Interview with Mark Takefman, Takefman, Citizen Sector Consulting, Founder and CEO ( PART I)

This is the first part of a long and engaging interview with Mark Takefman of Takefman Citizen Sector Consulting. Mark has a lot of experiences especially in the field of Organizational Development and he is one of the Advisors and Friends of ENGAGE. We felt that it would have been interesting to have more people know about Mark.

For more information about Mark http://takefman.com/

Would you tell us about your professional journey as development practitioner? How did you start?

I am going to expand on the idea of development to answer this question, for I initially studied Developmental Psychology at McGill University in Montreal. This is the study of how people develop throughout their lifetimes from the influences on the fetus in the womb and even before to the patterns of physiological and cognitive growth throughout a person’s lifetime.

I start with this perspective because  there is a case to be made for the way a person develops his/her personality as a template for how culture and other institutions in culture, such as organizations develop. What I am saying in terms of my journey[1] is that I look at organizations as if they are also organic entities, ones that are synergistically bound to the people that create and run them.

My professional career working with NGOs began while I was working for The New World Foundation in New York City.  I was tasked with travelling the world to study and report back on national community service organizations in countries around the world. This was an eye opener for me for two main reasons.  1) I got to witness the best altruistic behaviours of the human race and 2) the organizational methodologies I observed in these NGOs that were based in that altruism often exemplified an over abundance of good will and an under abundance of the skills and capacities to make their grandiose visions possible. This is not to say that there are also many organizations that had and have the capacity to fulfill their missions, but the vast majority of the millions of small NGOs are miraculously managing on their heart energy alone.  While I do find this impressive, I wanted to be a part of the force that helped these organizations be more productive and effective and long lasting.

What did you learn from your long overseas living, first in India and China? How would differentiate the different ways that “development’ is perceived and pursued?

I lived two years in India, about 6 months in Delhi and 18 months in Barmer, Rajasthan volunteering with the Society to Uplift the Rural Economy (SURE) to help alleviate poverty. 

In Delhi one of my projects was working for VSO India with a few UN organizations who had partnered with VSO to review and analyze a program called Teach India. I was tasked with looking at the program to decipher what went wrong. I learned that I did not want to work with the UN again for their bureaucracy and systems were a very frustrating experience.

SURE had many different programs such as helping blind adults (with Sight Savers International) and children (SURE school for the blind), agricultural development, a dairy farm, a reading program, a program (income generation) to teach the Dalit people (Untouchables) embroidery skills and then help them sell their goods in the Delhi markets. There were other smaller programs as well and the development of a new school for the blind outside of Barmer, which is now built and operating.

While in China I volunteered for about 4.5 years with Chengdu Urban Rivers Association (CURA). It is a eNGO, fully registered whose mission is to protect the rivers. It works on an ongoing list of projects concerning river pollution and environmental education. It is funded from multiple sources which has kept it solvent since its inception in 2003. With a full time staff of ~ 12, including a cook for the lunch meal,  CURA is well known and respected in China.

Some comparative developmental issues between these two NGOs. (For the sake of this interview I am only specifically comparing these two NGOs and I am not trying to imply that these differences are systemic in the two cultures.)

At SURE I once asked my line manager why is it we didn’t train some of the staff to have better skills for the work they do. Their practice was to hire mostly young women with few skills and  direct them in the work at hand. Only the management staff would really do the administrative work. I was told that if they helped to train the staff then they (the staff) would quit and find better paying jobs.  This of course may have been the reality, but for an organization whose mission was to “uplift the rural economy” this strategy seemed a bit amiss.  So I began to mentor the staff as a part of my service to the organization. There was a high staff turnover and the cost of this was not understood by the organization. Actually this kind of staff turnover expense is not well understood by most businesses and other organizations.[2]

At CURA, as well as helping with administrative and operations, I gave workshops to the staff on business improvement issues (which I called “CURA Talks”) and learning English. Training the staff and helping them be better at their work was built into the organizational profile.

