Looking Out For the Human Side of Technology

October 28, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Maintaining human priorities in the face of new technologies always feels like “a rearguard action.” You struggle to prevent something bad from happening even when it seems like it may be too late.

The promise of the next tool or system intoxicates us. Smart phones, social networks, gene splicing. It’s the super-computer at our fingertips, the comfort of a boundless circle of friends, the ability to process massive amounts of data quickly or to short-cut labor intensive tasks, the opportunity to correct genetic mutations and cure disease. We’ve already accepted these promises before we pause to consider their costs—so it always feels like we’re catching up and may not have done so in time.

When you’re dazzled by possibility and the sun is in your eyes, who’s thinking “maybe I should build a fence?”

The future that’s been promised by tech giants like Facebook is not “the win-win” that we thought it was. Their primary objectives are to serve their financial interests—those of their founder-owners and other shareholders—by offering efficiency benefits like convenience and low cost to the rest of us. But as we’ve belattedly learned, they’ve taken no responsibility for the harms they’ve also caused along the way, including exploitation of our personal information, the proliferation of fake news and jeopardy to democratic processes, as I argued here last week.

Technologies that are not associated with particular companies also run with their own promise until someone gets around to checking them–a technology like artificial intelligence or AI for example. From an ethical perspective, we are usually playing catch up ball with them too. If there’s a buck to be made or a world to transform, the discipline to ask “but should we?” always seems like getting in the way of progress.

Because our lives and work are increasingly impacted, the stories this week throw additional light on the technology juggernaut that threatens to overwhem us and our “rearguard” attempts to tame it with our human concerns.

To gain a fuller appreciation of the problem regarding Facebook, a two-part Frontline doumentary will be broadcasting this week that is devoted to what one reviewer calls “the amorality” of the company’s relentless focus on adding users and compounding ad revenues while claiming to create the on-line “community” that all of us should want in the future. (The show airs tomorrow, October 29 at 9 p.m. and on Tuesday, October 30 at 10 p.m. EST on PBS.)

Frontline’s reporting covers Russian election interference, Facebook’s role in whipping Myanmar’s Buddhists into a frenzy over its Rohingya minority, Russian interference in past and current election cycles, and how strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte in the Phillipines have been manipulating the site to achieve their political objectives. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s limitations as a leader are explored from a number of directions, but none as compelling as his off-screen impact on the five Facebook executives who were “given” to James Jacoby (the documentary’s director, writer and producer) to answer his questions. For the reviewer:

That they come off like deer in Mr. Jacoby’s headlights is revealing in itself. Their answers are mealy-mouthed at best, and the defensive posture they assume, and their evident fear, indicates a company unable to cope with, or confront, the corruption that has accompanied its absolute power in the social median marketplace.

You can judge for yourself. You can also ponder whether this is like holding a gun manufacturer liable when one of its guns is used to kill somebody. I’ll be watching “The Facebook Dilemma” for what it has to say about a technology whose benefits have obscured its harms in the public mind for longer than it probably should have. But then I remember that Facebook barely existed ten years ago. The most important lesson from these Frontline episodes may be how quickly we need to get the stars out of our eyes after meeting these powerful new technologies if we are to have any hope of avoiding their most significant fallout.

I was also struck this week by Apple CEO Tim Cook’s explosive testimony at a privacy conference organized by the European Union.

Not only was Cook bolstering his own company’s reputation for protecting Apple users’ personal information, he was also taking aim at competitors like Google and Facebook for implementing a far more harmful business plan, namely, selling user information to advertisers, reaping billions in ad dollar revenues in exchange, and claiming the bargain is providing their search engine or social network to users for “free.” This is some of what Cook had to say to European regulators this week:

Our own information—from the everyday to the deeply personal—is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. Today, that trade has exploded into a data-industrial complex.

These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. This is surveillance. And these stockpiles of personal data serve only to enrich the companies that collect them. This should make us very uncomfortable.

Technology is and must always be rooted in the faith people have in it. We also recognize not everyone sees it that way—in a way, the desire to put profits over privacy is nothing new.

“Weaponized” technology delivered with “military efficiency.” “A data-industrial complex.” One of the benefits of competition is that rivals call you out, while directing unwanted attention away from themselves. One of my problems with tech giant Amazon, for example, is that it lacks a neck-to-neck rival to police its business practices, so Cook’s (and Apple’s) motives here have more than a dollop of competitive self-interest where Google and Facebook are concerned. On the other hand, Apple is properly credited with limiting the data it makes available to third parties and rendering the data it does provide anonymous. There is a bit more to the story, however.

If data privacy were as paramount to Apple as it sounded this week, it would be impossible to reconcile Apple’s receiving more than $5 billion a year from Google to make it the default search engine on all Apple devices. However complicit in today’s tech bargains, Apple pushed its rivals pretty hard this week to modify their business models and become less cynical about their use of our personal data as the focus on regulatory oversight moves from Europe to the U.S.

Technologies that aren’t proprietary to a particular company but are instead used across industries require getting over additional hurdles to ensure that they are meeting human needs and avoiding technology-specific harms for users and the rest of us. This week, I was reading up on a positive development regarding artificial intelligence (AI) that only came about because serious concerns were raised about the transparency of AI’s inner workings.

