Journelism

During the late 1990s, like many Kellogg Fellows, I had the pleasure of participating in an Outward Bound program as part of my fellowship. So many elements of that experience have stayed with me over the years. One that I often think of involved a leadership game requiring our team of about eight members to use a collection of materials (boards, rods, beams, etc.) to get across a small stream. And one additional important rule: without getting wet. Indeed, the instructions asked us to pretend that the stream was molten lava, so that anyone who fell in would perish. I was assigned to lead the team.

After I solicited ideas from everyone, the group wanted to go out and try. “Not yet,” I said. “This is molten lava and we need to make sure our plan is foolproof.” Of course, the exercise was timed and the minutes slipped away while we studied the task. When we were ready to try something carefully planned, the time was almost up. Then we failed and many fell into the “lava” despite our schemes, foolish rather than foolproof!

Afterward, we debriefed and our facilitator used an expression I have come to love: “analysis paralysis.” What does it mean? My fellow fellows know it well from experience. It means thinking too much and letting “the perfect” become the enemy of “the good.”

Today I see signs of analysis paralysis everywhere in life. There are too many smart people out there who can predict all of the things that might go wrong with any plan proposed by anyone from anywhere. They study the mistakes people make so they can warn others. These people suffer from a sort of curse: the belief that not making a mistake is equal in value to getting something accomplished.

Change in human systems is almost never pretty. It does not play out like a well-rehearsed ballet or a beautiful symphony performed by a professional orchestra. No, change is ugly. Really ugly. Real progress is painfully slow, full of errors and false starts. To make meaningful gains requires us to dive in and try, then fix things as we go along. Delaying action just delays the inevitable process of making and fixing mistakes.

People looking for the perfect plan really don’t understand the world they inhabit. Here is the problem: While you plan, the world changes. While you execute your plan, the world changes. And meanwhile, you change as well. So no matter the time spent preparing, you need to be ready to change your plan anyway. Then why spend inordinate amounts of time making detailed plans? Millennia ago, Heraclitus said that one cannot “step twice into the same river.” The river you planned to cross is not the one you cross. The “you” who planned to cross is not the “you” who crosses.

Also, there are so many things that you don’t and cannot know until you are in the middle of actually doing a task. To study an obligation, to look at it out in the future, is just never the same as the experience of actually doing it in the present moment. You have to roll up your sleeves, dive in and make adjustments as you go along. You only really know the river once you are actually in it.

The world has way too many Monday-morning quarterbacks. Sigh. I really detest such people. They rarely attempt to do anything themselves. What they like to do is stand on the riverbank screaming advice to the people trying to make a crossing. When those brave hearts fall in, these people laugh, criticize and explain the mistakes of the wet ones.

It is so obvious from the dry riverbank. They can see it so clearly. But invite one of the critics to come out and try to make a crossing. “No, no,” they will usually explain. “I’m an expert. I don’t actually cross the river. I tell you how to do it. Then I point out your mistakes.” Real creators and innovators don’t pay much attention to these people. They know that there is a huge difference between those who do and those who stand by, watching and criticizing.

Our public policy today in many arenas—healthcare, education, economic development, foreign policy and so on—has been brought nearly to a standstill by people who would rather explain than do, who would rather criticize than commit, who would rather evaluate than achieve, who would rather measure than make, who would rather study than create. Our visible leaders too often are men and women who believe that talking about progress is a viable substitute for achieving it. They would rather be right than fail in a sincere effort. So many fans, so many commentators, so many coaches and referees… but where are those with the courage to go out and play?

The forward motion of human society requires a generation of courageous leaders willing to ignore the peanut gallery and to press on with flawed actions in the muck and mire of real life. We need more leaders willing to make mistakes, to get dirty, to be wrong and yes, to fall into the stream and die in the molten lava if need be.

I live near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and sometimes go there in the winter when it’s nasty and cold. The place is not famous as the site of a victory in battle or any single great event. It’s the place (you history buffs may remember) where Washington and his troops suffered and licked their wounds in the middle of the American Revolution. They were on the ropes after a series of major defeats, and for a time it seemed to Washington that the army might even disband. I like to imagine him there in the snow full of uncertainty, freezing to death, the outcome unsure, praying for the strength to move forward against extremely difficult odds.

I have learned from experience that this is the general posture of people who make a difference in causes that matter. So here is the good news: If you are feeling a sense of looming defeat, if you are standing steady in the focal point of great criticism, if people are laughing at you and explaining your failures, it may mean that you are struggling in a task of great importance, that you may well achieve something significant.

