The conference experience. As I scrambled to fit ever more words onto a PowerPoint slide for a presentation at my summer conference, I stopped myself: who was going to read all of this in my allotted 10 minutes in one of the last sessions of the last day of the conference? I stepped away from my keyboard and put myself in my audience’s shoes. What would they most want to hear? I believe good communicators do this all the time, not only considering “What would I hope to get out of this experience?” but also “Here’s what I want you to pay attention to. Here’s what I want you to take away.” While I’ve been presenting in such settings for over two decades now, I still needed to remind myself to consider my audience’s experience, so I wouldn’t lose them. Any occasion when we have the privilege to communicate our perspective to an audience is an opportunity to craft a meaningful experience for them. Approaching such a situation with intention is key.

Imagine a room like this but 5x smaller, with just 10 people crammed in, hoping to escape…

Photo by Headway on Unsplash

Zooming out from the paper presentation session (which went just fine by the way), I also considered the larger conference, where almost 10, 000 people converged onto central Philadelphia, strewn across the city’s convention center and largest hotels. Last year, it was a delight to have just one courtyard in a central conference center in Copenhagen, Denmark, where everyone ended up colliding with each other over shared food and drink. Yet, occupying one large space made it difficult to hear someone talk over the speaker in the session one temporary partition away. This year, I enjoyed walking all over Philly, but it can be hard to make connections as you powerwalk from one hotel to the next. First-year doctoral students feel overwhelmed and excluded from the chaotic hotel lobby and business school reception conversations that pop up among more experienced conference-goers. I know others who’ve failed to find community among the crush of souls distributed across whatever city we are in and who just avoid the conference altogether.

One trick is that more experienced conference-goers “hack” their social experience outside the main conference. For me, participating in smaller meetings and conferences over the years created opportunities to develop high-quality connections under much quieter and smaller circumstances. Those connections transfer over to the larger meetings; it’s easier to “find your people” when you already have them. Others craft experiences outside the flow of presentations and symposia: I was lucky enough to join a lunch planned by a friend of mine who gathered people around non-work connections (this daily carnivore got to lunch with a group of serious vegans). Some other friends invited folks they’d known from the time they were doctoral students to celebrate getting promoted to full professor, the highest rank in our field. Sweating it out on the dance floor the night before you chair a panel reminded me that I was still human. To its credit, our association has also developed numerous occasions to welcome new members and help them “find their people” in this big tent. The point is that, for an occasion where people interview for their first academic job, where being listed on the program matters for tenure, and where who you interact with could spark a major collaboration, the efforts that go into crafting the experience of that occasion (and getting some help to do so) can bring some ease and comfort in an otherwise anxiety-provoking setting.

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

The World Cup experience. Even before I caught myself mid-shovel-sling of words onto a PPT slide, I was reminded of the power of experience by a recent article on the different experiences of the World Cup, from the (very) expensive field-level seats and suites to the stratospheric nosebleeds. At field level you might “feel, briefly, as if you might be able to reach out and touch the face of God. Or…the face of Kylian Mbappé.” Later on, in the same stadium, at the same match, the height and angle of the nosebleed seats made the author feel like she might “plummet to [her] death at any moment.” FIFA – the governing body of (association) football, a.k.a, soccer – is well aware of the power of selling experience, given the nuanced tiers and dynamic pricing that made many fans wistfully sit out the very experience they cherished.

What was beautifully ironic about this account was that the author conceded to the challenge of privileging one experience over another. While “luxury,” field-level seats grant you literal proximity to greatness, with world-class athletes potentially brushing past you, it’s hard to watch a football match from the field since it unfolds “across planes so vast they can be understood only in real time from elevation.” Like her, I land more on the side of the collective experience, while accepting the subjectivity of it all. Like the conference, the paper presentation session, my classroom and your workplace, it’s hard to figure out just what will give everyone their desired felt experience. But, having some forethought about the possible experiences they might have based on the physical layout, the activities, and social infrastructure (Can people see and talk to each other? Can they form meaningful connections? Can they learn from each other?) will at least help you know what to keep an eye on when you do check in.

Different attempts at collective experience at the France-Iraq match in Philly this June

Experience in our society. The subjectivity of experience makes it slippery and difficult to articulate, even when it moves from the subconscious perceiving and monitoring our bodies continuously perform, to the conscious, felt awareness or those pesky “feelings” we’re always grappling with. This is the case whether it’s students in my classroom, audience members listening to a research presentation (God bless ‘em), or employees feeling their way to how much they want to “show up” today. It’s hard to measure and, thus, hard to commoditize. Outside of art, music and sport, we have to intentionally look hard for cues that tell us about the quality of the flow of ongoing experience. And this is where Jason Arday’s story comes to mind. You can read more about Prof. Arday’s experience and his recent, tragic death in a variety of places but the kicker is just how articulate he was about his experience of being hounded by the press. He said in his resignation note from Cambridge University that he’d “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.” Hounded by 188 additional articles about his character after his resignation. Hounded to the point of being found dead at his home on August 15^th.

We ignore such plain pleas at the peril of our individual and collective goods. We cannot afford to ignore when someone or whole groups of people are crying out in suffering and pain. These could be subtle, even weak, cues such as the presenteeism on the rise in our workplaces. Or the cues can be as baldly compelling as “I can’t breathe.” Given its fluid and slippery nature, experience is easily discounted so, as a society (and with organizations the most powerful actors in our society, in our workplaces too), we need to pay attention and then respond accordingly. I wish peace on Jason Arday’s family and for those that have lost loved ones in painful and tragic ways. But hopefully this is a wakeup call for us to attend in our own micro-settings to whether the people around us are gleeful and collectively effervescent or mute because so much of who they are is stifled.

How will you attend to experience in your own life today?

On June 13, my husband and I were driving to a memorial service when we listened to Scott Pelley’s interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Pelley was a mainstay of the venerable CBS News magazine 60 Minutes. You might recall his silver hair, square jaw and a captivating baritone that conveyed gravitas like no other. He was describing the experience of his recent firing after he stood up for his colleagues who had been unceremoniously fired after a change in the 60 Minutes and CBS News top brass. His shock and grief were clear in his voice: he described the experience as a “murder” or a “massacre” of family and explained that part of the shock was the contrast with the work environment he’d loved for decades, one where people could hash things out to get to the truth of the matter, both interpersonally and professionally. There have been a few critiques of his characterization of the experience (e.g., that he didn’t sound like an unbiased journalist), but I don’t think that was his point. His provocative storytelling was effective in driving home the sense of loss and grief he’d experienced in losing his work family. What’s clear from his account is that he remains bewildered by the rationale for the firings and is concerned about how to preserve the relational ties and organizational wisdom inherent in those ties.

On July 7, a little over three weeks after listening to and processing Pelley’s account, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed during an ICE traffic stop in Houston. According to the NY Times, he “was a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the city for more than three decades…He was not the intended target of the ICE operation, federal officials acknowledged, after initially saying he was.” The article, also reporting on today’s order for ICE to cease most vehicle stops, continued: “In Maine, ICE agents shot and killed a Colombian man early Monday, also in his vehicle. He was identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, according to a spokesman for Senator Angus King of Maine. A statement from the Homeland Security Department was unclear about whether Mr. Guerrero was the person that agents had been seeking.” A local resident in Maine who said she saw a screaming woman on her knees next to a young girl, was quoted as saying she “heard agony…I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”

These are cases of organizing for ugliness, if not cruelty. When we don’t step up to the challenge of making difficult organizational or institutional decisions while balancing human dignity and compassion, we have lost the plot. When goals remain unclear, ambiguous and confounding while expecting members to simply comply, motivation and energy go out the window. When human pain emerges in a situation and our organizational processes fail to acknowledge and address it, collective, concerted action is unsustainable.

Juxtapose all of this with the World Cup. I know, the comparison may seem unfair, maybe even frivolous. But, for anyone paying attention to the world at large, this is the very tension we all grapple with: organizational ugliness coinciding with organizational beauty. Cruelty and kindness simultaneously unfolding in different corners of the world. We have to step up to the ugliness but also take solace and inspiration in the beauty we can find that is still part of the human experience. In many ways, the World Cup is not just a salve but chance to see organizing come to life in inspiring and unexpected ways.

Since it began 34 days ago, the World Cup has continuously brought amazing human skill and joy to our screens and – if you’re lucky – on the pitch right in front of your seat in the stands. Trevor Noah has maintained a World Cup Watch Party for matches and recaps the ups and downs of each week with his “frenemy” Joe Opio. The Week 1 recap first caught my ear (via his podcast). Trevor and Joe were so excited not just for the excellence displayed by their fellow African players and teams, but also just for the plain joy of the game. Listen to Trevor recount with wonder being able to perceive whole teams moving with purpose across the field; beauty inherently involves being able to perceive elements coming together in some moving, pleasing way. Hear Joe extol the virtues of the US team players “inviting” each other to the ball as they played joga bonito (sorry about last Monday’s ignominious exit fellas).

The wonder and even ecstasy of human collective action with fun and joy as its end has been on full display week after week. Take Norway’s “Viking Row”…

After a heartbreaking loss to England last Saturday – due to two brilliant Jude Bellingham goals - more than 100, 000 people showed up in Oslo to welcome the team home with a massive Viking Row!

While you might have seen the row during or after a Norway match, every match began with the unfurling of both countries’ flags depicted on huge banners, unfurled by teams moving in unison across the pitch. This is some video from our time at the France-Iraq match in the group stage in Philadelphia a few weeks ago.

And then there’s the hope and the promise of the future of the game embodied in the youth peppering the ranks of many teams. Young men like Lamine Yamal of Spain, Gilberto Mora of Mexico and Endrick from Brazil (saw him score against Egypt in a friendly match in downtown Cleveland in June) will certainly continue to excel and entertain for a couple more decades. If Messi is still flexing at 38, then hopefully so can they.

I know what you’re thinking: isn’t there ugliness in the sport too? Of course there is. I hail from the land of former FIFA Vice President Jack Warner, who is still awaiting extradition to the US on corruption charges. FIFA’s naked greed is evident in the ticket prices, parking prices, hotel prices and all the other prices preventing diehard fans from participating. The “flopping” or “simulated” injuries on the field – where Oscar winners are made week after week – distract from the skill that should be the star of the show. Et bien sur, le racisme also rears its ugly head, evoking bewilderment and disgust at the contradictory claims to love the fluid, skilled beauty of a sport, while hating the very embodiments of that beauty for their looks.

Ultimately, though, I credit the experience of the past few weeks with bringing both the beautiful and the ugly onto the world stage. Never have I seen such rapid and frequent discussions from all corners of society about immigration, racism, skill, excellence, belonging, joy, beauty and heartbreak. With the summer rushing right past us here in the northern hemisphere, I hope you take some time to get energized and inspired with some beautiful football this week with the finals this Sunday at 3 pm EDT, while minding where we can combat the ugliness in our lives. And keep it classy like Mbappé did a few minutes ago as France just lost to Spain. My mind is still reeling but I trust there is more brilliance to come.

— Zobia, New York

Second thoughts get a bad rap. We’re trained to go with our gut and to show off how we can shoot from the hip with a quip, opinion or snarky comment. This is coming from the guy whose brother, in delivering his best man speech, said I was a “wellspring of snark.” So I know of which I speak. This is almost comically the case in your stereotypical academic setting, where displays of expertise are rewarded but certainly the case in so many of the settings we move through across our life. Thinking and re-thinking an initial thought or impulse to act can be seen as a sign of weakness and indecisiveness; such “flip-flopping” can be more often penalized than rewarded.

Image from https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1278758

But maybe, just maybe, we need a little more intentionality these days. However, this bias to march forward, firm in one’s convictions is pretty ingrained. I feel it too: when my co-authors and I wrote a recent piece on intentional attentiveness, I remember being concerned about how busy managers might receive the word “intention” and all the effort it entails. But a few things have come across my radar that have made me put my own stake in the ground in appreciation of intentionally taking the time for second thoughts:

· The kids might just be alright. I was really struck by the opening quote I shared from a NY Times piece on “Teenagers on the Best Advice They’ve Ever Received.” With the supercomputing power we now hold everyday in the palm of our hands, it’s easy to take for granted the ease of sending a message that can be read by anybody and everybody. But I’ve always wondered what if we all took just 10 seconds before hitting “Send” to review what we wrote, think about what our intention, who might read it, and whether we are accomplishing what we hope to accomplish? Maybe you’re already doing this but, I suspect, for many of us, that pause, that hesitancy, might help us either just not share something and, instead, maybe just chew on it, consider another way to dialog about it, get more information on it, or invite live, unfiltered conversation with another human being.

