim for a competitive PST score. Does that line up with your thinking? We are strict here with the PST standards. We're not trying to fail people. But when I say that you need to do 50 perfect push-ups, that means 50 perfect push-ups. Go and research what exactly the standard is. It's breaking 90 all the way up, locking the elbows out, all the way down, breaking 90. And so, that's what you're going to be held accountable for. And if you're going to get a warning, and if not, you're going to get stood up, and you're going to fail the PST for that day. And you'll be given a couple more opportunities. But again, your life is going to be a lot easier. You just passed the first time out the gates. I'm not interested in seeing a hundred of your crappy push-ups. I need to see 50 perfect ones. So I'll read between the lines here, and you can correct me or tell me if I'm wrong. But would it be a good idea if you're a recruit, you're at a boat team or with a mentor, to even maybe ask, like, be strict on me with these standards? Because I want them to be right. I want them to be perfect. Because who knows who will be judging them when they're at home before they get here? Correct. Do you think that's a good idea? Absolutely, 100%. Again, for whatever reason people think they're, I'm going to try to get as many as I can at the cost of perfect form. And that's not going to work out for you well. That's not what we're looking for here. So again, when I say perfect pull-ups, that's dead arm hang, chin all the way over the bar. Not up at the bar, looking up at the sky. It's chin over the bar. Your sit-ups, arms crossed, thumbs on your clavicles, all the way elbows right below the bottom of the knees. And then all the way down, upper back, touching the deck. So we're strict about it. And as you should be, right? Right. I think that kind of makes sense that people might be struggling a little bit more when they get here than they might anticipate, because they'd previously had X score and now maybe they're struggling. Like you said, yeah, they're not doing this at five in the morning in their hometown. They might not be doing this on, you know, lack of protein shakes and lack of pre-workout supplements fill in the blank. So I think it's important for people to recognize that things are going to be more intense. You better drop the no explode. Well, if you think you're going to have that kind of stuff to help you hear, you're sadly mistaken. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's important. People realize that it's going to be a different environment that they're in. The numbers aren't just going to be passed on. What should a potential sealer's wick or fill in the blank NSW candidate know about the dive motivator process and the stuff that you do here that they may not be aware of? So first off, if you're going to, in an NSW program, either sealer's wick, you are going to be segregated into that division, whereas we'll typically pair up the other NSO programs. Now there'll be some, maybe some overlap between the two, but the best we can, we try to keep NSW with NSW and NSO with NSO. NSO being Air Rescue, EOD, and Diver. And then SWCCA seal, their training will be the same here. You're going to get whatever specifics you need once you get to your respective preparation course or A-School. You're going to get dialed in. When you leave here to go to prep for seal and SWCCA training, they're going to start teaching, the knot tying, the life-saving, things like that that are going to help you. But right now we're all about the general purpose fitness and water-comfortability stroke development and time on your feet. So the NSW candidates you see coming in here, are there any low points in their skills or techniques that you see as a consistent issue that you see that you could maybe point out? One of the things that kind of is a pet peeve of mine that we see here is we'll still see people who will show up routinely who have never swam without a mask or goggles.  And to me, I'm baffled because so much of first phase in buds is without your mask, is with you trying to see underwater without a mask. So you better be doing it. I'm not saying to swim all the time without a mask, but do both. Learn how to swim with a mask on without a mask. Another thing that I want to highlight if we don't get to it later, I'll talk about it now, is don't cram for the test when you get here, okay? So the time you get to buds or SWIC training or any of the other programs, I want you to be fresh injury free. So start your training far out enough in advance. If you're going through the Seal SWIC website, then you'll know who you can rely on in that forum to give you the sound advice. If not, you can reach out to the actual professionals on there and they'll tell you ultimately all you have to do is do well on the PST. If you want anything above that's a bonus but I wouldn't get too carried away. Definitely don't be working on breath holds.  Just be very comfortable in the water. Maybe you can work on some treading with and without fins, but don't show up hurt. Don't be trying to save. Don't be slacking and then figure you're going to start ramping up all this running and swimming and then you're going to be prone to overuse injuries.  So don't over train. Don't over train or under recover. Make sure that you're ramping up, you're hitting it hard, and then as you get closer and closer you're fine-tuning it. You're at a good place where you're still getting the reps and you're still getting some volume in but it's you're training intelligently. And there's really in today's day and age no excuse whatsoever to not have the information you need to train smartly. Stay with a lot of these programs that tell you that you need to go and do a mini Hell Week or go to these really hot, expensive, rigorous courses where what you really need to do is make sure that you're doing this program for the right reasons. Understand that you really want it because you're going to be tested and when even in boot camp you may have your doubts where you're like, I don't know if this is really what I want to do but remember it was a good idea when you thought about it. Not any less of a good idea now that you're eight weeks in, six months in, it's still a good idea and you'll still be glad that you've completed the program successfully. Are you guys doing your work outside kind of consistent time of the day? You guys always in here in the morning, you guys kind of surprising people or how does that work? Yes, you're going to do everything the basic recruit does here at boot camp. The exact same things only you get to start your day a couple hours early. You're going to rev typically about 4.30 and you're going to show up over here at the dive motivator at the combat training pool and we're going to start kicking the workouts off at about 5.15 and you're going to be wrapping and on the road to breakfast at about no later than 7.15. Your initial PST is going to look like this you're going to show up and you're going to do your third class swim test which is pretty easy for those who have been training well to get here to do these programs you're going to work on float, basic swim stroke floatation with your coveralls, things like that at some point you'll practice an abandon ship, rescue with sea type thing with an inflatable raft but as soon as you're done you're going to roll right into your PST we're going to get you with the swim followed by your push, sit, pull and then we're going to take you out to the track outside during the warmer months when it's cold we'll take a bus and you'll go across the street to an indoor track and you'll do your run there What is the flexibility like for people that might not be hitting the right number for PST and they need to retake how many chances do they get if they're really close or if you feel like there's maybe some sort of excusable reason why maybe they didn't hit the right number or maybe they have a slight injury or something like that where you know that the candidate should be capable of hitting a better number You definitely want to pass the first time your life will be a lot easier however we're definitely going to take into consideration things like injury, things like hey I had to get some teeth pulled if you fail your initial PST full transparency here you will have to your fifth week of training to pass your PST and if you don't pass it by then then you'll be reclassified So there's plenty of opportunity for the right people to hit the right numbers? Correct That's good to know and it's important to know that when you quit the program you still are obligated to stay in the Navy you're obligated to go reclassify okay if you are medically dropped or medically disqualified you have the option to stay in the Navy for a different program that you may qualify for or you can elect to separate at that point because that's the contract you came in at but if you quit then you are going to go reclassify and it's not going to be the same rate that you joined at it's going to be what's available at the time but again the overarching theme is that you're coming here to be a basically transseller and you're going to learn the tools that you need at bootcamp while you're learning to be a basically transseller that's absolutely going to help you to be a better SEAL, SWIC or NSO candidate we provide three points for mentoring typically with the recruits the first piece is kind of like hey the welcome aboard here's what's expected of you when you show up to dive motivator for PT the second one is usually I'll give the introductory brief what I get into there is the big four sports psychology and I get into what I call the operational mindset and the operational mindset is purpose why am I here and commitment yes I made the right decision to come here I absolutely am ready to start buying in and