Storytelling Our Way to a Nobler Time

February 3, 2026 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Listening to myself tell you about something that happened in 5th Grade makes me feel like it was a hundred years ago, almost lost in the mists of time.

Either the weather was bad or there was some other reason that we couldn’t go outside for recess so our teacher—Sister Dennis I think her name was—needing some way to redirect our 10- or 11-year-old restlessness, asked if we’d like to hear her read us a story.

To call our muffled response a “Yes” that day would have been generous, but that’s what she chose to hear, having no better idea about “what to do with the lot of us” under the circumstances.

The book she’d selected was “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis. and this is how it begins:

ONCE there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.

That was really all it took to settle us down & put us on our way to finding out more about this refuge from the Blitz, the furtive games of hide & seek that took place there, and how one such game found Lucy (the youngest of the 4) hiding in a wardrobe that became a portal to a another world as she pushed her way inside and started feeling snow & ever-green branches instead of simply coats and sweaters.

Us 5th Graders ended up having the whole book read to us during that season of grade school because every time we couldn’t go outside (and even some times when we could) we called out for it in something like a chorus, not being able to wait any longer to hear what happened next as those children met the White Witch, a fearsome Lion and a taking faun named Mr. Tumnus.

I mention all this because a new book came out recently about C.S. Lewis, his friend and Oxford University colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, and how both came to pen sagas about marvelous worlds that were more hopeful & noble & loyal than the worlds that had collided around them during World War II. This book is called “The War for Middle Earth,” and it begins with the fantasy world that Lewis called Narnia, a place “with endless winter and no spring,” and with an equally menacing one that Tolkien conjured out of hobbits, dwarves, humans & elves and their struggles to defeat the malevolent forces that had gathered around the Lord Of the Rings.

In “The War for Middle Earth,”author Joseph Locate’s main point is that both Lewis & Tolkien wanted to bring a broken world stories that were powerful enough to re-animate human virtues like wisdom & friendship, courage & self-sacrifice we seemed at risk of losing in our modern battles of Good versus Evil.

Both Lewis and Tolkien had fought in the Great War (1914-1918) and the experience had (in the words of one reviewer) “endowed them with a tragic sensibility and a perception of true heroism” instead of the “twin drugs of ideology and nihilism” that too many of their fellows had turned to in order to manage the pain of that barbaric conflict. Concerned that the second great war also saw too little virtue and “faith in human dignity,” Lewis came to write his Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) and Tolkien his Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55). As this reviewer continued:

Much of Mr. Loconte’s history concerns Lewis’s and Tolkien’s efforts as scholars. Their positions in Oxford’s English department gave them authority to promote classic literature as a solution to modern discontent. Tolkien, a scholar of Old English, studied the ‘theory of courage’ found in poems such as the ancient epic ‘Beowulf,’ redeeming what he called the ‘noble northern spirit’ from the fascists who would pervert it. Lewis, meanwhile, sought to recover the ideas of love that animated medieval and Renaissance literature. Both authors admired the way that the medievals combined pagan virtues with Christian theology to sustain a culture that was simultaneously vital and humane.

Lewis & Tolkien believed that the West’s literary tradition provided the moral grounding that can enable individuals “in the face of death” to forsake their own safety in the struggle to save others from subjugation. In Loconte’s view, both hoped their imaginative stories would help to counter “many in the West” who had come to doubt and even resent our civilization’s ideals in their cynicism and retreat from what would have once been seen as necessary commitments. Arsenals like fellowship and a wider respect for human dignity would be necessary to counter new despots as they sought to spread their particular brands of tyranny.

In other words: What is still worth fighting for after all the darkness and horror they had seen?

What virtues will humanity need for its next battles?

_{“Evil has reigned for100 years.” What will we need to replace it?}

_{Legions of orcs are one face of Evil in the battle for Middle Earth.}

A couple of hundred posts ago, I wrote here about an exhibit at Oxford’s Bodieian Library of watercolors that Tolkien had painted before writing either “The Hobbit” or “The Lord of the Rings” so he could envision the world that his heroes would be fighting for. In that same newsletter, I quoted from a local philosophy professor who lamented the near-impossibility of imagining such an ideal world today—our “utopia of desire”—and what it would feel like to be returning there after the additional shocks the human race has experienced in the 80 years since Lewis & Tolkien had offered us their ways back home.

