 I was accidentally involved in performance art twice in one week this past month while in New Mexico. One of the times was of my own free will, when I agreed to lead a game of RoShamBo Rockstar as the closing "act" of the Ashoka 25th Anniversary Talent Show. I ran the game as an immersive theatre piece - translated from the original French - deconstructing the fleeting nature of leadership. I channeled my inner Marina Abramović and had fun with it. Earlier in the week, though, Ashoka staffer Simon Stumpf had led the whole group in an extraordinary experience of The Long Table - essentially a performance of a dinner party conversation - with the provocation "What have you learned to ignore?" It wasn't until I was home, and digging in a little deeper to the experience that I learned it was developed as performance art by Lois Weaver. The whole structure of the experience is the dramaturgy: you can only speak from the table, the table is always open, the audience is always a potential participant. It turned out I was in a performance and didn't know it - and neither did anyone else. Thinking back on the week, I think that's why it worked. Both experiences dissolved the same boundary — between performer and audience, between watcher and participant. And I've come to think that dissolution might be exactly what's missing from most of our current attempts to bridge what divides us. I've been thinking (worrying?) a lot lately about what it's going to take to get us out of the mess in which we currently find ourselves. There are calls for dialogues across difference and efforts to bridge what divides us. I am moved by the importance of these initiatives, and yet there is something about what these efforts ask of people - not to mention the scale and the foundational work that I believe is required for them to be successful - that has felt lacking. One thing that struck me about both the Long Table and RoShamBo Rockstar as performance art was that there is an important difference in the experience when play is integrated as content as opposed to being sidelined as icebreaker. The icebreaker model apologizes for play and signals that the real work is coming. When play is the work, there's no backstage to retreat to. You're already in it before you've decided whether to be. Looking at my two accidental performance art experiences, I also realize that the dissolution of the boundary between performer and audience turns out to be an extraordinarily important invitation for people to actually be present in the moment as opposed to performing their prior positions. In wrestling with the idea of how we get ourselves out of this current mess, I am feeling more and more that the key is in recognizing that the design of our collective experiences is the politics. Before anyone speaks, the room is already making claims about who belongs, whose time matters, whether transformation is possible here. Dialogue-across-difference work is most likely to succeed when content follows — rather than leads — opportunities for people to come together in less loaded, generously designed spaces. Otherwise we risk reproducing the very dynamics we're trying to interrupt. I am curious about play as a tool for disrupting the current dynamic, but only when it's not quarantined. It equalizes status temporarily in ways words cannot. It creates shared reference points that belong to no prior affiliation. It rehearses the specific moves - tolerating uncertainty, recovering from being wrong, being willing to look foolish - that hard dialogue actually requires. All of which has left me wondering: perhaps the decline of play and the decline of cross-difference trust are not merely correlated. Maybe they share a root cause: the systematic removal of unscripted, low-stakes, cooperative environments where difference was present but not the point. Third places. Recess. Pickup games. Barn raisings. What replaced them was structured, optimized, affinity-sorted. The productive friction got engineered out. That's why I keep coming back to a single data point from the US Chamber of Connection's national study on Communities of Play: only 30% of adults belong to communities that do activities together — and those people have the highest rates of connection. Not as a side effect. As the mechanism. In a couple of weeks I'm joining Aaron Hurst on the US Chamber of Connection podcast to dig into what that finding means — and what it might ask of us. What would it look like to design for this intentionally - not as preamble to the important work, but as the infrastructure democracy actually runs on? 
