learning : mackenzian

May 26, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Respecting the evidence

Once upon a time (last year), after I’d moved to yet another state (NY) and found a place to live in a tough market in a rather unreasonable amount of time (three weeks), someone who loves me very much called me “determined.”

I translated that affirmation as “willful,” and I laughed as I thanked her for it.

Willfulness involves a strong intention, the ability to drive from concept to act, and the power to push through resistance. It’s a trait I inherited from all branches of my family tree, and so no one who knows my people should be surprised that I’m good at it and only improving with age.

As I type this, I’m mostly laughing at myself. Willfulness can mean drive, and it can also mean fact-resistance. I have the capacity to keep on pushing despite jeers and storms, and I also have the capacity to be stubborn and stuck.

Determination and willfulness are both ways to honor purposeful commitment. I only offer the full force of my intentions when I believe something is worth committing to, and I think most people are similar to me in this.

In other words, one of the things that irks me most about my fundamentalist brethren—doggedness—is a trait I have too.

It means I’ll almost never give up on a course too soon: I’m more inclined to turn my ship a little late. Because I know that my default is Hanging In There™, I use all possible evaluation tools to disrupt my default, to keep me strategic and “on time.”

I’m learning from my own experiences and my observation of others’ experiences that nothing thwarts progress so easily and so thoroughly as failure to rightly read the data and integrate it into new action.

If something doesn’t work or isn’t healthy, a teacher told me to my face last year, don’t do it again.

I reread that line this week and felt exposed. Because it’s really that easy to self-delude: to imagine there are more degrees of flex in a rule than there are, to perceive a wider span of openness among relatives than exists, and to assert greater freedom in an organization than actually goes to participants at my level.

After my face flushed, though, I was able to swallow the wisdom again.

In every context where my choices matter, it’s up to me to pay attention to the outcomes of my assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors. And if those outcomes aren’t up to snuff, it’s up to me to change something.

Ultimately, the thing that proves learning is changed action.

May 21, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Why old dogs can learn new tricks

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a proverb I learned in primary school along with other common English idioms. It never occurred to me at the time that the saying contradicted the also-common “You’re never too old to learn.”

It turns out that even if the battle between “fixed mindsets” and “growth mindsets” is largely imaginary, “You’re never too old to learn” is the more accurate of the two sayings. Learning is always possible, even if it can become more difficult with time.

Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to respond to our environment and experiences by changing its structure, creating new circuits, signals, and neural pathways. New connections within the structure of the brain is the physiological evidence of learning, whether the content being learned is how to walk (motor function), how to make toast with peanut butter (object function), or how to adapt with and navigate a difficult family relationship (relational function).

Today I learned about three strategies that support learning and the rewiring of the brain:

physical exercise—especially cardiovascular exercise
direct learning—such as through sustained study or repetitive practice; and
focused attention—such as in meditation

The exercise suggestion surprised me, but I’ve noticed that people pushing for significant change in an area of their lives will often take up some form of physical discipline or training alongside that attempt to chage: a program of weightlifting, walking, running, yoga, or another organized practice like a martial art.

I would never have thought of these kinds of exercise as something that drove literal brain changes, but that’s what the research suggests.

“Old dogs can learn new tricks” because our brains aren’t cement or hardened clay. They’re soft, mushy, and more resilient than I’m sometimes tempted to acknowledge.

We can learn: it’s possible. Whether it’s likely is a combination of our will, our finding or making social networks and other structures that support our learning, and how motivated we are to learn and keep learning even in the face of resistance.

April 1, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Knowing you don’t know best

One of my notes from February’s bystander training sticks with me all these weeks later:

Often your first intervention will not work. Try another.”

The maxim suggests to me patience and persistence with experiment. Focusing on results and using outcomes to assess people or programs won’t always make room for that. It also implies the kind of long-term relationship where parties can stay connected and mutually evolve.