AI’s ability to solve problems (from processing big data sets to automating steps in a manufacturing process or tailoring a social program for a particular market) is only as good as the algorithms it uses. Given concern about personal identity markers such as race, gender and sexual preference, you may already know that an early criticism of artificial intelligence was that an author of an algorithm could be unwittingly building her own biases into it, leading to discriminatory and other anti-social results. As a result, various countermeasures are being undertaken to minimize grounding these kinds of biases in AI code. With that in mind, I read a story this week about another systemic issue with AI processing’s “explainability.”

It’s the so-called “black box” problem. If users of systems that depend on AI don’t know how they work, they won’t trust them. Unfortunately, one of the prime advantages of AI is that it solves problems that are not easily understood by users, which presents the quandary that AI-based systems might need to be “dumbed-down” so that the humans using them can understand and then trust them. Of course, no one is happy with that result.

A recent article in Forbes describes the trust problem that users of machine-learning systems experience (“interacting with something we don’t understand can cause anxiety and make us feel like we’re losing control”) along with some of the experts who have been feeling that anxiety (cancer specialists who agreed with a “Watson for Oncology” system when it confirmed their judgments but thought it was wrong when it failed to do so because they couldn’t understand how it worked).

In a positive development, a U.S. Department of Defense agency called DARPA (or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is grappling with the explainability problem. Says David Gunning, a DARPA program manager:

New machine-learning systems will have the ability to explain their rationale, characterize their strengths and weaknesses, and convey an understanding of how they will behave in the future.

In other words, these systems will get better at explaining themselves to their users, thereby overcoming at least some of the trust issue.

DARPA is investing $2 billion in what it calls “third-wave AI systems…where machines understand the context and environment in which they operate, and over time build underlying explanatory models that allow them to characterize real word phenomena,” according to Gunning. At least with the future of warfare at stake, a problem like “trust” in the human interface appears to have stimulated a solution. At some point, all machine-learning systems will likely be explaining themselves to the humans who are trying to keep up with them.

Moving beyond AI, I’d argue that there is often as much “at stake” as sucessfully waging war when a specific technology is turned into a consumer product that we use in our workplaces and homes.

While there is heightened awareness today about the problems that Facebook poses, few were raising these concerns even a year ago despite their toxic effects. With other consumer-oriented technologies, there are a range of potential harms where little public dissent is being voiced despite serious warnings from within and around the tech industry. For example:

– how much is our time spent on social networks—in particular, how these networks reinforce or discourage certain of our behaviors—literally changing who we are?

– since our kids may be spending more time with their smart phones than with their peers or family members, how is their personal development impacted, and what can we do to put this rabbit even partially back in the hat now that smart phone use seems to be a part of every child’s right of passage into adulthood?

– will privacy and surveillance concerns become more prevalent when we’re even more surrounded than we are now by “the internet of things” and as our cars continue to morph into monitoring devices—or will there be more of an outcry for reasonable safeguards beforehand?

– what are employers learning about us from our use of technology (theirs as well as ours) in the workplace and how are they using this information?

The technologies that we use demand that we understand their harms as well as their benefits. I’d argue our need to become more proactive about voicing our concerns and using the tools at our disposal (including the political process) to insist that company profit and consumer convenience are not the only measures of a technology’s impact.

Since invention of the printing press a half-millennia ago, it’s always been hard but necessary to catch up with technology and to try and tame its excesses as quickly as we can.

This post was adapted from my October 28, 2018 newsletter.

A Fateful Choice in the Seconds After You’re Accused

September 30, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you’re threatened, everything that ends up mattering happens in seconds. You take a defensive, even defiant stance and can’t (or feel that you can’t) step back and retain any credibility. You pick up a gun and, as often as not, end up shooting your innocence and outrage in all directions.

Almost nothing is more threatening to people than to have “how they view themselves” called into question. When I believe I’m generous and am accused of acting selfishly, my self-esteem is challenged. And it’s not just how I see myself. It’s how I’ve presented myself to others too. When determining my response, it’s also about everyone else who’ll be disappointed if I don’t defend how I want them to see me.

That larger group always starts with the people who are closest to me: my spouse, children, parents and friends. If you’re ambitious and need others to vouch for your work, their number expands. Teachers, coaches and priests who can attest to your character for first jobs or college admissions; colleagues who can speak to your honesty; subordinates you’ve mentored and bosses you’ve impressed. If your rise is meteoric enough, your supporters might even include Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and President George W. Bush.

So if you’re Brett Kavanaugh, you won’t just be defending yourself when you’re accused of wrongdoing, you’ll be defending what your legion of supporters think about you too. As a result, the frontline in need of defending is long and you’ll feel that it’s up to you to be “brave enough” to defend every inch of it.

And yet…

The fateful decision on how we’ll respond is often made in seconds, because that’s how the “fight or flight” response works when we’re threatened “to our very core.” At such times, it’s too easy to confuse our instincts for bravery.

You almost never stop to think about what you’ll do next because in that moment it’s incredibly hard to leave the reptilian parts of your brain for the more dispassionate parts, where it’s possible to admit that you’re not as perfect as you’ve convinced yourself and almost everybody else to believe that you are.

We also know that the most fateful decisions should never be made in a rush, particularly when you’ll be insisting that your white coat has never gotten dirty—not even once—in the ways alleged. But of course, that wisdom isn’t enough to overcome a knee-jerk urge to defend your honor. Part of what was so compelling about this week’s confirmation hearing was the defiance and combativeness that taking an irrational position always seems to require.