collaborate with the people around me collaborate and be a part of the navy be a part of the team the second piece is preparation and not just the preparation the piece of training the push ups and the swim but also the preparation to make sure that no matter what happens we're as ready as we can be to include making sure that all of our stuff our backpacks are packed the night before inspecting my bunk mates he's inspecting mine to make sure that all of our gear is ready in terms of the mental piece budge training is all about testing your mental fortitude it's about testing your ability to stay calm and perform under pressure and it's about your ability to collaborate and be a team player that's what all this is about and the cold water and all the physical conditioning that's all the medium in which we test that so it's getting into your mind and understanding that you are going to suffer you are going to have moments of doubt but you have to revisit why you're there and I tell people to write about it dear diary no kidding this is what happened me today and this is how I can be better tomorrow is really sit there and reflect and figure out how you can increase your performance we talk about the big four we talk about the goal setting so when I'm doing things where I'm extremely stressed and I want to elect to quit or to panic I can keep focused on my goal of that particular evolution and I do that by going through mental rehearsal or visualization techniques to think about alright this is what's going to happen to me let me walk through I use that in the SEAL teams when I was doing the more stressful things like close quarter combat clearing rooms is I would sit outside the door before training and I would go through it in my head and I would also do performance based self talk ok if he goes left I'm going to go right and I'm going to think about what's going to happen to me beforehand because your body absolutely processes that as a little bit of experience beforehand and we even get into mindfulness a little bit slow when you're breathing down taking deep and long breaths to make sure that you're kind of dumping a little bit of stress and getting in that habit of being able to focus back on what our goal is so we choose what the goal is and performing that goal rather than choosing panic rather than choosing fear and quitting and things like that I want to highlight one part of what you just said and that was the journaling portion we spoke with Mike Caviston and that's a part of his recommendations as well journaling your workouts but I think something that's consistent that I've heard through almost everyone that I've interviewed is my part why am I doing this and the goal setting part and I think that incorporating that why part into the journaling of your fitness I think that's a really good piece of advice for candidates because when the dust settles or you boil everything down that's what you're left with why am I doing this and like you're saying remind yourself of why it was a good choice to begin with or whoever is your inspiration or whatever your inspiration is keeping that forefront is I think that's important and absolutely and you write things in your journal like this is why I want to be a seal or swick and this is why this is a good decision and write down I know that I'm going to face challenges I know that there are days when I'm not going to perform well that I'm going to have fail things potentially things are going to test your confidence and so when that happens to you you go back to that journal that you wrote in you know months ago and you're like yeah I'm prepared for this because when you're cold when you're tired when you're stressed you're more prone to an emotional hijacking it's just like when you're under the water and you're doing pull competency and your body starts going without air you forget your goal and you elect to want to bolt to the surface and then you'll regret it you'll fail same thing here when you are tired and when you're stressed you're prone to let emotions negatively impact your decision making whereas you make it a routine to actually revisit when you wrote that stuff in a clear well-rested unstressed mind state and you revisit that and you say yes that's right I know this is what I want I made the right decision to come here I knew this was going to be hard I'm going to have hard weeks but I can do this it is very very doable and that's absolutely the truth you pass a screening test you have what it takes to make it through butts people go through and they'll get only more further refined you'll be even more confident in your life saving and drown proofing and things like that you're given the practice test at that point but the end of the day it still comes down to being able to push the negative thoughts out of your brain deal with what's happening deal with the fear deal with the stress the uncertainty and drive through it I was expecting to sit here and talk to you about the details the minutia of the training process the gear you use and stuff like that and it's interesting here that it's really important the physical part is just what's going to push you through but your mind it can't break and that needs to stay focused it goes without saying you need to have a very highly elevated level of physical fitness and swimming ability of course I was never particularly good at anything I could do PT okay I could make my timed runs I was a complete disaster in the soft sand got gooned on just about every single run but then I said hey hell week comes along and I wasn't a strong swimmer I was comfortable in the water I had that going for me because I spent a lot of time in the pool as a kid but I was not a fast swimmer I was not a fast runner I was not a PT stud but yet six months later I'm sitting there on the grinder graduating with the class that I started with so I'll just kind of highlight the things I think that I've heard from you that are really important and obviously making sure you're paying attention to detail and doing the basic things at boot camp you can't brush over that you can't slide through it because I want to because I think that a lot of people are just thinking this is BS work that I need to do to get the buds but it's been reiterated multiple times that these are things that you will be checked on at buds this is not just busy work this is not just BS to kind of give you a hard time look at it like this hell week is the first major hurdle after that comes the second major hurdle which is a dive phase and it's known as the pool competency up to that point you've never been scuba diving it's all still in the pool you're learning how to put the gear on how to take it off in a very precise sequence okay so you've got to know that reflexively all those things are now added to what's known as the pool comp test where you're given all the different problems related to cutting off inhalation exhalation hoses on your breathing apparatus and you have to work through that problem and when you sorted out it has to be in those exact procedures only you're stressed and all you want to do is get a breath of air and you're doing the funky chicken if you are thinking of that process instead of just head down like a pack mule when you're folding your clothes and when you're making your bed if you're trying to figure out okay I'm in the moment I'm thinking about why this is important if you're kind of thinking about that early on you are really setting yourself up for success when you are hopefully making it to the weekend finding yourself stressing out about pool comp you will have effectively set the table if you're able to be in the moment understand why all the things that you're doing are important that can't be over emphasized because there's so much in the media about the physical portion about the toughness about the logs the sand the cold water but there's procedure there's attention to detail there's order that is equally a part of this training process that's all about the dry stuff it's focus that's connected to this process which goes back to the walk crawl one you know you start with t-shirts and then it ends up being dive apparatus and jump gear or weapon systems it's all procedural and that's often just really glossed over that these guys are just tough guys you know what I mean it is the other piece that's worth mentioning it's absolutely the linchpin for the whole community for the whole program is you know that based on that kind of long live the brotherhood you've got to start putting the people to the left and right of your needs above your own me as an example I wanted to be a seal because I figured hey it'd be cool to crawl around and paint my face green and get challenged by a very difficult selection process but that was not enough to keep me there once I got there and I realized that I was surrounded by the best people that I would ever work with and I would ever be surrounded by I knew that I'd found a home and I knew that that's why I wanted to stay there and when you show up at the boot camp it starts there you start building and a lot of those guys are going to go away statistically that's just inevitable but you'll be left with a core bunch of guys that you'll start identifying as great Americans and this is who I want to spend you know a career with in many cases you'll be expected to start thinking in that mindset as soon as you get here we don't do this training alone we can't get through this training alone by ourselves we've got to start training on each other you'll find guys that have trouble with swimming they'll go over at night when they come back they'll have a couple of kids that are probably water polo players in college and you'll be like hey can we talk about that egg beater or whatever whatever it is right you know that's what it takes for a class to be successful for