He despairingly told us:

The utopias of desire make little sense in a world overrun by cheap entertainment, unbridled consumerism and narcissistic behaviors The utopias of technology are less impressive that ever now that—after Hiroshima and Chernobyl—we are fully aware of the destructive potential of technology. Even the internet, perhaps the most recent candidate for technological optimism, turns out to have a number of potentially disastrous consequences, among them a widespread disregard for truth and objectivity, as well as an immense increase in the capacity for surveillance. The utopias of justice seem largely to have been eviscerated by 20th-century totalitarianism. After the Gulag Archipelago, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the Cultural Revolution, these utopias seem both philosophically and politically dead.

That catalog of smashed ideals was compiled almost 8 years ago, before a global pandemic, growing political divisions, media’s assault on our attention spans, and the rise of artificial intelligence had defeated even more of our hopes.

So it’s fair to ask: how much more do we need collective stories—ones that affirm the best in humanity, show us how to have courage & conviction—in our current battles against nihilism & tyranny?

Such a story might begin with our visualizing what we cherish most about our lives. For Lewis & Tolkien, it was the communal life of the countryside and the heroism that everyday people could muster in challenging times. For both, it was also courageous action emboldened by faith.

In their respective writings, their challenge was to combine these elements into more compelling narratives than the fascists or communists had been telling. To that end, Lewis & Tolkien took what was best in the Western literary tradition and wove it into characters & plot lines that effectively “critiqued and opposed the point-blank threat of what was worst in our tradition,” as another reviewer has noted. These sagas “made qualities like courage and fortitude deeply attractive to an otherwise skeptical generation.”

Said Lewis himself: “When we have finished [these narratives], we return to our own life not relaxed, but fortified.”

_{The early-teen protagonists in the streaming saga “Stranger Things,” arrayed against the forces of Evil that treaten their hometown}.

By now you’ve probably gathered that I wish every unexceptional inhabitant of this troubled planet could have the benefit of new stories & sagas that could bolster the fortitude and courage they’ll need in their current struggles against cynicism, despair and resignation.

How long has it been since a story you’ve read or watched actually left you emboldened or (as C.S.Lewis put it:) “fortified” instead of merely entertained?

Late last fall, I joined the daughter of close friends who was visiting from graduate school, we got to talking about stories we’d recently enjoyed, and she strongly recommended that I watch Season 3 of “Stranger Things,” an 80’s-inspired, sci-fi/horror-saga with large doses of comic relief about a close-knit group of small-town kids who play games like Dungeons & Dragons far from the in-crowd of their middle school before mustering their talents to confront the ultimate Evil.

The recommendation came with certain demands, like watching the first 2 seasons of the show to get to know the characters and their fight against the horrors of the mirror world that exists beneath them as well as a federal government that aims to harness its potent powers. Well I took her advice, made it through the Season,1, marveled at the uptick of Season 2, and was (as promised) amply rewarded by the remarkable confrontations of Season 3.

The story profiles young heroes in impossible situations while their adolescent hormones intrude & shows their self-sacrifice and courage in genuinely terrifying circumstances, all while celebrating (in technicolor) the aspects of their town (the mall & community pool, annual fair & middle-school dance) that they love the most and rally to protect.

The Duffer Brothers behind “Stranger Things” are not C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but what they built in this multi-dimensional & deeply human saga about a more “contemporary” battle between Good & Evil is noteworthy, and their success as storytellers in the storytelling marketplace even more so.

The entire 5 season franchise has gotten more than 1.2 billion views. It has become a global cultural phenomenon for younger generations that have lived much of their lives during the Great Recession, a global pandemic, through the downsides of cellphones and social media & amidst their ever growing fears about the future. If the show’s fans were looking for heroes who embodied loyalty & bravery against impossible odds they would have found them in Season 3—several of them in fact.

So if “Stranger Things” demonstrates anything, it is the ravenous hunger that young viewers have for stories that might help them cope with the daunting array of challenges they’re facing on a daily basis.

And while the show will likely be less fortifying for anyone over 30, I found Season 3 to be a sometimes unnerving, sometimes hilarious & often heart-rending thrill ride through some of my best memories of the 1980’s, all delivered with the soundtrack, hair, clothes, cars & destinations that made it a slice of America that actually may be worth fighting & dying for.

“Stranger Things” is not quite the successor to the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, but it demonstrates our burning desire for a story that can help us prevail in what is far too often a horrifying & dismaying world,

This post was adapted from my February 1, 2026 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Your Values Should Feel At Home In Your Workplace

August 19, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Values grounded in religion are moving into the workplace.