· Excellent organizations run on second thoughts too. In this graduation season, the question of whether our students are actually learning how to think critically also crops up (or it should, after looking at those years of tuition now piled up). I’ll stick my neck out and say we sure are trying over here. A lot of what I research and teach, along with my friends and colleagues in the fields of positive organizational scholarship and organizational change and development is about intentionality. Part of what we do is capture and make sense of how organizations intentionally seek out and try to practice what is good. For example, in a recent paper on humanistic organizing, the authors map out the intentionality of Greyston Bakery whose founder set the goal of helping the “chronically underemployed” or “people who were routinely overlooked or rejected—such as those without work experience, people with disabilities, immigrants, or people with a past criminal history—so they could receive the possibilities and opportunities offered by employment.” This required and still requires giving second thoughts about both all the challenges this may present for running an organizing, and the potential for uplifting people and populations who normally may not get a second chance. Here in Cleveland, Brandon Chrostowski has carried out the same intention in founding EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute, where the dining experience is defined by “intentional chaos.” This experience is crafted by workers for whom the service industry is their second chance after incarceration, when most of society (i.e., most of us) typically make re-entry challenging. EDWINS – its food, the learning that goes on in its Institute, and its community outreach – is thriving. If we think of any excellent organization – your favorite sports team, theater or musical ensemble, hospital system, the military etc. – all of that excellence, surviving and adapting isn’t happening by chance. In my own experience in the field, you see this in organizations that invest in gleefully (but, sometimes, painfully) collecting feedback and reflecting on it so they can learn. Excellent organizations take the time to pause and have second thoughts about where they’re going and why.

· Society might need our unconscious second thoughts. One of the main reasons I wanted to write about second thoughts was this recent article in Nature Human Behavior written by a friend and faculty colleague here at CWRU, Heath Demaree and a team of co-authors led by one of his former doctoral students. I hadn’t seen Heath in a long time (not unusual in academia where we often get way too busy for own good) and he was so excited about the discovery they’d just published that it was infectious! His paper is about the Implicit Association Test (IAT) - which you can take here if interested – and hesitancy (those pesky second thoughts). Now, remember all the press around the IAT in the early part of this decade, in the swirl of the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice reckonings with the rise of the #metoo movement and George Floyd’s murder? As the world, and the United States in particular, came to grips with how a range of painful issues were entrenched in patterns of bias, this test and the term “implicit bias” that were formerly limited to the world of social psychology found their way into the public consciousness (pun intended). The test involves presenting participants with one concept, like a Black or White face, and then another concept, like the words “good” or “bad.” So if a Black or White face is presented, do you associate it with “good” or “bad?” You make these selections very rapidly across numerous kinds of objects and concepts across many trials. You can see a pattern over time in terms of the response speed, which can be interpreted in terms of implicit (i.e., unconscious or unspoken) sentiments, judgments and biases. So, if I am presented with a Black face and I’m selecting “good,” do I take longer to select “good” than I would if it was a White face? And does this effect hold across a variety of associations? If so, this may indicate an unconscious bias against Black people, right? Right?

Image taken from Bhati (2020)

Heath’s paper with his colleagues suggests a different interpretation, one that I think we should seriously consider. I believe that, regardless of our identity, we all swim in a culture or social system with all sorts of stubborn biases baked in. Things that we learn about the people that don’t think, look or sound like us and about the very people that do. Ideas that hold it is better to set ourselves apart, rather than see ourselves as connected. In the venerable words from the Broadway musical, Avenue Q, “everyone’s a little bit racist” (with the caveat “But everyone is just about as racist as you!”). For me, this means that we’ve all absorbed a lot of junk and often hold onto it without knowing it. These are often our first thoughts. What Heath and colleagues found after analyzing over 115, 000 unique IAT sessions was that, while there might be implicit bias in participants’ brains, the results could also be partially explained by what they called “response caution.” This reflects people slowing down on incompatible trials to avoid making mistakes and to improve performance accuracy. What I think they’re pointing out is that both bias and response caution can be in operation. People may hold some sort of bias but they can also slow down enough to shift their choices and behavior.

This gets to Zobia’s wisdom. Flitting between the conscious and unconscious, we are able to check ourselves: “Hey first thought, you’re not so great. Let’s bring in second thoughts and see what they say.” As Heath put it: don’t we want people to actually slow down to make better decisions and fairer, more ethical judgments? I wholeheartedly agree with him (and Zobia’s dad). I think the challenge is for us to accept that some, maybe not all, of our first thoughts probably suck. To accept that we can be mean, petty, vengeful, and lazy in our reliance on heuristics. (A stereotype is a type of heuristic, or path of least resistance for making quick judgments, where we project attributes onto individuals based on their group membership). Heuristics save brain capacity; think of the last time you pulled into your garage at home and jolt upright at the realization that you can’t recall how you got there. The familiarity of your commute allowed your brain to roam or dwell on a sticky problem without (thankfully) causing an accident. But the social world is obviously complex and, given the complexity of today’s world, I wager that we can’t afford to rely just on first thoughts. For example, it matters what gets shared on social media from the heights of government and what information is spread about science, healthcare and the environment. These should all receive quite a lot of second thought before they are shared. And this is why the scientific enterprise is so important, since it involves quite a number of first, second and even third and fourth thoughts. Yes, maybe the process could be a little quicker, but it’s imperative to train the practice of second thoughts. Research is telling us that there is a capacity for intentional pausing and that it may very well be a good thing. Our universities and schools can and should lead in training this capacity by asking students to reflect on the effects of what they and others produce. It also implicates our first places of learning, our homes, with our parents. That piece of advice may have been an offhand comment for Zobia’s dad but, for Zobia, it was worth submitting to the New York Times. In our daily speech and actions with each other, those second thoughts may be more meaningful than we may ever know.

Good evening Black Student Union grads, members, families and friends! How we doing? I feel so privileged to be asked to address you as you mark one of the most important transitions in your life. Thank you to Amarachi Osaji and James Kline for thinking of me and extending the invitation. By way of introduction, for those of you that may not know me, I have been a professor of organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management for 16 years. I’ve had a few of you in my classes so far, but not many of you. Hence, I am very grateful to make this connection, as I know so many of you hail from all over campus, bound together by this union. Most of my time in my role as a professor is actually spent outside the classroom, in my office or in the field or in the lab with my research team, studying how people relate to each other in the workplace, particularly how people come together as a unit or collective as they organize to get big things done. So, this makes for yet another connection, as you come together to support and celebrate each other now, just as you have been over your time here at CWRU. My goals in talking to you this evening are threefold: 1) to not take too long, and 2) to encourage you and cheer you 3) from my vantage points as a faculty member, a member of the African diaspora, a former international student and an immigrant. I can also sum up what I hope you takeaway tonight in one word: belonging.

So let’s start at the start. I am somebody who is, according to ancestry.com. from all over the place. I am wearing my national colors tonight, as a proud native of Trinidad & Tobago, the most southerly islands in the Caribbean, lying off the coast of Venezuela. Trinidad and Tobago is the most ethnically diverse and most industrialized country in the English-speaking Caribbean. That industry has been supported not just by our petrochemical reserves but by waves of settlement, first by the indigenous Amerindians or Taino tribes, then the Spanish, the French, the British, enslaved and free Africans, indentured Indians, Chinese, Irish, Portuguese, Syrians, Lebanese and others. I am a product of that unique mix of races, cultures, religions, symbols, languages, festivals and, of course, cuisines. So, let me pause and get a sense of the diversity of people in the room from across the diaspora: can my Caribbean people wave a hand or stand up, or just holler!? From which islands? What about our African brothers and sisters? From which country? Our African-American family members? From which cities or states? [I heard “Jamaica!,” “Trinidad!,” “Nigeria!” “Ghana!” and “GHANA!” and folks from every corner of the United States]

And did I miss anybody? Ok, good! Now, when you think of food from anywhere touched by the diaspora, anywhere and any tradition you hail from, what do you think of? Is it certain colors, smells, textures? [Here is where people start to shout out answers: there was a very persistent Jamaican dad with “curry duck” but Trini “pelau” also got thrown out]

Nice! Well I think of spice. I think of flavor. I think of seasoning. Just to make a point, anybody here ever try the Trinidad Scorpion pepper? It is one of THE hottest peppers in the world, a hybrid whose parentage is derived from the Trinidad Moruga scorpion indigenous to Trinidad and Tobago. You never tried it? Well never have I; and I probably never will!

So seasoning, flavor, spice. I bring this up not in some off-handed way, meaning just because of your heritage, our inheritance, that you bring flamboyance and flair. I mean…we do that too. But I mean more sincerely something along the lines of how the Bible talks about being salt for the earth. Without salt, food loses its tastiness, its flavor, its joy, its meaningfulness. Our seasonings, salts and spices provide flavors that make us want more. Now, it is certainly possible to have too much salt. But that’s where you come in, leveraging your skills at elevating yourselves, others, the conversations you join and the ideas you develop. You bring balance to all the situations you find yourself in, by virtue of your unique experience. It is through your invaluable and unique perspectives that you have been the salt of this institution. And I think, more precisely, the salt that you add is a sense of belonging. I think of the fact that I have not met many of you but that you are all together right now, building and sharing a welcoming space for folks that hail from very different backgrounds and perspectives. You have taken the sense of “otherness” that someone might feel as a person of color on a predominantly white campus, or that an international student who has left their home country for the first time might feel, and translated that into a sense of “we-ness,” into a Union. And, just from scrolling through your Instagram page, I can see that you have done a lot to be proud of in that regard. You have created welcoming spaces at major transition points, like welcome BBQs and this graduation celebration. You have stood up for the oppressed and spoken out against the rollback of progress. You have also celebrated the accomplishments of black women and the invisible work they perform in society. You have been salt for this institution, seasoning and flavoring this place.

[From https://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/abcs-of-nutrition/the-salt-of-the-earth/#gsc.tab=0]

I reflect these accomplishments of creating belonging back to you because I believe it is a superpower that I hope you don’t ignore or take for granted. Your experiences here at CWRU can help you empathize with those, from other walks of life, and other arenas, other backgrounds. With others who feel like they don’t have a voice or a particular place or a particular home. For a fellow student or colleague who feels a little like a fish out of water. A friend who is questioning where to go next. An international student who has to navigate crossing borders in a troubled political, and social landscape. I have not had every experience under the sun, nor can I claim to fully understand someone else’s journey or story. But if I can relate, just a little bit, I view that as a privileged opportunity to create a space where folks can feel seen and welcomed, even if just based on a small thread of connection, just as you have been doing for each other year in and year out. I see this strength of connection on display tonight not just as a privilege but also as a skill. Bringing together various seasonings and flavors as you’ve done so beautifully in your time together is something that our organizations, and social institutions sorely need today. It is not a skill that artificial intelligence can replace. It is, in fact, one that employers are aware they need. I know that today’s job market out there is insane and the global uncertainty faced by all sectors and industries does not make it easy to fall asleep at night. But I still wager that the superpower you have developed in your time together, of not just seeking belonging, but providing and creating belonging, is more and more necessary. In a world of work where people are increasingly disconnected, disengaged, and lonely, you are salt, you are seasoning. You are the flavor that brings out all the other flavors and helps them “pop” right along with you. And just to be clear, this is not a mandate to go help others feel included and safe and welcomed, to your own disadvantage. No, this is a reminder that what you’ve cultivated with each other is a special strength that deserves to be valued, nurtured and rewarded. Your flavor is what the world needs.

I’ll leave you now with a few more reminders. Whatever you’ve gone through in your time here at Case Western Reserve University, you have been burnished, but not burnt. You have been polished, coming through the fires of intense studies, of friendships made and lost, of questioning and trying to find your place in the world. None of us are perfect, but we are still seeking and becoming. You have spent the past few years taking up space where you need to and creating space for others when you need to. I encourage you to celebrate and remember that you’ve built up a superpower of flavoring the world, creating belonging where it is most needed. I hope that you take some time to reflect on your experience here at Case Western Reserve University. Take the time to reflect on how you flex that superpower and practice what you have learned, and not just hop from one thing to the next, which is what a lot of us tend to do. That time with yourself will help you appreciate everything that you are, and help you to mindfully set intentions to continue creating those kinds of experiences for yourselves and others. You now have an opportunity to show others what it looks like to build a place of belonging. Thank you for all that you’ve brought to this university and all that you will continue to bring wherever you are in your families, in your neighborhoods, in your cities, in your institutions and organizations, and in your countries. Thank you for these few minutes with you, our future.

This is actually a fundamental idea in social, cognitive and developmental psychology. Our mothers are how we come to know the world and also how we come to know how to make meaning of the world. This is grounded in our practicing joint attention with our moms as infants. The mother-infant dyad (just you and your mom hanging out, feeding, playing, fussing, smiling, crying, tending, etc.) is the crucible of our development as social beings.

In that dyadic, relational space, moment after moment, day after day, month after month, mother and child try to grab each other’s attention with oohs, aahs, gurgles, eye gazes, pointing and facial expressions to say “Hey, come check out what I care about!” That attention paid to you lets you know that you are valued. That responsiveness is attuned not only to our physical survival as infants but also, because we're human beings, feeds our emotional and social engagement and development. That mutual attention is how we learn about concepts and objects in the world, and how to make meaning of them, how we learn about what is what, who is who and how it all comes together as a buzzing, blooming social world.