individuals to be successful I mean I know great team guys that could barely pass the time run in third phase but they're phenomenal guys and they were really good at other things so we try to do that we try to say hey these minimum standards are low because you may suffer in one area but be really good in all the other areas if you have trouble with the run but you're crushing the other areas you know there's room for you here we'll find a way for you to fit if you had the ear of a candidate you had just a couple minutes to give them some of your solid rocks of advice for this aspect and the whole process what else would you say to them that we haven't covered in the mental process again figure out why you really want to be here spend a lot of time thinking about it okay and understand and write about it get in the habit of reflecting on your experiences in life we're only as good as our ability to draw the right conclusions from what's happened to us and help those inform our decisions tomorrow spend as much time being deliberate thinking about your successes and how to repeat them and how to further improve them make sure that you are spending enough time investing in your training way in advance to you showing up at boot camp make sure that before you ship you are nice and healthy if you're worried about breath holds and things like that do freestyle sprints that's going to get your wind up that's going to help your capacity just spend time in the water and just be comfortable make sure you're swimming with a mask on and a mask off make sure your PST performance is a hundred percent in accordance with the instruction get somebody to film you doing your pull push sit make sure you're cranking out solid perfect reps if you do all that and you show up and you're ready to be part of a team you have everything you need to be successful and make it through this program I think that's some really great powerful advice thank you for taking the time to join us thank you my pleasure find out more at Sealswick.com and join us again for the next NSW podcast head start my program


Okay, it's Python on hard more time and we got some stuff going on the newsletter is gigantic this week. Thank you so much and for putting in all the work that makes this I think the best most popular Python on forever newsletter. Yes. So a couple bits of news and then we'll go into what I think it's big story this week micro Python support for the Raspberry Pi Pico W. It is progressing. If you want to play around with it, you can check it out. There is Bluetooth support for the Pico W and micro Python does pull request in progress and there's experimental builds already that you can play around with. Yeah. Yeah. And you'll want to use our blue fruit connect if you want to like actually use it. Yeah, which I mean, we have a great app that implements and uses the Nordic. Sorry, the Nordic. You are at standard because believe me doesn't have a profile for you are so like Nordic kind of made one up. And it's sort of standardized because you know Nordic has so many chips so you use our app. It's a great free free little chat app that you can communicate. And we just updated it on Android. Circuit Python 804 release couple updates fixes enhancements the printing the soft reboot message that works out and then some board specific changes. So some new issues but please check it out. We're going to be doing more updates and then we'll be releasing of course probably like final final as we think we're waiting on some if I have fixes but yes we're getting close.  And then of course, unending stories I think some of the neat things in the newsletter is what's going on in the community what other folks are sharing their stuff. This is a pie dog. This is a Raspberry Pi for running Python and it's a dog you can make your own. I think robot dog friend robot dog enemy. This is neat. Charlotte has an interview with embedded FM. If you've seen her work it's really great and she's a lot of eight fruit stuff lost her Python to and then just go through and look at all of the projects and more it is never ending. There is something to do with Python on hardware everywhere. You can have anything that you've ever wanted to do stop here first and just get some ideas from physical computing interfacing with things that maybe were never meant to be interfaced with to making your own games to a menagerie of hardware. It's happening in a lot of it because of the community of folks out there producing libraries and that's what our big news this week is we're up to 100 libraries in the community bundle. Thanks. Yeah. Then library then. Yeah. So they're Libras. So why don't you talk about what are the community bundles. Yes, it's a community bundle there's 100 of them now. And then maybe you can give an example of something that's worked out really well. Yeah. So we have the main Adafruit bundle and that's the bundle that Adafruit employees and engineers and people that Adafruit pays design libraries design sorry write libraries for mostly our designs. And it allows us to support our hardware and we kind of maintain them and keep them to date and close PR as an issues and stuff. And then there's people who write libraries for circuit Python that again will work through Blinka with any Linux computer or even desktop computer through a USB to GPIO converter. So it's like you write the library once and then it runs everywhere that circuit Python or micro sorry circuit Python or Python C Python will run. And so we have a couple hundred library remember how many to 300 libraries but then you know I saw recently see Grover put in some analog to digital converters and like some PWM generators and also FOMI guy and some other community members have been working on a lot of Adafruit display I. Oh which is our display like Sprite and layered base graphics engine for circuit Python you know adding more like built in devices like gauges and gauges and scroll bars not scroll bars but slider bars buttons like other user interface elements by like building up the frame buffer image and like they just need to have their own little object and so they're kind of spitting out a lot of those graphical elements and so there's there's quite a few in the community bundle. Anyone's welcome to do a PR to add your library and there's there's some benefit to it you're like why would I do that.  We will grab that code will stuff into the zip file that you can download every night that gives you all the libraries all the examples. And then we'll also perform the the compression which I can't remember the name of MP the MPY compress will run that on your code so people don't have to like do that on their own they get like the MPY file and I believe also if you're using. You are. CPY pip sorry it's it's not micro pip which is the micro Python version it's Sir Cup, which is like an automatic updater for your circuit Python boards make sure you have the latest libraries. People will be able to get the bundle and that will automatically like instead of going to every repo they go to the bundle has everything and then they can update all their libraries at once it has all the. dependency graph as well so it's kind of just like our little way of making it easy for boards to automatically update themselves. Code to know what dependencies they have and like we make all the bundle very nice and pretty so whenever I start a new project I'll usually download the latest bundle so I can get all the latest libraries so I'll be like oh I want this this this this and you. Or you can always get the latest build for your board and then you can also get the latest libraries that keep you up to date yeah there's a lot of. UI element dashboard widgets all these things for the lots of sensors and like you know we don't have every sensor and devices people like I want to add this OLED display and I'm like I don't have that OLED display but if you want to. Add a driver and you put it in the community bundle and yeah I just it kind of just kind of gets kept up to date so it doesn't have as much link rock I think this is the big deal I think that. The next chapter of microcontrollers is this where. We've all spent a lot of time having a pile code that's kind of over you can now just you know kind of do real time stuff and then like oh like how do I update my board this is impossible it's I can never find the. The latest firmware that we made that easy now it's getting all the drivers. And community bundles also like automated yeah so it's like we get there's a human that does the final PR approval but a lot of it is pre checked for you and to make sure that everything is named correctly and. Within not all like coding standards but just we look for like really obvious mistakes when like hey you like made. You have like serious a serious type of that might mean that your code has bugs we do have automated lenders that check that for you yeah so. Hopefully this will continue to do what it's been doing which is getting you making things sharing things as fast as possible of course you can dig in really deep. And do a lot of other stuff but this is when you want to do that project and you just wanted to work and prototype fast great for educators you're spending more time doing instead of managing. And one more thing we have a we have a guide in the learning system on how to write libraries and submit to the community bundle so if you're like I want to do this. Check out the learning system and just type in how to write circuit path on library it's one of the one of the guides that comes up. We deliver this newsletter every single week to your inbox it's a separate site for daily.com and we don't harvest your emails you know track we don't spam we don't do anything like that. So go over there if you want or you just read on the web there's RSS feed for to all that stuff doesn't matter we want.