What might have been commonplace a hundred years ago for a church-going public became increasingly uncommon over the past 50 years as fewer people identified as believers and the Supreme Court circumscribed the role that religion had once played in public life. Among other things, that meant that most workplaces became religion-free.

At the same time, the American worker was introduced to so-called “corporate values.” As religious values had before them, the hope was that corporate values would provide commitments that the entire workforce could rally around to realize the company’s objectives. In my experience, corporate values have largely failed to either unite or motivate most employees—which is one reason why companies are reaching for deeper, and more explicitly religious hooks to drive that kind of unity and engagement today.

Another reason is the increasing alignment of “political values” with “religious values.” You’ll recall that discussion here a few weeks back, and it didn’t take long to discover how this development was manifesting itself at a local company.

The underlying business insight—that corporate values have proven shallow and largely meaningless—can’t be denied, but dressing work-oriented values in religious garb seems misguided for any company that ties its success to a workforce with diverse talents and experience. Since every company should be aiming for this kind of workforce diversity, employers should be creating work environments where the value priorities that its employees bring to work as opposed to the business owner’s religious values can be advanced.

Before elaborating, some context about the larger forces that are at play here might be helpful.

An Historical Perspective

Cyclical developments that play out over extended time periods can often help to explain what’s happening now.

Last week’s newsletter was about how change agents at work can take hope as well as practical advice from prior historical events when turbulence (like economic recession) permitted the reappraisal or outright rejection of basic assumptions in the workplace. Organized religion also tends to react to moral decline in predictable ways when viewed from history’s perspective. During times when the public seems to have abandoned its moral foundations, religious forces have always seemed to rise up to re-establish them in the workplace and elsewhere.

For the past 400 years, America has witnessed periodic social movements that were aimed at bringing those who had strayed into “sinfulness” back towards “godliness,” or at least “more upstanding” ways of living and working. Moral decline followed by moral revival is part of who we are.

Some of these movements—like the First (1720-60) and Second (1800-1850) Great Awakenings—spanned decades and altered the public’s perceptions of “right and wrong” before the American Revolution and Civil War. More recently, Evangelical Christianity and its political acitvism have been fighting to restore our moral foundations today. In other words, from an historical perspective it’s almost inevitable that concerns about our moral fitness would eventually find their way back into the workplace.

Religious Values Where We Work

The local news article this week was called “Putting Faith at the Forefront: Burlco’s Productive Plastics Brings Corporate Ministry to Work.” Burlco is Burlington County, New Jersey and Productive Plastics is the company’s name.

Just inside the entrance to the workroom at Productive Plastics Inc., which molds plastic into parts for manufacturing companies, is a place to post prayers.

A sign above the section reads, “Welcome to Our Prayer Wall,” in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, and a notepad and pen hang at the bottom of the space. Tucked into the wall are folded pieces of paper, each left by an employee and containing prayers offered up anonymously.

The company’s goal is an audacious one: To encourage all members of Productive Plastics to pray together for each other.

The prayer wall was discussed at Productive Plastic’s monthly “Caring Team” meeting earlier this month when managers, employees and two “corporate ministers” gathered to share ideas about employee well-being and “ways in which the company can better reflect its core values.

The company is privately held. It’s also “an openly Christian business,” so new employees know its owner’s commitments before signing on to work there. John Zerillo, Productive Plastics vice president of sales describes the company’s focus on its workers as follows: “We’re not there to proselytize. We’re there to care for the needs of the people.” By addressing these needs, Zerillo says the company is no longer losing employees “like we used to.”

The company’s CEO, Hal Gilham, initiated the change. After overcoming some personal challenges, Gilham regretted that he couldn’t extend his faith into his work life. He joined the Philadelphia chapter of C12, a network of Christian CEOs, business owners and executives and made the decision “to extend his born-again Christian values to the way he runs Productive Plastics.”

Beyond the annonymous prayer wall and prayers that employees voluntarily share with one another, each work shift starts with a “Take 5 Meeting.” The first 4 minutes are mandatory where meeting leaders share company notices and manufacturing priorities. The last minute—a short Biblical passage to keep in mind for the day—is optional. Outside its facility, Productive Plastics flies a Christian flag below the American flag. Its four “core company values” lead off with “honor God in all that we do,” followed by develop people, a relentless pursuit of excellence and the need to grow profitability.