But don’t think about this too much… it’s time to get wet.

One of the biggest constraints of social innovation is the battle between the Right and the Left in American politics. Every new idea gets parsed through each combatant’s unforgiving ideological grinder.  As a result, promising concepts get torn to pieces because they include some element odious to one side or the other.

The current debate over national health care provides only the latest example.  Rather than think through proposals on their own merits, each side is on a relentless hunt to find something wrong with what the other side proposes.  It’s not hard, because in almost every domain of national dialogue, the political economic frameworks advanced by the two countervailing parties to the dialogue have become so different that they can barely understand one another anymore.

The Ideological Grinder of the Right: The Free Market

Emerging from worship at the temples of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand, the Right’s vision of the proper role of government is limited to protecting private property, enforcing contracts, and ensuring national security.  In the Right’s view, the private markets would provide everything else needed by mankind if the government would only stop interfering and attempting to plan the future.  The Right believes that capitalism unbound would lift the poor as all boats rise in explosive economic development.  The unfettered markets would deliver a surplus of everything, driving down prices, improving quality of life in the form of inexpensive consumer goods and services.  The enormous profits created by the leading innovators would help those in need through energetic, innovative, private philanthropies led by technical and industrial titans during their retirements.  These supremely creative and productive (and wealthy) people will cure the ills of mankind out of the pure goodness of their hearts (case in point: the Gates Foundation).  Private philanthropy would be quicker and more effective than the programs wrought by a horde of tax-hungry bureaucrats beholden to special interests.  In the world view of the Right, every dollar taken from the wealthy in taxes deprives private economic development and philanthropy of their effectiveness.

The Ideological Grinder of the Left: Equality

On the other side of the aisle, steeped in the thought of philosophers and economists like Rousseau, Marcuse, Rawls, Keynes, and also Adam Smith (yes, believe it or not, Smith has a place on both the Right and the Left), the Left’s fundamental vision of the role of government is to maintain the welfare in “Welfare Capitalism.”  That’s welfare as in the “welfare” mentioned in the first line of the Constitution where it is written that “we the people” of the United States will work together to promote something called the “general welfare.”    The Left focuses not on total national productivity, nor on the miraculous innovations of the free market, but rather on inequality and on the plight of those for whom the benefits of capitalism remain out of reach.   The Left is also concerned about those at the bottom of the economic ladder who are squeezed dry, left out, or reduced to machinery in the market’s relentless pursuit of efficiency and creative destruction.  In the vision of the Left, government has a legitimate role in providing a societal playing field with some base levels of fairness and some base levels of subsistence services and benefits.  The Left perceives that when too much economic power becomes concentrated in the hands of too few, then manipulation of the state by those few is not far behind.  What emerges from unrestrained capitalism sometimes looks and feels like something feudal, complete with royalty who reduce everyone around them to serfs and who use public resources such as the military and the treasury not to advance the national security or the general welfare, but rather to advance their own parochial interests (cases in point: energy interests and the war in Iraq, the recent Wall St. bailouts).  For this reason, while the Left embraces government in its role as the protector of the disadvantaged, it remains suspicious of governmental police and military power.   Mr. Hayek, says the Left, there is also a road to serfdom through unrestrained capitalism.   After all, when one can command the military power of the state to protect their private kingdom, hasn’t one become a sort of king?

Different Destinations, Different Roads

The argument between the Right and the Left concerns not only the vision of what is good for people but also about the vision of how progress should unfold and the consequences of choosing one road over another.   To the Right, engaging the government in solving social problems necessarily entails redistributing resources that could be used more effectively if they were programmed by Smith’s invisible hand.  Profits are merely signals calling forth entrepreneurs to solve problems.  Restraining profits simply stops hyper-efficient market mechanisms from functioning.  Leave that process alone, says the Right, and the market will perform its magic.  Government interference leads at best to waste and at worst, down the road toward socialism, communism, and eventually to totalitarianism.  The Right sees government as an evil and destructive beast to be kept in chains lest it devour the master who feeds it.  This is the world view held by people who come to health care rallies depicting Obama as Lenin or even Hitler!  In the view of the Right, the time that the market requires to respond to human needs is nothing less than the price of liberty itself.