Some righteous outrage is warranted if you are wrongly accused. Some anger is certainly justified when accusations are distorted into parody. But unequivocal denials require more. Their nature almost demands that outrage at your challengers never waivers.

It can reveal more than we intend to those who are trying to keep an open mind and understand what really happened. What I saw were hours of defiance on Thursday, a reminder of Queen Gertrude’s comment in Hamlet that: “Thou dost protest too much, me thinks.” That is, too much reptile and too little rational judge if there really is nothing to your fall from grace.

In that initial “moment of truth,” when you first hear what you’re accused of, you don’t think of anything other than “protect myself,” “protect the queen,” protect everything that it’s taken me all these years to build. Unfortunately, I’ve had those moments and never thought once that I had an option other than to “go down swinging” if I have to, because everything I hold dear seemed to be at stake.

Somebody needed to tell me that I had an option, so maybe/hopefully I would remember the next time that while there are instincts hell-bent on defense inside of me, there is higher order biology inside me too.

It’s a pathway from instinct to emotion and onto thinking that I need to be reminded about. I can step back from the precipice and say: “I don’t have to start my denials right away, my ego is not so fragile that a searching moment or two is impossible.”

It’s a pause we almost never take, but could always take, if we thought about it beforehand, before someone confronts us again about a time when our pants were down.

Maybe I could respond not selfishly but with generosity towards myself (given the terrible costs of defending my perfection) and towards others (who say they’ve been damaged by far less flattering parts of me).

It’s hard to respond generously when you can’t see the option in the heat of the moment. You have to think about other ways forward long before your instincts take over, and too many of us never do.

This post was adapted from my September 30, 2018 newsletter.

The Truth Between You and Others On Your Career Path

September 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week, it’s impossible to ignore the unfolding story of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The politics aside, there are two threads in this controversy that affect everyone who interacts with other people while trying to build a career.

It has never been truer than it is today that everything you’ve said and done (or not done) will find its way into your work record—particularly when the stakes are high like they are here. That being said, there is no denying that Kavanaugh has amassed a sterling resume as a lawyer, judge, colleague and community stakeholder. The number of people who have come forward to testify to his good character is remarkable; we should all be so lucky to have this many people we have known stand up for us. But after the testimonials were over, Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct in high school.

Her accusations put Kavanaugh between a rock and a hard place. The job of a lifetime is within his grasp. It seemed that he had already proven his fitness for it “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But in this hyper-political context, there seems to be almost no possibility for any kind of resolution of Ford’s charges.

It’s likely that we’ve all faced “moments of truth” like Kavanaugh’s while climbing the career ladder—where whatever you say or do could jeopardize your reaching the next rung. When your sense of personal responsibility and the uncertain path of forgiveness collide with your fear of letting yourself and those who have vouched for you down, how do you respond?

Much of the answer comes from the philosophy we bring with us to work. The ego and ambition that drives a candidate for the Supreme Court is only different in degree from what motivates us to gain the raise, the next promotion or the coveted office perk. Is the deep-down philosophy “whatever is good for me,” while I keep up the appearances of modesty and collaboration? Or is my drive “to realize my best self though my actions” bound up with “my enabling others to realize themselves through their work too?” These are two, very different orientations.

Of course, it’s never just either/or between our selfish and generous impulses.

To put us (along with Kavanaugh) in the most favorable light, what if our drives have been almost entirely generous towards those who have been touched by our work over the course of our careers? Would an 11^thhour charge of behavior that is sharply inconsistent with the reputation you have built stimulate your long-standing generous impulses or the more selfish ones that have been in tension with them all along, particularly if your’re ambitious and competitive by nature? In the heat of that moment, will you define your character by its lesser angels or its better ones?

A lifetime of good work is almost never called into question by facts or accusations but by how you respond to them. This is why our system of justice is based on regular people (the so-called fact finders) determining whether witnesses who have sworn to tell the truth are actually doing so. Whether it’s a global audience watching on TV or the managers and co-workers in your office, regular people can generally “hear the truth,” so it helps to be able “to speak it” when your character is called into question

What follows are some of the factors that I’ve been mulling over as I get ready to sit in the Kavanaugh jury box with everyone else.

Some Similarities and Differences With Judge Kavanaugh

I have a lot in common with Judge Kavanaugh.

We both grew up in similar towns in the urban corridor that stretches between Boston and Washington. In our lifetimes, many of these zip codes became the breeding grounds for an elite that, according to Charles Murray, would see men and women like us intermarry and establish an aristocracy of education, income and status that increasingly divides America socially and economically. In other words, we are both on the fortunate side of that divide. I’d argue that good fortune like this creates noblesse oblige or a special obligation on the part of its beneficiaries to act in a noble manner—not to justify our privilege but to serve others along with ourselves. In other words, we’re duty bound to act beyond our self-interest.

When I was 14 and 17, I know what I was doing on weekends (and often during the week) when I was in high school. Hormones and drinking never made for a pretty picture. No one here seems to be disputing that Kavanaugh did some partying too.

He and I also profited mightily from our Jesuit educations, which for me at least included a weekend bar in every college dorm to alleviate the academic pressures imposed by the right graduate school and career. Maybe it was some kind of Irish-Catholic rite of passage. All I know is that by working hard and playing hard, Kavanaugh and I ended up at similar law schools.