Apparently by way of the C12 organization, the company has also hired Lifeguide, a “corporate chaplaincy service” started by Paul and Amy Shumski after years of doing traditional pastoral work. Lifeguide chaplains are available to employees at Productive Plastics who are experiencing work and life problems that affect their jobs and want someone to discuss them with on a confidential basis. Lifeguide charges companies that hire them around $5 per week per employee. According to Paul Shumski’s video presentation at C12, Lifeguide was already working with 7 companies in the greater Philadelphia area by 2017. When interviewed by the newspaper, Amy Shumski said Lifeguard “respects all beliefs” and tries to give employees “skills to help [them] handle their situations” rather than solve their problems for them. The article also indicated that there are at least two non-Christian employees in the company’s workforce.

In digging below the story, one question I had was whether these corporate chaplains also see themselves as missionaries seeking converts to their Evangelical Christianity.

My research couldn’t locate a website for Lifeguide and their ministry referrals may come through the C12 network. Dave Shoemaker, who runs the C12 branch in Philadelphia, introduced Paul Shumski’s corporate chaplaincy presentation in 2017 by saying:

70% of employees do not darken the door of a church. How are they going to find out about Christ?

In the talk that followed, Shumski indicated that he has had over 1800 conversations about spiritual hope in the workplace over the years, that at least 174 employees looked at religious texts during Lifeguide counseling (some for the first time), and how grateful he was for one employee who had “found Jesus” through his workplace ministry.

C12’s website includes a Vision Statement (“To Change the World by Advancing the Gospel in the Marketplace”), a Doctrine Statement (“Jesus Christ is Lord, the whole Bible is wholly true, God has an eternal plan for each believer’s life, and that plan includes their business”), and a library of resources about Christianity and business that appears to be shared by other local C12 groups nationwide.

Some Thoughts

While writing this newsletter, my research didn’t go deep enough to reach conclusions about either Lifeguide or C12, but the story about the rise of Christian chaplaincies in American workplaces did highlight the problem that led me to write my book. Moreover, C12’s and Lifeguide’s approach also differs markedly from the solution I’m proposing.

The Sixties in America challenged traditional authority of every kind. Among other things, mainstream churches lost millions of believers, the objective “truths” of science and social science swamped the more subjective “truths” of religion and the other humanities in colleges and universities, and, for many Americans, values that had been shaped by worshipping communities were replaced by individual perspectives on what is “good” and “bad,” that is, when people bothered to build new moral frameworks at all.

When moral perspectives get watered down or are abandoned altogether—and people become increasingly shallow, materialistic, selfish and self-absorbed— religious revivals like America’s Great Awakenings periodically jump into the void, seeking to restore the nation’s moral compass. The overlapping of Christian Evangelical values with conservative political values is today’s version of this moral revival. It aims to restore the traditional Christian values that many Americans rejected during the Sixties and to give our lives and work a sense of meaning and purpose that they currently lack.

When I started writing WorkLifeReward, I was also concerned that we had torn down the traditional value frameworks and not replaced them with new ones. For many people, morality became increasingly personal and self-contained—private spirituality with little or no public face. Other people seemed to lack direction in life altogether. I was interested in a moral framework that included work because work is about improving more than ourselves. It reflects commitments to others and, more generally, to the world—my internal well-being as well as what I do beyond my selfish concerns.

I was convinced that it would be impossible to “turn back the clock” and restore religious groundings for those who had left them behind. But at the same time, I wanted to identify basic imperatives that would be compatible with traditional beliefs for those who continued to hold them. I also feared the practical consequences of alienating people who could never accept a religious value system; it would exclude too many people who should have the opportunity for a committed and meaningful life but didn’t know how to realize that opportunity. In other words, even if the Lifeguide chaplains aren’t missionaries, they begin their outreach from a moral framework that too many Americans have already rejected as a point of departure when seeking to live their values through their work.

So I took a different approach. I proposed two basic priorities–for personal autonomy and generosity–that can be actively nurtured by non-religious as well as religious people in every kind of work that they do. Moreover a foundation that’s based on these personal values might be able to do a more comprehensive job of filling the moral void that exists today.

My argument—greatly stripped-down here–is that all people at work want to develop and grow in ways that they need to (in terms of competence, collaboration, and aspiration) along with realizing goals that are important to them personally (from bringing well-made products to consumers to improving their community or even the world in some way). This is the value of autonomy that every employee brings to work. Generosity is simply the complementary commitment to acknowledge and support the same drive towards autonomy in others.

These commitments are durable enough to provide the personal meaning and sense of purpose that is lacking today. We don’t “find” these values in the workplace. Instead, we bring these commitments with us when we go to work, hoping to nurture them there as well as in every other part of our lives.