In contrast, the Left sees the market’s inequities and the time required for the market to respond as the very problems that the government is called upon to address.  Excessive profits are not signs of the market at work, they are inefficiencies and symptoms of market failure.   Taking to heart Keynes’ stark reminder that “[i]n the long run we are all dead,” the Left has no patience to await market solutions that require perhaps decades of rampant inequality along the pathway to serving the needs of mankind.  If the market is so good at providing health care, says the Left, and if rationing health care is so bad, why should we tolerate a market that leaves so many unserved?   Isn’t that just another form of rationing employed by market forces?  What good is “the best healthcare in the world” to the person who can’t afford it?  The Left remains cynical and circumspect about the alleged efficiencies of the free market.  It sees the ways in which runaway profits empower market operators to manipulate the government in order to erect barriers to market competition, some subtle and some painfully obvious.   In the view of the Left, the Right likes a free market as long as it doesn’t get too free.

The Future Hangs in the Balance

In this divided political culture that finds itself nearly in perfect equipoise, the future of the nation rests in the hands of a tiny sliver of voters and politicians who are either very muddled in their thinking about these concepts or able to transcend them entirely.

Let’s admit that some of those in the center are just muddled in their thinking.  They vote based on emotions rising from tone, appearance, the use of words and gestures, how things look and feel.  This is politics and economics by feelings, barely rational.  It’s very hard to predict what these people will do.  One day they prefer chocolate, the next, vanilla.  People who make decisions on the basis of intangible feelings can be manipulated by figures like Willie Horton or the specter of a man with too many houses.  They observe body language and closely inspect images.  Does the Obama poster make him look like Che Guevara, they wonder?  They make judgments supposedly based on intangible qualities like “character” and “leadership,” but actually the process is more like selecting cheese for a dinner party.

Now, let’s also admit that there are some thinkers out there truly able to rise above and transcend these rigid paradigms of thinking on the Right and the Left.  These are not your normal swing voters.  It’s possible that the roots of a true “third way” in American politics can be found in thinking that transcends the old categories. If innovative strategies and approaches are going to take root in our communities, they are going to need some breathing room—more than the current political culture will allow.

For some reason, it is easier to recognize 2010 as the last year of the new millennium’s first decade than it was 10 years ago to recognize Y2K as the final year of the 20th century. 2000 felt like something new. That New Year’s Eve 10 years ago, people around the world indeed partied “like it was 1999,” feeling that the entrance of that numeral “2” was the start of something big. I suspect that the celebrations this year will be much more subdued, because—let’s face it folks—we got off on the wrong foot.

Not that the last one hundred years were so wonderful, featuring world wars, global genocides and a nuclear arms race threatening Armageddon. Still, the achievements of the 80s and 90s, featuring the collapse of the Cold War, progress on human rights and extraordinary developments in a full spectrum of life-enhancing technologies, imbued us with a visceral sense of optimism as we crossed the bridge to a new century. Our confidence was reinforced when the world did not end on the morning of January 1, 2000, and traffic lights and air-traffic controllers continued to function despite their ancient software. We were even smarter than we thought.

But as we threw away our duct tape, the dot-com bubble burst, along with the Twin Towers and the world as we knew it. And what followed were more wars and bursting bubbles, a rough ride downhill almost to another Great Depression. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wants to call the decade “the Zeros” because nothing good happened, but we know all too well that there is something worse than nothing good. Indeed, the disturbing theme of this first decade of a new time in human affairs has not been the absence of something good, but rather the hidden presence of something very bad, like biting into a shiny, hard apple and finding nasty rot inside.

We saw this motif again and again. That great stock you bought was actually worthless. The average-looking guy sitting next to you on the airplane turned out to be a terrorist. The company that posted record profits was actually sinking like the Titanic. The miraculous energy company was actually an energy black hole. The war against terrorism was actually a terrorism factory. The quest for imaginary weapons of mass destruction somehow managed to produce mass destruction itself.

Moral crusaders (there were many) turned out to be immoral philanderers in disguise. The insurance company turned out to be a casino. The guardians were thieves, the buttresses were battering rams, and the rock turned out to be quicksand. Donning their bleeding red brackets, assets revealed themselves as liabilities. The world seemed (indeed, seems) to be rife with “Black Swans.” The impossible was not merely possible; it was real and it arrived in the flesh. As a person who grew up in the shadows of Manhattan, what I still cannot process when I look at the New York City skyline is the absence. The empty space visibly towers, serving as a stark reminder that what seems permanent and trustworthy can change in a moment.