As such, it speaks to me of humility: knowing you don’t already know best and leaving room to learn from life and others. Not much social learning or relationship is possible without humility, and a lot of otherwise well-intentioned projects go off-course without it.

This is a recurring theme among non-profit administrators who field volunteers’ requests.

“I once started a project to help give people what I thought they needed,” one administrator wrote recently. “Turns out they needed something different.”

What made that a good story rather than a cautionary tale is that the administrator was able to adapt with the community’s newly articulated needs rather than either shut down and stomp away because they couldn’t receive what the administrator intended as help or forge ahead and do it anyway regardless of whether it was going to be helpful.

The dynamic also applies to organizations as well as people.

As individuals, we can easily deceive ourselves into believing that we do not perpetuate global inequities and discriminatory attitudes we claim to oppose. Organizations are no different.” —Fairouz El Tom (May 26, 2015)

Remember, for example, the organization Invisible Children, which launched the viral Kony2012 video campaign five years ago? Shortly after that campaign against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Invisible Children started participating in intelligence gathering for Uganda’s government.

Rather than staying focused on the “invisible children” being kidnapped by the LRA, Invisible Children pivoted to supporting the military interests of Uganda’s 30-year president, Yoweri Museveni, and American defense contracting funders intent on destroying the LRA through more conventional means.

Reports from this year show that the organization has pulled covert human intelligence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and other central African states into its regular programming, but not solely by foregrounding the White Americans who drove its initial marketing effort.

Today, Invisible Children equips African informants with radios and its continental staff (some of them are “volunteers”) work with private military contractors and the United Nations’ peacekeepers to report on LRA activities in the region.

That isn’t the model of change that co-founder Jason Russell aimed to get the media so excited about in 2012. It takes a lot of corporate energy to make a mission shift that significant. Perhaps it helps that, according to Russell’s bio, he still has the same philosophy he did years ago: “If you want to change the world, you have to be crazy enough to believe you can. [Jason] does, has, was, and still is.”

In Teju Cole’s more sober assessment, “The world is [still] nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.”

But enthusiasm isn’t all that’s needed. Some international development workers are beginning to explore race, power, and influence as well as personal passion: it’s a necessary, challenging industry-wide conversation, and humility opens the way.

After all, just because you change, doesn’t mean the change is good.

March 4, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Learning by accident

What was the last thing you learned by accident?

Biocognition specialist Mario Martinez gives a few examples of incidental learning in his book The Mindbody Code.

Children develop motor and strategic skills through a video game hobby. Adults build focus by way of tai chi practice. Daniel-san learns integrity, self-respect, and self-defense through car waxing and bonsai training.

There are other examples from the worlds of education and crafts: students who study both mathematics and music build their facility with space, time, and pattern recognition. Knitting and crochet seem to help practitioners grow more at ease with failure, recovery, and the principles of computer programming.

We can learn new skills and mature by building competence in different areas of our lives than the ones we think need change; zooming in on a desired ability and grinding at it until it yields isn’t the only way!

Increasing competence in an area of life also typically means building confidence life-wide. As competence and confidence build, fears decline. That’s a good thing!

Increasing your competence [gives] you faith to continue without any guarantees. No fears, including the fear of emotional wounding, can be resolved with guarantees or appeals to logic… Competence reduces fear.” —Mario Martinez

This is a concept that makes me read a part of the Sermon on the Mount in a new-to-me way.

Jesus advises his followers not to worry about the basics of survival: food, shelter, clothing, and longevity.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin… That is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire. Will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ …But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” (Matthew 6:25-34)

The last time someone told me not to think about a purple cow, purple cows were all I could think about. That’s what happens when you have a prohibition without a substitute.

At least in this passage, Jesus tells his followers not to worry but also advises them on what to do instead. His substitute for worry is like an incidental learning experience: as we collectively “seek kingdom and righteousness [justice] first,” he teaches, we find our needs provided for. As we prioritize just relationships and build the kind of community that holds in both sunshine and storm, we also stumble into a world where no one has to be fearful or hungry.