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 Notes from an experiment in progress
When I ask Board Chairs how they’re doing, the answer is often something like, “I’m okay… I think,” followed by a pause. Not because they don’t care, quite the opposite - it’s more that they find themselves in a role that is strangely hard to describe. It’s part leadership, part stewardship, part emotional ballast. It lives somewhere between having authority and not quite having it, between being accountable and not fully in control. Only after spending time with Chairs in this first round of The Chair Project have I come to realize how much ambiguity shapes the experience. Chairs are being asked to care deeply, to hold responsibility, and to keep things steady, all inside systems where authority is shared, and responsibility can feel very personal. The idea for The Chair Project grew out of a pattern I kept encountering in my interim work and consulting around succession planning. During moments of transition, the Board Chair often becomes a central stabilizing force for an organization - shaping decisions, relationships, and pace - yet there are remarkably few resources available to help Chairs understand or prepare for the role. In a period of significant change for the social sector, that absence began to stand out as something worth examining more closely. I shared an early version of the idea on LinkedIn, expecting little more than a few nods of recognition. Instead, the response was immediate and wide-ranging. Chairs reached out wanting to be involved. Executive Directors asked how they could better support their Chairs. Friends of Chairs wrote, hoping to be helpful. Other consultants and advisors contacted me, sharing that they too were noticing similar dynamics with their clients. The responses didn’t offer clarity about solutions but did confirm that the question itself resonates. Given the response, I kept the first round intentionally small - a group of six Chairs - enough to begin noticing patterns, but still contained enough to learn as we go. We’re now about halfway through the protocol we’re testing, and the process has been deeply engaging. It’s still early, and I’m doing my best to stay inside the experiment as designed rather than rushing ahead to define what it might become. That said, while it’s too soon to draw conclusions about impact, the experience itself is already teaching me a great deal. Early learning #1: Sense-making changes experienceOne of the first things that struck me is how deeply the Chairs I’m speaking with care about their organizations. They care about the mission, about doing the job well, about the people they work alongside, and about the health of the institution itself. They are devoting real time and mental space to meeting day-to-day needs, supporting leadership, and stewarding productive board meetings - frequently under conditions of uncertainty and pressure. What I’m also beginning to see is that what’s missing isn’t insight so much as permission. Chairs are often uniquely well positioned to make sense of what’s happening: they see across the organization, the board, and the leadership, but the role rarely explicitly invites them to pause, hover, and interpret what they’re seeing. Creating space for sense-making turns out to be as much about legitimizing that perspective as it is about giving it time. Again and again, I’ve been reminded (and maybe I’m re-learning) that sense-making can be a causal act. Helping someone frame the role they’re in doesn’t just change how they think about it; it changes how they experience it. The way a Chair understands what they’re stepping into shapes what they notice, what they worry about, what they prioritize, and what feels possible to do next. One Chair put it this way: when she stopped seeing herself as the person who had to solve every problem and started seeing herself as someone who could stand slightly above the situation and notice patterns, she felt less frantic and more clear - even though the challenges themselves hadn’t gone away. Nothing external has shifted in those moments. The organization hasn’t changed. The constraints and opportunities remain. And yet, the experience can change. Simply creating space to name and interpret what’s happening seems to alter how the terrain is experienced. Early learning #2: Structure shapes experienceI’ve also noticed something closely related: the way putting in place even very light structure changes how people experience the work. By structure, I don’t mean heavy process or formal governance tools. I mean simple invitations: ways of framing a conversation, a meeting, or a relationship that create space for checking assumptions, naming patterns, and intentionally designing how people show up together. One of the quiet challenges of being a Board Chair is the sheer cognitive load the role creates. Chairs are holding multiple perspectives at once - the needs of the Executive Director, the dynamics of the board, the long-term health of the organization, and the pressures of the moment. Much of that work happens in their heads, often invisibly. What I’ve begun to see is how even small structures can give some of that thinking a place to land. I sometimes imagine them as literal chairs - a place to set down part of what a person has been carrying. What’s striking is that these don’t have to be big shifts to matter. Small tweaks in how meetings are framed, how roles are named, or how conversations are designed can accumulate into meaningful changes in how the load feels. Those changes show up in small, human ways: in tone and what feels possible. For now What this first round is giving me is not so much a set of answers as a clearer picture of the terrain Chairs are navigating. They are asked to care deeply about something that does not fully belong to them. To be accountable without being all-powerful. To hold the long view while responding to the urgencies of the moment. It’s an inherently human tension - one we all recognize in different forms - but it becomes especially vivid in governance, where