The word I will associate with the transition to a new decade this year is “risk.” It’s a good word to contemplate in a blog dedicated to the practice of courageous leadership. I really hate to quote Donald Rumsfeld, but back in 2002, he said it right:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

Real risk is not just about the known unknowns, it is about the unknown unknowns. The Zeros have been a decade dedicated to these special risks: that treacherous floor beneath your feet that looks and feels secure but is about to give way. How do you marshal courage against the unknown? It’s a very hard case, because a mature, pragmatic courage calls upon us to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of a particular choice. But when we are actually in the arena, rather than on the sidelines pontificating, we not only lack information, we often labor under lies and deceit, and so the risks we confront are often painfully hidden and unknowable to us in the difficult moment when we must make our way forward.

While humans as a whole are gaining increasing mastery over the world they inhabit, they remain sharply vulnerable to one another and to their own systems. This is the special teaching of the first decade of the new millennium. The greatest global threat to the natural lifespan is no longer nature but humanity, menacing not only itself but every other life form on earth as well. At this moment in human evolution, courage acquires a special meaning. Courage no longer dwells in confronting the risks “out there,” nor even the risks posed by “others.” The special courage called for in the third millennium is the grit needed to stare deeply into the mirror and to know ourselves. That which lies hidden within human nature itself is surely both our greatest asset and our most profound liability. The courage we must call forth now is the capacity for self-knowledge and self-control.

Courage as We Know It

Working with community leaders over the past decade, I have seen many praised for taking courageous stands against wrongdoing. Courage usually begins with a series of meetings. People come together, reflecting on a fundamental injustice. In the inner-city where I work, the underlying condition could involve any number of serious problems: drugs, failure of schools, lack of employment, racism or other unequal treatment.

Leaders then emerge. Sometimes they are the group’s initial conveners, or the ones who called attention to the injustice, but not always. The group implicitly knows that it needs someone courageous to press its cause forward.

In the next phase, a single person, or a small leadership team, then focuses the group’s attention on a person or group that should be held accountable for the problems suffered by the community. During this phase, the group defines and identifies an opponent. Leaders must have courage when this targeted person or group is powerful and can threaten those calling for accountability. The powerful target of the campaign often controls legal power or funds being called forth to fix what’s wrong.

Then the campaign enters a public phase during which a confrontation or sometimes an outright attack ensues. Sometimes the process leads to change, sometimes not.
In the final chapter, the group celebrates those who fearlessly held the feet of the others to the fire. Plaques are made. Books are written. Interviews are given. Awards are given. The courage is enshrined and remembered.

I myself have often been directly involved in such efforts. At times I led them. At times I supported them actively. Sometimes, I merely looked on with a sense of approval.

Courage and Moral Certainty

Courage and righteousness in American civil society are close friends. A feeling of certainty and clarity in one’s moral compass provides a large measure of the initiative required to “stand up” and “stand your ground” against those bad elements that have let us down or failed us in some way. Courage involves confronting risk and danger. Risk and danger come when we threaten or confront something more powerful than we are. When we experience persons or factions as having greater power, we often experience them as limiting our own power. We may experience limitations on our power as oppressive. And that which oppresses us is usually believed to be unjust. What is unjust in turn becomes the focus of our courageous action. The unjust sit in the bull’s-eye of our courageous cause in which we determine to take back what really belongs to us, speaking our truth to their power.

Courage also entails the sense that the good to be achieved for our community outweighs personal risks. If we do not perceive this greater good in unambiguous terms, our courage may falter. Without that greater good, our actions may seem foolish, wasteful or wrong. For this reason, courage often entails suppressing doubts and uncertainties as we move forward. In our moment of courage, we cannot afford to suffer “analysis paralysis.” When action is slowed by nuances and shades of gray, it often loses its bold and courageous nature. In the rear view mirror of victory, not much time is spent looking for ambiguity.

It is the courage to make change while preserving the dignity and moral status of those in part responsible for the bad situation we all face. It is courage willing to grapple with the complexity that the oppressor may also be oppressed. It engages those with whom we disagree in dialogue rather than squaring off for a fight.

American leadership in civil society abounds with individuals who would wish to frame their actions within the narrative structures I have outlined above. After all, a story about the crusade against injustice (with ourselves or those we care for cast as the crusaders) is the story most leaders would want to tell about their own lives, isn’t it? It is the story of those who confront evil, root it out at the source, and then go on to live a better life, their heroic personal narrative growing incrementally after each crusade.

But . . . (Did you sense that a “but” was coming?)