In the same way that it is difficult to be a person who lives (and works) their faith, it takes effort to live (and work) the values of autonomy and generosity. A commitment to individual and collective flourishing is compatible with all traditional religious values, and drives similar levels of motivation and engagement. The first two “corporate values” in every company should be to support their employees’ autonomy and generosity (instead of their boss’s version of them). And when employees don’t experience a commitment to these basic values where they work, they should bring their energy and talent to a workplace that will support them.

Even in America, the revival of moral foundations doesn’t have to be religious in nature.

Note: this post is adapted from my August 19, 2018 weekly newsletter.

Our Understandings Can Evolve and Complement One Another

July 15, 2018 By David Griesing 1 Comment

The heat makes everything slow down in July. Like these horses, who were excited to be let loose in a new grazing field, I’ve been slowing down and grazing on some new stories.

They argue that the stands we take on the job should be flexible, nuanced and generous—as opposed to their opposites. They counsel patience and the ability to hold competing perspectives at the same time. They build on topics that have been covered here before.

Here’s some of what I’ve been chewing on this week.

Commonly Held Views on What’s Good and Bad Are Always Evolving

As far as morality is concerned, we’re fish in a fishbowl.

We have an internal compass that determines which way to swim, when to open our mouths for food, what kind of fish we think we want to be. But we’re also in the water, in a bowl on a table, with light from a lamp or window coming in, and big faces that appear periodically above the rim or in front of the glass to look at us. As a fish, our vitality, beauty or even personality affect what happens around us as surely as the external environment we’re stuck in influences the choices that we make inside.

The first story is about how the music that we’re playing inside our fish bowl and the external forces that are judging its suitability can affect one another. It’s about American Christianity’s slow embrace of rock-n-roll, what it initially heard as “the sound of sin.”

How long it took the churches to move from condemnation to accommodation is chronicled in Randall Stephen’s The Devil’s Music. He begins with the extraordinary Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who blurred the lines between gospel and pop in the 1930’s, and ends in 2001 when Christian rock outsold jazz and classical music combined. How it eventually happened is suggested by the following quote from William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army:

The music of the Army is not, as a rule, original. We seize upon the strains that have already caught the ears of the masses, we load them up with our great theme—salvation—and so we make the very enemy help us fill the air with our Savior’s fame.

When opposition persists, bridges between the sides get built and a middle ground with a new understanding of “what’s good” emerges. It rarely happens without pain, and usually takes a long time. If you’re interested, the link to Stephen’s book comes with a Spotify playlist that doubles as a soundtrack for rock-n-roll’s 60-year moral evolution.

In other areas, conflicting priorities between traditional religion and, say, minorities within their communities of faith, are still playing out. For example, the Mormons and the Anglicans have both subjected their LGBTQ believers to condemnation, shunning and banishment over the years. Two related stories this week come from inside these believing communities.

Places like Utah with its large Mormon population have unusually high suicide rates, particularly among young people. Some Mormons and former-Mormons have begun to insist that the seemingly irreconcilable tension between an individual’s sexual identity and his or her faith is one reason that young Mormons are taking their own lives.

A new documentary called “Believer” is about the rock band Imagine Dragons and its straight Mormon members who staged a concert in Provo, Utah last August to celebrate the LGBTQ members of the Mormon community. It’s not a great documentary, but the story behind how this massive public statement came together and the Latter Day Saints responded is consistently compelling. Both sides believe that they are championing a life or death issue (an individual’s sexual identity in this life vs. his or her eternal salvation). Moreover, individuals with personal stakes in the Church, like members of this rock band, are risking their own ostracism by trying to bridge the moral divide. The moral courage is palpable. The moral evolution is one step forward and one step back.

While several testimonials in “Believer” are moving, I wasn’t prepared for the gut-wrenching interview on BBC America with an Anglican woman who has been struggling with her faith and sexual identity for more than 30 years. It is impossible for me to describe her internal moral struggle as well as she gives voice to it; you have to hear it for yourself. It is also unclear how the Anglicans will respond. What is clear is that pain like this “from within their ranks” will be difficult to ignore and a catalyst for eventual change.

Today, where many of our moral commitments are shallow instead of deep, it can be difficult to imagine individuals who have not one but two life-or-death issues struggling inside of them. (“Why not stop being a Mormon or an Anglican?” “Well, it’s not that easy for me, because my faith is also my life.”) It may be even harder to imagine individuals who see their work as helping to bridge these kinds of moral divides.