On the other hand (and at least as far as I know today), Kavanaugh and I don’t share anything like what happened next for me in common. The fellow lawyer I met in law school and later married went on to testify a few years later at the first federal trial in the US that was brought by a female lawyer against a major law firm for sex discrimination. I held my baby daughter in the courtroom during her mother’s testimony. The experience couldn’t help but provoke a great deal of thinking on my part about both Fran’s and Emily’s future prospects in what I increasingly came to realize was a man’s world.

The Moral Education We Had (or Didn’t Have) When You Were Young

This week, I heard a public radio segment called “How to Talk to Young People About the Kavanaugh Story.” Of course, kids and teenagers are following it and thinking about how his story relates to them. This radio piece was aimed at giving parents points of entry into a timely and important conversation.

Part of the dialogue that the piece was urging relates to consent in the exchanges that kids have with one another. For example, your 4- or 5-year old grabs a crayon from another kid. The adult in the room (or you, when you find out about it at home) needs to explain to him that he has to ask for the crayon first, and if the other child says “no,” you need to find another way to get your own crayon. It’s the beginning of consent education, flows naturally into discussions about bodily autonomy, and should always predate conversations about sex later on.

Another point of the broadcast was about our need to have this conversation about consent with boys as well as girls, particularly as the sexes become interested in one another. The fear was that we’re not having those conversations with boys as much as we need to. Here is the part of the segment that included comments from Karen Rayne, a sex educator:

When talking about sexual assault and consent, we often focus on victims, and primarily on girls. But, ‘it’s the people who are doing the sexual assaulting that need a different kind of education and a different kind of support starting from a very young age,’ says Rayne. ‘About things like [what to do] when they’re attracted to someone or interested in someone and that person rejects them. With the right education a young man might be able to say, Oh, you know what? I’ve been drinking too much and I feel like my capacity to make wise decisions is failing me. Or, Hey, you know, when someone’s trying to push me off of them, that’s something that I should take as a cue to get off.’

In 2018, it’s a conversation that many boys are still not having with their parents or anyone else.

Finally, older boys as well as girls are following the Kavanaugh story for suggestions of a double standard. By the end of these Congressional hearings, these kids are likely to learn something about whether adults in power take claims like Ford’s seriously, and whether alerting those in authority about bad conduct results in harsher consequences for those who speak up than for those they are complaining about.

It bears reminding that our kids are part of the public who will be listening for the truth in Kavanaugh’s and Ford’s testimony.

Listening For the Truth in Unanswered Questions

Kavanaugh has already stated “under oath” that Ford’s claims are “categorically and unequivocally false.” On the other hand, it seems likely that Ford will testify that when she was 15, a drunken Kavanaugh held her down on a bed, tried to engage in sexual activity with her, covered her mouth when she protested, feared for her life, and that she only escaped when one of Kavanaugh’s friends who was also present fell on top of them, interrupting his advances.

“The truth” of these accounts will emerge from a couple of directions as questions we have today begin to get answers. The first direction concerns the motivations behind Ford’s assertions and Kavanaugh’s denial.

We already know what Ford has lost (or stands to lose) by coming forward: her privacy, having to relive the incident she alleges, having to relocate her family to maintain their privacy, a disruption of her worklife, hounding by the press, name-calling and condemnation by strangers, harm to her reputation, risks to her safety and her family member’s safety, the longer term consequences for her children and husband, to say nothing of the expense of lawyers, security guards and therapy for months if not years to come. What we have not heard is why she is willing to pay such a steep price for coming forward. This is the as-yet unspoken part of her truth, and if her motives seem political or delusional, most of us who still have open minds will likely be able to tell.

Part of what motivates Kavanaugh’s response to Ford’s charges is substantive (the prize is close and, until now, seemed well-deserved) and part of it is tactical (a flat out denial has a better chance of getting him over the finish line than a more equivocal one). On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder whether just such an equivocal response might have served him better—something like:

I went to several parties in high school and I don’t remember encountering you [Ford] at any of them. If I did and you were injured by something that I did or said, I also don’t recall your complaining about it to anyone at the time or contacting me afterwards to demand an apology. If you had, I would have done everything in my power to make it right at the time and I am still prepared to do so.

A statement like this concedes the possibility that Ford’s alleged injury happened but that Kavanaugh had had too much to drink to remember it. It also offers to address her pain if he can. It’s not about his prospects on confirmation but about her alleged injuries at his hands and a willingness to make amends.

Of course, that’s not how Kavanaugh responded. Where we are today, either he or Ford is lying–and because she is paying more for her accusation than he has paid for his denial, Ford has the presumption of our belief. Moreover, Kavanaugh’s denial to a jury that’s entirely comprised of current and former teenagers will likely leave everyone who still has an open mind with the suspicion that a liar is about to be confirmed to the highest court in the land.

It didn’t have to play out this way.

A Generous Instead of Selfish Response

Suggesting that this Supreme Court nominee might have been better off with a statement like the one above seems like a lawyerly solution to a sticky problem, and to some extent it is. Every trial lawyer begins with what everybody else (i.e. his or her potential jurors) already knows, which is what most teenage boys in high school are like, and to build your defense from there. How can Kavanaugh be “unequivocally and categorically sure” that what Ford alleges didn’t happen in the fog of high school partying?

But if Kavanaugh really has no recollection about what allegedly transpired 35 years ago, there is another, far better reason for an equivocal explanation here.