Our moms’ reactions to the world introduce us to a repertoire of possible events and reactions. It's through that joint engagement, that pointing, that looking, that smiling while holding us that we learn about what is good and begin to recognize that there are others in the world with their own perspectives. I know that we all have different moms and experiences with these women and caregivers. I’m sure most of us didn’t think every moment with our moms was perfect. I’m sure they didn’t either! But for every tough moment I hope there was another with her or someone in a mom-like role that taught you to attend to the world through someone else’s eyes.

If you haven’t already, be sure to call your mom today if you can. Especially if you haven't in a while. I could leave it there, but also, if your mom isn't with you anymore, hold a thought for her. Give her a moment of attention the same way that she did to you.

Photo by Max Wolfs on Unsplash

The experience and ritualization of waiting connects believers across the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity – as well as other faith traditions that practice meditation or fasting in some way. Holding vigil as so many of us do to honor loved ones we have lost, or as my mother does each night, staring out into the darkness as she awaits my sister’s safe return home from work, is not unique to people of faith either. In the service known as the Easter Vigil last Saturday night, I got to sing for and witness to a small congregation gathered to celebrate new life in baptism and confirmation. But three hours later, and fighting off the remnants of a cold, I was certainly waiting, too, to go home to celebrate with a lazy Easter on the couch. New Yorkers and those in locales where “the new” is constantly celebrated and visible seem to enjoy waiting too, even in Big Dumb Lines for the latest taco, pizza, or a very special windbreaker.

Maybe the faithful of all stripes are onto something when they valorize waiting, whether in holy texts or outside of Supreme stores. In waiting, we slow down enough to pay attention to our immediate experience of an unfolding process. Most of the time, waiting can feel viscerally painful. Many of us have recently felt frustration in long TSA lines, with our joy postponed and our vacation destination seeming farther and farther away with each ticking second as our feet warm the same spot in the terrazzo floor. Outside the airport, we might want to renew our driver’s license or grab a half pound of sliced turkey but find ourselves holding ticket #99 when #37 is just getting called. Frustration understandably emerges from a sense of distance from a valued goal or outcome. But waiting – and doing it for long enough, under the right conditions – can help us reframe how we think about those distant outcomes and recognize what’s worthwhile in the here and now.

Waiting helps us sit in and appreciate process, helping us to take a more appreciative, less anxious perspective on far-off outcomes. A correlate of this in my field can be found in what we call practice theory or simple “practices.” The idea is that, historically, much of organizational studies has focused on “performance” in terms of outcomes like number of widgets made, budget, schedule, quality, satisfaction and lots of other things that are really important. While we can count or measure these things, we can’t really understand much about them without appreciating the processes that produce and affect them. A “practice” perspective says that much of these “hard” outcomes are actually comprised of patterns of behaviors unfolding and adapting over time among participants. Not just single behaviors at certain points in time, executed by some powerful person somewhere. Instead, the world can be understood in terms of interweaving, pulsating threads of speaking, doing, and feeling that form patterns that further shape what we say, do and feel. Moreover, like religion (whether organized or of Supreme merch) practice is social. The patterns of how we line up and interact in a TSA line are shaped by others and we, by falling into line or not, reinforce the pattern or force it to adjust. The same goes for our workplaces and how we effectively accomplish all the “strategic” goals and outcomes we read about in the news. It takes all of us, and what we say and do in patterned ways, to make the world go round. Waiting helps us slow down enough to zoom in on those patterns and, perhaps, sometimes, ask…”What are we doing? What am I doing? Why?”

Focusing on practice has helped me appreciate waiting. Viewing change in any organization, group, or person in terms of practices and patterns has helped me be more patient with myself and others. Patterns aren’t easily broken. Who we are right now – whether as people or as organizations - is an instantiation of years of doing, saying, thinking and feeling in ways that served us at some point. Taking on the weighty task of “being” or “doing” things differently is often fraught with resistance, disappointment and frustration. A little forgiveness, grace and self-compassion can be easier to come by if you take the weight of the past into account. Armed with that grace, you can then start to appreciate that the same holds true for the future. If it is to be different, then it has to begin with small actions that we commit to, actions that slowly shift the patterning we have carefully (or not so carefully) built up over time. Waiting reminds us that we got here over time and will get “there,” wherever that is, over time and in time.

Final, final thought: What we wait on matters. After drafting some of this earlier in the day, I got into my car and heard newscasters waiting and waiting, narrating the minutes and hours until 8 p.m. EST to see if catastrophic devastation would be wrought by this country, or not. Just another Tuesday evening in 2026. Waiting by my news feed felt counterproductive and hopeless. As an ineffective salve, I called my Senator, Jon Husted’s, office and left a message imploring him to do something, anything. I believe that we need to remain aware of the world at large. Growing up on a small island demands that of you. Knowing about the possibility of things like wars, cruelty, violence and injustice, working to prevent it, and stepping up in the aftermath, certainly matters. But, from one Tuesday to the next, I’m waiting on the things in my immediate control – how I treat others, how I respond to challenges and unfairness in my work and neighborhood. I’m focused on changing the patterns and practices in front of me, mindful that, over time, the effects ripple beyond what we can see here and now.

Photo by David Taffet on Unsplash

1. One of my students emailed to let me know that the instructions for an assignment were unclear, maybe even inaccurate. With eyebrows raised beyond their typical mobility, I emailed to say what I’d written was, in fact, correct. He then pointed out the confusing detail in his next email. I could feel hackles rising but then caught myself - what the heck was wrong with me? It took a while, but I eventually accepted I was wrong and that yes, using the word “Sorry” in my response to him was appropriate. [My husband may or may not be familiar with this dynamic.]

2. Later in the week, I stepped up to the host stand at a campus restaurant to request a table for lunch with a colleague: “Hi there, I’d like a table for two for lunch, no reservation. And I’m waiting on my guest.” I thought I was being efficient until, after looking up what tables were available, the young man (most likely a student employee as well) politely asked “So are you waiting for two guests?” The way I’d stated my request and status was unclear, I can see now. I felt I was a little sharp in responding: “No, I’m waiting on just one more.” Even if it sounded just fine and pleasant to him, I knew I was thinking “Why didn’t he understand me right away?”

3. At the end of that same day, I was running an errand; I just wanted to get it done and go home. I got confused about how to enter the parking lot for the store I needed (where I wouldn’t have to pay) vs. the public parking lot (where I’d have to pay). I didn’t register that the former existed until I was already in the latter. A woman had just parked in that public lot and was getting out of her car. I had to exit the public lot, get onto the street and immediately turn into the entrance of the store lot (with me so far?). But that meant crossing over the sidewalk the woman was just about to step onto. She was several steps away from where she would cross in front of my car, and adjusting her coat, so I figured she was slower in her approach and I kept going. Yet, as I crossed the sidewalk she was about to step onto, I heard her mutter something, probably not very appreciative of my cutting in front of her! My internal response? She needed to chill out! It was only a few minutes later in the store that I realized how rude, maybe even potentially scary that may have been for her. Or maybe she, too, just wanted to get home at the end of the day.

[Photo by Saif71.com on Unsplash]

I don’t like how I behaved or how I felt in these situations. That feeling made me reflect about what was triggering these reactions. Was it pride? What else could it be? Having just taught a class on this, Daniel Shapiro’s Beyond Reason approach to disputes came to mind. Based on his experience with Middle East negotiations and more, he endorses the need to examine five core concerns when it comes to the things that trigger defensive postures in ourselves and the folks across the table from us. These core concerns include:

• appreciation (do I feel seen and understood?)

• role (am I happy with my designated function?)

• autonomy (am I agentic/able to make decisions?)

• affiliation (do I feel like I belong?)

• and status (do I feel respected?).

Maybe I felt my status or role was threatened with my students, or maybe I felt that my autonomy was at risk in the parking lot (and maybe that woman felt the same). As I thought about it some more, here’s what I think could help:

1. Slowing down, especially when tired, before I respond. This could be very effortful to pull off, but if it’s a rough week, setting a goal to slow down before I hammer out email or verbal responses might be useful.

2. Thinking the long game. Ultimately, in these kinds of situations, my status and role, and the other person’s status and role remain unchanged. Nothing under threat here, folks (is what I can tell myself)! My student is still my student and I’m still his professor. Even when I’m wrong. And maybe especially when I’m wrong, I may be in the best position to teach him what it looks like to acknowledge that.

3. Taking on their perspective. That woman may have been scared or, just like me, focused on getting through her tasks so she could go home to be with her family. The young restaurant host was probably just trying to give the best service he could. I’d like to do a better job keeping in mind that these kinds of mundane situations, even with their small frictions, are opportunities to connect, to acknowledge that we more likely than not share similar concerns and values. Even if we don’t share similar concerns and values, these small moments are micro-opportunities to learn how others view the world, striving in their own way.

If you have tips of your own, please share!

Last November, I got a ticket after parking in a poorly-signed handicapped spot (while the handicapped zone sign was high up behind a utility pole, the wheelchair decal was stripped off the parking meter). I’m happy to admit to a mistake but was upset that the poor signage wasn’t being addressed as I witnessed (and photographed) others similarly getting ticketed due to the confusing signage. Since my first appeal was denied, my next recourse was to go to the traffic court in downtown Cleveland’s Justice Center. Now, before you start thinking “What’s the big deal?” I’ll clue you in to my unique vantage point.. First, this was the same Justice Center made notorious in season 3 of the Serial podcast. Episode after episode detailed the insanity and inanity of the slow and often painful path experienced by those either seeking justice or to whom some version of justice was meted out. So, while I was there by my own choice, I still expected a pretty poor environment: long lines, apathetic staff, a broken system. Second, my 24 years in the United States classified as “immigrant” still outweigh my two years as “naturalized citizen.” I used to joke about being afraid to have a “record” of late library books or Blockbuster videos (yes, I am that old). Given the reports of simple traffic violations being held as cause for pursuing current legal immigrants, maybe I wasn’t far off. I was in my English class as a sophomore in college when 9/11 happened. I remember being told that all F-1 (i.e., student) visa holders were “on a list” or, at least, being scrutinized because at least one of the attackers also held such a visa. The climate of fear, of being monitored and trying to avoid the slightest slip-up, let alone a major social or legal transgression has been a fixture of my otherwise privileged life here in the US for decades. So, lil ol’ me, voluntarily setting a date to go to court? Who did I think I was? Jane Fonda? I didn’t think I enjoyed the same sense of security that undergirded her response of “One night, big deal!” when faced with a night in jail.

I’ll give away the punchline to this story here: my brief time in court was a series of pleasant surprises. It told me something about how someone could take interest and exercise skill in shaping a climate for justice. I think, for those of us lucky enough, we can recall a team leader, manager, a friend, or a parent, who was adept at shaping how people felt when they got together. In my field of organizational behavior, while there are varying definitions and ways of measuring it, “climate” generally refers to the shared, immediate experience or perception of the patterns of behavior and attitudes in an organization or a team. A related, more recent concept is “atmosphere.” While references to “vibes” seem to be pervading corporate-speak these days, “atmosphere” is about how the materials, space and our interactions with each other effect feelings that define our experience. Both concepts try to capture the felt experience of the daily situations we face in our organizations and institutions.

I’d been to the cavernous Justice Center a few months prior to file the appeal. I’d already gone through the uninviting security sensors at the doors where you were encouraged to leave your weapons. I’d already zigged and zagged, up and down various floors looking for the right spot to file the appeal. I’d already encountered some of the no-nonsense staff at their windows, intensely engrossed with whatever they were inputting to their computers, seemingly not too pleased with my interruption. So, as I stepped out of the security line and sought out Courtroom D, I had a less vague sense of where I was heading. As I got to the bank of elevators, a gaggle of youthful court staff with ID badges at their waists, coffee in hand, and office gossip to exchange, I saw the sign taped to the elevator door. It was a typical 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper, printed with the slogan: “we aim to be your problem-solving court.” This was definitely not what I was expecting.

As I stepped out of the elevator onto the floor I needed, I was cordially guided towards the hallway of courtrooms by the security guards. The judge and her clerk were there in the hallway too, poring over some folders. I asked them if I was in the right place and they said yes, pointing me towards Courtroom C and telling me they’d be right in. When I got to the room, it also wasn’t quite what I expected. Instead of a looming judge’s dais, a witness box next to it and a sea of seats for an audience, the small room felt like a compressed version of the images I’d absorbed from movies like 12 Angry Men. The judge’s dais didn’t loom, but was lower to the ground, with little distance between it and the two tables in front of it where lawyers (I guess?) would sit. Between those two tables was a simple podium to step up to when addressing the judge. Between the door and those two broad tables were three or four long benches, looking like they’d been lifted out from a nearby church and plopped into this clerical space. Rather than an august, wood-paneled cathedral of justice where one was meant to beg penance, this space felt manageable, rather than overwhelming or dehumanizing.