apologies for the earlier confusion with the audio, but hopefully you can hear this clearly and I look forward to presenting to you. As you can see the title is Global State of the Year for 2022, so this was completed in January 2022, so therefore it's really a reflection of what people were doing in 2021 versus the previous years. I'm going to provide some context now, which I think is really important for you to understand the way that Forrester thinks about enterprise architecture and the way that value is delivered. So this follows on from the previous conversation, but it does use some of the approaches that you've heard from the other speakers. So in context what Forrester does every year is say rather than have really pedantic discussions about what is EA and everyone getting really upset about certain definitions or the meanings of certain words, we've always found it better to say well what is the value of EA and the best way to actually find out that rather than have in a comfort zone type of approach is to us practitioners. So every year info world and Forrester have a EA award ceremony where we ask Forrester and non Forrester clients to present to us how their EA practice is contributed to delivering value. So they're going to provide us insights about the organization and EA's role in delivering value. When we actually analyzed all of these responses and we've been doing this for well over a decade now, what we actually find is that when people explain about the way that their organization focuses, there are some organizations that are very focused on strategy. It's all about corporate strategy and it cascading down through the organization. So eventually you get the delivery or execution of that strategy. However, we have just as many clients who say that they're a project driven organization. They don't really have a strategy business units come up with their own initiatives. They get funding and it's very tactical and they do changes. So if you do that as a continuum, what you'll actually find is that your organization may be somewhere on that line. It's not any that you're definitely 100% strategy versus 100% project, but you're somewhere along that continuum. The second sort of analysis that we do is the orientation of the EA practice, the mission of the EA practice. Has it been constrained by the champion of EA, whether that be the CIO, CTO or whoever to only focus on technology or is it more open that we want you to provide business values so there's a business orientation? So if you actually put that into a 2x2 grid as I'm showing here, what you can actually see is that there's four quadrants and that's what we call EA archetypes. So the winners primarily focus on one of these quadrants. So when we say primarily focus that means that 60% plus of their effort is focused in that area. They spend the remainder of their time on the adjacent quadrants. So if your technology strategy at EA, you may spend 60% plus in that space, but you obviously need to translate the business strategy. So it's some space in the business strategy and you also want to ensure that the technology project is delivering the tech strategy. So you're going to be in there. So that is, it's an L shaped model and that's what you find in all of these. You very rarely see people do the diagonal. Now there's a couple of things that also come out of this research that when we look at failure and when I say failure, that doesn't mean that the architects are a failure. It's about their positioning. They're not perceived as delivering value usually for a number of reasons. The first reason is most chief architects would like to be in that top left hand corner in business strategy. In their view of the world, enterprise architecture delivers most value when you do business strategy top down architecture if you want to call it that. However, if the issue is time to market and it's down in the bottom right hand corner, you now have a mismatch. If your chief architect is trying to focus on business strategy that the business actually want a reduction in time to market, they want it on the delivery side. So when you have a misalignment, you are going to be perceived as not delivering value. The other thing that we find is that, and there's a strong argument for this, that enterprise architecture is all of these things. In our experience, every enterprise architecture practice which has tried to do all of these things delivers too little to too many people. They are not perceived as delivering value. So they don't really have a value proposition. Their mission is confusing because they're everywhere and they'll get pulled who have chance loudest. So the failure side is really important to understand and that's why the window is it's very clear what they're actually doing. The second point is that EA is not static in that the problem space may actually be in the tech project EA space. So your EA practice is providing reusable components, standards, reference archers, patterns or the usual buzzwords so that they delivery teams can deliver a quicker, more effectively, consistently. There's quality there. Once that becomes BAU and everybody's using these standards in that, EA now has the opportunity to move into another quadrant. The debate here is now skills, competencies, capabilities and you've seen that through Chris's discussion on the learning. If you're in technology project, you probably want people that are very technically biased in that if you're an Oracle house, you want Oracle expertise. If you're Cisco, they would Cisco Windows, Windows and it goes on. However, if you're not going to move to tech strategy, you don't want that. You want open-minded. You want people who will challenge and explore all technologies to come up with the right technology for your organization. So evolution doesn't mean that you move one EA team into another area. There's also an argument that when you look at each of these quadrants, they're serving different stakeholders who want different services, have a different level of expectation in value. They probably want to be served by different set of competencies. So when you look at all of this, what you'll actually find is, yes, EA is going to focus on one of the quadrants, the others are going to be supported by an EA ecosystem. So let's have a look at what the data says. So this is what you can see. Three years data. I could have provided more, but let's just look at it for three years. What you can actually see here at the top is there was a significant increase in technology strategy from 42% to 67%. And I called this in my reports, the Great Reset VA. And the reason that I said that is, if you look at previous years, technology strategy EAs have been declining. And the reason that they've been declining is because more and more EA practices were moved in above the line into the business area, and they were becoming business-driven, value-driven, outcome-based driven EAs. What we saw last year was effectively a major change. Could be many reasons, chance at high probability at something to do with a pandemic. The fact that we now needed to focus on remote working, sustainability, resilience, and all of those issues. I might be wrong, but that would be my take on this. It didn't have any impact on the technology project and what you saw on the business side, they declined. They declined because people went on to take strategy. So even though tech strategy has been the strongest or the primary focus of clients, there had been over three or four years a decline every year. Now we've seen a big spike. Now what we do here is, as you can see, the question is rank these. So we don't say tech strategy.  And if you understand the statement, you will understand that that statement is only true for tech strategy. So they're actually ranking them. So this is showing you the number one ranking for each of those organizations. So let's have a look at the relationships. As we see here, the light green in nearly every area, you can see that the light green has been growing. See, EA's have got out of their shell because one of the things that was very ever done in many EA practices, they didn't have a relationship with people outside their own domain. Architects could talk to architects, but they didn't really have a relationship with people outside. That has changed. And you can see it through nearly every year. There has been an increase in EA getting out there and working with other people. So this is quite good. Interesting, there was a slight decline online at business and there wasn't much in supply chain. And you wonder why we've just got a figure. We don't know the reason for that. There doesn't seem to be a specific reason for that. In fact, you can even see dates to governance second from the top where you see a decline as well. I can't explain that, but that's just showing you that for some reason, they're not increasing the collaboration in those areas. Is it because they're at a level they're acceptable with? Who knows? That's just something to try and sort of look in your own world. Do you have relationships with all of these people? And do you need it? Because the important thing is that the relationships will depend on the previous slide and you know what your mission is. If you're to serve business people, then you would expect to have good relationships with the business people. If it's you're serving the tech project space, then your relationship will be with the project manager, solution architects, delivery teams. You're serving different people. You have different relationships. So what you can actually see here is okay, so we're building all of these relationships, but who's actually supporting us? Who's got the back of the EA? Who are the people who are championing us when there's maybe something hits the fan and things like that? So what you can actually see here and I think this is the most disappointing data every year as I expect it to be glowing. All you can see at the bottom, the strongest is IT leadership and you would always hope that. You would hope that IT leadership see the benefit in the EA, but 64%. That's not really outstanding, so what is it with certain IT leaders in the EA? Why aren't they the advocates? Why aren't they shouting about it? And then as you go here, security I would expect, but the next one, why really the delivery teams and operational teams, why is that dev and infrastructure less than 50% advocate of EA? Is there really an issue here with you helping them by you providing reusable components, things that help them do delivery to market quicker, higher quality? What is it that's caused that tension and friction? So this is alarming. So this is why I say this is disappointing. In the previous slide, we saw about all of the growth in relationships, but this slide is actually telling you that if something goes wrong, these guys won't hold you back. They won't be protecting you. They won't be supporting you and things like that. So this is alarming. So I think you've got a long way to go. Most EA has got a long way to go to get advocacy from their stakeholders and that may be because they're not seeing the value that you profess. So here's another thing to consider.  