It’s the possibility that regular people in the court of public opinion (and maybe in the Senate too) could acknowledge your imperfection, forgive a drunken transgression that may have happened before you reached adulthood, and be grateful to have a flawed but human Supreme Court nominee. Under these circumstances, Kavanaugh’s response would have “spoken to” his character instead of merely defending his “perfect record.”

If Kavanaugh had responded in this manner, the shame today is that many would still have politicized it, and many others would never have forgiven him. But far more importantly, at some point in this process Ford might have if she felt his remorse, and others of us who are watching would have been glad for his admission that he might have hurt her. Sadly, he didn’t say that and it’s almost impossible to see how any of us will get to healing from where we are today.

“I don’t remember” opens up possibilities for understanding and forgiveness that “It couldn’t have happened” does not. At the workplace, in the ambition of our careers, in fact in all of our dealings with one another, I’d argue that acknowledging our shortcomings and offering to make things right (at least as best we can) imagines understanding, even forgiveness, and a better way for everyone involved to move on.

Unfortunately, in the selfish rush to protect ourselves and get what we want, it’s easy to miss the opportunity to be generous to an accuser– to have enough confidence, accomplishment and good fortune to also admit that we’re flawed, and maybe in our honesty and regret, still end up with the job.

+ + +

Over the years, several people who have come forward at great personal cost to speak their particular truths to power have been profiled here. These are links to posts about a Yale ethics professor and nun who confronted the Catholic Church over a book she wrote about love, internal whistleblowers in the American security establishment who challenged government surveillance programs, and Edward Snowden. There have also been stories here about admirable public figures who were trying to talk their way past their accusers at the time, including Lance Armstrong Post 1 and Post 2, before he confessed his sins to Oprah Winfrey, and Eric Greitens, who went on to resign as Missouri’s governor last May. Their stories are all similar to Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s.

I believe that the only way to nurture moral leaders and citizens is to talk about these controversies, learn from their successes and failures, and ultimately, to acknowledge that an accused’s response—whether made by a public figure, an institution like the Church or a government—always provides the opportunity for a better future when it’s motivated by generosity instead of selfishness.

This post was adapted from my September 23, 2018 Newsletter.

Your Jobs Feed One Another

September 16, 2018 By David Griesing 2 Comments

(photo by Mindy Schauer at the Orange County Register)

The toolbox we rely upon to make a living often enables the other work commitments that we take on. At the same time, these second and third jobs can reward and sustain us in ways that our first job never could.

You’ve already demonstrated a skill (or constellation of skills) for a paycheck. You’ve experienced pride in what you’ve produced and others have responded, perhaps better than you expected, to your contributions. You’ve actually gotten good at something and wondered: What if I take my game to a different field, or to a different sport entirely, and find out whether I can make a difference there too? It just might open up a brave new world.

If your co-workers or clients were asked today, what would they say makes you shine? Your speaking, organizing and responsiveness, your pitching in, rabble-rousing and getting to the bottom of things, your caring, crisis managing and advocating–or maybe it’s your way of combining all of them. They might even say that your peak performance makes room for them too, a place where they can gain their own spotlight, sense of accomplishment and gratitude when you’re working together.

Even as a kid, these talents have helped you succeed. So what if you brought them to a new challenge, with risks and opportunities that are at once similar and different from the ones you’re confronting today? It’s the small voice that asks whether “there’s even more to me than I’ve demonstrated already” and considers finding out. It’s your irritation or even anger at seeing others getting it wrong when you have the suspicion or audacity to think that you’d get it right. What energy and renewed sense of purpose might you find along the way?

When you’ve already been on both sides of this conversation, you know that some of the best stories come from what happens next.

It’s Having Enough Confidence to Act On Your Frustration

Jose Andres is a James Beard Award-winning chef and the owner of several highly successful restaurants. Andres grew up in Spain, near Valencia, and came to the U.S. after serving as a cook in the Spanish Navy. Among many other things, he is credited with bringing small plate tapas eating to America.

Andres’ father was always cooking for his family and often for their entire community. As a boy, Andres wanted to be more involved in the food preparation but his father always put him in charge of the fire. As he recounted in a Fresh Air interview this week: one day during meal preparation

I got very upset, and he sent me away. They finished the meal. But he came, and he pulled me aside, and he told me, my son, I know you wanted to do the cooking. But I had nobody else to do the fire, and actually the fire is the most important thing.

For Andres, it not only stoked his desire to cook but also taught him about the many essential jobs that add up to a wonderful meal. More than food preparation needs to come together to make the best out of what you have. As he grew up, taking on more of these jobs along with eating with his extended family or neighbors became the most (as he says) “natural” part of him, and Andres came to see places for eating “as the pumping hearts” that sustain communities.

In Washington D.C., where he opened his first restaurant and in subsequent ventures, Andres brought his most valuable skills with him, in particular, his ability to produce conistently wonderful meals despite each kitchen’s complex and ever-changing environment. In other words, he’d mastered the art of improvisation.

As chefs, restaurant people – we manage chaos very well… And what we are very good at is understanding the problem and adapting. And so a problem becomes an opportunity… We’re practical. We’re efficient. We can do it quicker, faster and better than anybody.

Why? Because every night there are people with very high hopes sitting in his dining rooms and waiting to be fed.

With energy and personality, Andres got very good at making the chaos work. But he was also drawn to hungry people in D.C and elsewhere who couldn’t afford his restaurants. Among others, he sought out Robert Eggers for advice. When Eggers opened the D.C. Central Kitchen in 1989, it was the country’s first “community kitchen” where food donated by hospitality businesses and farms became the basis for a culinary arts job-training program. It was also reminiscent of when Andres helped his family cook for their entire community back in Spain.