[So, NOT this! Image taken from https://www.supremecourt.vic.gov.au/about-the-court/virtual-info-hub/explainers-the-work-of-the-court/explainer-criminal-courtroom]

As I took a seat in one of the pews, I could see I was joining two other men. One of them, a young man in a suit, was sitting at one of the tables between the pews and the judge’s dais. The other, a younger man in a sport coat and slacks, with some dressy sneakers, was seated in the bank of pews across from mine. Soon enough, the judge and her clerk (both middle-aged women) entered the room, the clerk swore us all in and we proceeded. The judge was quite matter of fact and pleasant. She got right to the young man in the suit who was a lawyer contesting another case; since the opposing party was absent, he quickly left for another case. We had begun early and seemed to be dispatching things quickly, which was another pleasant surprising – hopefully I could get out early too! Soon enough, the judge called on the young man across from me and he stepped up to the podium. He was amazing. As he began to calmly and methodically recount his case, I realized that he was here for the same reason I was – that darn handicapped parking spot! It was when he got to phrases like “the City does not have the burden of proof...” that I realized I was witnessing something special. I’d submitted pictures and a narrative to make my case, but certainly didn’t have fancy legalese up my sleeve! The judge’s response was affirming and encouraging: “Hey, where’d you learn all that? Are you in law school?” It turned out that he was actually a law student who had parked in that spot so he could get to his campus job. She and the clerk took some time to chat with him, telling him that good people like him were needed in the judicial system, and that it was so nice to see a young person taking everything seriously and being prepared. After letting him know his testimony would be taken under advisement, he was dismissed.

That meant I was the only one left. After witnessing that exchange, I was encouraged but still unsure of how this would go. When I stepped up to the podium and thanked the judge for my audience, I said out loud what was on my mind: “I’d like to enter to the court ‘what he said!’” They laughed and I continued, bringing up the flyer on the elevator and sharing that I was really here to get help to solve the problem of this messy signage. I was more frustrated that this was an easy problem that the police didn’t seem interested in solving. Just as she had done with the young man before me, she invited and then listened to my account of what happened and why I felt it was a wrong decision on the part of the police. Her response was to reiterate that her intent was to use her court to solve problems. But then she went even further: in her response to the young man, she called his recounting “prosaic.” With me, she pointed out that it was rare to have well-prepared, well-dressed individuals come before her in her courtroom. While the letter specifying the court date also indicated the need to dress appropriately, I took her point. The young man and I were enjoying immense privilege from our education, employment and the environment we grew up in. She continued: given the needs of the clientele she usually adjudicated, a key part of the mission of her courtroom was also to educate. She wanted to ensure people understood why they were there, what was happening and what they could do about it. After some more exchanges, I too, was dismissed and able to get on with my day earlier than planned, but certainly encouraged by what I’d just experienced.

Why have I recounted all of this? As someone who traditionally could (or should) be wary of the U.S. judicial system, I couldn’t help but notice and appreciate how an individual placed in a literal seat of power could marshal spatial and procedural elements to ensure those involved felt that they were participating in a just process. She explicitly stated her mission and intent to educate and this was borne out in her demeanor, her use of inquiry, and in her listening. From her seat of power, she operationalized a clearly stated mission. While I could take comfort in my own privilege as a US citizen and academic, I didn’t take the climate and atmosphere she was creating for granted. I study how people meet and interact to get their shared work done, and it’s not a waste of breath to repeat how powerful an influence a leader has over all those gathered whether they want to be there or not. It is especially necessary when there are sharp power differentials for those with the leg up to be mindful of how they set the tone, how they acknowledge what people are bringing into the room, and whether or how they create the space to discover what understandings people are brining into the situation. This is true whether you’re directing a choir, teaching a class, running a meeting, or prepping a team in a huddle. Imagine a society where those who can flexed their climate- and atmosphere-creating muscles for the benefit of those sharing the space with them, one home, one courtroom, one classroom, and one Assembly house at a time.

I also wanted to change the name to reflect what I deeply care about. I teach my students to dig into others’ underlying interests and deep motivations. I write and give talks on how to build high-quality connections. But I struggle to practice what I preach. It takes a while in the middle of a tiff with my husband about who should clean the basement to remind myself that my righteousness is butting up against his needs too. I’m not always pursuing high-quality connections, preferring at times to just keep things low-quality and move on, regretting later what I could have learned if I’d nurtured and sustained that 5-minute encounter. So, as a reminder to myself, as much as a message for those of us wondering where to go next, I wanted to focus on what is still intrinsically there in us as humans: the fact that we matter to each other and keep mattering to each other. The Winter Olympics is ongoing (let’s go Trinidad & Tobago men’s and women’s giant slalom, men’s slalom and two- and four-man bobsleigh teams!) and the world just witnessed the solemn but joyful ritual of people coming together across countries and creeds, literally walking under a shared light. We create holidays like Valentine’s Day for crying out loud! So, on this Winter Olympics/Valentine’s Day weekend I wanted to reflect on our inherent capacity for connection, even though that may not be top of mind these days.

[Beating Heart emjoi Published by: Creazilla; Author: JoyPixels; Source: EmojiOne project]

We dwell in an age of easy disconnection. Decades later, Henri Tajfel’s “minimal groups” experiments, where simple, random assignations (by which painting your group supposedly preferred, or how much money you got, or even which pencil you had) split strangers into foes, still vividly show us how easily we sort into us vs. them. Tajfel knew the power of prejudice intimately, having himself survived World War II as a Jewish prisoner of the Germans. It seems the slightest cue (a Super Bowl halftime show anyone?) can set us adrift from one another. But that is only part of the human story. The great crime is selling a story of only ingroup vs. outgroup. Oh no. Self-defense comes naturally, but we are also made to bridge and embrace. We have to remember the other side of ourselves, our ability to embrace differences and to create family outside of bloodlines. That capability is woven into our shared human fabric at the cellular level.

I finally cracked open Steven Strogatz’s book Sync (thanks to the brilliant Hooria Jazaieri for giving me her copy to read last year) and it is chock full of insights into how our bodies and minds and nature itself self-organizes into complex systems. His wide-eyed wonder at an audience’s clapping eventually arriving at a steady pattern, at the summer dance of fireflies morphing into a symphony of light and at the syncing of internal clocks in our cells, organs and whole body systems is laid bare from the first page. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craighero’s influential articulation of how mirror neurons help us learn from observing each other and Marco Iacboni’s work on how those same neurons help us empathize and understand each other’s minds suggest that even our neurons have evolved to connect with other humans. Part of my dissertation research involved digging into the concept of “interpersonal synchrony”. Physics is why clocks that back onto the same wall eventually sync their ticking, but physics, chemistry, biology, culture, movement, emotions and aesthetics are all part of how humans eventually sync when we walk, run, dance and talk with each other. If you and I took a long enough walk together, our pacing would eventually sync up (let’s assume your legs are as short as mine). Because we are human, that sense of keeping together in time won’t just be left as physical fact. It will become associated with rapport, liking and closeness; our moving together is readily wrapped in meaning. Plain old physical closeness – the propinquity effect – can lead to liking each other. Think about it: running into the same people in the same spot for no reason other than having mailboxes in a central location or the water cooler at just the right distance from our offices can lead to catching feelings. Those feelings can build into what Harry Reis and colleagues term interpersonal chemistry, or a felt sense of “click” that emerges in our interactions.

Photo by Fitsum Admasu on Unsplash

I have to acknowledge that all of this is fragile. If that water cooler was a few feet farther from me and closer to you, would we even run into each other at all, let alone talk and form a bond? Maybe. It takes work. Reis’ work on responsiveness suggests that for us to sustain chemistry, let alone whole relationships, we need to lean into our capability of attending, listening, understanding and responding to each other in ways that meet each other’s needs. Reis and Sonya Lyubomirsky’s new book “How to Feel Loved” (it’s on my list!) seems to lean into this idea of responsiveness even further: if we want to feel loved, then we need to deploy our own openness and vulnerability (and encourage others to do the same).

All of this sounds hard, but worthwhile. Reminding myself that our very cells and simple cues of just being in the same place at the same time as others can foster connection helps make it all sound a little less challenging. Stepping back from noisy news and social media cycles driven by algorithms of division and reflecting on how we can be conduits for love, generosity and gratitude sounds like a good move as we lurch forward into what is still just the second month of the year.

What can we do when we finally turn away from our phones and TVs and go back to our comfortable lives? How can we genuinely answer “How are you?” with “I’m ok?”

You may have heard the term “cognitive dissonance” thrown around in an off-hand way in casual conversation. Many of us may chalk it up to a feeling of internal conflict that we need to resolve. This tracks with the original conceptualization by Festinger that various cognitions (e.g., thoughts, beliefs and attitudes) conflict with each other (e.g., my life is going pretty well vs. life is hard for others). The cognitions (e.g., beliefs or attitudes) may very well be unconscious, and we may only be aware of the conflict because of the feeling of discomfort. Festinger mainly theorized that we are motivated to reduce such discomfort and do so by finding ways to support the cognition most resistant to change. Much research has followed to tease apart how and why this happens and to produce different versions of dissonance theory. However, I’m particularly attracted to work by the psychologist Eddie Harmon-Jones that focuses on the role of action (maybe because that’s what I focus on in my research and what I think matters most for how we affect each other). Harmon-Jones points out that Festinger did not propose why cognitive inconsistency would induce discomfort. For Harmon-Jones: “cognitions usually have implications for behavior, and when these cognitions with action implications are inconsistent with one another, dissonance occurs because unconflicted and effective action cannot occur.” From this perspective, we’re not uncomfortable because our beliefs or attitudes are in conflict, but moreso because the actions that they will lead to are in conflict. The dissonant experience of January 2026 may very well be because of the actions in conflict: “doing what is needed to maintain personal comfort” vs. “doing what is needed to make a difference for others which may bring personal discomfort”.

Photo Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle for NPR

This matters because it forces us to move past how to change beliefs and attitudes (despite their importance) and focus on changing our behaviors. I can still hold conflicting sentiments – I do have a good life AND terror is evident in neighborhoods that look just like mine – but focus on the actions I’m committing to in this moment. Here are just a few encouraging and moving examples of folks doing just that – acting on the discomfort – that I’ve run across:

- Residents of Edina, a well-off suburb of Minneapolis, express and respond to their dissonance. This woman’s anguish and frustration (with herself and with the broader situation) is so palpable). But she took action.

- Folks in South Lebanon, OH are meeting to find common ground around immigration reform. These meetings are organized by the Braver Angels group that try to bridge people across political divides. They’re taking action.

- Chris Madel dropping out of the Minnesota governor’s race because he believed it aligned with his core principles. He wanted to be able to tell his daughters that he did the right thing when it was hard to do. He took action.

- And last but not least (here is where I wished I saved more videos), there was a video of a crowd outside a neighborhood convenience store in Minneapolis, confronting ICE agents. While one woman recited the constitutional rights of those being sought out in the store, an African-American woman spoke directly to one of the ICE agents, a tall, burly White man. She told him that she loved him and could see that he was probably a good person. Did he also love them, she asked? (not an exact quote, but you get the gist). What action!

I cite these as examples of uncomfortable actions undertaken by people who didn’t need to take them. I think that represents the majority of our society, and certainly the majority of folks reading this: we may experience terror ambiently, but it doesn’t shade each waking moment as it does for many others with whom we share a common humanity. I hope the examples help to remind us of what it may take to live a good life and to contribute to a good society. We define what is “good” by our actions. Alastair MacIntyre’s book “After Virtue” covers a lot of ground on what it means to pursue “good” with our actions. He puts forth the framework of “virtue ethics,” which suggests that the path to a life well-lived and to a “good” society is through reconciling potentially conflicting interests: what one pursues as good for the self also needs to be good for the collective. When we pursue the highest heights of excellence in whatever we do, what makes such pursuit “good” is not just our own self-aggrandizement but the uplifting of the community, the traditions, and the society in which we are embedded. As I grow, the community – all, and not just some, by my definition – needs to grow too. That is the virtue ethics measuring stick that seems absent from January 2026.

I started this Substack several months ago as a reaction to the historical moment we are in and to (hopefully) demonstrate the value that people like me could bring to this moment from our vantage point as academics, social scientists but, most of all, as complicated humans. A big part of my job is to explain human behavior, to understand how and when we can achieve excellence together. We cannot effectively do this without keeping MacIntyre’s words in mind: “Indeed without allusion to the place that justice and injustice, courage and cowardice play in human life very little will be genuinely explicable” (p. 199). And the virtues of justice, courage, honesty and wisdom really only matter when they shape our actions.

