teams : mackenzian

December 22, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Relational growing

Even if somebody writes a recipe for you, what’s not in the recipe are the nuances: how the gravy looks when it’s ready, and how it smells when it’s ready. You can’t see that on a piece of paper where a recipe is written. You have to walk with a real good cook to learn how to cook. Secrets are not in books and manuals. Wisdom passed down from the elders is in direct proportion to how willing you are to walk humbly with your teacher… We are a reflection of someone else’s love for us.” —Bishop Yvette Flunder, August 4, 2014

Apprenticeship and discipleship aren’t so far apart in my mind. That’s partly because of the cultures I inherited my understanding of discipleship from and partly because they’re among the best ways to grow and build skill.

As infants we learn through observation, modeling, experimentation, and feedback. Many babies constantly scan their environment not just for objects to learn about but also for people to learn from. We learn quickly to watch our elders’ responses: there’s praise when a child staggers from a crawl into a walk, and a wagging finger when they reach for sharp scissors. In this culture, we expect an infant’s elders to watch and walk alongside it; we expect a child to become a student as it learns with adults how to do things and, ultimately, how to be human. Until each child becomes old enough to find new examples beyond their immediate circle of adults, they rise to the level of their models. That’s discipleship.

The teams I mentioned in yesterday’s post relied on apprenticeship in the tactics of civil disobedience and resistance. In 1959, for example, Diane Nash and John Lewis trained with Jim Lawson at Fisk University, studying through role play how to respond to taunts, threats, and physical assaults during desegregation sit-ins. CORE trained activists and reviewed their daily actions in Miami, FL, in 1959. They were intentional about learning and analyzing their efforts, and they were motivated to refine their contributions, to become more and more effective at raising pressure on a corrupt system until segregationists dismantled their handiwork.

All of these scenarios, and others—the trainee chef watching the master plate a meal; the youth invited, as Flunder tells it, to hold the elder’s flashlight while they do repairs—imply qualities of closeness and attention that contemporary classrooms and lecture halls can’t always include. And “the nuances” of the object of learning, the tacit or implicit knowledge, can only be learned with others who know it and are willing to share.

Any of us might be able to go long distances on our own, but to go deep, we need help.

December 20, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Acknowledging the team behind the hero

Every so often, a historian will teach us a little more about the cast of thousands who co-created the 20th Century US Civil Rights Movement, those who preceded charismatic figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kwame Ture in the work, and whose stories surface far less often.

In a new collection of essays, interviews, and speeches, former professor and lifelong abolitionist Angela Y. Davis speaks to the teams that are always just off-stage when we rather focus the spotlights of headlines or memorials on single and supposedly singular individuals. Mandela’s work in South Africa is a great example. So is Martin Luther King, Jr., in the mid 1950s and 1960s:

Dominant representations of the Black freedom movement are a discrete series of historical moments largely produced by the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. And somehow, although Martin Luther Jr. himself began to emerge to prominence as a consequence of that boycott, he is seen as always already the orator and leader of the civil rights movement.

Even though numbers of books, both scholarly and popular, have been written on the role of women in the 1955 boycott, Dr. King, who was actually invited to be a spokesperson for a movement when he was entirely unknown—the movement had already formed—Dr. King remains the dominant figure…

As a matter of fact during the 1950s, some 90 percent of all Black women were domestic workers. And given the fact that the majority of people who rode buses in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 were Black domestic workers, why is it so difficult to imagine and acknowledge what must have been, among these Black women domestic workers, this amazing collective imagination of a future world without racial and gender and economic oppression?

Even though we may not know the names of all of those women who refused to ride the bus from poor Black communities to affluent white communities in Montgomery, Alabama, it seems that we should at least acknowledge their collective accomplishment.” —Angela Y. Davis, October 25, 2013

Yes, we should. Work worth doing always involves more than one person, and usually more than a plucky handful. When we tell the stories of our movements, we need to acknowledge the teams with whom we move from mere imagination to collective progress.

September 19, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Giving up the need to know it all

After this weekend’s conference closed yesterday, I invited a fellow presenter to stop by our house for lunch on their way home. We were both exhausted and fit for little more than sitting quietly on the couch and waiting for food to appear.

So I was surprised when my friend picked up my almost finished but abandoned Rubik’s cube.

You remember the Rubik’s cube? It’s been the joy and bane of would-be nerds for more than three decades. I never had one as a child and bought one about five years ago.

At first, I’d pick it up and toy with it in between writing sessions. But I was afraid of messing it up, so I never made more moves than I could remember how to reverse.

After a few months, I got brave, jumbled it randomly, and tried to restore it to order. I came pretty close, and even googled strategies at one point, but never followed them to the finish line.

Eventually, another writing distractor toy replaced it.¹

Until yesterday, when my friend picked up my Rubik’s cube and solved it in half an hour.

How?

They knew the solution patterns. Someone had once taught them a handful of patterns, they memorized those patterns, and that’s the whole story.

You don’t need to be able to navigate 166 logic trees to solve a Rubik’s cube. You don’t need incredible spatial reasoning skills. You can study a few simple patterns, and those patterns unlock the game for you. It’s not as complicated as it could otherwise be, and most importantly, you’ll never know that unless you’re in relationship with another person who knows and will tell you.

Surrounding yourself with people who know things and will share them with you is how you don’t have to know it all and can still flourish as if you do. It’s why even people at the top of their class still hire tutors, why winners still hire coaches and mentors, and why businesses that want to move forward hire skilled consultants and contractors.

Good teammates, who at their best are peers working constructively toward goals you share, free each of us from the trial of the Little Red Hen: plenty to do, no cooperative hands on deck, and the sense that we’ll just have to find all the answers by ourselves.

There’s pleasure in searching and studying, of course.

But others will always have a skill, an insight, a perspective—something—that adds to us and resolves a conundrum we’d probably have never resolved on our own.

Treasure your teammates.

I haven’t found better desk toys than Magnetix (recalled in the mid-2000s when children ate them), the construction classic Play-doh, and the Ball of Whacks. [Back to text: ◄]