While at CURA I learned an important lesson on leadership from Tian Jun, the General Secretary (aka Executive Director). Often she would get invited to go to conferences, both in and out of the country, and she would send her top management staff to represent the organization. Even I, a volunteer, went to Delhi to represent the organization at an Omprakash conference. The purpose of this was to let the staff get leadership experience.

She also confided to me once, when I told her we didn’t have too much of a chance to get a  certain European Union grant application, that was using up about 10 people in preparing for it, that she felt the staff education of learning to write the grant was just as important as getting the grant. (it was a big project looking for 2.5 million Euros and I packaged the grant for submission. We didn’t get it.)

This concern for the development of the staff in the different organizations still stands out for me today as I work with both my mentees today and my clients. My mentoring perspective can be summed up in this definition from the org Mowgli:[3]

A Mentor “is someone who stands beside you in a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship and works with you to empower you to achieve your potential by developing your own leadership, thought processes and decision-making capabilities. They do this by acting as a listener, friend, mirror and objective sounding board. They don’t tell you what to do but empower you with hope, aspiration, motivation and true support”.

The other major difference between the two organizations and between the two countries has to do with poverty. China has surpassed its Millennium Goals of reducing poverty by some 500 million people. India, meanwhile maintains its high poverty levels.

India authors, such as A. Roy and P. Sainath (and many others), have written that it would not take much to help reduce the poverty in India if  (for example) land policies where changed allowing small independent farmers to exist on their own land. This is what happened in China, the rise of small farms allowed families to enter the capital market to make money and raise their standard of living. (yes there is more happening but land ownership is key)

“According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US $1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms.”

Figure Above    Left: Barmer, Rajasthan, a poorly equipped, open sewers, lack of water and  no continuous electricity city compares to   Right: Chengdu, Sichuan, a modern rich city of 14 million people with high speed trains and a solid infrastructure.  The small towns outside of Chengdu may not be as modern, but they are not as poor or dirty as Indian towns of the same size in these two “developing” countries.

What about something very related to development, let’s call it community engagement. Have you seen big differences between India and China? Would such differences be driven by the different political systems in places in the two countries?

Community Engagement. Good topic for a study group and Yes there are differences. And for sure political differences are at play here, but I look at it this way: Most people in India are struggling for their day to day existence, taking part in community events outside of religious ones, are mostly for those who are financially stable, including university students in the big cities.  This is not to say that protests for social, health, safety and environmental issues don’t happen in India, they certainly do, but not as much as in China[4]. The interesting thing is, that in China groups of 50 people or more are not allowed to occur. A permit from the police and the police presence is required for large events, which, if political in any way, would not get a permit. The interesting thing is that these protests happen anyway by the tens of thousands of protests a year.

But economic development in India (and other developing countries) is dependent on having a large poor sector that is poorly paid to enrich the rich. True this is the same in China, except that the poor Chinese worker get a much better minimum wage, better housing and in some cases health care.

• Average hourly salary 2017 India  $ 0.40 USD an hour for factory worker
• Average hourly salary 2017 China  $3.60  USD an hour for factory worker
• Average hourly salary 2017 Canada $13.00 CDN an hour for a factory worker

(It should be noted that it is not always how much pay a worker gets but how much disposable income he/she has after paying off all essential expenses that can determine poverty.)

Linked to the previous questions, what do you think is the role of citizens in steering and leading grassroots forms of development?

This is very important. Without citizen involvement there would be no development outside of wealth development for the few. Political advocacy, including protests, journalism, boycotts, lobbying, education etc. are important tools to work on change.

When I’m asked “what can I do to affect change?” I tell people it’s not what you can do it’s about what WE can do. Yes it is the role of citizens to create and participate in grassroots organizations (and other organizations and in politics) to help make societies better and help advocate for better policy.  This is, unfortunately a Sisyphean task and in all countries, and a dangerous one.  A high sense of morality and passion is needed and witnessing this in those doing this work is what keeps me going.

