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Patient Urgency
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Patient Urgency

Thinking about change

For this edition, here’s a little theory about how things change.

Individual Change Is Gradual

For individuals, changes come by gradual improvements in skill, habit, and character. Dramatic shifts are rare, and when they do happen they are usually unsustainable for us. Considering how much of our thinking and decision-making is automatic—the great majority—it makes sense that individual change is gradual. We can all become better people, but usually it happens by degrees over time.

Social Change Is Sudden

At the level of society, change rarely happens gradually. In many cases, it doesn’t happen at all for many years. But when it does come, change comes suddenly. That’s because social change happens when institutions change, through laws (Brown v. Board of Education), policies (LGBTQ service in the military), programs (Social Security), leadership (US Presidents), or technology (TikTok). And social change tends to be sudden even though the ingredients of social change can take years to develop.

Patient Urgency

Individual change and social change have at least some things in common. Neither comes quickly. They both require patience and urgency.

This means:

  1. To help people (and ourselves) change, we are willing to do it by degrees. We keep at it and enjoy small daily victories.
  2. To help society change, we persist as credible advocates with a plan, persuading minds one at a time and being ready to show the way when the moment comes.

And it means not quitting, even when it feels like change is slow or nonexistent. We can trust that change for the better is always possible.

What change are you looking for and what can you do each day to help make it happen?

Seeing Good at Work

An inspiring example of change at a social and individual level, Oakland’s Operation Ceasefire reduces gun violence through life coaching and data analysis. One study directly ties it to a 32% reduction in homicides. But the program took over a decade and three different attempts to finally stick.

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Now that I have a couple of months of the newsletter under my belt, I would be incredibly grateful for your feedback. If you have ideas, criticism, or resources to share with me, please reach out.

Better Than You Think
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Better Than You Think

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

–Piggy

The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, has convinced generations of school kids that we’re all basically selfish and wild. Humanity constantly teeters on the edge of chaos. In the end, we’re all either predators or prey. This, of course, is a big heap of nonsense.

How do we know that Golding got it wrong? Because there actually was a group of boys who were marooned on a remote island in the Pacific, for over a year, and they were amazing to each other.

Lately I’ve been reading Humankind, by Rutger Bregman. He’s a Dutch historian who hunted down an incredible story of the real Lord of the Flies. In 1965, six teenage boys in Tonga were so bored at school that they decided to steal a boat and sail to Fiji. Being teenagers, all they brought for the 500 mile voyage were some coconuts, a gas burner, and a couple of sacks of bananas. The youngest, 13, was recruited because he was the only one who knew how to steer a boat.

A storm caught them asleep the first night, breaking their rudder and ripping away their sail. After eight days of drifting, they spotted a tiny, rocky island. It became their home for the next 15 months.

Did they descend into cruelty and chaos? Of course not. They survived through cooperation and kindness. The boys developed a roster of duties, worked in pairs, and even tended a flame they kept going for a year. One of them broke a leg, and the others cared for him until it was fully healed. When they were finally rescued, the doctor who examined them found them in peak health.

If it’s a surprising story, that’s only because we are bombarded with the idea that people are basically evil. And for some reason, in spite of ceaseless evidence to the contrary, we believe it. People around the world—every day—are helpful, kind, forgiving, and patient. Bregman’s book makes the convincing case that we are fundamentally good. (It’s also well written and engaging. I highly recommend it.)

Believing the worst in others just brings out the worst in ourselves. Can you spend the week looking for good in people, especially the ones you like the least?

Seeing Good at Work

At a time when political rancor can drag us down, I thought it would be good to draw attention to the research of More in Common. Their study on the Perception Gap in the US shows, among other things, that:

  1. Fewer people hold extreme political views than we think.
  2. The more immersed you are in political news, the less accurately you understand the other side.
  3. The less you understand the other side, the more likely you are to call them “brainwashed, hateful, and racist.”

You can even take the quiz for yourself and see how well you can predict the views of your political opponents. It’s quick, and well worth your time.

Take the Perception Gap quiz

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My friends and I at Merit Leadership are working to develop more ethical leaders around the world. If you’d like to keep an eye on our work, please follow us on LinkedIn.

What Are You Broadcasting?
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What Are You Broadcasting?

The signal we send all-day, everyday

How well does your reputation serve you? Thinking about this should be part of your personal and professional development. We may not realize it, but our daily life is like a radio station and everyone around us is tuning in. They are listening for reasons to trust us.

A reputation for being untrustworthy usually costs us in ways we never even see, because people look elsewhere when they have opportunities to share. It’s not something we’ll hear from people (who enjoys telling someone they can’t be trusted?), but the cost to us is real.