As I have grown older, (hopefully) gaining more perspective, I have come to appreciate a different kind of courage, growing from a different place. I would describe it as the courage to proceed to try to make the world better while maintaining clarity on the inherent moral ambiguity of real people and real situations. It is the courage to make change while preserving the dignity and moral status of those in part responsible for the bad situation we all face. It is courage willing to grapple with the complexity that the oppressor may also be oppressed. It engages those with whom we disagree in dialogue rather than squaring off for a fight. Can we change the world in a way that recognizes our own part, our own complicity and responsibility, for the creation of the world we now want to change? The usual concept of courage entails confrontation and combat. This “different” kind courage is not about fighting. It’s about converting enemies and morally questionable actors into partners in thinking and dialogue.

This different kind of interaction deserves the name courage, because to see that the innocent sometimes share the guilt of the guilty can be painful. To recognize that the guilty are sometimes innocent of much charged to their account can unsettle us. To acknowledge that those labeled as demons perhaps share something profound with us can be threatening. To understand that we contributed to the problems we wanted to blame on others can disquiet us. From another perspective, the group that calls for justice can become a mob that persecutes.

It takes a different kind of courage to stare hard into the eyes of “evildoers” and see our own reflection staring back at us!

Am I saying there is no right and wrong in the world? Of course not. The problem though is that right and wrong in this world of ours is usually tangled up and embedded in strange and surprising ways that may cast our courage in a different, less flattering light.

A Different Kind of Courage

It takes a different kind of courage to maintain hopeful, constructive actions in the face of the astounding hypocrisy of the world. We live a world with unhealthy doctors, unethical ethicists, illegal lawyers, unfaithful fiduciaries, tax delinquent tax collectors, immoral clergy. Even the humble are immodest in their humility. It’s a fallen world. Imperfection abounds. The work of change must be done, will be done, at the hands of sinners, failures and hypocrites.

It takes courage to move forward knowing we will often fail by our own measures of success. If we did not fail often, our aspirations would terribly uncourageous! Some may find this a dark view of human nature, a sacrificing of vision. But I see it as a grounding in reality that allows us to move forward in ways that are practical, serious and real. It takes a different kind of courage to live with this inherent messiness of reality that will not stay put in the neat ideological and moral categories we create in our manifestos.

Something that fills me with hope is the kind of courage we see from Barack Obama in this regard. There have been many comments and situations in which this different kind of courage was on display. Appearing on Larry King during the campaign, he said:

“I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country. It’s what keeps us locked in “either/or” thinking: the notion that we can only have big government or no government; the assumption that we must either tolerate forty-six million without health insurance or embrace ’socialized medicine’.”

Similarly, in his speech in Philadelphia about race, he showed an unusual willingness to see people as they are, with their strengths and weaknesses, in their full moral ambiguity. He recognized that his white grandmother, who loved him dearly, also embraced racist stereotypes. He acknowledged that his black pastor, a man he clearly respected and admired, was a man who could provide important leadership and service to the community while also holding views that Barack Obama himself found wrong, divisive and racially charged. Barack showed us a different kind of courage.

It takes courage to see the shades of gray in this world of ours. Barack Obama notwithstanding, it is usually not the kind of heroic courage that gets your picture on the front page of the local paper or that wins you “the most influential person of the year” award. Reality and nuance generally don’t make for great headlines. But I suspect that this different kind of courage actually leads to more meaningful and lasting human progress.

“When you’re digging a ditch, don’t look up.”  A scout leader gave me this advice 36 years ago, when I was eleven.  At the time, I was actually digging a ditch, so I understood his meaning!   Hard tasks can be slow to yield.  Those words, “don’t look up,” have stayed with me over the years as I confronted many difficult challenges.  To me, the expression served as a reminder to have patience, to soldier on even when success isn’t visible.  Take the long view, that’s what the wise man said.  Checking progress against a difficult task can really discourage us.  And there’s that word again, courage, buried behind the “dis.”