What does organizational development mean to you? How to truly and passionately get engaged into it without ending up “dominating” the agenda?

Guilty, it does often dominate my agendas. I think Bob Dylan once said or sang: “There’s no success like failure and failure is no success at all.” To me this means that those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Sure I can, do a project or whatever on my own with all the details in my own head, but I will not be as effective or productive as when I work with others. And as soon as you work with others, you need some sort of documentation of common understanding of vision, mission, budget, etc.  So to me development means good visioning and planning in a team community setting.

But everything has its place, if you don’t want OD hogging the agenda, then using OD tools, set up an agenda where all the parts are discussed, tossed and turned. Let those who want to talk mission, talk mission, and those who want to talk budget talk budget, then projects, then marketing, then HR and so on. In the end, all these seemingly separate issues become the master operations plan from which an administrative set up can be made and also an implementation plan.

What is your personal approach to “organizational development”? Would you like to share some stories?

When asked for organizational help I first want to listen to the persons or persons about what it is they think they need and why for their organization. Why is an important question to ask. At one organization I heard that they wanted to hire staff who were professionals. One day I asked what this meant to them. As I suspected my definition was not the same as theirs. I was told that a professional is someone who can get the work done faster and on time.  And that was it. So there was no professional support of any kind for the unlucky few who didn’t last more than a few months at the office who were actually professional. Lesson: don’t assume what you know is what others know or think.

I also do my research about the organization itself  i.e.: the founders, marketplace, budgets and funding etc. Sometimes I will do a SWAT analysis, and often I will ask staff, if any, about their perspectives and concerns. You can get a lot of information from those on the front line, about how things really work vs. how management thinks it should.

When I think I have a plan I write out a concept note and share this with the leadership for comment and adjustments.  When approved I put together an implementation plan, have it approved and budgeted for, and begin the agreed upon process.

What is your understanding of social business or social entrepreneurship? How can more traditional charities or not for profits get into this sector?

A social business or social enterprise (SE) might be defined differently in different countries and have different legal status. Here in Canada we do not have a legal entity defined as a SE. Nor do we have a triple bottom line(3BL)  (also known as a B Corporation legal entity (profit, environment, people).  What an organization does here is to register as a legal entity and establish their by-laws according to the concepts of a SE or 3BL.

A SE for me is a corporation and one that makes a profit but it is using this profit for social impact, such as fundraising for a NGO or charity which it is attached to. The SE will operate like a company that makes money but a substantial amount of its profit goes to a sister NGO or charity.

For instance in China an NGO cannot sell products for fund raising. Therefore setting up a SE that sells T-shirts etc that make a profit for the NGO would be way to go. The SE still has to pay its own way in terms of staff, and operations costs so it will have to make a decent amount of money in its offering.  It could also be working for more than one NGO and sell in different markets for instance.

Do you think that the “sustainability” should always be pursued at any cost? What does it mean? Can an hospital or school targeting poor segments of the population be necessarily sustainable?  

What does sustainable mean in this context? What if we also considered regenerative sustainability?   What are the costs you imply? I need more feedback, but understand that in some cases of how we define sustainability, it is not sustainable.

For instance, look at Gro Harlem Brundtland’s definition”

“Fundamentally, sustainable development is a notion of discipline. It means humanity must ensure that meeting present needs does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs.“

Many aspect of our present needs are finite to some degree. Even food production. So how can we meet the increasing future generations needs? And how much do we leave “in the ground” (as per energy) for future generations? After all we will run out of oil and many of the other materials we depend upon for making our consumables.

When targeting the poor, can a we be sustainable you ask? Think on this, the rich people in the world got that way by targeting the poor throughout history.

You recently work an article, Youth Community Service, A Key To Our Future, what do you think about the importance of youth community service in a developing country as well in more established nations like Canada?

Yes youth are key and are doing things that you and I cannot do. I can’t say it better than Robert Reich’s 6 REASONS FOR HOPE IN TRUMP TIMES

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4soui9GMU2g