I did a little digging into what went into organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which Dr. King, Jr. helped to organize as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The SCLC was itself “an umbrella organization of affiliates” and Dr. King, Jr. joined their efforts to those of other organizations in a broad coalition to orchestrate the largest demonstration to date in the history of the nation. The latter were words spoken by A. Phillip Randolph at the March as he welcomed those present. He went on to galvanize the crowd by telling them they were not an unruly mob (President Kennedy had already affirmed that their orderliness signaled they were serious about their mission) but instead were “the advance guard of a massive moral revolution.” Many of the gatherings we have seen in the United States over the past few months and years (and now Denmark and Greenland this weekend) have a moral tint to them, a yearning to assemble with others around what is felt to be right and true. A few features of the March on Washington seem like stalwart elements of organizing as a collective that we could take note of, features that I see in the energizing and effective meetings that I study:

· Synchronous movement. Many of the images and sounds of the March on Washington immerse us in movement: marching, clapping, singing, listening and laughing. Imagine late August in Washington, D.C., under the open sky of the National Mall, sweating and smiling, arms aching from holding signs, and maybe some anxiety over whether this will all fall apart. Organizers helped to keep marchers bodily entrained, their attention and energy focused as they aimed their bodies, eyes and ears to musical acts and speeches on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, held hands as they collectively sang, and were peacefully massed together on the lawn with a clear shared goal. What do you do to create a sense of synchrony in your own organizing? Maybe you have the kids stand at attention like the von Trapp family, or have people take turns standing up to deliver their updates in your team meetings? Or maybe you’ve given everyone a chance to stretch and flex their muscles in the middle of a class?

[Untitled Image by James P. Blair; Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Jim and Elise Blair]

· Framing. The title of the March was “for Jobs and Freedom.” Civil freedoms were linked to economic success and economic success is something most folks could get on board with then and still can today. Work – and the dignity of work – is something a critical mass of folks view as collectively beneficial. We see how framing practices – how words are selected, used and repeated to give meaning to events and to decisions – have immense power today in our social and political landscape. How do you frame your actions to yourself, to your loved ones, and to all the other stakeholders in your life? What words and meanings are you (un)intentionally applying to persuade, to guide and maybe beguile? Can you be mindful about which frames work to inspire a critical mass?

· Intentional diversity. With over 200, 000 people in attendance and the world watching, the organizers of the March had to be quite careful about who would speak, in what order, and what they would talk about. They intentionally reflected the diversity of the crowd in the diversity of selected speakers and performers. Even now, in watching video of the March, you have no choice but to appreciate how everyone present might see a bit of themselves at the podium: men, women, Black, White, Jewish, labor, musicians, religious, etc. Do you intentionally ensure all voices are visible, perhaps with a end-of-meeting roll call to ensure everyone’s last thoughts are put on the table? Or do you rotate who takes the lead on different tasks, whether at home or at work? Just so they know they can do it (and have to figure it out, with support) and others can see them as part of the bigger story, the collective solution.

To keep learning about these moves (and their power), I recommend that you check out the following to aid your reflection this holiday:

Images: Kitty Kelley’s book “Let Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington” which pulls together Stanley Tetrick’s inconic documentation of the March in living color.

Movie: Rustin. This film introduces the world to Bayard Rustin, Deputy Director of the March, whose role as orchestrator was played down through history due to his identity as a gay man. Brilliantly played by Colman Domingo (couldn’t find any superlative that felt adequate for him)

Music: Lift every Voice and Sing - as sung by my alma mater, Morgan State University. We had to learn this song as students, sung at every Convocation and graduation. I took it for granted then - what was this “Black National Anthem?” Its words and themes now hold so much meaning for me during these times and I think you’ll find them inspiring too.

First, I’m checking in on myself and asking “What words capture how I’m feeling right now? What words capture how the nation is responding?” The words “calloused” and “callous” emerged in conversation with friends and colleagues last week who had the wherewithal to chat about this. As a lifter, I’ve developed calluses on the pads on my palms, just under where my fingers join my palm. These tough patches of skin developed over time to protect my (oh so soft) palms from the rough knurling on weightlifting bars that help you hold onto them. The calluses on my hand remind me of the calloused nature of my heart at times. Ah yes, another school shooting. Oh, more news of violent raids on immigrant communities? Ho, hum. Well, not really, but more like “This is so hard to process, and what can I do anyway?” And here is where having good people around you helps: those I was in conversation with reflected that calluses are your body’s way of protecting you from further harm, a response to continued damage and trauma. Sometimes the mental shelving and even forgetting is protective, as I’ve noted before. But it comes at the risk of letting injustice lie. Either way, in the first shadows of shock and grief, some grace and self-compassion are probably in order.

But “callous” – meaning being insensitive and uncaring – also bubbled up. The sentiment that someone deserved to die like that is mind-boggling. Renee Good is not the only victim of recent federal actions, and there are so many people who remain in pain because their families have been split apart or their custody is inhumane. There is much to be said about a country where violent death can be readily dismissed by governments, rather than mourned, no matter the cause or justification. A poet, wife and mother is now gone from the world and that is reason enough for a society to grieve.

Second, while tuning into the words and feelings swirling around these events, I’m letting myself be open to having those calluses slough off, tapping into the immediacy of what is happening and acknowledging that all of this is, in fact, close to home in various ways. This is where I think representing - through words and visuals - matters so much. Folks are lauding the bystander videos of Renee’s killing because it gives insight to the viewer, whether citizen or law enforcement, about how this unfolded. Imagery has always been a powerful tool, of course, but the accessibility, quality and ubiquity of modern smartphone videos makes it possible for much of the planet to access events in real time in ways never before experienced in history. This accessibility to immediate experience is why people appreciated the power of images in 2011’s Arab Spring, and the images of the tragedy of war in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine. Indeed, this is probably why Iran has imposed an Internet blackout this week, to limit the sharing of information but particularly images of protesters. As humans, it is important for us to see and feel happenings for them to hit home.

And this is where the video was particularly powerful for me. It was a residential street in Minneapolis that was the backdrop for the sickening moments that have drawn international attention. The recognizability of this mix of duplexes and old Victorians, the mundaneness of historic homes crowded together on a Midwestern street that looked eerily like my own, was jarring. The images – easy to miss, but essential elements of the scene - drove home the possibility that this could happen on my street. Much of my current experience has brought local and geopolitical happenings close to home. Our university has limited building access to those with campus IDs in response to the shooting at MIT and Brown University late last year. My husband and I (along with thousands of others across the Caribbean) were delayed in our return to the US last week from Trinidad. This was due to the closure of the airspace in response to the actions in Venezuela over a week ago. Such is life in 2026.

It is understandable that the lack of direct experience splinters us. We need to empathize with the fact that our human nature means that we tend to lean on what we can solidly know. By the same token, we need to empathize with the pain of others when they share experiences that we can only know distantly. The same splintering of experience between middle America and the coasts, between urban and rural, between those without a high school education or college degree and the “liberal elites”…these are all divides we are experiencing now. The challenges right now seem to be a) can we open ourselves up to others’ experiences, especially those we don’t understand or like, so we can discern the why and how of our fellow citizens? This is not to excuse inhumane behavior but, to address it, we need to understand what shapes it. And b) if we open ourselves up to those experiences, how do we respond?

Third, and lastly, I’m trying to find hope where I can. And that means more words-in-conversation in a search for meaning and connection. Yesterday, as I got to my office on the first day of Spring classes, I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with a young former state trooper who is now a member of my university’s police department. It’s unusual to find a uniformed officer patrolling our hallways. He was actually looking for someone to talk with about our PhD program! We talked about high-quality connections between police and the community, the lived experience of police officers and community members, and his own hopes to positively impact communities. Much of what we discussed was mirrored in the conversation between Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara and the New York Times The Daily podcast host Michael Barbaro that I heard later yesterday evening. I was stunned – and heartened – to hear the incredible overlap between those conversations, from two different officers in different cities speak with sincere grief about the moment in which we find ourselves, but also with yearning for a better nation built on building, rather than breaking community.

I know so much more will come our way this year, both the good and the bad. As we make our way forward together, I hope we can stay in conversation together, helping each other find some meaning through connection. Let’s keep looking, talking and listening, especially when we need some grace.

As the semester draws to a close, I wanted to share some more tales from the field. Last Wednesday was my last undergraduate negotiations class for the semester and, if you’ve been reading these posts for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been learning a lot from and about my students a.k.a., the future leaders of the world. And the learning never stops. Three somewhat small moments come to mind, yet all three loom large for me:

· In one negotiation role-play several months ago, teams of students had to negotiate with other teams to split a pot of money to fund their “community care” operations. While their instructions told them to seek out as much of the funding for themselves as possible, no one could get any funding unless they partnered with other teams. Typically, the mutual interdependence part often gets relegated to the background by the self-interest part, despite both being simultaneously true. Before they all left in their teams to negotiate in different breakout rooms, I asked students to think about the “moral calculus” they might apply to this case. A few minutes after they settled in, I floated in and out of several breakout rooms to observe this “moral calculus” in action. In one room, the more powerful team (the one that could command more resources) was playing hardball, paying little mind to the pleas of the least powerful team to invest in resources that could support more of the community. The spokesperson of the powerful team – one of my favorite students, by the way (yes, we all have favorites) – said bluntly, “This has nothing to with ethics.”

· This past week, as we reflected on what we’d learned over the semester, one student (another wonderful human) said they’d found it a little too easy to lie in the role plays. Fudging facts or telling outright lies had actually gotten them better negotiation outcomes in some instances. I wasn’t sure how to respond to this but asked if greater penalties attached to such behaviors would help, and she seemed to agree (see some of my thoughts on lying here).

· Finally, also a few days ago, a former student confessed to looking up the opposing party’s confidential information to get a leg up during a negotiation role-play. He regretted it and the role-play experience devolved into a quick transaction with little learning for him as a result. Apparently, I’ve got quite the face for confessionals!

What is the point of all of this? For my students, I think the point has been that they are continuously confronted with moral and ethical choices and actions in their lives, see these choices and actions playing out in the news and may have few opportunities to consciously grapple with these choices and actions. I don’t think many of us are aware of our morality and ethics all throughout the day or, if we were, we’d probably be crippled with moral anxiety! My students’ confessions, however, tell me that regardless of what they did in the moment, they grew to question and weigh the consequences their actions and interactions.

My students’ actions in the moment – “This has nothing to do with ethics” – tell me that even simulated situations can give very strong cues that overpower their sense of interrelatedness. Just a simple sentence that says they should seek self-interest x some features that give them more power over others x the opportunity to play with no real-life consequences = tantalizing cocktail. I don’t judge or blame my students but, instead, feel even surer than ever that we need more occasions like this where students can hear themselves professing when and where ethics has a place or when and how cheating and lying seem “ok.” Because then the conversation can start. When does ethics come into play? What do you mean by ethics? Why does ethics matter here, but not there? What if the shoe was on the other foot? How would you feel if you learned your partner was lying to you or had cheated, albeit in this low-stakes situation? Rather than discussing abstract notions of right and wrong in a world of alternative facts, students now have direct experience and their own words to chew on, not just mine, Dewey’s or Aristotle’s.

For us as educators, managers, academics, leaders, parents and the ones currently running the world for better or for worse, the point is that our young people are open to, if not hungry for, insights about how to be good actors in the world. They want to know how to define the “good”: is it simply in terms of who gets more of something? How we make each other feel? How fair the process was? And yes, between the ages of 18-22, they’re still wondering about these things. We can be the ones to create occasions of moral salience, where high moral intensity of an issue (i.e., how much we feel something harms or benefits others) coincides with high relational intensity (i.e. a strong belief of our obligation to each other). Put simply, we are more likely to say “This definitely has something to do with ethics” (moral salience) when we can more intensely feel something will harm or benefit (moral intensity) those we feel connected to (relational intensity). The funny thing is that, without intending to, I’m writing about moral salience at a time of year when we teach many kids to determine whether that thing they’re about to do will put them on the “naughty” or the “nice” list, increasing the moral salience of every action every 6 year old will take over the next few weeks.

I’m exploring these ideas against the backdrop of a year where we’ve seen unprecedented attacks on science and higher education. As a society, we may have been long overdue for a conversation questioning the value of both, for exploration of how we could do better for more people. I hope we can have that conversation at some point. Our classrooms and labs are just one occasion where we can craft morally salient experiences that help us all grow. The university is not the only place where this can happen but, while they continue to exist, universities have immense capabilities to equip young people from all swaths of society and the globe with practices to live better lives. As my colleague, the philosopher Jeremy Bendik-Keymer put it when he advocates for “doing studies in ethics…as when one does studies in drawing, music, or sculpture… if you studied Ethics in [this] sense…you would be going to class to exercise your capacity to do good.” We could treat our classes, our studies, our gatherings and each of our interactions as PhysEd for how to be fully human with each other. Or, as the former FBI negotiator turned author Chris Voss puts it, we can be training grounds of “small-stakes practice for high-stakes results.”

I’ll close with a plea and a commitment. My plea is that we spare a thought for whether we might be missing out on some morally salient moments in our own lives as we head into the crazy holiday season. “Did I really need to say that just now?” Or, “Is dwelling on this old hurt really helping me grow?” “Am I helping or hurting someone here?” My commitment is to keep figuring out how to frame moments with my students, my colleagues, my family and my friends as experiences where “this probably has something to do with ethics…”

Good luck as you sprint, leap, dodge, lunge and slide into December.

It’s the first Sunday of Advent in the Catholic Church calendar. It’s also a Thanksgiving weekend with a surprising amount of snow here in Ohio and the rest of the northeastern United States. Whether you’re a Catholic, Christian, or religious at all, it’s been a few days of deciding whether to stay under the blankets - literally and metaphorically - or to engage with the world.

