Making Change

James Comey, departing a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week, stepped into a knot of reporters and network news cameras staked-out in the corridor. In response to a journalist’s question he said, with his voice rising:

This is the president of the U.S. calling a witness who is cooperating with his own Justice Department a ‘rat.’ Say that again to yourself at home and remind yourself where we have ended up…

In Comey’s vexed response I could hear the echo of Joseph Welch’s withering challenge to Senator Joe McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

I’m not sure whether I really watched that exchange back then. I think I remember the scene playing out on the screen of our black and white TV. But no matter, I have seen the news footage so many times by now that it is easy to replay the words again now.

Welch, a civilian lawyer representing the US Army against McCarthy’s accusation of lax security at a military facility, had just demanded that the senator’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, produce a list of alleged communists.

McCarthy stepped in to divert attention from Welch’s effort to call Cohn’s bluff. The senator accused Welch of harboring a communist sympathizer in his own blue blood law firm. If you needed to put your finger on the tipping point when the national anti-communist fever broke, it would be Welch’s indignation at that. While blacklists lingered, McCarthy’s assault effectively ended with Welch’s question.

Since then we’ve learned a great deal about the cascading changes set off when a tipping point is reached. Cohn, of course, resurfaced years later as the young Donald Trump’s attorney who infamously tutored the future POTUS 45 in the fine art of gaslighting.

That is why Comey’s indignation has got my attention right now. It is difficult for me to admit my appreciation for his upright defense of American values—after all, as FBI director this man advantaged President Trump’s presidential candidacy when he carelessly put his hand on the electoral scale with public pronouncements about Hilary Clinton’s email. Even so, I am happy to give Comey credit if this becomes the tipping point that brings down Trump’s presidency.

Throughout this year I have often felt hopeless witnessing this administration’s cruelty. Trump’s policies have caused so many hardships for the people and causes I care about. But in Comey’s speech I hear my frustration echoing and growing into something potentially powerful.

Who knows whether we will look back on this as the tipping point that changes the course of history. As our current commander-in-chief might proclaim: “maybe it will and maybe it won’t.” What’s different now is that even if it doesn’t, the momentum has shifted: this presidency is self-destructing.

And that, finally, gives me hope in the dark.

As Election Day results settled over me, I tuned in to Stephen Colbert’s live Election Night special. When Trump’s victory seemed inevitable, Colbert turned to journalist John Heilemann looking for the silver lining.

“I got nothing,” Heilemann replied.

I turned off the television. I too was adrift.

The election violated so many beliefs I hold dear. I could not envision the future.

My son Adam gave me a way to look forward: these words by Rebecca Solnit, a Harper’s editor, activist, and author of Hope in the Dark, an account of the power of political engagement against steep odds.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away….

Though hope can be an act of defiance … it is important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine…. It is also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-getting-worse one…. Grief and hope can coexist.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes…. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”

Solnit also finds hope in “the altruistic, idealistic forces already at work in the world.” I know those forces are real in the nonprofit sector.

She adds, much of “our everyday lives … are in essence … made up of things we do for free, out of love and on principle.” I thought about all the committed organizational leaders I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years in my consulting practice.

What are we doing to dispel the fog that has enveloped the many idealistic souls who populate the nonprofit sector? What is an organization’s leader’s role at a time like this?

Perhaps sharing Solnit’s words will be meaningful. They have helped me begin to see past my disappointment to the possibility of action. Thank you, Adam.

Solnit has made an electronic edition of the book available free during this week, via the Haymarket publisher’s website. Click here for more info.

I recently came across this quotation from Charles Darwin:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent…It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

The quote so perfectly captures my thinking about organizations that I searched for the source in the hope of reading more. What I discovered instead is that Darwin never wrote those words.

The phrase, according to QuoteInvestigator.com, is an “idiosyncratic interpretation” of Darwin’s theory from a 1963 speech delivered by a Louisiana State University business professor.

The people at QuoteInvestigator have so much experience with this kind of misattribution that they offer an explanation of how it works. Essentially one person summarizes, condenses, or restates someone else’s idea, and passes it along to others. And when   such restatements repeat over time in a multistep process, you end up with a simplified, shortened misquote—in this case reassigned directly to Darwin.

It is ironic that through a process of cumulative restatement—natural selection, if you will––a casual description of Darwin’s theory of evolution has been socially distilled into a pithy quotation. In spite of (or maybe because of) their imperfect pedigree, the words still resonate for me.

So much of management “science” and organizational culture resists change and promotes stability. Yet it is clear to me that all organizations operate as small particles in a complex and changing universe where the inability to adapt overpowers whatever other advantages they may enjoy.

In other words, this one deficiency—not being able to change—can become an organization’s Achilles heel.

That is why I insist in my consulting engagements that adaptive capacity is the indispensable advantage high-functioning organizations must cultivate.

Maybe Darwin didn’t say it’s the most adaptable that survive, but I’m sure that’s what he meant.

“America is unmatched by any developed democracy for the depth and extent of its poverty.” With those words, Matthew Desmond launched into a description of his research into evictions at an event this morning at the Boston Foundation.

Desmond is a professor of sociology at Harvard and a MacArthur “genius” winner. I am reading his recently published book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which has received a great deal of attention. I think what is most remarkable about it is the way it zeroes in on a problem hiding in plain sight and makes it visible in an extraordinarily compelling way.

It’s worth considering how Desmond does that.

The book certainly has me reflecting on my own bias towards “hard data.” In my performance management and evaluation consulting I often advise nonprofit clients on how to use quantitative data to improve their program outcomes. But Desmond’s work reminds me of the enormous power of real stories told well.

Desmond lived in two Milwaukee neighborhoods for months documenting the struggles poor people have finding and keeping housing, and his book chronicles their real life experiences. At the same time, his book employs hard data to demonstrate that these stories are emblematic of a pervasive problem in the housing market.

There’s a lesson here for any organization trying to get the importance and impact of its work understood. Our goal should be the skillful marriage of quantitative data documenting the scale of the problem with stories that substantiate its impact on the lives, health, and well-being of families.

As for the substance of Desmond’s conclusions, this one got my attention: “If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”

Desmond’s research certainly seems to me to provide definitive evidence for circumstances being the culprit in the story of America’s eviction crisis. Even so, a review of Evicted by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute—which bills itself as “a leading free-market think tank,” describes Desmond’s subjects as anti-heroes. As Husock reads it, “…Drugs and a range of other bad decisions and bad behaviors number among the most common causes for the looming evictions of his characters.”

Of course, no matter how strong the data and well-told the stories, not everyone will be convinced by strong findings. The debate about the deserving vs. the undeserving isn’t going to die anytime soon.

But Evicted shows the way to using quantitative data and storytelling to report on research and touch readers’ hearts. The book left me hopeful that this approach will touch not only us “bleeding hearts” but at least some of the “hard hearts” of those who still belong to the free-market blame-the-victim crowd.