People thrive in a just world, not because as individuals they put a lot of energy or willpower into surviving, but because just relationships are the containers in which life and lives are respected and supported. Individual flourishing is a property of that container, but like focus in tai chi and strategic smarts in video games, it’s something that emerges, not something that’s sought out.

We don’t have to scrap around a disordered world to get what we need, and ultimately, even when we have promises to draw comfort from, we can gain a great deal from disciplined practice: we grow from the skills we’re focused on and benefitted by what we learn on the way.

December 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Expect error

My generation, the children of West Indian immigrants, didn’t learn to look kindly on imperfection, even when it was all we had.

My mother’s mother trained perfectionism into her children by scrunching up inattentively ironed shirts and requiring the poor unfortunates to iron them again. My mother once punished me for not starting a summer project, an assignment from a teacher I’d never see again at a school I’d already left: many things were possible in this world, but her child missing an assignment was not among them even if the assignment was obsolete.

Perfection, defined as a state of flawlessness, was a good.

But researchers who study wrongness and those who study error have lots to say about how little “perfection” and “real, live people” overlap:

In the 1980s, sociologists like Charles Perrow pored over institutional documents and concluded that however uniquely horrifying, glitches were not exceptional events. They were “normal” accidents; things that were bound to go wrong when people started doing and applying science and engineering on a complicated scale. In Perrow’s account, accidents were normal because they happened with enough regularity that any institution of a sufficiently large scale could practically count on one. They happened through tiny errors in routine activities that became magnified with tragic consequences. To ignore the probability of accidents, Perrow suggested, was to live in a fantasy world.” —Joanna Radin, December 12, 2016

Accounting for errors as you plan projects isn’t about being sloppy. It’s about being wise.

Perhaps you underestimate the time it takes you to complete a task. Maybe you overestimate the contributions other team members can offer. Something comes up, and whatever the error, you have to adjust.

As Radin explains, accidents and “glitches” allow us, if we’re willing, to learn and reshape our context: “The glitch provides us with an opportunity to make a bridge between what doesn’t make sense and what could turn into knowledge… an opportunity to begin considering how things could be otherwise.”

The kind of acceptance that makes change possible

The only possible way I could have had my unique set of experiences is by living my life as it is, and that means dying when I die.” —Max Edwards, March 19, 2016

Max Edwards was 16 years old when he died from terminal cancer. A week before his death, Edwards wrote about accepting his prognosis and not resisting the truth that his life would end within months. He wasn’t interested in a dramatic response, he wrote, and he had begun to find the routines of life comforting.

Edwards stayed focused on the ever-emerging present, and that made it easier for him to adjust as his body function declined.

Making room in our lives for today means not fleeing to the past and not projecting into the future. Today, after all—in “this present moment”—is where we have the greatest capacity to act.

Angel Kyodo Williams once wrote, “Acknowledging our past is necessary; living in it is a form of escape.” Williams also wrote this: “When we get too stuck in the past or future, the quality of right now suffers. In fact, you miss now altogether. And if life doesn’t happen right here, right now, when does it?”

In my personal and professional lives, I’ve usually been the person on the room who’s most happy planning, structuring, measuring, and scheduling. Life has a lot of fun with that! (I think of the saying “We plan. God laughs.”)

What I’m still learning is how to leave room in my plans for God’s laughter and life’s adaptations. Allowing the present into my awareness without immediately trying to corral it into my timetables and long-term plans—that takes patience I’m not always motivated to exercise.

But I’m learning that I benefit a lot when I pause long enough to pay close attention, to really listen, to really look, to allow myself the space to absorb what I notice and learn from it.

Exhaustion is the result when we use energy in mulling over the past with regret, or in trying to figure ways to escape a future that hasn’t even come yet. Likewise, setting up an image of the future and anxiously hovering over it for fear that it will or won’t come true uses all of our energy and leaves us unable to live today. Yet living this day is the only way to have a life.” —Nar-Anon Family Groups, Helping