The swirling snow matches the swirling of my mind, caught up in Christmas gift lists, lists of holiday parties, travel itineraries, final classes, grading, manuscripts that need writing and reviewing, and Spring semester plans that need finalizing. Not to be forgotten are fun family dynamics as we are thrown together once more for the holiday season, and the generalized anxiety over the state of the world - will there be military action on Venezuela while we visit Trinidad? Can food banks survive as they try to help so many hungry survive? - as Black Friday offers stuff our inboxes from early November on.

Yet, even in its swirling, snow inspires stillness. It dampens the sound of everything whirring and crashing in the world about us. The frigid quiet calls to mind much of what is invoked in this Advent time: readings and reflections about discernment, particularly discernment to see the light in the midst of darkness, the stillness and calm in the midst of storm. It is a time, as heard in one homily, after the busyness and bombardment of the past year, “to let our souls catch up to our bodies.” Again, whether you believe in souls or not, I think what resonated with me was the need to create space for seeing and hearing what really matters more clearly at this time of year. It’s time to awaken and engage more mindfully with the world as we mark the end of one year and step forward into another (whether we like it or not).

What does it take to have this discernment, this mindfulness? Words of wisdom from the recent conference I attended on managing the unexpected and collective mindfulness come to mind. It will take noticing, intuiting, looking, seeing, maybe even parsing and questioning the categories we automatically draw on, so that what we know is more vivid and alive, more feeling and useful. From these scholarly notions I’d reinforce one option in particular: to discern the current state of the world, to remain alert to injustice, and to awaken to the sense that “this is not normal,” can also involve moments of quiet. Quiet to heal the self, and to repair the senses. Quiet to practice hearing when it seems like there is nothing to hear, paralleling the daily struggle to hear good news when only the bad overwhelms our feeds, algorithms and headlines. We need dedicated times to contemplate and be still so we can feel better, as in feel what is unfolding around us more deeply and accurately. So we can get better at tuning into the holistic situation around us with all our senses and experiences and stirrings of the heart and soul.

By carving out some quiet this season, we may get better at anomalizing the happenings that bombard us from the fire hose of (mis)information around us. We might slowly re-awaken to see:

• Cruelty is an anomaly not because it is rare but because we aspire for kindness

• Apathy is an anomaly not because we don’t feel it ourselves but because people the world over share a history of creative non-violent resistance to injustice

• Retreating into self-isolation is an anomaly because our core selves are screaming for connection, despite the immense capabilities afforded by the digital companions in our palms. If we stood still for a minute or two, we just might hear and respond to their cries this winter.

Anomalizing this past year is pretty important. If we accept as normal masked men grabbing and throwing people into vans, bullying as a negotiation tactic, and the denigration of those who question power, then we indeed live in a mindless world. If, instead, in the swirling downpour we can pause long enough to quietly feel what matters, what makes us human - our shared dignity, love and forgiveness that stretches past boundaries, justice with mercy (just as we would want for any of our kids) - then we have a chance. We have a chance to again claim what we believe to be good and human and to speak up about the signals that tell us we are deviating from that.

As the snow continues to drift and bank, to blanket and dampen my own little world, I think I’ll claim some quiet today, thankful for what I can discern out of the beautiful blankness.

The version of grief that I’m most familiar with is when it is unexpected, when it is distant, and when one is trying to make sense of it in the space of a few weeks with family before returning home. It is the grief of the immigrant son, of the child who holds family in their hearts but, with two plane rides between them, is too late to hold loved ones in their arms. When I write this, it’s now almost Margaret’s birthday, almost exactly 5 months since she suddenly went to sleep on a Sunday night (Father’s Day) and was found dead in bed by my mother on Monday morning, lost, after a long battle with depression, to kidney failure, probably due to a seizure in her sleep. I think my mom pointed out the link to Father’s Day in her own retelling, reminding anyone who’d listen over these past few months that Margaret loved her father and missed him dearly. Our father had also suddenly died, his body also an object found, this time in the heights and hollows of Mount Saint Benedict. He, too, suffered from a severe bout of depression prior to wandering in the southern foothills of our Northern Range. He was searching for something out there, maybe himself; the coroner ruled the death an accident, due to a fall. In both instances, the deaths were communicated to me by my husband, Jeff, over the phone. Both deaths involved me quickly and somberly buying flights from Cleveland, Ohio, under the missive of “you need to come home now”, to join my family to be with them in grief.

What I have to offer from these journeys in the valleys of grief is a primer on the return home. I am familiar with the urgent sensemaking your brain cannot help but attempt, while dealing with the mundane drudgery of passport checks and the warm, well-intentioned but, ultimately, uncomfortable presence of family and friends. Who wants anyone around when all you want to do is shut out the world and wish that Margaret was still alive? When the only thing that seems absolutely necessary is to hold the survivors, the ones who found Margaret that morning, in your arms. I’m acquainted with this version of grief, with having to hold it together while quickly re-acclimating to a familiar yet unfamiliar space; this was the house I grew up in, but it was no longer my “home”.

This isn’t Kübler-Ross’ “five stages of grief,” of which much has been written. Instead, this is advice for those who have to make the unexpected journey home, who must quickly descend into situation already made for you, a swirl of people, tasks and intentions not of your own making, with no time to work through denial or acceptance. This is what you might read on that flight or car ride home, and what you re-read as the funky mix of sadness and relief settles on your heart each morning. Sadness for the reason you are home, but relief that you are there.

A primer on grief

1. Be prepared to be angry at everyone and everything. Kübler-Ross never professed that her “five stages” were intended to progress in a fixed sequence for everyone. Denial doesn’t always precede anger. For me, there was no denying that Margaret was gone. Her existence was both persistent — she’d survived decades of depression and, more recently, seizures — and tenuous. How long could she keep this up without some major change? Now she simply was not physically there. I was pissed. Mad at the doctors who said past kidney scans revealed no damage after a seizure. Mad at us, her family, for not figuring out what kind of care she needed; it didn’t matter that we had tried and that mental health care options around the world are limited. I was angry we hadn’t done more. Mad at the neighbors, friends and extended family who were constantly there, checking on Mummy, providing condolences. Why didn’t they just give us space? And why was no one crying? Why were people rehashing memories of times gone by, of things Margaret did or said, making Mummy laugh? Again, why was no one crying? I just want to be sad. The calm and good cheer from loved ones may rattle you because it is not what you want for yourself. Be prepared for the maddening cocktail of confusion and ambivalence…

2. …but then remind yourself that people are trying to show that they care. It is ok to mourn in whatever way you see fit. Which means it’s also ok for others to do the same. The hustle and bustle of food, flowers, laughter, chatter about current events here and abroad and reminiscing over never-before-seen family photos brings an energy into the otherwise low-grade fever dream of grief. People aren’t crying all the time because they are bringing their full lives to your immediate situation. They bring their own laughter, tears, packed school lunches, missed deadlines and losses to your porch and living room, to the seat next to you as they hold your hand. They bring the fullness of life, recalling the past, holding you in the present, and helping you to imagine a future without her or him or them. Let their talk and its normalcy, the mundaneness of life marching on around the bubble of your family’s pain lift you up. They, too, are trying to feel their way to some understanding, right along with you.

3. Use gratitude as a salve. Mustering whatever intention one has at this point, it can help to begin noticing these moments. As you ride the waves of sadness, frustration, anger, confusion and joy, notice that you are still here and still loved. This may be one of the hardest parts of all of this. You still being here means that you are away from her, because she is not here. She is gone. But you still being here means that there is much life for you to embrace in each moment. There is comfort to be had in being with age-old friends and cousins. There is joy in finally figuring out which uncle was that handsome man in the black and white beach photo or stumbling over a shot of us three youngest children, my gap-toothed smile not quite matching the quizzical expression on my sister’s face. There is solace in having time with Mummy while she is still with us, grace in seeing my big brother Michael take the lead — yet again — in coordinating our family around death and its rituals. There is appreciation for my sister Frances’ constant support in executing plans, in just getting things done that needed to be done. Gratitude for my husband, Jeff, for being here with me and mine in a humid, foreign land that he now also claims as home. Seeing, noting, calling to mind, jotting and speaking of these small wonders, holding these tiny miracles is a salve in that moment. Crossing some invisible threshold of pain to feel thankful is a fresh dressing on the wound of grief, a gentle salve on the sore. Over the days, months and years, it is to be applied often and again until the scar that remains only dully aches. Visible, but lightly carried.

4. Choose a story to believe. Four days after her death, two days after my arrival, I realized that Mummy and those around her, her friends of a similar age and core faith, had made a choice. They had collectively and reinforcingly set an intention, choosing to believe that Margaret was at peace. My other sister Frances, for years the caretaker of the caretaker, also chose a story of redemption. Around my second week there, she told me she saw Margaret’s recent progress as a triumph rather than viewing the halting of that progress as a regret. Our belief helps us cope with the strange absence, the Margaret-shaped hole in our lives that we cannot avoid, the empty bedroom with the open door and naked flame that I could not avoid every time I walked through the main hallway of my childhood home. Choosing a story to hold on to gives you a sense of agency, maybe even a little control, in the midst of a world falling apart.

***Thinking about this today, on the first anniversary of her death, has been it’s own balm. I was tired — not fully exhausted, just “low” — last week and frustrated since I couldn’t figure out why. I was worried about how Mummy would feel today, and what I “should” do today. I think the uncertainty was draining; making a choice, any choice — to bike, to be quiet, to make phone calls, to just do nothing, seems to help. It turns out Mummy was not the one to worry about. When I asked her how she felt today, and what she needed, her response was “What month we in again?” Whether it’s the encroaching, greying memory of old age or her psyche protecting itself, I’m not sure it matters. Instead, I’m reminded that there is little I can actually control, so I might as well focus on what I can.***

5. Choose a story to tell. My mother and her friends shared their chosen story with each other over and over again. Figuring out how to express the story, once chosen, is the next step. The tricky part of this is in figuring out at whose feet you will lay bare your soul, and to whom you will say “Everything’s fine.” Which friends, siblings, cousins, or acquaintances will get to see and hear the rawness of your grief? Who has the capacity and willingness to sit with you and hold you, even if it is in silence over the phone? Who might know when to commiserate about past hurts and frustrations and when to gently nudge you to move on and forgive? Or, who are the ones in your life who are well-meaning but not in the right place or time to truly listen? Or don’t have the life experiences — yet — or emotional wherewithal to be fully present? For some time, I assumed that I needed to bare myself to all in order to stay sane. If asked, it was the whole truth and nothing but. But, now I accept that I don’t need to do that to feel comforted, nor is it appropriate for everyone. Maybe it’s a feeling about the place, situation or moment you’re in, or maybe it’s an explicit invitation to share, but you’ll eventually know when and how to share your grief. It’s ok to say, “I’m ok, and how are you?” to one set of people and to fully break down into a weepy puddle with others. It’s not other people’s fault or any weakness or strength on their part. Some people will be able to give you what you need and others won’t during this time. My advice is to have a story, a few sentences perhaps, at the ready for those who may not know what to say, how to say it, or how to listen. A few token words to share your thanks for their concern. But then have your people around you, the sponges who can absorb all that you feel, knowing that you’d do the same for them when the time came.

Part of why it’s been two weeks since I’ve posted is because I have been in a couple of small weekend conferences. A week ago, I was in Boston, at the Relational Coordination Roundtable, hosted at Suffolk University. Today, I just returned from a small conference in Baltimore, Maryland, to celebrate one of the luminaries of the field – Kathie Sutcliffe, an expert on resilience, safety, reliability and mindfulness – and to see old friends. And it was in those spaces that I was reminded both of how humanity is hit time and again with crisis and disrepair, but also how our relationships help us get through those crises. Yet, we all know the fractured times we live in now – what relationships? But this is where stories can help; we’ve built and rebuilt relationships, even at Warp Speed, to navigate dark times before. We just need to remember that we have and how we did it.

I’ve written about stories before, with my good friend Jason Kanov. We opened our paper about storytelling with this fantastic quote from Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk on the power of a single story:

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize.”

In that paper, we focused on how storytelling can empower individuals by giving them a sense of dignity at work. But now, after a couple of weekends spent listening, talking, presenting, feeling scared, then feeling hopeful, I was reminded of the power of stories as our collective memory systems. Just as stories can help repair our broken selves, I think they can also help repair our collective selves. Stories can be our bulwark against complete collapse in the face of crisis.

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

The power of stories came to mind because of some of the presentations and conversations I experienced over the past couple of weekends, particularly a presentation by the former head of US marketing at Bavarian Nordic, the Danish vaccine manufacturer. In his talk, Glenn Omanio illustrated how relationships were the engine that got mpox vaccine commercialization and distribution shifted from federal control to a more market-based model. Those relationships facilitated “coordinated action across multiple stakeholders, including the manufacturer, government partners, payers, healthcare providers, and community-based organizations serving at-risk populations.”