the stakes feel high and the lines of authority are blurred. What I’m beginning to see is that what helps most in this role isn’t expertise, but support in recognizing and managing what the role demands. Language that helps people name what they’re actually carrying. Simple structures that give shape to conversations that would otherwise stay stuck in someone’s head. Moments of shared reflection that remind Chairs they aren’t wrong in finding this work challenging. I’m still in the middle of this first round - still listening, still learning, still letting the experience show me what it wants to become. There are undoubtedly things I’m not seeing yet, places where this work will surprise me, and places where it will fall short. That’s part of what makes it an experiment rather than a program. For now, though, my job feels pretty clear: to keep paying attention, to keep creating small containers where this work can be made more visible, and to keep walking alongside the Chairs who are willing to look closely at what it means to hold responsibility for something that isn’t fully in their control.  An experiment in supporting the role we rarely talk about
There’s a leadership role at the center of every nonprofit that we almost never talk about: the Board Chair. We talk about the CEO. We invest in leaders. We send Executive Directors to coaching, to fellowships, to retreats designed to help them grow, reflect, and try to stay sane. We’ve built entire sub-industries around supporting the person hired to run the organization. But the person responsible for managing that leader, stewarding the board, shaping the agenda, and holding the organization’s narrative during moments of growth or crisis? That person gets almost nothing. No map. No practice. No coaching. No peer group. Just expectations. Board Chairs sit at the nexus of strategy and execution, governance and operations, aspiration and capacity. They play an outsized role in:
So I’ve Been Wondering… What would it look like if Board Chairs had:
Introducing The Chair Project: My Next Workswell experiment This January, I’m exploring what structured support for Board Chairs might look like. Not a curriculum, not a certification, not a set of rules, but a practice and a space to explore what intentionally designed support for Board Chairs might look like. Over the next few months, I’ll be piloting a small coaching experiment with a handful of Board Chairs to see what emerges when we treat this role with the same intentionality we give executive leadership. I’m looking for 2–3 Board Chairs (or Executive Directors who want to nominate theirs) to participate in a no-cost, 6-week experiment that will include:
You don’t need to be struggling. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be curious. And Yes, There’s a Tee! Because no governance experiment should be joyless, each participant in the pilot will receive a (yet-to-be-designed) Chair Project t-shirt - minimalist, elegant, and just cryptic enough to be cool. Interested? If you’re a Board Chair or an Executive Director who wants to nominate one, send me a note at [email protected] . I’ll share a brief questionnaire to help select participants. I don’t know exactly what we’ll discover, but I’m excited to do some exploring with other motivated leaders. Welcome to The Chair Project. Let’s see what this seat can do.  This past summer, I officially joined the Interim Executive Solutions (IES) network — a community of interim executive directors, CEOs, CFOs, and CDOs who step into organizations during moments of leadership transition. Although I haven’t yet been placed through IES, I wanted to attend their annual retreat (which happened earlier this week), meet other interim leaders in person, and spend time in a room full of people who understand the strange, beautiful discipline of helping organizations navigate between what was and what’s next. Since coming home, I’ve been thinking about what stood out, and have landed on four themes: 1. Transitions are a normal part of organizational life. Not a failure, not a scandal to be contained, and not a frantic pause before the “real leader” arrives. Just a developmental stage that deserves clarity, structure, and care. 2. Boards are often exhausted before the transition even begins. After years of COVID, political whiplash, staff turnover, and the constant pressure to do more with less, many boards show up depleted. A surprising amount of interim work involves helping them reclaim their role, reconnect to purpose, and step back into meaningful leadership. 3. Interim leadership requires real emotional steadiness. Interims step into organizations at moments when people are often a mix of tired, worried, hopeful, and uncertain. Part of the work is helping teams navigate those emotions without losing momentum or clarity. 4. It’s a craft, not a hero's journey. What I appreciated most at the retreat was the complete absence of lone-wolf war stories. Instead, people shared practice: templates, frameworks, checklists, and the kind of grounded tools that make transitions go better for everyone. One small example: a simple “arc of engagement” tool that maps a transition as an entire journey — from the first quiet conversation about an executive’s departure, to staff and funder check-ins, to welcoming and supporting the new leader months after they start. On a single page, boards can see who needs to be engaged, when, and for what purpose. It’s deeply mundane, really just boxes on a timeline, but it turns an overwhelming, emotionally charged period into a series of concrete, doable steps. I've also settled on a few personal commitments that I want to carry forward as a result of the gathering - and figure I'm most likely to actually do them if I share them out loud here:
I left the IES retreat with a clearer sense of both the craft and the community behind interim leadership. The work we do - helping organizations move through uncertainty toward something steadier and more aligned - is real, skilled, and deeply necessary. If you’re navigating a transition, anticipating one, or simply curious about what healthy in-between leadership looks like, I’d love to talk. PS: No one who knows me will be surprised that I collaborated with the IES team to create an IES-branded Interim ED tee! The picture above is of IES Managing Partner David C. Harris and fellow interim Jay Voigt sporting theirs.  This past year, I got to participate in an extension of my Pahara Fellowship that was designed to deepen practices focused on personal identity and racial justice in the education sector, and included a chance to dive in on a case study exploring the “glass cliff.” For those unfamiliar with the term, the glass cliff refers to a phenomenon in which women and people of color (and particularly women of color) are promoted into leadership roles during moments of organizational crisis or instability, often without the structures and support they need to succeed. I was drawn to this case because so much of my consulting and interim leadership work these days lives in that same territory: the in-between moments of succession and transition, when systems are shifting, identities are evolving, and everyone is figuring out what comes next. Our group was multi-racial, and many participants (including me) had first-hand experience with transitions - some as outgoing leaders, some as those stepping into new roles, and others as colleagues navigating the ripples of institutional change. The conversations were rich, challenging, and deeply human. The experience wrapped up last week and I wanted to share a few key takeaways that really stood out for me. 1. Slow Down. The nonprofit sector is famous for its sense of urgency - an adrenaline-fueled conviction that everything must happen yesterday. But in the context of leadership transition, that urgency can do real harm. Rushing through a handoff almost guarantees that the deeper work of reflection won’t happen. An interim executive director can offer a designed pause, an intentional moment to steady the organization, clarify roles, and prepare for what’s next. This is especially important in founder transitions or when the leadership shift also represents a shift in identity, such as moving from a white leader to a leader of color. 2. Expect the Remodel. A major transition can be a bit like doing a kitchen remodel: once you start pulling out the cabinets, you discover the dry rot. Issues that were hidden suddenly come into view. Addressing every problem before the new leader arrives may not be possible, but boards have a responsibility to see what’s there, and to be honest about it. Transparency is both the respectful thing to do and the path most likely to lead to good outcomes. Pretending everything is fine only sets everyone up for disappointment later. 3. Boards Must Lead with Intention. A board’s role in an executive transition is perhaps its single most important responsibility. This is the moment when governance and culture intersect most visibly. If a board has especially strong ties to the departing leader, it’s worth naming that attachment and creating clear space for the incoming leader to lead. That might mean adjusting communication patterns, shifting committee structures, or simply recognizing that loyalty to the past can unintentionally limit the future. Leadership transitions are tests of an organization’s ability to act intentionally and of a board’s capacity to hold that intention steady. 4. Relationships Need Redesign Too. Leadership transitions aren’t just about people and positions; they’re about relationships. Funders, partners, and staff all experience change when a new leader arrives. Thoughtful communication and intentional handoffs matter. When boards and outgoing leaders design opportunities for new leaders to assume these relationships publicly and with support, they strengthen both confidence and continuity. When they don’t, isolation sets in fast. 5. Onboarding is Culture Work. Onboarding is real work. It takes time, attention, and care. Too often, organizations treat onboarding as a checklist rather than a process of relationship-building and cultural integration. Done well, onboarding is an act of care, signaling that the organization values the leader’s success and is committed to learning alongside them. It’s also a mirror: how a team welcomes new leadership says everything about its culture. 6. Build Your Own Kitchen Cabinet. Finally, being offered a leadership role can be both exhilarating and humbling. But in moments when you most need confidence, humility isn’t always your best strategy. For leaders stepping into high-stakes transitions - especially people of color entering situations that may carry elements of the glass cliff - building a personal kitchen cabinet can be invaluable. This group of trusted advisors, beholden only to you, can help navigate the negotiating, onboarding, and early decision-making phases of a new role. Their job isn’t to tell you what the board wants or what the staff expects - it’s to remind you who you are, what you stand for, and what you need to thrive. Closing Reflection The glass cliff isn’t inevitable. With care, pacing, and awareness, leadership transitions can become moments of growth and renewal rather than risk. They can be spaces where we learn to tell the truth about what’s broken, to slow down long enough to repair, and to create the conditions where new leaders can genuinely succeed. Transitions, at their best, are futures work: the rehearsal for the next version of who we’re becoming.  October is Bullying Awareness Month, prompting me to think about all that we’ve learned at Playworks over the years about how respect takes root: not through lectures or campaigns, but through play and human interaction. From the beginning, Playworks focused on helping children practice the skills that make communities work: teamwork, empathy, fairness, and respect. We weren’t created as an anti-bullying program, and yet when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded a randomized control trial evaluation of our work, schools with Playworks saw a significant reduction in bullying behaviors.