You can champion your own value and say, oh, the value of this service is X, but if it's not perceived as value by your stakeholder, then you're probably not doing the right thing.  So I talked about the ecosystem. So let's have a look at it. On the left hand side, these are all the different types of architects that we are experiencing within forestry clients. Now, I'm quite sure when you look at the ones at the bottom where you can see all these 90 and 80 percenters, all of that you're going to know. You have those in your organization. What you may not know is the ones at the top, which are all the business focused ones. And I would argue to a certain extent that these are all the specializations of business architecture. So if we think about people, these are people architects. They're understanding roles. They're understanding job families. So when you as architects suggest that a capability is unbundled to a third party, that has an impact on your people when you automate a capability. Again, it impacts your people. So the people architect may sit in the human growth or human resources, human capital asset, whatever group you have. But there is somebody who understands that. They understand all the building blocks and relationships of people. And when there's a change to the organization, they understand the impact of people. The organization architect. You heard this in previous discussions or presentations today, operating and business model. That's what these people do. How to organize, how to build an ecosystem with your partners. This is organizational architecture. So most see in the organization as a black box and how it interacts with the other black boxes in your market and the broader community ecosystem. You'll see fourth one down experience. Note it doesn't say customer experience. Customer experience, employee experience, partner experience, any stakeholder experience. These are people who understand customer journeys, the experience, your moments of truth. So they know how to architect it. And then digital. These aren't digital technologies. These are people who understand how to do digital business. So you can actually see that there's quite a few here. So I mean, just looking at experience, 42% are faster clients who've got an experience architect or someone in the business world that is architecting the experience. They are part of the broader ecosystem. And this is why I often, I wouldn't say frown. I challenge our clients when they say they have an EA team. Because it usually means in their little world that this small team does enterprise architects. They are very much dependent on all these other. So it's really an ecosystem, a cellular organization, if we'd like to use that word. So technology is driving EA demand. So what you're actually finding is that these are areas that is creating demand for EA. So when people are saying that I think in one of the presentations, someone say from 2016, the EA's has become very, very important. These are the types of things from the business side, really, that are forcing EA to get involved. And this is probably why you saw all of those relationships building at the bottom. Employee experience. We keep on talking about the shortage of tech talent. How do you retain your staff? How do you keep engaged employees? How do you develop them? This is all part of the employee experience. This is where your people architects in, your experience architects as well. They're all involved in this and it will impact your organization. So you get all these other different types of architects and their subject matter experts in those areas. Doesn't mean an EA can't facilitate the discussion, but you are dependent on the input from all of those people. If we specifically look at technology that they're exploiting or experimenting with, I don't think there's going to be anything on this list that you don't already know. At the bottom, you would expect lots of people focusing on automation. 82% of people are focused on intelligent automation. You might call it smart automation. Cyber security and privacy, very, very big. This is going to be an interesting one for EA because in certain countries like Saudi and I know there's others, the cybersecurity people are no longer allowed to report into IT. They must report directly to the board. So now you've got the two different groups working together. Who's doing the security architecture? Is one just doing policies and the other one is doing the implementation, the frameworks and that? Who's deciding those governance risk and compliance? Again, we see 79%, but as people move to become agile, you'll hear empowered and trusted governance. So is EA or architecture governance now being done by different bodies outside of an architecture review board? And I'm sure you'll have your views. I've said for many years, I think the ARB is dead, but everyone has an opinion on this. So this shows you all of the technologies that are driving EA focus. You might want to talk about, well, how's EA organize who they report to and all of those sort of things. So obviously we have all of those questions, but the one that is gives a nice little story is this one here that we've always seen EAs in a hybrid model. So it's really a combination of the ones above. So if we look at centralized, not much change over the last two years. So still predominantly EA is a centralized team. What you then see is that there's embedded in product service and customer teams. And you can see that there's an increase from 8 to 13%. I think we have to be conscious when we interpret this, because when you actually talk to the integrated product service and customer teams, none of them have an EA. What they're really telling you is that they have a architectural capability within the product service or customer teams. And that usually means there's a solution architect or a domain architect. Scaling is very much a matrix model. So it's really a derivative of centralized because you're actually being seconded to a probably a project team. And then embedded in the strategic planning function, this is always nice to see. So all of those organizations that they're saying that EA should be a business strategy EA, this is where they're going. They're going into the strategic planning function and they're out of IT altogether. Now there are going to be many organizations that don't want the responsibility and accountability for the EA teams. They'll probably say, I want you aligned to the strategy. I want you centralized, aligned to the strategy and planning. So that's where you'll see in people. Again, you will have your own views. These types of questions, they all seem good. But the one thing that doesn't really come out a lot in all of these organizations is different parts of your business will be at different levels of maturity. So you may have some legacy environments where things that are a bit chaotic and it makes sense to have a centralized EA to look after them. You have others which are fast moving and things like that and maybe like your digital organizations, maybe as better as have embedded integrated product service and customer. So you may find that you have different operating models for different parts of your business based on their maturity. What you can actually see here is in the previous presentation on the importance of the EA, there was a bit of a discussion about the measures and metrics. Everything that I said was correct. What you can actually see here is a subset of the measures and metrics that people focus on. Everything that you see in the sort of bottom half of this list is what you would traditionally see in an EA practice. Very much on the quality of the architecture, productivity of the EA team. That's what you really focus in on there. That's all wonderful stuff. Has absolutely no value to the business. It has value to the chief architect so that they can improve the services and the offering that they provide. So this is what we call internal measures and metrics. You need them, but they're not really for communication outside of the EA role. If you now look at everything at the top, this is where you get into my preferred areas, architecture contributions to revenue, financial value of the architecture. A bit further down, architecture contributions cost, architecture, processor speed. These are a bit more upside in. This is what the stakeholders want to see. How are you helping me generate revenue? How are you reducing my costs? That's the types of things. You just are cogging a machine, but you should be able to present when some architecture has been implemented before and after. What is the