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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

planning

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Knowing you don’t know best

a white hand writes with a black ballpoint pen a list on square grid paper. the list is out of focus.
Photo credit: Glenn Carstens Peters

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.

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Happy new year!

Two candles in short glass jars. Foreground is an orange hue; background is dark blue.
Photo credit: Jovi Waga

Happy new year! If you’ve set any goals or targets for 2017, turn those goals and targets into plans and schedules.

Hope is a terrible strategy. You need more than hope. You need a plan.” —Mike Speegle

I’m in your corner. Thanks for being in mine!

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The most important part of the pyramid

A glass pyramid photographed with a bright blue almost cloudless sky.
Photo credit: Ice Cream Photography

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, commonly represented as a pyramid, has physiological and safety concerns at its base.

These basic concerns include food, shelter, and freedom from violence, and it makes sense that people need these existential needs met in order to live well.

But it’s easy to focus on planning for everything else except the basics at the bottom of the wellness pyramid.

For years, Britain’s junior doctors have protested their working conditions. They conducted a strike this spring to challenge excessively long shifts and the risk of harming patients with fatigue-fueled decisions.

Like all too many entrepreneurs, parents, and academics, medics are, as Angel NP recently said, doing “too much for too many with too little. And running on fumes.”

I’ve joked before about the United States being a workaholic’s paradise but our incidence of chronic and so-called lifestyle diseases tells me it’s not in fact funny. The constant wear of overscheduling and sleep deprivation has physiological consequences as much as it also affects people’s efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction.

As you determine your goals for this coming year, keep your physiological and safety needs in mind.

How can you plan for a solid morning meal before your work day starts? What could you take off your do list so that you can dedicate time to physical conditioning? How can you budget or redesign your evenings so that good sleep is guaranteed?

Just as the pyramid is the most stable shape because of its base, our quality of life rests on whether we can secure the fundamentals of physiological well-being: not only for ourselves but also for each other.

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Remembering with minimal projection

Mari Andrew illustration: "what it looks like now [squiqqly line]... what it will look like in hindsight [straight paved road]"
Illustration: Mari Andrew
Memory helps us to shape our sense of ourselves, and it’s a creative act, not an objective accounting.

Psychologists have established what they call “hindsight bias,” a mental quirk that encourages us to believe that today’s outcomes were once obvious and inevitable and that tomorrow’s changes are unlikely. We assume more constancy and less variance than we ought: our memories are both constructing and conservative.

In a very short talk, “The Psychology of Your Future Self,” Harvard professor Dan Gilbert explains this phenomenon. “We overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability,” he says. We retrospectively perceive the past as a road much straighter and smoother than any road we’re currently on, and we project onto our future selves all the consistency and coherence we imagine we already have.

As David McRaney might say, we’re not so smart.

When you desire meaning, when you want things to line up, you forget about stochasticity. You are lulled by the signal. You forget about noise… If you have a human brain, you do this all the time.” —David McRaney

So this is how the human storytelling brain works: we smooth out the wrinkles in our experiences for a tidier trip down memory lane, and we extrapolate from the present as much as we can (and more than’s appropriate).

If we can’t fix this bias, the least we can do is try to be more aware of it whenever we review where we are in life, what we’ve been able to create so far, and what might be possible tomorrow.

SMART goals (specific, measurable, attainable or assignable, realistic, and time-bound) are one way to moderate the effect of this quirk when it comes to our future, but perhaps only a tall glass of self-compassion with a twist of skepticism can moderate it when it comes to our past.

Ask: What could just as easily be true? What other explanations fit the facts? Is there another story we could tell?