An RWJF evaluation expert once told me that she believed this was because Playworks approached the challenge from a primary prevention perspective, changing the playground environment itself. Instead of relying on awareness campaigns or punishment after the fact, we focused on redesigning recess so that every child could experience safety, joy, and a sense of belonging. By transforming the context, we changed the culture. That insight continues to guide the work and feels extra important in this moment. Children learn how to treat one another by watching and practicing, and the behaviors we see in kids almost always reflect what they observe in adults. I’ve never been comfortable labeling a child a “bully.” They’re still learning what power, fairness, and respect look like in real life. When we model kindness and give kids opportunities to practice it every day, we help them build the habits of character that last a lifetime. That’s why I’m so thrilled that Playworks recently received a $10 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to deepen and expand our work helping adults create the conditions for children to develop the building blocks of strong character. This support will enable more children to experience play as a time when kindness is learned, community is built, and everyone has the chance to respectfully contribute. And because I like to commemorate milestones playfully, I’ve created a new tee to mark the moment. It honors Playworks’ original name, Sports4Kids, but with a twist. A student once asked why we were called Sports4Kids when the logo showed five kids. So this one’s for them, with all the proceeds benefitting Playworks: Sports5Kids - a reminder that there’s always room for one more in the game. You can get yours here!  I recently got back from my annual solo backpacking trip – this time 10 days in the Eastern Sierras. Like most backpackers, I think obsessively about the weight I’m carrying and pretty much always limit myself to two t-shirts for any trip. As you might imagine, when a person is going to spend a couple of weeks with just two t-shirts you give the selection of tees some thought. This summer I chose the Golden State Valkyries First of a Lifetime tee and my UC Berkeley Haas Staff t-shirt (both received comments by fellow hikers, namely “Go Valks!” and “Go Bears!”) Over the years I’ve chosen different shirts to reflect the moment – Playworks’ t-shirts, shirts from kids’ colleges (NYU and UBC being represented more than once), and Radcliffe Rugby has been a frequent choice. I have avoided political t-shirts of all persuasions because one of the best things about an extended backpacking trip is being completely divorced, however briefly, from our political realities.
You also have a lot of time to think on a backpacking trip and I spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time this trip thinking about t-shirts I have loved. I printed my first t-shirt up when I was a freshman in college – it was a purple tee and read Radcliffe Motocross. I sold this fictional team’s swag at the Head of the Charles and other occasional events for spending money (OK, beer) throughout my freshman and sophomore years until the tees ran out. Later, playing rugby after college, there were t-shirts for fundraising for our rugby tours, and when launching mocha and then Sports4Kids there were tees for those organizations and assorted related events. All of it got me thinking about how much I enjoyed designing and selling these t-shirts. And then it occurred to me that I could still do it. That this was potentially something that the interwebs made easy and low-risk in a goofy, don’t-take-yourself-too-seriously kind of way. Announcing Jill’s Tee Shop! Currently on the site are six tees. A re-do of the Radcliffe Motocross tee (the Jill tee original), a personal favorite of my Berkeley rugby shirts, a limited-time political shirt (which I won’t be wearing backpacking) announcing the upcoming No Kings 2 March on October 18 (all proceeds to benefit Indivisible). There’s a new tee for Interim Executive Directors, a Francophile Golden State Valkyries tee I’m hoping to wear to play-off games, and a more-than-slightly random tee that I wanted to make when I had small children (because what in the world do the lyrics from the Farmer in the Dell actually mean?!?) You can check them all out here. It's a prototype. I’m going to play with it. Add some shirts, include guest tees, maybe raise some money for things I care about (Playworks and mocha tees coming soon!) I appreciate you taking a look and I look forward to hearing what you think! Amanda von Moos and Jill Vialet, Substantial Co-Founders Almost nine years ago, we co-founded Substantial Classrooms with one overarching question: how might we get substitute teaching working better for kids and adults? Equipped with a deep belief in human-centered design and seed money from the Jenesis Group and the TJ Long Foundation, we set out to learn forward and figure out what might make a difference.