However “post-belief” and “enlightened” we think we are, these kinds of slow and painful evolutions affect us all. Who among us isn’t challenged by the gapping moral divide between the blue Coasts and the red Heartland in America today? What are the names of this conflict’s many victims? And who is risking their standing “in their own righteous communities” to help bridge this divide so that–slowly but surely–we can begin to move forward?

Conflicting Moral Perspectives Can Enrich One Another

I’ve written here before about the tension between the perspective of science and that of the humanities when it comes to how we do our jobs. Where science aims at objective certainties, the humanities champion personal and subjective truths, for example, not just what the evidence says but also what it means. Instead of picking one or the other, I’ve argued that each perspective has its essential contributions to make. (For example: September 24, 2017 newsletter – a Yale neuroscientist seeks input from philosophers; May 6, 2018 – social scientist and philosopher Amartya Sen argues that our material needs co-exist in a moral exchange with our spiritual needs.)

I’ve also written here about how our reliance on “objective” technology and data needs to be humanized by our “subjective” priorities. As part of the work that we do, we need to ensure that these tools aren’t merely used to manipulate us as consumers or citizens but also to enrich our lives. (August 6, 2017 – we’ve gotten a vending machine from our on-line technologies instead of a banquet according to Jaron Lanier; September 10, 2017 – some designers at Microsoft start with human instead of market-driven needs when designing our mediating devices.)

Lastly, I’ve questioned whether economics and the “invisible hand” of the market should be trusted to deliver what people need and want. (September 24, 2017 – the human side of markets in the writings of Adam Smith; October 15, 2017 –considering how humans actually behave wins Richard Thaler the Nobel Prize in economics; April 18, 2018 – whether other economic benefits like good jobs and fair competition should weigh as much if not more than convenience and low prices: a challenge to Amazon.)

Since I’m usually arguing that the balance between these different ways of understanding needs to be restored, it’s easy to forget how beautifully these understandings complement one another. This week I stumbled upon a beautiful illustration of that complementarity.

Alan Lightman, who is a physicist at MIT as well as a novelist, has just published a new collection of essays where he wonders out loud about whether a scientific understanding of the world diminishes its emotional impact or spiritual power. In Searching for Stars from an Island in Maine, he repeatedly concludes that far from diminishing one another, these different ways of understanding amplify our sense of reverence and wonder.

While reading reviews of Lightman’s book, I discovered what his fellow physicist Richard Feynman said in a 1981 interview about an artist appreciating a flower:

The beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. … At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. … The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower.

The vacation months of July and August are for refreshing ourselves with the beauty, meaning and wonder of the world and the people who make our lives worth living. They’re for starting with “Feynman’s flower” –with all of those humane concerns of ours—and adding the scientific, technological and data-driven understandings that can (and should) deepen our appreciation of them in the work that we come back to do.

(This post was adapted from my July 15, 2018 Newsletter.)

Rewind and Get It Right This Time

August 6, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Whenever my face hits the mud of a first mistake, I’m usually surprised by how many people seem to be watching and wondering: What will he do next? What’ll he say? What does he really mean? Has he accepted responsibility for what’s happened? Said he’s sorry?

Assume that your mistakes will always attract a crowd, especially at work. When you’re busy (or overwhelmed) it’s surprisingly easy for one knee-jerk reaction to compound your next one, until you’re doubling-down while everyone else is wondering why you’re so intent on making a bad situation even worse.

An audience that expects little from you

Work mistakes are rarely private moments. And that’s actually the interesting part, because a mistake that’s out in the open gives you a chance (sometimes repeated chances) to say something courageous and totally unexpected about yourself, to start-over in front of a surprisingly large audience that’s close to writing you off.

There were two news stories this week with just this kind of ending.

Everything about them speaks to a crowd that’s even larger than those who were already following because we don’t get to see anyone rewind and start over very often, and secretly hope (at least I think we do) that when the moment arrives, each of us will have the character to do the same.

I got into writing about values because I’m convinced that most people want to act morally but few actually know how. There are several reasons for this today, including:

a decline in institutions that once saw themselves as custodians of our social values, such as churches;
the reluctance of other institutions (like schools and parents) to pass their own values on to new generations; and
a preference for lazy cynicism (in politics, in the media, and in our interactions with one another) instead of forging deeper commitments.

As a result, even when you want to act morally, you are increasingly “on your own” to figure out how.