impact? Everything you heard in the previous presentations. So I think it's very, very important. And the other thing that's very key was that you've got to communicate in the language of your stakeholders. If you were actually talking to your chief operating officer or the equivalent, he's probably going to be focused on efficiencies. So he wants to know things about the efficiency of business operations. If you go to the risk manager, it's going to be at risk mitigation. Go to CFO, definitely financial. When you go to line the business and maybe a bit higher into corporate reports, that maybe it's bottom line. Who knows, but it's going to be probably financial. Maybe it's going to be about market growth or something like that through introducing new digital channels or whatever. So the important thing is to look at the measures and metrics. And the ones that we find that are particularly good EA practices are moving away from balanced scorecard type report into OKRs, but you can't do it unilaterally. The whole organization has to be doing OKRs. You can't just do it in one piece. So there is the constraints of the organization. Tooling, an enormous amount of focus on tooling. Always surprising. Look at the bottom one. In the last survey, 82% are using Microsoft tools, so they're not using an EA tool as their primary tool. So what you can actually see along here is internal strategic planning tool and at the top the vendor strategic planning tool. So it's nearly 40% that have a planning tool of some sort. Probably all it's focused on is investments and delivery against the goal. It's not doing architectural mappings that we would traditionally set. And right in the middle there, COTS commercial off the shelf EA tools. Now I actually do the analysis of the EA tool market. 54 vendors support the EA market. Some of them a little more than drawing tools. Others are big beasts that do considerably more than EA. But by EA having all of that functionality, they're able to build the ecosystem as other subject matter experts come in and see the information. The 30%. So this is a big opportunity for EA vendors. Why are people not using the tools? It's an enormous growth area. And then the other thing that I'd really like to say about this is if you're not using an EA tool, just think of your productivity, the accuracy of your architectural decisions. If you're relying on documentation in Microsoft documents, there is a high probability that the data in the document does not reflect what is actually in the physical environment. Now that's obviously going to be true in a tool. If you don't have the right interfaces to your CMDB application portfolio management and that you may not have accurate information, particularly if you're not updating the source, but you put yourself at risk.  So the last slide is really just to show you because we've heard a bit about agile today. So where are people on this agile journey? So we look at four factors when we're looking at this. And on the left-hand side, we say this is traditional EA. On the right-hand side, we say this is agile EA. You might have your own view of what should be at the ends of these continuum. So if you look at command and patrol, you can say architecture review board. Everything goes through the architecture review board. Trusted governance is basically the delivery teams are empowered and trusted to make certain architectural decisions. You can see people are on the journey. And going by being skewed to the right-hand side, that's quite a journey people are going on. If you go to the next one, mandated framework versus agnostic, obviously you could say mandated is Togath. Agnostic does not mean that you do not have a framework. When we talk about agnostic framework, it means that people are cherry-picking. They may be taking something from Togath, something from Zachman that someone mentioned, something from IT for IT, from your digital playbook or book of knowledge. So people are cherry-picking what's right for them in their environment. So they're not being, their EA practice is not constrained by a framework or the compliance to a framework. They're actually being pragmatic and choosing the bits that help them do architecture for their environment. The perfection of a speed versus speed over perfection, always a big debate. Traditional people want to dot the i's and cross the t's before you move forward. On the other side, they accept that you're not going to get 100% accuracy and then maybe some failure. There is a bell curve there at the moment. So when people are on the journey, it would tend to suggest there's still too immature that I think there's probably speed over perfection from an architectural point of view. There have been probably more failures than what people wanted, so that's why it hasn't moved over to the right-hand side so much. And then waterfall versus agile. So waterfall means you're doing everything by project, and then there's the agile. And you can see it's a right skew at the moment. Will it skew much more? Big debate. I'm a big proponent of only do agile where agile makes sense. Only have dedicated teams where it makes sense. Others will have a different view. So the important thing is that you choose what's right for your organization to deliver the value. Is the presentation for you? Because this is the recording now and we didn't have time for it working in a live environment where you could ask questions. If you do raise questions, I'm sure they will be forward to me and I'll do my best to answer them for you. So thank you very much.


I wanna welcome all of you that have joined us for another episode of The Nonprofit Show.  Stephanie Savislin has joined us and I'm so excited for our conversation and for you to join us in this dialogue about steps to create nonprofit value-based engagement. And so you're going to be talking to us about that and when you reached out to me, Stephanie, via LinkedIn, I thought, wow, this woman is dynamic and I couldn't not offer you an episode spot because what you talk about is so important and I think you have a bit of disruption moments that you might be sharing with us later. So thank you for joining us. And of course, thanks to all of our presenting sponsors. If you joined us for the Chitty Chat Chat session, you also heard that many of these sponsors actually came to us first, asking if they could support us, like financially support us and elevate the show, elevate the conversations around the globe. So please do check out our presenting sponsors. They exist in your community because they work nationwide and remote. So they are here to lift your missions up and to help you continue to make value-based decisions. Thanks to Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy for having this wonderful idea to create the nonprofit show in March of last year. I'm so grateful to serve alongside you Julia. I'm Jarrett Ransom, also known as the nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. And again, today we were talking about steps to creating non-profit value-based engagement and welcome Stephanie. Thank you so much. Okay Stephanie, I've got like step one and you'll see this reoccurring theme of people going up and down steps throughout our time together. But I'm thinking let's back it up a little bit and explain to us what value-based engagement even is. Well, I am really excited today to talk about engagement in general in the nonprofit industry. I've been in the nonprofit industry for about 10 years now and engagement as you know is starting to come to the forefront of what we're talking about. Engagement is how employees feel about working at their jobs. And in the nonprofit sector, we want them to feel good because nonprofits are doing amazing things in the world. There is nothing like hearing for me for hearing stories about what nonprofits are achieving to close gaps, to meet needs, to better the lives of people and animals and nature and so many things in our world. So we want our employees to be excited about doing that work. And engagement, that's what engagement is. And so we wanna look at how employees are feeling when they come to work. And values-based engagement just means that we have the how to our why. We can know our why we can have our mission but it goes a little bit deeper than that. We need to know the how in addition to knowing our why. How to our why. That's like, I love that phrase. Okay, so I love how you teed this up. So let's get into it. Step one, what would that be? So step one is actually to create our baseline. We wanna do an engagement survey. I have never actually worked in a nonprofit that is looking at engagement or measures engagement. And it seems like it might be a buzzword right now but it's actually really important. Engagement is your productivity. It's how people feel about coming into work. It's how good of a job they're trying to do. It's whether or not they're an ambassador for your organization. This is going to affect your costs. This is going to affect your turnover. This is going to affect your reputation. This is going to affect your sustainability. So we wanna start looking at engagement. And unfortunately, the statistics are pretty bad around engagement in this day and age. Over two thirds of employees are unengaged, which means higher costs, more mistakes, less enthusiasm about what they're doing, less commitment. And in the nonprofit space, we don't want that. We want people to be excited about what they're doing and we want them to believe in what they're doing. And that's gonna come with engagement. So value, what values does is it inspires us. And when we know how we're working and what matters to our organization, that's really what it is. It's being able to look around and say, I know what matters here. So the first step we wanna do is measure that engagement. It's not difficult. You can create a survey. There's a ton of free platforms. There's some software that you can use, but you just wanna create a baseline and ask your employees, hey, tell me about where you're at. Tell me about what it feels like to work here. Tell me the last time you felt proud of this organization. Tell me if you would recommend our organization to your friends as an employer. And you wanna look at those answers and know. And so if you're getting pretty bad scores, it's okay to start with. I would almost expect that just because of the nature of engagement in this day and age. If you're getting 25, 30% of engagement, it means that we can raise them. So it's okay to not get the greatest scores, but you do wanna create a baseline of knowing where your people are at and knowing what is lacking in your organization. So I would say that's step number one. And if you need help with an engagement survey, there's so many tools. It's not expensive. It's not difficult to do, but you do wanna take it seriously.  