Today, we are celebrating that our most successful answer to that question – meaningful training in classroom skills – is becoming part of the National Center for Grow Your Own (NCGYO). As we pass on the stewardship and scaling of SubSchool to our incredible colleagues at NCGYO, we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on what we’ve accomplished together and what’s next. We’ve always been a small team with big ambitions. Our journey together had three main chapters:
On July 1st, 2025 SubSchool will become part of NCGYO, fully operated by their team. NCGYO is a non-profit organization that provides technical assistance to state education agencies and school districts that are interested in launching “Grow Your Own” (GYO) programs. After years of advocating for subs to be recognized as a significant teacher pipeline – and creating the largest national survey of subs, verifying that 34% of subs aspire to be teachers – it’s exciting to see SubSchool championed by NCGYO. NCGYO is on a steep growth trajectory, and we’ve been impressed by how quickly they’ve become a national thought leader and key advisor to state education teams across the country. They are uniquely positioned to advance the idea that subs deserve training and support that prepares them for their current and future roles in education. With SubSchool on a path for scale with a trusted team, we will be wrapping up our daily operations at Substantial at the end of this school year. Over the next several months, our team will be working to ensure that we’ve made our key learnings publicly available on our website, which will remain active for at least three years. We’ve also learned quite a bit about a strategic nonprofit exit and making an asset transfer to another nonprofit, and we are pleased to be able to share this Nonprofit Strategic Exit Toolkit developed by a student team working with us from the UC Berkeley Haas Social Sector Solutions class this Spring. As nonprofit leaders, we work for impact and always hope that this impact extends beyond the projects we directly touch. There remains so much opportunity to fundamentally redesign how substitute teaching works. We hope that our work at Substantial inspires other people to center the humanity of subs and take up the challenge of making this essential system work better for kids and adults. We are so grateful for the people and organizations that believed in our work—that includes many of the people reading this! Thank you for being part of Substantial’s journey, and we look forward to collaborating with you in other ways in the future.  Working at Cal comes with some delightful perks: borrowing art from the Graphic Arts Loan Collection, swimming in the Strawberry Canyon pool in the summer, already having a parking spot when going to see a concert at The Greek. But hands down, my favorite benefit has been taking classes. Last spring, I dipped into Life Drawing (available to the public via the UC Berkeley Art Studio)), and this fall, I’m auditing the MBA Financial Accounting course.
Now, I get it — the thought of taking Accounting as an elective might make you say, “Huh?!” But I had two solid reasons. First, the instructor is Omri Even-Tov, the newly-named Faculty Co-Director of the Center where I’ve been interim-ing, CSSL. Omri’s won the Cheit Award for teaching excellence at Haas — twice — while teaching accounting. I’ve long believed that a great teacher can make just about anything interesting, and this seemed like the perfect test of that theory. Second, I’ve been thinking about joining a for-profit board, and while I’ve always been comfortable with Balance Sheets and P&Ls, I wondered if being self-taught, and mainly focused on nonprofit financials, might leave some gaps. So, here I am, diving into the deep end of debits and credits. We’re now in week 6 of 7, and I’m happy to report that the experience has far exceeded expectations. Reason one? Omri himself. Watching him teach has inspired me to up my own game — it’s like that moment in As Good As It Gets when Jack Nicholson says, “You make me want to be a better man,” except in my case, it’s “a better teacher.” Reason two? The whole experience has turned out to be an unexpected empathy exercise. Immersing myself in the world of first-year Haas students has been both fascinating and humbling. Admittedly, I’ve always liked school. I was good at it. But being back in a classroom, even as an auditor, can still stir up stress. I may not be taking this course for a grade, but there I was, sitting down to take the first quiz, heart racing, as if it would be graded. I’ve got a full-time job and some consulting clients, and sometimes I don’t get to the homework until the night before class (I see you, EWMBA students). The anxiety in the room was real, and it’s been a valuable reminder of what our students experience day to day. There’s also something wonderful about feeling more connected to the Haas community. I recognize people in the courtyard, say hello, and it feels like I’m just a little bit more plugged in. Universities can be siloed, and post-pandemic hybrid work schedules haven’t exactly helped that. So, this class has given me something unexpected — a stronger sense of belonging. As for Omri’s teaching, I can’t help but gush. He uses the Socratic Method, sure, but in a way that’s less “gotcha!” and more “let’s work through this together.” The class is impeccably organized, with weekly emails that are clear and concise. There’s a rhythm to the course — read the slides, do the practice problems, finish the homework — that makes everything feel seamless. And while Omri does cold-call, it doesn’t feel scary because the class is set up to make you succeed, not to trip you up. And then there’s the entertainment factor. Omri brings