Even when you want your work to mean more than a paycheck, you have to figure out how to find and do work that can engage your mind and heart like that.

And outside of traditional religion, almost no one is offering help to those who are groping for these answers today—which is another reason why these stories seem so compelling.

The first is about a message T-shirt that Frank Ocean wore at a recent concert, and the second is about a twist in the admissions policy at the University of California at Irvine. So in case you missed them. . . .

I was already a Frank Ocean fan. (If you don’t know his music, you can get a taste of it here.) He has also been a hiatus from touring, so when Ocean reappeared recently in New York City his fans were already watching. But it was his T-shirt that caused a sensation.

The T-shirt featured a tweet from an 18-year old named Brandon Male that asked: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” Both the sentiment and the bid to “just be quiet” are very Frank Ocean, but Mr. Male had a different reaction when he found out about it. His tweet was suddenly selling even more T-shirts, and the sellers still hadn’t bothered to reach out and say: “Thanks man.” This time, Mr. Male couldn’t let it go.

Kayla Robinson, also 18, runs the on-line company which sells the T-shirt. It calls itself the Green Box Shop. Mr. Male had already contacted the company last January, after somebody known as @lustdad posted an image of himself on Twitter wearing the same T-shirt and saw his post retweeted 87,000 times and liked by 191,000 people. (To put this in context, the most retweets or likes my posts have ever gotten is around 5.)

Anyway, Mr. Male thought this was valuable promotion too, but when he contacted the Green Box Shop, someone who was not Ms. Robinson pretty much blew him off. “They told me I needed to calm down and said they credited me on Instagram one time,” he said. He was prepared to let it slide, but then Frank Ocean out the T-shirt on.

Following the concert, Mr. Male took his complaints to Twitter directly and received an outpouring of support (“give him his coin!”), some of which finally got Ms. Robinson’s attention. Apparently, she doesn’t handle the social media side of things, but realized that something was happening, that is, something beyond her company receiving 5400 more T-shirt orders than it received on a typical weekend. Ms. Robinson sent Mr. Male $100 and added a link to his tweet on her product page, but if she thought this would put the matter to rest. . . . As Mr. Male told the New York Times: “They threw me $100 and told me to go away.” By his calculation, $100 was less than 1 percent of the new revenue the Green Box Shop pulled in over those two days alone.

Of course, this is where it gets interesting.

While great legal minds were speculating on whether the use of someone else’s tweet can result in monetary damages (It’s yet to be decided), Ms. Robinson admitted that hers was “an impulsive decision. I hadn’t looked at the number of sales [and] it does look like I was just throwing money at him to keep him quiet.”

She also said something else that’s far more noteworthy. “It would be pretty irresponsible of me to just take [his words]. Being a creator myself, people have copied my shirts before, I totally understand Brandon.” Then she reportedly called him to apologize and to set up a time to talk numbers. Where Ms. Robinson could have re-trenched, instead she rewound while the skeptical were watching.

The second story follows a similar arc.

When the University of California at Irvine admitted its new freshman class, 800 more applicants than it could “feed and house” said: “Yes!” Irvine has long been a popular destination for first generation college applications, and it was no different this year. This is what a recent applicant pool there looked like:

Accurately forecasting an incoming class is often a problem because calculating the “yield” on admissions is little better than guesswork. (When I was a college sophomore, so-called “overflow freshman” were put up in a local motor inn where, among other things, they were rumored to enjoy much better food.) Anyway, because Irvine’s lawyers informed them that an admission letter is only a “conditional offer” (based on satisfactory completion of high school, submitting paperwork on time, etc.), the university eventually withdrew 500 of its acceptances as applicants failed to meet one or another of its requirements like: “No deposit check by May 1 and you’re out.”

You can read a newspaper account of the gnashing of teeth that ensued, reactions that prompted the university’s next misstep. Even though it had never once rescinded admissions because of late checks, Irvine insisted that it was just “following policy” when it acted as it did. (Who knows what its lawyers were advising at this stage.)

Once again, the seemingly most clueless point is where things get interesting. Was it press involvement? Still other lawyers threatening to sue? We don’t know. But from a public letter shortly thereafter, it’s clear that Irvine’s chancellor, Howard Gillman, had a change of heart.

“We are a university recognized for advancing the American Dream, not impeding it. This situation is rocking us to our core because it is fundamentally misaligned with our values. The students and their families have my personal, sincerest apology. We should not have treated you this way over a missed deadline.”