In my advancing (some might even say quickly concluding!) middle age, however, I have come to distrust the patient, long view.  As the famous economist John Maynard Keyes said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”  Extremely slow progress might deserve another name: failure.  In the famous words of William Gladstone, the 19^th Century British statesman, “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

During many years in leadership roles in the public and nonprofit sector, I have noticed that “the long view” often enters wearing compelling costumes.   One mask is “faith in the process.”  Leaders who buy into the religion of process often spend substantial time focusing on how things get done.  A process focus often leads to an investigation of best practices.  In such settings, the dominant belief is that doing things the right way will lead to the desired outcomes, eventually.  A commitment to best practices also implies a focus on research, founded on faith that others have successfully encountered our problems before.  Process focus also tends towards the specialization and professionalization of tasks, making progress reliant on consultants, highly-educated and often expensive.  In its worst manifestation, process focus can cause organizations to descend into literally months and years of examining internal rules and procedures.  When this course reaches its outer limits, organizations develop many layers of people making rules and meta-rules, painstakingly pointing out all the infractions of those below them in the rule hierarchy.   The creation and perpetuation of bureaucracy threatens to become a poor substitute for getting things done.  In the end, painfully, slowly, expensively and with the utmost perfection, nothing is accomplished.  We shovel really well, but in the end we still haven’t created the ditch.

|     The point is simply this: talk is cheap.  Ideas untested by reality are cheap.

Another disguise of the long view is focus on abstract principles and values.  Here the premise is that if we promote the right ideals, good results will happen, someday.   A corollary belief in this setting is that if we are not “walking the walk,” the cause must be that we are not “talking the talk.”  Unfortunately, experience teaches us that, all too often, the people who are the biggest espousers of principles and values are also the biggest flaunters.  (So many spectacular examples of moralizing scoundrels have made the national news recently–no need to recount their bizarre exploits here!)  Interestingly, people with high integrity often do not talk much about their values and principles, preferring to let their actions speak for themselves.   Of course, there are counter examples on both sides.  There are those who preach loudly, faithfully living out their doctrine, and also those who flout law, morality and ethics, but discretely, avoiding hypocrisy, at least.   The point is simply this: talk is cheap.  Ideas untested by reality are cheap.  Unfortunately, in our modern institutions, digging a ditch often becomes a highfalutin exercise in talking about “good” ditch digging while the shovels sit idle.  And the windbags doing the talking rarely get anyone closer to having a functioning ditch!

After a long life of “not looking up” within organizations that are mired in process, principles, and values, but lacking meaningful achievements, people often take on the persona of Sisyphus, the mythic King cursed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it come rolling back down.  Perhaps you have seen this “Sisyphean” look before.  Grim.  Determined.  Nose to the grindstone.  The look that says, “We are on the Titanic and we are riding it into the cold deep, all the way to the bottom.”  I recently saw that look on the face of a basketball player, his team down 30 points with five minutes to go, still fighting for every rebound.  It is the look of honor in defeat.   Hopefully not the look in the mirror!

I served as a narcotics prosecutor for several years.  I will never forget the day a senior leader in my department told me, “Dave, things will go a lot easier when you realize we are powerless to change what’s going on out there.  We’re giving aspirin to a terminal cancer patient.”  Sisyphus.  He was a good man who knew the system didn’t work but kept on trying anyway.  There are so many such people in systems across America.  In their hearts they no longer believe success is possible, but they go through the motions because “looking up” and confronting system failure hurts too much.  It is easier and more comforting to keep shoveling, taking the long view, with faith in our process and principles.   At least I am still trying. This is what we say to ourselves as the boulder rolls back.

What is the courage to “look up”?  What does it mean?  It starts with crediting our own observations of reality rather than believing a fable when its narrative no longer rings true in our experience.  Beware.  Those defending the status quo will question the credentials of those showing the courage to confront reality.  They will deny the visceral experience of system failure by attacking the perception of the failure.  “Who are you to say that the ditch cannot be dug?   Are you a professional ditch digger?  Have you been to ditch-digging University?  How long have you been digging?”  But what happens if the ditch digger credits his or her own common sense, puts down the shovel, looks up, and says, “If this is the solution, we’ve still got a problem.  Isn’t there a better way?”    The willingness, the courage, to credit common sense experience is one of the great well springs of American progress.

As Emerson wrote in Self Reliance:

Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature.

Something powerful and deeply liberating rises inside us when we have the courage to look up, when we recognize outright failure, or its close cousin, progress that is so slow it amounts to failure.  In that difficult moment, we may recognize losses, wastes of time, missed opportunities.  But the courage to stop doing what does not work often opens important paths to new strategies.  The great leaders of our time have had the courage not only to persist, but also to stay focused on painful reality and to continue to innovate in the face of poor performance.  Breakthroughs come when we persist in meeting failure with new strategies.

So what should we tell a scout of the future?  Don’t play Sisyphus.  Instead, come to work with a commitment to blast that boulder into orbit.  And as you do, keep this in mind.  When you’re digging a ditch, look up.  And if hard work doesn’t produce meaningful progress, then stop.  And go get some dynamite.