While this was one of many stories like this shared across these two weekends, I was struck by the fact that Glenn harkened back to ancient times like 2022! One effect of the consistent bombardment of our attention with one crisis, surprise and threat, after another crisis, surprise and threat is the slippage of our sense of time. Yesterday feels like a year ago. 2022 is a blur. Yet, I remember the scramble to distribute the mpox vaccine and the anxiety in the LGBT community around access. Glenn’s story brought all that rushing back – the long lines at community health centers in the summer sun with fingers crossed that you’d get to the door and they wouldn’t say “Sorry, we’ve run out. Try again tomorrow.”

This story-telling is important not just because it’s easier to forget now, harder to hold onto details as information firehoses its way into our minds, but also because these crises are traumatic. We actually want to forget in an effort to protect ourselves. I was part of an interdisciplinary faculty research team studying how universities weathered the pandemic (Case Western Reserve University did relatively quite well, all things considered). After a first round of successful interviewing, I thought we had discovered some things that required some more elaboration and depth. Could we go back to our interviewees to learn more? This is pretty typical in qualitative, exploratory research, but it all depends on the participants. In this case (I was told), they just didn’t want to talk about COVID-19 anymore. Words like “trauma” floated back to me when I asked again. People were tired, burned out and sad. The question remains then, given our desire (maybe even our need?) to forget, how might we effectively remind, renew and uplift ourselves so that we’re not caught completely off-guard by new threats? When the threat is not immediately there, how do we remain vigilant without depleting ourselves?

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

In an era of polycrises (the experience of multiple, simultaneous crises that amplify each other’s effects) stories could be an answer to this question. Specifically, compelling stories jointly crafted by folks of different backgrounds and perspectives. Stories that drive home what we already made possible together and not just what could be. We need to share these kinds of stories about the pandemic and other crises to make plain:

One, we can’t predict anything.

Two, but we can rapidly respond.

Three, we need resources to do this.

Of course, I’m not the first to think of this. StoryCorps, the nonprofit founded to collect and preserve conversations from Americans across all strata of society has been doing this since 2003. They have collected stories of African-American life, LGBT people in America, high school students, those impacted by mass incarceration, military veterans, those isolated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and those striving for connection across political divides. Many of us may have experienced StoryCorps just as my grad school roommate did, as the radio show that made him cry on the El on his morning commutes in Chicago. StoryCorps collects stories about everyday life, love and loss for their own sake, and preserves them in the US Library of Congress for future generations. Preserving, compiling and marshaling stories of how we have weathered crises together, both big and small is within our grasp.

I haven’t shared this story on StoryCorps but the pandemic was a particularly proud time for me as a faculty member. Like so many others, our students, staff and faculty had to quickly pivot to online learning, decipher the information continuously streaming in from our local and state hospitals, the CDC and the WHO, figure out how budgets could be redirected to support shutting the university down, housing students who could not go home, getting vaccines and testing supplies, re-engineering classrooms and other physical sites of interaction, and not lose our minds in the process. We had to figure out how to weather the storm and, importantly, we did. You have to understand, my institution was formed from the merger between an engineering school and a liberal arts college. The divisions are subtly yet palpably felt in many ways, almost 60 years on. So it was incredibly heartening to see a relational infrastructure (to borrow Glenn Omanio’s words) arise from across academic divides to form a team of teams. While some focused on virology and testing, others focused on social and behavioral health. I joined one of the latter teams. Weekly Zoom meetings and data repositories were set up. Huddled in front of our respective screens in our respective makeshift home offices, scholars of all stripes hashed out plans, argued with each other, solved problems and mostly gave each other, the university, and the surrounding community hope.

Now there is another crisis, and yet another, and yet another in front of us, grabbing our attention, hijacking our sense of resilience and thwarting our capacity for problem-solving. I believe we need a mix of stories, some infused by memories of the burning platform that we need to jump off of, reminding us of how bad things can get, of how we can so easily think all is well when it’s not. Other stories (or maybe the same story) need to point us to the shore we can swim to, or the new platform we can build. As Ms. Adichie tells us, we need more than a single story but, I’d add, we need their telling and re-telling even more.

We are currently facing a tragedy of work and a tragedy of meaning. And these are borne out of ignorance about what work actually entails. Most of my posts, including this one, are based in some experiences or conversations I’ve had during the week, but this one is also based on some thoughts I jotted down on March 29 of this year in response to the DOGE job cuts. As DEI efforts in particular were targeted, along with many other jobs deemed unimportant or expendable, I thought of Steve Barley and Gideon Kunda’s missive to “bring work back in.” By this, they meant that our own profession of organizational studies scholarship was suffering, maybe even becoming potentially irrelevant, by not revealing to the world what work actually looked like and why it mattered. Imagine being a DEI center employee, sharing how you were fired and someone saying “Well, we know DEI doesn’t work…” or “Well that shows we don’t tolerate indoctrination anymore…”. My (somewhat-) educated guess is that the person’s response may very well be “But that’s not what I do/did”. What is missing from our public spheres of information is firsthand knowledge of how the very people affected by these cutbacks actually perform their work: the teachers, the scientists, the staff members, the refugee responders, food bank administrators, etc. The media has an opportunity to showcase to the public what these people actually do (see NPR’s coverage of how national park rangers tend to dehydrated hikers, rescue folks, clear brush from trails and clean bathrooms), but doesn’t always do it. You know who does? We do: organizational scholars, particularly those focused on how people practice their work.

The role of my own profession to reveal the inner workings of the world of work came to mind more recently this week for a few reasons. Some of it had to do with checking in with friends still languishing on the job market here in the US and abroad. It still sucks to try to land a job right now, no matter the amount of experience or the number of degrees. Interviews seem to go well only to be told they’ve “decided to go with someone else.” Requests for feedback – “What could I have done better in the interview?” – go unanswered. Organizations, of course, have to make tough decisions for good reasons. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck for the people involved. Another reason this is on my mind is my friend Dave Jurca asking me over dinner “Why do you write?” just before we went to see Malcolm Gladwell talk about his own profession as the storyteller of our time. Dave’s question made me articulate why I do what I do and it was enthralling to hear about Malcolm’s own motivations and practices.

Getting my hair braided this week for the first time in my life was another reason: I had no idea how it would go, but my stylist set me at ease, explaining what she was doing as she did it, and recounting her journey in this profession, her skill and discipline evident in each careful part made with her comb and in each twist of her fingers.

Last, listening to Trevor Noah’s conversation with Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI as I whirred away on the indoor trainer (too cold to bike outdoors this week in Ohio) was also revealing. As they wrapped up their conversation on whether AI would save humanity or end it, Trevor said: “I wouldn’t say we want to get rid of work. I’d say we want to get rid of jobs... And I think there’s a difference between the two because working is something that brings humans fulfillment…in a perfect world we find a way for everybody’s work which is their passion to find the other person that finds value in it…the value of everybody’s work comes to fruition because you do have value if you like knitting…if you’re a sculptor you do have value, if you are a poet you have value, if you’re a philosopher you have value, if you’re a coder, if you’re an architect, an engineer, whatever it is you have, that’s like my dream world…”

All of this is to say that the humanity at the center of work, the impetus to create and grow, to master a craft or to just do something well enough in ways that bring benefit to you and others, were front and center for me this week, as was the dismissal of that humanity in the current experience of work.

The impetus and the craft of telling stories about work in ways that compel, delight and demystify are evidenced all around us, well beyond academia. I think we need more Gay Talese’s in the world, whose book A Writer’s Life I bought when it first came out while I was a doctoral student. Here was a dogged journalist, chasing the truth down to a deadline. His own meticulous methods help us understand other people’s meticulous methods – whether it was Sinatra’s pursuit of fame, the Mafia, the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Broadway productions, playing baseball, or writing itself. Stories like his remain compelling sixty years later, drawing us in to the worlds we create with others as we labor.

I did not encounter Studs Terkel’s Working until I met my husband who had been assigned the book in high school (we still have his copy somewhere in our house). The full title of the book is “Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.” As I started my own ethnographic journey, it was fascinating to read about what waitresses and assembly line workers, fishmongers and farmers all do all day, and how it made them feel. Their stories, in their voices, spoke to the worth of their labor and their own worthiness. I’ve heard that this book has helped many people appreciate what “blue-collar” work really means and how it enriches our societies.

[This image is from Carlson’s Fisheries in one of my favorite spots in the world - Fishtown in Leland, Michigan]

Among academics, John van Maanen’s early accounts of how Disneyland worked and what it means to “police” are legendary for how he mined the depths of work experiences that the general public could only imagine. Gary’s Fine’s careful accounts of the brilliant chaos of restaurant kitchens preceded the auditory and visual explosion that was the TV series The Bear, where we saw chefs and sous chefs and friers and servers constantly colliding until they…collided in new ways. But through Fine’s writing and, now in a brilliant TV show, we also feel what the pursuit of excellence in this work means to real people in real time. It also means we might be more empathetic to hapless servers and hosts in the next establishment we patronize. One more: Norman MacClean’s Young Men and Fire provides a detailed account of the life and death decision-making wildland firefighters actually face. While the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire took place in 1949, it could help us understand how to leverage scarce resources in the present, given the scale and frequency of today’s wildfires. And yes, young men and women are still on the frontlines of these disasters.

Where does this leave us with the future of work? The Secretary of War called US Generals and Flag Officers from their work around the world to admonish them for allowing fat soldiers and “beardos” to serve and for enforcing gender-differentiated physical combat standards, among other things. In one read of the transcript it sounded as if he was concerned about the doing of the work, but another pass revealed an emphasis on abstract notions and norms rather than the myriad ways a given soldier – the human on the ground – gets their work done. The phrase “more AI in everything” didn’t help. This week Amazon announced it would cut 14, 000 corporate staffers, with more layoffs on the way, all due to AI adoption. On an earnings call, Amazon’s CEO seemed to consider the work itself, saying that with Amazon’s expansion over recent years, “you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers … sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work.” But – at least in that report - Amazon’s Andy Jassy provided little clarity on “the actual work” and how people have ownership over it. As we look on and question our own place in this evolving world of work, we need to shed light on what people actually do in practice, why they do it, and how it matters to them and others. We each need to be able to tell our own stories of our own worth and work – and how it evolves – if we want to craft a world we still want to live in.

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

This may not be new news but, as things hit increasingly close to home, it certainly reminded me of a few things:

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

1. Compassion. Although the details I shared above are brief, the stories tell me that we can’t take things like compassion for granted. “Compassion is the heart’s response to suffering” say researchers from the Compassion Lab. These researchers frame compassion as a process of noticing, feeling and responding to help someone who is suffering. Other researchers frame compassion as focusing on helping others to grow. If our organizations and institutions are lacking compassion, how do we change that? How can I practice more compassion for those in my orbit? (weekly check-ins have been a good start)

2. Gratitude. The experiences of these friends – more like my extended family – remind me that there but for the grace of God, go I…my own relative security and privilege aren’t guaranteed. So I am grateful. Gratitude is a positive emotion with a wealth of positive outcomes. When it comes to our social relationships, gratitude can help to find-remind-and-bind, as it draws our attention to folks who take care of us, reminds us of their value and mutually binds us to each other. As a positive emotion, gratitude broadens and builds our capacity for seeing and appreciating the world in new ways. And, as the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl taught the world, it is possible – not easy, but not impossible – to choose gratitude during the bleakest of experiences.

3. Relational attention. Compassion and gratitude are ways of directing attention to others. I’m ashamed to admit that it’s often easy for me to get wrapped up in my own uncertainties and stresses, to the neglect of how those close to me might also be affected. For example, this Spring, as higher education faced the first salvo of funding threats, it was so easy to be focused on what was on my horizon. It was only in talking with my friends that I finally got the reminders (and the guilt): “Oh yeah, you’re a government contractor!” or “Your research depends on federal data!” [insert head smacks here]. This woke me up to the need to be much more relationally attentive than I thought I was. This would involve intentionally scanning, investing and designing opportunities for connection in whatever sphere you can, whether in your own department or across various types of organizations.

I’ll be practicing these as the days unfold; “practicing” meaning that I’ll be doing my best and giving myself some grace when I inevitably stumble. I hope you will too.

This week I had the pleasure of chatting with a relatively new buddy…, the thoughtful author of the Pursuing Success Substack. We were connected by Jane Dutton, my PhD mentor earlier this year. Josh had stumbled across this article from The Athletic highlighting Jane’s work on high-quality connections and tying it to successful sports teams. Jane connected us when Josh reached out to her about this since – as a Mental Performance Coach for the Baltimore Orioles – he’s always on the lookout for how to improve players’ experience and resilience. So far, it’s been fun building our own high-quality connection!

Yet another amazing human and high-quality connections expert, Emily Heaphy, sent me yet another article from The Athletic (so much sports in my life these days!). Emily and I have both been intrigued by the role of the body in organizational life. Of course, I also thought “I wonder what Josh thinks about all of this?” My brain was racing to make connections between how athletes leverage the ‘constraints-led approach’ in their training, what it has to do with adaptability and resilience, and how these ideas transfer from sports to organizational life. So I gave Josh a call and the following are excerpts from our conversation (edited for clarity and some connectivity issues). I hope you find it as intriguing as we did!