In his interview, Andres talks about how much he regretted not being one of the volunteers who joined the New Orleans relief effort after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and how horrified he was about FEMA’s bungling. Among other things, he saw the Superdome as a giant feeding station for fans that should have been adapted for the thousands of displaced and hungry people who had huddled there. Five years later, Andres was ready to volunteer when an earthquake devastated Haiti. That was the day when he took on his second job.

I think the turning point for me was in Haiti when I arrived to Port-au-Prince a few weeks after the earthquake. And I began cooking there in different refugee camps. And I created World Central Kitchen…

[W]hat happens is that once you are on the field somewhere, and you know the landscape, and you know how a city or an island works, when a tragedy like this happens, you become very good at solving the problems.

He brought his skill at making chaos work to a devastated community, and he never looked back.

The Largest Restaurant in the World

When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico a year ago, Andres arrived the same day as the first government officials. As summarized in the Washington Post, Andres, along with the volunteers he brought with him and the locals he enlisted on the ground, jumped into the maelstrom and went to work.

Andrés and the thousands of volunteers who composed Chefs for Puerto Rico remained for months, preparing and delivering more than 3 million meals to every part of the island. They didn’t wait for permission from FEMA. They didn’t even wait for FEMA funding (though funding eventually came from the agency). They just started activating restaurants, churches, food trucks and, eventually, the Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan. They quickly scaled up their production of sandwiches, paellas, stews and, really, anything that would provide more comfort than the field rations known as Meals Ready to Eat, or MREs, the food often passed out after disasters.

As Andres explains in “We Fed An Island,” which was published this week: “I like to say that a hot meal is more than just food, It’s a plate of hope [while] an MRE is almost hopeless.” He provided additional observations about his months in Puerto Rico in his Fresh Air interview on Monday.

Andres’ “first relief kitchen” on the island was secured through a chef friend of his in San Juan. Shortly thereafter he began to serve doctors and nurses in the hospitals because no one else was feeding them and they were working around the clock. Of course, it was impossible to escape the realization that the entire island was hungry. As he explained in his own brand of English:

It was plenty of food in Puerto Rico. The private sector makes sure of that. What we had to do is organize a logical system to start activating kitchens that will have generators, that will have refrigeration, that will have gas, that will have people to work, preparing those foods. So we had to adapt.

For example, sandwiches are important because you can make them quick. You can make many. You can use all the volunteers that want to help their fellow citizens. So what do we do? We bring bread from the mainland in a moment that the airport is in chaos, and the ports are collapsed? Or do we identify the bread factories who are amazing, and you help them with diesel and fuel to go back up? That’s what we did. We partnered with local bakeries to make sure that those bakeries will be functioning sooner rather than later. We began getting bread. We began getting every single ham and cheese we could get our hands on – mayo. We began making sandwiches day one.

So what else we had? We had rice, yes. We had chicken, yes. Let’s start making rice and chicken. This is something Puerto Ricans love. It’s easy to transport, gets hot very quickly. You can transport for an hour, and the food is going to arrive hot. This is the kinds of things chefs do. We adapt. So in Puerto Rico, we began getting our hands in anything we could get. And we began cooking.

After Maria, his people prepared more meals for Puerto Rico than the Red Cross. At one point, he had 18 kitchens functioning at the same time producing 150,000 meals a day. In the early fall of 2017, he was running the largest restaurant in the world.

The book cover for “We Fed An Island” shows Andres holding a huge spatula and looking like he’s cooking. During his interview, he admitted that he didn’t do much cooking in Puerto Rico because his ability to manage the ever-changing demands was far more critical, “So, yes, my team probably is joking on these photos, saying, OK, the only time you would really cook [is when your picture is being taken].” Instead, his abilities enabled others to lead once he had gathered the raw materials and secured the facilities where they could do so. (“I became the leader, “ he said. “But actually, we had 25,000 leaders.”) As he later wrote:

What we did was embrace complexity every single second. Not planning, not meeting, just improvising. The old school wants you to plan, but we needed to feed the people.

That observation highlights Andres’ mission for World Central Kitchen going forward: to fill a gapping hole in the emergency relief efforts that he witnessed first hand in Haiti and Puerto Rico. Top-down, paramilitary style disaster initiatives are plainly ineffective. What’s needed instead are organizations in specialized areas like providing food, medicine or shelter that “embrace the chaos” that is inherent to crisis, including enabling those who are most affected to use whatever’s available, including idle restaurants, schools and stadiums. He wants World Central Kitchen to be, as he calls it, “a first food responder” in future disasters. As for him personally, there is no question that the most satisfying times to lead are “in the moments of darkness.”

Andres’ personality bubbles out of him, as do his stories and observations, which partly explains his need for an additional job; his first one wasn’t big enough to contain him. But there was another reason too. A need in him to feed his entire community simply couldn’t be met by serving up five-star fare.

This link to the Washington Post story includes a 9-minute video of Andres discussing his months in Puerto Rico and how “even thinking about” running for political office can heighten the sense of responsibility you feel for the welfare of your fellow citizens. It’s funny, visceral and subversive. His Fresh Air interview is a gem too, including how his reinvention of the famous Phllly cheesesteak will change your life forever.