It makes people cranky. Jared, go ahead. Well, I wanna know, like, I'm assuming this is an anonymous survey so no one's being identified. And also are you finding through your experience of providing this, Stephanie, are you finding that the answers are honest? Are they truly honest? I believe that if you're asking employees and telling them why you're doing this survey and that you intend to use the data to listen, this is the employee voice, right?  So you are gonna get honest feedback if you're really upfront about why you're doing it and what plans you have to use the data that you're getting. You never wanna throw out a survey with no plans to follow up on it. Correct. Yeah, I agree with that. Well, step one was already a wonderful one. So move us into step two. So step two, I would say you wanna ask people what they see happening in your organization. And I wanna throw out a caveat before we get into this, your leadership has to be on board with us. If your leadership doesn't wanna create the how to your why, if the why is plenty good enough for you and you don't wanna have a culture of accountability or a culture of inspiration, then don't even bother doing this because going through this exercise, the purpose of this exercise is to create expectations and to create a little bit more uniformity or not uniformity, unity in your organization. Sure. And so if your leadership isn't on board and that includes your board and your C-suite, you don't wanna leave either one of those groups out of this. So if you're not interested in this, don't even bother because it's just gonna make people more unengaged. So the second step is to ask people what they're seeing happen. Sometimes it takes others to be able to see what we can't put our finger on. So you don't wanna ask your employees what they want the values to be because it's not up to them to decide what the organization believes in, but you do wanna ask what they see happening. You know, what's showing up in your culture? What do you see that matters? Do you see service? Do you see excellence? Do you see power? You wanna ask them what they see and that's where you're gonna get the best idea of what values are currently in play. And it might be a mix of good and bad but also ask people you do business with, vendors, clients. So you just wanna take kind of an informal poll. Hey, if we were to ask you what you think our values are, what would you say? And then you start to make a word cloud or just start to collect that data so that you can start to see what is at play in your organization. So I shared with you Stephanie in our chat previous to the show, I reached out to my friends, close friends. And I said, give me three to five words that you would use to describe me, right? Like as a person, as Jared and I was amazed with a lot of the same words, right? Like a lot of people really provided a lot of the same three to five words. And I did just that, I created a word cloud and I now have that in front of me in my studio. And like one of the biggest words that shows up is service, right? Another is passion, another is kind hearted, right? And I was just like, wow, these are the words like just short, sweet, brief words that people think about when they think about me. Now, when I think about me, I don't know that those would be the top words that came to mind. And not to say that I don't possess these values, I feel like we ourselves are a little bit harder on ourselves, right? When it's like, oh, I don't know, am I really that passionate? But to elicit the results, as you say, from other people, not just the team, but vendors, partners, you know, there's so much value in that itself. So great, yeah, Julia. So I'm fascinated then we've got, you know, values-based search, if you will. We've started with a survey to create that baseline. We've moved into more of a descriptive, we've pulled in our vendors, stakeholders, people that we work with. Now, step three, I can't wait. Step three is to identify what your values actually are. And what's fun about this is there are not a ton of rules about how you wanna create a value statement. Southwest Airlines, they have two prevailing values and then they have like different values under those values. The company Mad Greens, they have one word, nourish. And for them, that means they wanna nourish their employees, they wanna nourish their vendors, they wanna nourish the community. So their one value is nourishment. Some organizations, it might be service. You can have 10, you can have one, you can have three. There aren't a lot of rules, but it brings so much life to your organization when you find out this, this is what really matters to us. This is the heart, this is the core of our business. This is what we would be willing to be punished for. This is what we're not willing to compromise. And the reason I think nonprofits need this is because likely if you're, if you have a nonprofit and you're watching this, you're probably not the only nonprofit that does what you do. Oh, sure. You know, if you have a homeless services shelter or an animal hospital, any kind of nonprofit, it's not likely that you're the only one, but how you go about achieving your mission, that's what's gonna set you apart. And that is what is gonna unify your staff. If everyone knows, you know what? We are here to serve this population and we're here to do it with integrity. We are here to do it with service and kindness. That gives people that, first of all, it inspires them. And second of all, it creates an expectation.  So you wanna go through and you wanna identify what those core values are and then you don't wanna stop there. You wanna start putting behaviors to those values. So if you say, you know what? We really value professionalism. We wanna be known for how professional we are. What does that look like? What does professionalism look like? Is it what you wear? Is it how you speak? Is it what kind of memos you put out? What does that mean to you? Because I can almost guarantee that what professionalism looks like to me might be different than what it looks like for you, Jared. So we wanna create expectations. If we say we value community, I need to know what that looks like because my idea of community and your idea of community might be pretty different. A lot of, sorry, go ahead. I do have a question because I am shocked that this step three is not step one, right? Like wouldn't we want to identify our values before we survey and create that baseline? Like tell me why and maybe these aren't in priority, right? But tell me why that wouldn't be our first step. Well, you can make it your first step. I wouldn't put it before step two because a lot of what's going to inform your decision on what you value is gonna be a lot on that feedback, right? Of what your employees are saying they're seeing, what your vendors are saying.  You do wanna kind of take into account what other people are seeing. If someone had asked me my values I probably would have said, oh, compassion, dignity. But one of my friends was able to say, you're a risk taker, you take risks. And I thought, oh, you know what, I do. And I don't know that I would have been able to pinpoint that about myself. And the only reason I wanted to do the engagement survey ahead of time is to create that baseline that if we're moving in the direction of making values based engagement let's look at what it is before we roll our values out and then let's look at it afterwards and see if we've moved the needle at all. That's why I would put it in that order. You don't wanna spend too much time identifying your values and putting behaviors to them until you're really, first of all, sure that that's the direction you wanna move. And second, you're confident that that's truly what your organization is about. Interesting, interesting. Okay, so now we're on to step four and I'm fascinated to see where this process leads us to. Well, as you can probably guess, once you've identified these values and now created some expectations around them, meaning behaviors, we wanna start bringing them into our operations, right? We gotta let these values change the way we do business. So if we say we really value service, how do we value service? Let's look at how we're doing things. Get some feedback from your frontline managers, your frontline employees, what's making it difficult for them to act with service? What obstacles are they coming up against? What about some big decisions that are coming up? If you've chosen respect as one of your core values, how are you making decisions respectfully? What do your meetings look like? Do you have expectations around how your meetings are run? Is anyone allowed to interrupt anyone else? Cause that's not very respectful.  