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Defining the ‘constraints-led approach’

JP: So I read this article and then I pinged you, because I was like, oh, Josh…He’s an athlete, and he has to deal with athletes. What does he… what does he think about this? So…do you mind sharing, how would you define CLA in your words?

Josh: Yeah, first off, thanks for wanting to have this conversation with me. By no means would I consider myself an expert in CLA or things like that, but I do think that there’s elements of it that can be applied, specifically to the sport that I work in, which is baseball. So CLA is constraint-led approach. How I view it is it’s a way to get reps to create a practice environment designed to teach skills in a way that are going to be applicable in a game setting. A lot of times, when I think about CLA approaches, or CLAs, you want it to almost be harder than a game. So that way people, whether it’s coaches or players, have to make decisions that either they’re gonna face in a game, or that will kind of stress their mental side a little bit more than they would in a typical practice, whether it’s in baseball, just taking BP, batting practice, whether it’s just taking regular ground balls, whether it’s pitchers throwing bullpens…. That’s kind of my 50,000 foot view of CLAs. I think they’re great. I think there’s something to it, for sure.

JP: I mean, it pulls in so much of, like, what we think about from experiential learning, from, cognitive psychology, from embodied cognition… like, there’s all these fields…And so, it’s just interesting to see it get kind of packaged in a certain way, and then it’s like, oh, there’s this article, and it’s grounded in some really deep and important intellectual roots, and I guess I’m curious… so the way I think of it, I’ll take everything you just said, and I’ll try to boil it down – and probably get it wrong - but it’s… it’s to really, like, have… kind of what you said, kind of have practice mimic the variability and the dynamism of the actual game, right?

Josh: That sounded way better than what I was trying to say! Yeah, that’s all… and that’s just my look at it, yes.

Translating ideas about rehearsal and practice for organizational performance

JP: It looks different, but my sense is that in a lot of organizations, the idea of “let’s actually practice, and do that mindfully” can sort of get lost in the background. And that’s really curious to me, and I just wonder if it’s, like, organizations just… they’re so focused on go, go, go, go, go, they don’t take time to actually, like, step back and reflect.

I’m thinking more of, like, the folks behind the scenes, you know, like, what’s our, you know, our strategy? What’s… we have this presentation coming up, we have this pitch to make… You know, we have all these other things that need to get done. How are we actually approaching our rehearsal, and our planning of it.

Josh: Yeah, like, if you’re… if you’re about to pitch an idea to a company, you’re not going to create a presentation and have the opportunity to do it in front of 500 people to practice first, right? So you have to maybe be a little bit creative in how you do that, whether it’s visualizing the presentation, whether it’s recording yourself, like, I’m sure that these are things that you’ve talked about and worked through with people, but…you may need to get creative in how you kind of do that. I think having the ability to talk with people like yourself or coaches about what they’ve done, I think you can probably brainstorm a few different ideas of how to do it.

I’ll give you an example of just baseball and what I’ve seen, not specifically from the teams that I’ve worked for, but we’re at the field for quite a long time, throughout the course of a day. And you’ll see when, like, the other team is on the field and doing their work to get ready for a game. And every team is watching the other team to see what they’re doing, to see if they can pick up on an edge, or a way of just trying to be better. And so, like, as you’re doing that, you notice things, right? And sometimes it’s when a team is practicing their defense, and they’ll have a coach out there with a stopwatch saying, like, okay, you have 4 seconds to do this, to make a throw across the field. You have two and a half seconds to hit. When they’re hitting batting practice, sometimes they’ll set up two different machines, pitching machines at the same time, and one’s thrown like a fastball, and one’s throwing a breaking ball of some sort. And they’ll rotate, and they’ll alternate some of those things to try to get the hitters to not necessarily mimic what they’re gonna see in a game, but to be able to make decisions ahead of time.

So the environments are being set up in a way to create this decision-making, or choice that needs to be made from players, and also create, some of that internal clock that you’re gonna be facing with, in the course of a game. So, I just think about, okay, if you’re gonna give a pitch, or if you’re going to present, doing things to kind of up that heart rate, add a little bit of pressure, put a stopwatch out there… I don’t know, just, like, those types of things, like, make it challenging. So then, back to that point I made earlier, when you get into it, it’s like, yeah, alright, I still have to go deliver, but I’ve already done the hard part, and now I just gotta go do what I need to do.

JP: Yeah, I think… I think for sure sports has, you know, an edge on that, but I think there’s a lot of, sort of, areas in organizational life that I think could probably use more of that.

Josh: Yeah, as you were talking, I use this word a lot, and you hear it in sports too, is just, like, what’s your process, right? Like, and you hear, sometimes, trust the process, but then places or people don’t know what the heck the process is. And listening to you speak, it’s like, well, what is… okay, you have a pitch, what’s your process to that pitch? Or you’re gonna go consult, like, what is your process… what does it look like? What are the steps that you need to take to get to where you want to be? And I think it sounds like, it’s maybe easier to think about where do we want to be, or what do we want the end product to look like, or pitch, or however it is that it’s going to go, and then almost working backwards for, okay, we know what this is… what we want it to look like, what are the steps we need to take to get there? And then you get creative as a group, or individual to, okay, first I need to do this, this, this, this, and this. As opposed to just walking into it and be like, okay, I know I have to do this next Friday, let’s just figure it out. Like, if you can lay out some of those steps ahead of time and create your own process, then it gives you something to go back and evaluate, alright? Like, were those the right steps to take? What could I make adjustments in? What could be different next time? And then now you continue to get better and learn, and it’s not just based on the result, right? Like, the process was what you had control over, leading up to it. The result you do too, in some extent. But I think that’s the part that you can continually tweak and get better at, so asking yourself, like, what’s my process to do this, I think would be really helpful.

JP: Yeah, that’s really great, and I’m seeing that on the projects that I’ve been studying. In part because they’re bringing in, in very explicit ways, things like lean, you know, which is, you know, about efficiency, but also about how you treat people, and lean covers a lot of ground. But with sort of lean processes, whether it’s manufacturing, healthcare, construction, whatever it is, there’s meant to be this checking process. So not just the output, like, it is working towards a certain output, but you’re continuously asking, whether it’s in, like, daily huddles, at the beginning of a meeting, at the end of a meeting, like, how was our process? And how do we want it to be? And that’s just continuous, sort of, cycles of reflection and action, reflection and action, which is why I mentioned experiential learning as sort of a core concept that is built around these cycles.

The challenges of training for resilience

JP: Of course, people care about that in any organization, but particularly in sports, and… so why is this [CLA] so revolutionary? Because it sounds pretty intuitive, right? It sounds… is it because it’s really hard to implement in the first place, and hard to kind of plan for, and then execute?

Josh: I think it’s that. I think it is difficult to plan and schedule and set up. I think…Especially given the amount of information that’s out there when it comes to, workloads and the physical taxing environments that are set up through travel, through practice schedules, through a game…exertions that, though, I think it makes it difficult to sometimes create some of these environments to handle [the variability]

JP: If you’re really gonna simulate game day, that’s really tough. And I think having some mindfulness about how you dose this, or how you pace it out. And then the implications are, well, are you checking in on people? Are you, making sure people are taking care of themselves as they engage in that sort of intensive prep? Do they have recovery time?

Bridging the mind-body divide (yeah we went deep…)

JP: Well, the last thing I want to pick your brain on, which is sort of maybe at the crux of all of this, is really… and you kind of hinted, you kind of touched on this real quick when you were talking about watching the other team practice, and getting a stopwatch in, and… is that mind-body link. And your field of mental performance, that mind-body link, I think is so key to human existence, but gets lost in a lot of how we examine, and just understand, social life and organizational life, maybe athletic life, too.

So with that very long setup, sorry, it’s this mind-body connection which I think CLA is kind of saying, like, hey, let’s set up constraints very intentionally, let’s… let’s… let’s involve the body in very dynamic situations so that the mind is also ready alongside the body, when it’s time to actually perform. You mentioned, which I really enjoyed, if you’re, you know, developing a pitch deck for a consulting team, get a stopwatch in there, actually get the heart rate up, but we don’t think about that. When you get in front of a client, your heart rate probably will go up, so how about you actually get that sensation going so that you are prepared for it. Have you found that sort of mind-body link really tough to articulate, or to practice, or to weave into some of the stuff that you’ve been trying to do?

Josh: I think it’s tough because there’s not always easy ways to measure it, right? Like, when you’re performing, or if you’re watching sports, and you hear about guys choking, or not being able to perform under pressure, or, you know, it’s their first time playing, in the major leagues, right? You just got called up, and now you’ve never experienced this before, and your dream is coming true, or you’re going to play in the Super Bowl, and you’ve worked 30 years to do this, there’s no way to specifically, like, train for that moment, right? And there’s no way to say, like, absolutely that I’m ready for this. All I think that you can do is teach yourself tools and give yourself skills to be able to manage some of those things when you are dealt with those moments.

So, what do I mean? Like when your heart rate’s picking up, do you know how to slow the game down? Do you know how to calm down? Do you know how to take that feeling that you have manage it, and still go out there and perform, and give yourself the best chance to have success. So that’s how I look at the work that I do with players and coaches is helping them define how to do some of those things. Everyone’s different, everybody has different ways to do it. The tools that I talk about and teach are varied, throughout, whether it’s breathwork, whether it’s understanding pre-mortems, whether it’s knowing the biases that you may fall into as a leader when it comes to making decisions, it varies, and I think that’s what makes it tough sometimes when we’re talking about this field or this work to say, like, absolutely, this is what you need to do, and this is how it works, and the mind-body connection is the most important thing, and, like, this is how you’re gonna win championships.

So yes, it’s practice. Yes, I think it’s important. Yes, I think the more that you can experience through learning, these skills, these tools, these feelings that you have, and then obviously understanding, like, how to… to deal with it, and then having some sort of success, I think that’s how you kind of do it and be able to navigate some of those things. But I think, yes, the mind-body connection is important. How do you continue to improve it and get better, and try… that’s always going to be the tough part right now.

And then the tables turn…Josh interviews me!

Josh: I’d just be curious your thoughts on how you take some of this, whether it’s the mind-body connection, or experiential learning, or, the CLA, you know, idea. How would you take that into the business world, or teaching or academia, like, I’d just love to hear some of your thoughts on that.

JP: Yes, I’m like, yes, Josh, interview me! Another big thing that was on my mind when I saw this article was, here’s a method for introducing variability and dynamism in sort of controlled ways, so that you can better manage it in, in actual performance, which you can’t really predict, right? When there’s fewer designed constraints. And I thought it was so applicable to business, particularly when it comes to resilience. You know, so I’ve, you know, like, you know, I’ve published on high-quality connections, and how it helps individual resilience, and how it helps team resilience. I think that was maybe some of the tone of the original Athletic article that… that kind of got us connected. And I’m also, you know, written about group resilience, and I’m working on a project on organizational resilience, all of which really matters. We’re still in the wake of the pandemic, right? And how organizations came through that is super important. And I think we’re all sort of reeling from the effects of that in, and now maybe it’s kind of gone underground, but I think the effects are still there.

So this idea of CLA I thought would be very interesting for leaders and leadership teams. There’s certainly things like… they call them tabletop exercises, which large, you know, institutions do all the time. Who are the major stakeholders that would be involved in decision making. Let’s get them to the literal table, and here’s a scenario: Another pandemic has hit. Funding has been cut. I’m not an expert on tabletop exercises, but just to say that my university and other organizations do these things to think about what’s the next crisis, what’s the next threat. So they are actually sort of rehearsing in very intentional ways. I don’t know how much they use constraints or opportunities for action, or limitations to action as sources of information, right, that kind of tell you, what you are capable of doing and what you’re not as capable of doing, and then also the combination of those things, and, oh, how do I respond in this complex situation versus that complex situation? So I don’t know how complex the tabletop exercises are. But I guess my big takeaway is, if you really care about organizational resilience, and we care about team resilience in the workplace, I think this would be a pretty cool approach to figure out.

My suspicion is that when it comes to, like, your typical workplace, they may be doing the tabletop exercises, but they’re not doing the mind-body stuff that you kind of touched on. I don’t know, but, like, hey, you have 5 minutes to make this decision. Here’s this big countdown clock.

Josh: Let’s go!

JP: somebody’s shouting at you, CNN is on in the background with…

Josh: You got this stuff going on at home. At the same time, like, your significant other’s saying the kid’s got sick and you gotta pick them up.

JP: I doubt that that’s happening. That’s real! Oh, guess what? All the schools are closed, so your little one is right there in your arm while you’re trying to make a decision about, do we close the university or not!

Maybe that’s where you could go an extra step to really bring that bodily experience of decision-making under pressure. Because then you can experience trying to absorb a lot of information about a very complex thing in a very short space of time. I love that you pointed out, the home life, and the work life… all that’s so real. So, that was my main thought about how do we introduce more variability under safer conditions so you can experiment more, fail more and fail more quickly. All so that you can be better prepared when the real thing hits.

Huge thanks !

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