A Story about Origins, Meanings and the Significance of a Name
nce upon a time, two rather unruly women met in a boardroom. They began a long conversation, sometimes in writing, sometimes in person, sometimes drinking wine and staying up far past their bedtimes, about the larger meaning of their work. They asked each other challenging questions, like what stands in the way of nonprofits building longstanding, productive relationships? and why don’t more businesses use relationship science instead of marketing science to gain repeat, loyal business? and why aren’t governments and their citizens in more balanced, reciprocal relationships? They integrated pop culture, psychology, social science, art, permaculture, community building, and placemaking. There were no limits to where the conversation could go but it always came back to this: what does it take to build strong relationships between an organization and its constituents?
As the two women pondered all these questions, they realized that while they’d initially met over fundraising and donor relations, what they were really uncovering was a method of inquiry that could lead organizations away from transactional interactions and toward meaning, resilience, and collaboration with people who believe in their work and want to be a part of their success. This finally led to Patricia Berry (me! Co-Creator and Executive Director of the Heurista Institute) and Anne Manner-McLarty (Founder and Co-creator of the Heurista Institute) to formalize their work around their questions and start a nonprofit dedicated to exploring these and other interesting questions of relationship and resilience that would engage others who shared these interests and put the results into practice through facilitated conversations, research, educational opportunities, and documentation of the collaborative study.
Since we officially started the Heurista Institute in early 2018, I’ve spent a lot of lovely time responding to the following questions:
How do you spell that?
What does Heurista mean?
And still… so what do you do?
The spelling is easy, pronunciation can be a bit more fun ( hyo͞o-rist-uh ) and it has been both fun and a bit of a head-scratcher for me to refine my explanation of the word while simultaneously discovering the “what do we do-ness” of the Heurista Institute.
I first encountered the word Heurista back in the early 2000s when I met Anne Manner-McLarty, owner of the donor relations consulting firm, Heurista, Co. We met while serving on the board of the Association of Donor Relations Professionals (ADRP) and I had the same three-question dance for Anne that others have for me now. It sounded Greek, I was pretty sure that it alluded to heuristics but was it made up? I felt a little too intimidated to ask out loud and instead went home and did a little research.
So yes, it is made up. Heurista is a play on the ancient Greek word heuristic; loosely translated as “I find, I discover.1”
That had me immediately. I love the idea of centering a business practice on “discovery”. In my own experience as a business systems analyst at Accenture and then my work as a fundraiser in large and complex organizations, “discoverer” was somewhat antithetical to a culture of “expertise”. If you were an Expert (capital “E”), you weren’t finding or learning, you were all-knowing and disseminating that knowledge. Both as a consultant and as a fundraiser, I was encouraged to bring enlightenment to the customer or donor. There was little respect for the possibility that the best answer was already with the client or donor, it just needed to be explored, understood and put to proper action in a controlled, productive way. Encountering a person who’d centered her business on “discovery” over “expertise” felt intriguing and very compelling for me, both in meeting Anne as an individual and exploring her point of view and practice.
What has continued to fascinate me is the journey from the masculine heuristic toward the invented Heurista. Jacques Derrida would call this journey a de-centering of the “violent Hierarchies” of a Western philosophy that often favors one viewpoint over another. Heuristic practice is immediate, creative, generated from an innate sense of the best practical and possible solution to any project. Solutions generated from a heuristic approach are not guaranteed to be optimal, but their time-saving, small trial-and-error decision-making process is iterative and ultimately results in creative solutions that can then be put through their analytic paces. You see this heuristic approach in a number of different fields, perhaps most often in computer science2.
I was delighted to begin to think about the move from heuristic to Heurista in terms of the conversation Anne and I were just beginning about where we saw the future of relationship science, fundraising, and donor relations. It’s not that Heurista gives preference to one viewpoint over another, but that it is willing to shake up the status quo and look at things from different angles, including more voices, taking in more points of view.
Of course, dear reader, Anne and I became friends and collaborators. Over the course of our ten-year friendship, in addition to our day jobs as consultants and directors in the fundraising industry, we also spent a great deal of time thinking, writing, debating (dare I say arguing?), learning and collaborating about what we felt was the greater question of our field, namely, how organizations build long-term, resilient, ethical and equitable relationships with the individuals who support their work. We debated and reviewed the many ideas that had been brewing for years in Anne’s work and conversations with her husband and business partner Jeff McLarty around questions of how best to integrate the deep relationship practices we used in fundraising into the public sector, and most interestingly, into our national political conversation. This exploration resulted in the creation of the Heurista Institute in 2017. In 2018 we officially became a 501c3 nonprofit and I left my job as director of development for the University of Michigan Libraries to become the Executive Director of the now-realized Heurista Institute.
THE HEURISTA INSTITUTE IS LEARNING AND COLLABORATING ABOUT HOW ORGANIZATIONS BUILD LONG-TERM, RESILIENT, ETHICAL, AND EQUITABLE RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIVIDUALS WHO SUPPORT THEIR WORK.
Now, to the third and most important question; “So, what do you do?” The Heurista Institute is first and foremost interested in how healthy and equitable relationships create resilience in organizations of all types; from the for-profit/customer, to non-profit/donor, to municipality/citizen. We are exploratory and analytical in our approach, but have a strong interest in how our theories and pilot projects apply and thrive (or don’t) in the real world. Here at the beginning of 2019, we are thinking about two projects currently in their formative stages:
The role of “place” in community arts organizations. We will be taking a community arts organization on an 8-month research project that explores the role of place in their work. It will include a two-day conference for fifty curated collaborators/executive leaders from other similar organizations nationwide coming together to explore this question and identify things to focus on that will positively impact their work.
How to apply fundraising strategy and relationship science to transactional funding platforms like Patreon. We will be working with an artist on a year-long research pilot project that will include an analysis of the impact that relationship science-based activity has on the highlighted artists income stream.
The delight for me in our heuristic approach is the evolution that will inevitably be a part of all we do. There is an aspirational nimbleness in our practice that makes it inevitable that we will discover our work as we go along. I can’t wait to see where it will take us. Come join the conversation, it promises to be thought-provoking and inevitably fun knowing the two unruly women involved. Not a bad way to start 2019.
With gratitude,
Patricia
1
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heuristic accessed 1/3/2019 1:30PM Continue reading.
2
The challenge with this quick and intuitive approach is avoiding the pitfalls of cognitive bias. We ask ourselves difficult questions as we continue to learn and hone our heuristic process to avoid bias in our decision making. Continue reading.