Food Is As Local As It Gets

There’s an Episcopal church less than a mile from me that, through changing demographics, now finds itself in a struggling neighborhood. It’s called St. James the Less, and today most of its notoriety comes from its school, which goes through the middle school grades and is free to boys and girls in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park community.

One of th City’s highest-end food purveyors, Di Bruno Brothers, recently celebrated its 75^thyear in operation with a founding gift of $75,000 to launch what’s called the Neighborhood Kitchen at the St James School. With the Kitchen at the School, students gain “a sense of food security because their lunch is right there behind them.” They learn to set the tables, multi-tasking during set up and clean up, and how to have an interesting conversation while eating family style. As the kids describe in a clip about the initiative, lunch is their “favorite time of day.” I enjoyed some of the food (including jerk chicken and rice) recently and understand why everyone over there looks forward to lunchtime every day.

In addition to the Kitchen experience, the students also have an educational one, care of one of the City’s leading chefs and restaurant owners, Marc Vetri. Through what he calls the Eatiquette Community Partnership, he provides St. James and other City schools with a program of “hands-on nutrition education” that emphasizes “the use of whole foods and whole ingredients” including fruit and vegetables, and how to serve them in delicious ways.

The St James School has 10 to 11 hours of programming each weekday and two Saturdays a month. Its school year extends through the end of July. Some of the 63 students live at the School. Given its small size and high level of backing by funders and the Church’s congregation, it has become a refuge for those who are fortunate enough to attend and an oasis in a mostly troubled education system. (Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate among the country’s ten largest cities.) But like Jose Andres, its backers have stepped into a disaster in their community and have been improvising solutions that are making a difference now, with the hope that they can be replicated later in all of the other neighborhoods that need them.

Like Andres, those with second jobs at the St. James School have paying jobs too. The Di Bruno Brothers and Marc Vetri are using their food and restaurant skills to improvise solutions related to health and nutrition that were lacking until they came along. In the process they’re not just serving their well-healed customers but also an under-served part of their entire community.

They are doing jobs that enrich one another. They are seizing work-related opportunities that exist almost everywhere.

Have you applied, re-purposed or even reinvigorated your skills in a second job? If so, it would be great to hear more about it.

This post was adapted from my September 16, 2018 Newsletter.

Acting On Common Values Makes Change Possible

September 9, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We don’t act on our values at work because we feel hopeless, that the odds are staked against us, that nothing we can do will matter. But are we right about that?

Resignation affects our paying jobs—how we retreat from our priorities in our workplaces—as well as the jobs we do in our communities (say, to support a local institution) or at home (as a caregiver). Since everyone else is only concerned about himself or herself, then maybe that’s all I should be worried about too. Am I right that my occasional impulses to be more open and generous are pipedreams that can never be realized?

A survey taken by the Common Cause organization in the UK in 2016 challenges both what we think about other peoples’ selfishness (as opposed to ther generosity) and the sense of resignation that quickly follows in us. The accompanying report also discusses how we decide on what we value more and value less. It’s not just the convictions that we’re born with. Our priorities are also influenced by what we think other people and the social institutions that we identify with value. It works in the other direction too, with our values and how we demonstrate them influencing these others too. Our values take form and get applied because of a complex back-and-forth.

Think of it as a three-way conversation. But you need to participate in that conversation to have an influence, and Common Cause discovered that your influence is probably far greater than you think it is.

Common Cause UK initiated the survey because, as an organization, it was concerned about the lack of public support for social and environmental changes it was seeking. Its leaders understood that values drive change and wanted a better understanding than it had already about citizen priorities. Those conducting the survey were surprised enough by the amount of common ground they discovered that they went on to propose ways that individuals and organizations (including businesses, non-profits and governments) can begin to overcome the current gridlock.

Here is a link to the survey report (“the Survey”), which I think you’ll find as interesting as I did.

This is the question I brought to it: Is where you “make a living,” try to make a difference in your community and create a better life at home primarily about your “selfish values” or is your work really driven by far more generous impulses? What the Survey shows–in a one-two punch–is how acting on the so-callled “compassionate values” that play a lead role for most of us is likely to be far more consequential than you know.

We Have More Common Ground Than We Think

The Survey defines “selfish values” as wealth, social recognition, social status, prestige, control over others, authority, conformity, preserving public image, popularity, influencing others and ambition. It defines “compassionate” values as broadmindedness, a world of beauty or at peace, equality, protecting the environment, social justice, helpfulness, forgiveness, honesty and responsibility.

The Survey found that nearly 75% of participants placed greater importance on compassionate values–with Survey protocols correcting for the bias that participants were seeking to cast themselves in a better light by downplaying the importance they attach to selfish values. Even more striking was the Survey’s finding that 77% of participants believed that other people were primarily driven by selfish values. The truth is that a large majority of people (three-quarters of the population) believe that their generous motivations are more important and drive them far more often than their selfish ones.

Because people always influence one another when it comes to values, and the priorities of social institutions are shaped in a similar conversation, the Survey’s authors make several recommendations to activate our generous commitments, including these.

Since people are discouraged from declaring their priorities when they believe that most other people disagree with them, accurate information—like that provided here—will not only counter pessimism but also fuel optimism. When it comes to your values, what other people value matter almost as much as what you value “in your heart of hearts”. But it goes beyond your optimism or pessimism. In the course of our work, we can probe other people’s motivations (instead of assuming them) to strengthen our social connections, while also finding enough courage in “the strength of our numbers” to act more generously.