in quirky guest speakers, samples of random products, even unlikely music — all peppered with a healthy dose of Dad jokes and NBA references (as a basketball fan, I’m here for it!). His humor keeps the class fun, and his deep understanding of his students — from referencing their former employers in examples to weaving in shared interests — makes it clear that this is a student-centered experience. What’s really struck me, though, is how Omri and his GSIs create an environment where it’s safe to say, “I’m lost.” From sharing his own story about learning English as a non-native speaker to offering extra study sessions, quizzes with answer sheets, and frequent office hours, Omri has built a support system that shows his unwavering belief in every student’s ability to master the content. My mom, who’s 87, has been taking classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) in DC, and we often chat about what she’s studying and her instructors. OLLI is this amazing resource that not only delivers engaging content but also builds community — and I’ve realized through my experience this Fall that Omri’s class offers the same. It’s a beautiful reminder of how transformative learning can be when it’s done right, and what a gift it is to be able to be a lifelong learner.  We are launching the search for my successor at the Center for Social Sector Leadership (CSSL) today, so I figured this was a good time to check in on the interim-ing experience. I’ve been at Haas for almost eight months now and it feels both like a lot has happened, and like I’m still just figuring out how things work. I’ve wrapped up my second 90 day plan and have moved into my third, and looking back at those documents, along with the bi-weekly memos that I’ve been sending to the board co-chairs, provides a helpful framework for assessing my progress and the areas where I still feel like there is work to be done. There’s a game I like - generally played at the end of the day or to wrap up an activity - where you reflect on an experience by calling out something that delighted you, something that surprised you, and something that inspired you. With my experience at CSSL, I’ve been delighted by my ability to bring my network to bear in supporting both the organization and the people associated. Introductions, recruiting organizations to participate in our board fellows and social impact consulting programs, and nominating folks for fellowships (congratulations to Krutika Menon!) have been a blast. When I got into interim-ing I was initially focused on bringing my nonprofit leadership experiences to bear in helping organizational transitions and I was imagining more of a maven role in the Malcolm Gladwell Tipping Point taxonomy. Being a connector has been a delightful bonus. The CSSL ED job is a delightful manifestation of the Maya Angelou quote: "I do my best because I'm counting on you counting on me." The surprise probably shouldn’t continue to be such a surprise, but the pace and processes of higher ed – and a big, state institutional version of higher ed at that - takes a lot of getting used to. My reaction to the various ways in which unexpected processes show up has morphed during my tenure as the interim ED – from confusion to outrage to wry amusement and creative acceptance. There’s undoubtedly a danger in that – workarounds as the default are hard on a culture (h/t to Jennifer Pahlka). But I do see that there is also a way in which the randomness of some protocols has helped me to take myself less seriously and to adopt a more sanguine approach to getting things done. Finally, on the inspiration front, I think it’s a tie between the people (getting to work with the students, staff and faculty has been a great reminder that there is a very real and collective desire to be a part of something bigger than oneself) and the sense that an intentionally designed interim process can really make a difference (shout out once again to Third Sector and the Interims Executive Academy) . I set out eight months ago to do six super sexy things: to create a fundraising plan and identify some shorter term fundraising opportunities, to support and stabilize the staff, to steady some of the organizational systems and practices, to improve internal and external communications, to support new programs and to lead a search process. We have made some progress in the first five areas (though I am getting my butt kicked in my effort to navigate the UC finance system), and I am genuinely excited to turn to the task of leading the search process. Just as a teacher’s success is measured not in the teaching but in the learning that ensues, I’m convinced that the success of an interim has to be measured in the experience of her successor. I would be deeply grateful if you would share the official job description (here) along with the job profile we created (here).* If you are interested in the role, or know someone who might be, I’m happy to chat. I’m working with a really great search committee from CSSL’s Advisory Board (Sally Carlson, Dwayne Marsh, Linda Wood, Lynne Heinrich, Bob Miller and Nora Silver ex-officio) and we are collectively committed to creating a great process for all who participate in the goal of finding the right next leader for CSSL. I’m imagining that every interim gig will be slightly different, but there is something particularly exciting/terrifying about doing it all for the first time. I still have a lot of work to do to ensure that the transition goes smoothly, but this inflection point feels a little like the moment in which I begin to let go even more. Many thanks for following along and thanks too for your help in getting the word out about the search. *see above re workarounds
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