Just like we don’t know how much Ms. Robinson agreed to pay Mr. Male, there’s still some uncertainty at Irvine as this goes to press. 300 applicants who simply missed a paperwork deadline have been re-admitted, but another 200 are still in limbo because of other conditions on their admission. What is clear is that prior mistakes were acknowledged, a more generous spirit was expressed, and two people declared to everybody who was listening that doubling down on a bad idea doesn’t have to be the last word.

It is always better to think through the ramifications of work decisions beforehand and act accordingly, but in the real world, it sometimes doesn’t happen that way—particularly when a seemingly “bigger” opportunity or problem is confronting you.

That’s when the “ramifications” of one bad decision compound, just like they did here. But what really matters comes next. These stories have a moral that says: even when you’ve doubled-down, it’s never too late..

How Slowing Down Your Judgments Lets in Some Light

July 30, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When it comes to morality—is something right or wrong—you have a trigger finger. Everybody does.

However open-minded you think you are, the closed-minded parts of you are likely to beat you to the punch every – single – time. These mind-closers include your emotions, hopes, habits, beliefs, prejudices and instincts (like that reptilian fight or flight). These sub-conscious drives literally make you jump to conclusions. It’s as if something fundamental in you were threatened.

A quick Q&A so you’re with me so far:

The next time politics comes up in conversation, how long does it take you to decide that what you’re hearing is right or wrong (2 seconds, 10 seconds, until the person has stopped talking)?
On a social issue you know little about, will you give someone you view as religious the benefit of the doubt or be skeptical right away?
If you color your politics blue, how open to persuasion are you when you hear a red perspective? Same question if your color is red and you’re hearing a blue perspective (Not open at all, tune out most of it, will hear them out, will actually talk to them some more about it)?
Which hat are you wearing right now?

Your moral judgments are likely to be rendered before you’ve “thought about it” at all. (Your “reasons” for them come afterwards, that is, when you bother to come up with them at all.) And as the “religion” question suggests, your subconscious may have judged what someone will be saying before they’ve even opened their mouths.

So if our unthinking selves are leading us “by the nose,” is it inevitable for the conversation to break down in almost every area where we share things in common?

Actually, it’s not.

But let’s begin by reiterating that your moral judgments—the decisions made in the light of your values—are the most powerful motivators in your life.

I’m writing about “following your values to a good life at work” because of how your jobs can empower you when they are aligned with this evolutionary flow.

However, reconciling what’s rational and deliberate (your work) with what’s subconscious and intuitive (your values) requires you to take one key step. Because moral judgments happen so quickly, it almost always helps when you slow them down.

Why? (1) because you can, and (2) because your reasoning faculties—some of the better angels of your nature—have a chance to inform your moral judgments, making those judgments more nuanced and constructive without losing any of their primal force.

In his groundbreaking Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize winning economist) made much the same point, arguing, among many other things, that when we “slow down” the “fast process” of moral judgment, there is an opportunity to introduce some reason into it. Indeed, many thought that Kahneman’s book was so important when it came out in 2011 that they made animated summaries of it. Here’s one of them that amusingly illustrates the downsides of too-fast thinking in several contexts, including making judgments about almost everything you value.

Two new studies, out this week, got me thinking again about not being so knee-jerk (and predictable) myself. Moral fervor grounds good work but it’s also the seedbed for dogmatism.

Based on surveys of more than 900 people, the researchers behind these studies found some important similarities between the religious and the non-religious people they tested. The most dogmatic believers said their convictions were based on empathy while the most committed nonbelievers claimed to be fact-based analyzers. But in fact, the opposite was true. In both groups, the most certain were less adept at either analytical thinking or the ability to look at issues from another’s perspective.

So where you fall on this spectrum matters.

In his book The Righteous Mind, self-described liberal Jonathan Haidt surveyed 2000 Americans and reported finding that those identifying themselves as liberal were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. “Liberals don’t understand conservative values,” he wrote. “And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.”

Dogmatic. Predictable. But, in fairness, almost everyone with a moral perspective sits on a high horse.

Haidt argues persuasively that your values or “moral intuitions” guide your behavior long before you can give your reasons for what you said or did. But he also argues for the effort to become more open to opposing views, to pause and reflect before reacting, and to break up your ideological segregation by seeking out different perspectives. (Haidt talks more about why good people are divided by politics and religion in this video clip of him speaking to Google employees.)

There are several reasons for a deeper consideration of the role that’s played by your values —including your better life and work. But for now, it may be enough to reflect on becoming less dogmatic and predictable whenever your values come racing to your defense.