And once you've kind of put it out there internally, you know, if you've rolled it out to your staff, you wanna start scrutinizing first of all your own behavior. And leaders, this is where it's gonna come down to you. You're gonna model the behavior that you wanna see and you're gonna need to model these values as best as you can. And yeah, you might slip up, you might have a rough day, you might get stressed out, but then what you need to do is own it and say, you know what? I didn't act according to our values and I'm sorry and I recognize that and I'm gonna change my behavior. And people are gonna be looking to see, do we really, are we really valuing this or are we just saying we are? And if you work with service. Yeah, and I'll tell you what, when it comes to engagement, people can see through a lot of this, if it is lip service, they're gonna know pretty quick. If you really value service, people are gonna have to see it. And the reason I'm so passionate about this is because I want nonprofits to do really well and values are so inspiring to people. This is what brings out the best in us. This is what allows us to make biggest impact on all of our audiences. If we can know who we are and stay true to what we believe in as an organization and work as a unified core unit providing these services seamlessly and as a true team, that is what's gonna change the world. And I remember, gosh, maybe I'm dating myself as 80s or 90s, like you'd walk into an office and you would see the values on the wall. Like it would either be painted or sticker art kind of things. And it was like, these are our values. And to your point, Stephanie, there might have been one word or there could have been 10. But I remember seeing that so visually, vividly, like in offices that I would walk in or work in.  I love that. I feel last year, of course, 2020, we've all had so many uncertainties to navigate. And I do think our values have been questioned. So it's time, I know a lot of us, myself included, have done a lot of personal reflection. What do I value? I always say, my why is freedom, flexibility and travel. But what are my values? And that is something that I think it's really important for us to know. So we've currently gone through step one, two, three, four. If I'm correct, if I can count so early in the morning. You're good. We're on to step five and tell us what step five would be on your list, Stephanie. Step five is going to be reinforcing those values. So look at how you are conducting annual reviews. Are your values in that? Are you reviewing your employees based on how they're exemplifying the values of your workforce? Look at what behaviors you are either permitting or punishing for the sake of performance. This is going to be huge. This is where the rubber meets the road. If you're not reinforcing these values and bringing them into your everyday and creating habits and expectations, you've just had a colossal waste of time. People are going to be wanting to see these in action. So you're talking about this on the employment review. How might we incorporate this when we hire, right? Or we're looking to bring on new employees or even volunteers. How might we include our values in the preliminary process? That is so great that you brought that up. So everything in the employee experience, starting with recruitment, you want to be recruiting people who match those values of your organization.    That's a great word to use is that alignment. You want to find people to work with you who agree with your values. And it doesn't mean that you're looking for a homogenous workforce. It can be people of all different races, shapes, sizes, backgrounds, economic status. But all of us can get behind these values, right? It doesn't matter where you've come from or what race you are. You can still believe in kindness. You can still believe in dignity or passion or grit or any of the values that you've identified. That's where you wanna build your workforce. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because this is something that should be communicated to whoever is doing your corporate communications, your marketing, certainly development. I mean, the development team has got to buy into these, reinforcing those words. I can see how on an institution, it can really become that guiding light for moving everybody in the same direction. It's really in the same way. Such a great analogy is a guiding light. This is gonna be your flashlight in the dark. Especially when times get rough, like we just went through a pandemic year, a lot of organizations have found out what they really believe in. And it's important. I want organizations, especially nonprofits, to know what they're about and to be really proud of it. You know what keeps you there? Right. And I would say to Stephanie, the organizations have found out in individuals because over the course of the last year, I have never received more phone calls and cries from help. I'm gonna say from young professionals, mostly, saying I do not align with the values of my nonprofit. I stand for something different. Or I stand for more. Or I stand for willing to be more bold. And I would say between the like, I was receiving most phone calls from like 25 to 40. And a lot of these professionals were really questioning if they were working in alignment with an organization that they have been so passionate and committed to. But this last 18 months, as we've all witnessed, it has given us all time to reflect and to really realign, maybe, with what's most important. Yeah, COVID had some very powerful lessons for us, both personally and organizationally. Yeah. I would say, you know, pandemic's plural because we had such a heavy year, the global virus, the political divide and the social injustice. And that was heavy, heavy. And we're all still, I believe, we're all still feeling, you know, those changes as Julie and I constantly refer to it now as the recovery phase. We are moving into the recovery phase, although, you know, there are still shortages in our world, it's just... It's worse. I know. I have a question, Stephanie, because as Jared's, you know, leading to the notion of moving forward in recovery and really looking at everything from our work from home strategies to how we deal with our campuses and in our office space, would this be a good time to kind of start again and reevaluate everybody and try and figure out where we are? Because I would imagine if you asked those questions, you know, six, 12, 24 months ago and then you asked them now, you're gonna get different responses. I would say that anytime is great to identify your values. It doesn't matter that it's after a pandemic. I'm gonna say, of course, it's a great time to do it, but really anytime, this is the heart of your business. This is the core of what your business is. And nonprofit employees, they like working with heart. They want to work with heart. They want to be inspired. And your values are the number one predictor of their engagement. So let's do right by our people. Let's do right, I know on your last interview and you talked to Lisa McEwen, we talked about people are coming into this sector. People are wanting to contribute to this, to the nonprofit world. Let's do right by them. Let's give them heart. Let's give them values that they can attach to and unify around and do the best job that they can. Wow. Well, thank you. It's very clear you're passionate on this topic. I'm so glad that we could get you in to talk more about ways to align and engage with your employees and your entire organization. So Stephanie, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on, sharing your time, sharing your passion and your wisdom with us on this topic. We're so appreciative. If anyone has questions, your email is up there. It is now again. Was up there, it's back up there now. And of course, all of these episodes you can find archived on many of our platforms. Thanks to Julia Patrick, again, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, self-professed nonprofit nerd and CEO of the Raven Group. And also want to thank our presenting sponsors. They are the ones that continue these conversations. They allow us to show up each and every day to continue to be of service to all of you. But the thing is, and I like to say this, they like us, but they love you. They love the work that you do. They believe in your missions. They're here, as I said earlier, to elevate and to support you to do more good. So please do find them online, give them a like, some love and definitely follow them. And of course, their voices are on the show as well. Julia, what's this slide about? So we have some exciting news, Jarrett. Next month, we are going to be launching a new show, Yes Calls Crazy, called Fundraising Events TV. It's going to be a show just dedicated to all things event-oriented. So from golf to gallows, if you're having them in ballrooms or barns, it doesn't matter. There's a very specific type of our business and our activities that we do in the nonprofit world around events. And this pandemic and these pandemics have shaken this all up. So we think it's about time to have a dedicated program to this. It's going to be twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Jason Champion is going to be co-hosting it. It's going to be a lot of fun. And so you'll be hearing more about it. How about that? That was great. How's that for a teaser, huh? Well, it's been another great, great episode. We're so appreciative, Stephanie. I love how you've recentered us and given us some new ways to look at something that we know in the heart of hearts is really at the core of how and why we're successful. And so it's been a joy and a pleasure to chat with you. Jared, wow, tomorrow. Friday. What can happen tomorrow? First of all, I can't believe it's Friday. I know, today's Friday Eve. Even the news stations are saying that now. Love it. I think they heard it from the nonprofit show. I'm sure they heard it from the nonprofit show. Tomorrow is our Ask and Answer episode. So check us out. It's a lot of fun. And as we end every show, we want to remind you to stay well so you can do well. See you back here tomorrow, everyone. Thanks so much. Thanks, Stephanie.