The message we transmit comes, in part, from our actions. Do we do what we said we would do? Are we kind? Are we patient? Do we take criticism well?

But a lot of the radio signal we broadcast comes from our words, too. It’s in the way we talk about things like integrity, respect, and accountability. These moments are often small enough that we don’t even notice them. Have you been annoyed at the inconvenience of someone doing the right thing? Did you use an excuse like “What they don’t know won’t hurt them”? Be careful: these little moments can send a loud message.

What signal are you sending out? When it comes to our trustworthiness, we generally broadcast one of three messages:

  1. Integrity. People can think of times we spoke up about doing the right thing. They remember a time we paid the price to treat someone else fairly. Because of this, they expect us to treat them fairly, too.
  2. Cynicism. People can remember a time we cut corners. They felt uncomfortable because we made an excuse for bad behavior. They heard us talk about someone else unkindly, wondering if we talk about them the same way.
  3. Silence. People genuinely cannot remember a time we made a hard choice. When someone else was suggesting a sketchy idea, we never spoke up. They don’t know much about our integrity, because we never paid the price to protect it.

Notice that #2 and #3 do the same damage to trust. We have to be proactive in our integrity. It’s not something people will assume in our favor.

What can we do to broadcast more integrity, especially in the little moments? It matters because people are always tuning in.

Seeing Good at Work

Because bad news dominates the media, broadcasting good into the world is a choice, not just something that will happen on its own. The Solutions Journalism Network identifies news stories that describe solutions to the world’s problems instead of just talking about the problems themselves.

Their Solutions Story Tracker just crossed 10,000 stories. You can search their database for good news of all kinds. Also consider following them on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

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You’ll be hearing me say this a lot, but the most common misconception about ethics is that it’s just a matter of character. The truth is that good people make ethical mistakes all the time, because it’s more than character. Ethics is a skill.

If you’re enjoying Good at Work, please share it with someone. If you’re new, I’d love it if you subscribed.

How Enemies Become Friends
Newsletter Past Issues of Good at Work

How Enemies Become Friends

Small moments of grace have power

I’ve been thinking lately about how amazing reconciliation is. I have a hard time appreciating it in the heat of conflict, but there’s always hope for making my enemy into a friend. Here’s evidence of how that works.

Ann Atwater was a black civil rights activist in Durham, North Carolina and a fierce advocate. Her granddaughter described her, saying “If something didn’t seem right, she was going to speak up for it. She really wasn’t afraid to ruffle feathers.”

C.P. Ellis, on the other hand, was a grand exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan who, in 1971, was determined to derail a school desegregation effort in Durham. He was chosen by fellow white supremacists to co-chair a 10-day community meeting, called a charrette, about the conflict. The other co-chair was Ann Atwater. The two already knew and despised each other.

Ellis came to the first meeting with a machine gun in the trunk of his car, while Atwater came carrying a Bible. (In a previous, heated encounter, she’d pulled a knife on him to make her point.) It wasn’t until after three days of contentious meetings that a small moment of grace broke down the walls between them.

A church choir was performing for the group, and Ellis was struggling to clap with the tempo. Atwater reached over and grabbed his hands to help him along, an act of kindness that softened his heart. This opened the door to a conversation, where they learned that both of them had children who were being bullied by classmates. The shared experience helped them see each other differently.

That’s when the walls came down between them and they began working together. The committee successfully adopted a set of school integration proposals that had seemed impossible at the start. Atwater and Ellis became lifelong friends. C.P. also publicly renounced his KKK membership and went on to a life of promoting civil rights and workers’ rights. Atwater spoke at his funeral in 2005. She passed away in 2016.

Reconciliation is almost always preceded by mercy. The question for us: Is there a small moment of grace we can offer in our conflicts? We may not realize what it could mean to turn an enemy into a friend.

(If you want to learn more about Ann Atwater and C.P. Ellis, start with this beautiful NPR segment following Eliss’ death. There’s also a book about the two called Best of Enemies, and a movie by the same name.)

Seeing Good at Work

Restorative Justice is a criminal reform movement that brings victims and perpetrators together to find forgiveness and reconciliation. With enough resources and participation, the process substantially reduces two huge justice problems: high incarceration rates and victim exclusion/dissatisfaction with punishments. Victims typically find the restorative justice process far more satisfying than the criminal justice system.

This story in Slate is a great place to learn more about the movement and its history and challenges. To dig even deeper, I recommend the Restorative Justice Library, an online resource at the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation.

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