The consequence for you and for others is similar to when you voice your dissent in a group, a back-and-forth exchange that was discussed here a couple of months ago. When you speak from your convictions and are clear about the changes you seek, it enables others to clarify their commitments, even when they’re different from yours, and for the group to move forward. Acting on your commitments also conveys your beliefs about how social institutions (from community groups to the federal government) should operate.

The entire time that our values are at stake, we’re watching and subtly influencing one another, so it’s important to read the social landscape around us correctly. The Survey’s writers ask:

How is a person’s perception of others’ values shaped? A person’s perceptions will be influenced by both what fellow citizens say is important to them and what he or she infers about fellow citizens from the way that they behave.

For this reason, it is very significant if people don’t always bear testimony to the values that they hold to be most important – either in what they say, or what they do…[P]eople often speak and act as though they attach particular importance to values that are actually relatively unimportant to them.

In other words, co-workers, neighbors and even family members may only seem to be acting selfishly. To discover their generous impulses, you may need to watch them more closely or simply ask what drives them in the work that they do.

Your actions and others’s actions speak louder than words to social institutions too. An institution like the US Supreme Court is always “noticing” how the American people are expressing themselves as decision-makers, voters and consumers. Because the men and women who guide these institutions are influenced by the public’s values, our acting generously impacts institutional commitments as well.

Our Commonality Goes Deeper Than Our Political Divides

In America today, it may seem like politics mirrors the debate between generous and selfish values, but it doesn’t.

While Common Cause’s objectives in conducting the Survey were to advance liberal-sounding social and environmental objectives, this Survey isn’t about the liberal versus conservative divide in either the UK or in America, even though one of the Survey’s compassionate values (“social justice”) may have political connotations here that it lacks in Britain. The polarity that the Survey identifies between compassionate and selfish values is different than the struggle between political left and political right.

The Survey’s results plumb something that goes deeper than the “political values” in those debates. That’s because “political values” both here and across the Atlantic are little more than buzzwords aimed at mobilizing one’s political base: red flags like “global warming,” “taxes,” “abortion” and “diversity” that have a high emotional charge but little if any ethical content on the political surface. When you plumb beneath the surface however, most conservatives as well as most liberals are committed to the health of the planet, to paying for our social institutions, to the quality of every person’s life, and to the inherent worth of people who are different from them. Three quarters of us!

Why not start with the values that unite us rather than the buzzwords that divide us?

Consistent with the Survey’s findings about compassionate and selfish values, most peoples’ convictions extend far deeper than will ever be apparent during bouts of political gamesmanship. Moreover, those on their “political sides” are often voting, marching and lobbying for the lesser of two evils (as in the last American election), which further obscures their true convictions. Even when the ethical imperatives that drive a block of voters are reasonably well-known, too little time and effort has gone into identifying the common ground that could unite them with those “on the other side” and break the current gridlock.

In this regard, the Survey provides a glimpse into the majority’s convictions when asked about two key values that are prime motivators for tackling our problems today. A broad-based preference for generous over selfish values provides at least some of the foundation for a collective way forward—and all of us would be seizing an opportunity by taking it. Given the Survey’s findings, the influence that your actions will have on others and on our institutions will likely be considerable and certainly more than you currently think if you’re as misguided as the Survey participants about the selfishness driving others.

Rebecca Solnit whose “Hope in the Dark” was a topic here last week provides a surprising postscript to this argument in her book. Above all, Solnit values grassroots solutions to problems over ideology-driven policies imposed from above. It’s a propensity that has made her flexible when it comes to finding common ground for her activism. In other words, she’s had to go deeper. As Solnit observes:

I’ve often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges of right and left. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalistic, gun-happy and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might have been too weird to be our allies, but they were just the frothy foam on a big wave of alienation, suspicion and fear from people watching their livelihoods and their communities go down the tubes. What could have happened if we could have spoken directly to the people in that wave, if we could have found common ground, if we could have made our position neither right nor left but truly grassroots? What would have happened if we had given them an alternate version of how local power was being sapped, by whom, and what they might do about it? We need them, we need a broad base, we need a style that speaks to far more people than the left has lately been able to speak to and for.

The value that could have driven this unity was the protection of livelihoods and communities (a compassionate value) rather than sacrificing them on the altar of globalism and trade (an ultimately selfish one).

Solnit’s desire for environmentalists and ranchers in the American West to make common cause is similarly astute. Again, she attacks top-down ideological convictions that will never succeed because they always seem to miss the human costs at ground level.

Environmentalists had worked with a purist paradigm of untouched versus ravaged nature. Working with ranchers opened up a middle way [for her], one in which categories were porous, humans have a place in the landscape—in working landscapes and not just white-collar vacation landscapes—and activism isn’t necessarily oppositional.

This time, the common ground that Solnit saw was how environmentalists and ranchers both love and depend on the land, how each cherish different things about it, and how neither wants to harm it (another compassionate value) while the other side’s interest in the land is largely motivated by how much can be taken from it (a selfish one).

One day, the generous values we hold in common will help us to solve the problems that confront us. I’d argue that we should start acting on our generosity today.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 9, 2018 newsletter

A Fateful Choice in the Seconds After You’re Accused

The Truth Between You and Others On Your Career Path

Your Jobs Feed One Another

Acting On Common Values Makes Change Possible

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