My father’s PhD in history made me aware of the concept of sabbatical early in life. The only one he ever took was due to a Fulbright that enabled us to live in Paris for a year. It was grand. I was three. I’ve used the word “sabbatical” now and then. It’s a word I like. It [...]
Lately, I’ve had a few conversations with people whose organizations are going through a not uncommon, but often painful and sometimes even terminal, phenomenon: questioning their relevance, their place in the world. Even as I type those words they feel heavy. There is weight to the idea that a thing, once useful and full of life [...]
How often do we reflect on memory? Surely, we think about it when it fails us. We may damn it when we lose our keys or forget someone’s name, or dread it in the case of Alzheimer’s, robbing mind of memory as bleach leaches color from cloth. We may also think about memory when our memories disagree with each [...]
“Leading isn’t doing. Leading is thinking.” The pace of change in our world is much more rapid than it was a decade ago, and with the influence of technology that makes access to information constant and infinite, combined with the human thirst for knowledge and the new, this pace is not likely to slow in the next ten. [...]
I wrote this blog a few weeks ago, before the recent natural disaster in Japan. This event has added greater significance to the context in which to read it. For a post script on this, see below. I went to hear a talk on leadership the other night. I love the subject of leadership. It has intrigued me since I was a [...]
Thanks to Geof Stone, University of Chicago law professor, for pointing out an unintentional omission in my post last week on sarcasm and the Supreme Court: examples of the Court’s sarcasm. I realized that this trend is so glaring in my mind, I assumed it was in others’. Oops. So, here’s my amendment with cites and explanation.
As an enthusiastic listener to NPR’s legal correspondent Nina Totenberg, who brings the Supreme Court to life by reading excerpts from oral arguments, I’ve noticed an increased use of sarcastic tones by Totenberg when quoting some of the Justices. It isn’t Ms. Totenberg’s sarcasm. It’s theirs. And that’s what prompted me to write Supreme Court: No Place for Sarcasm.
And then on This American Life in a piece called Take the Money and Run for Office, Senator John McCain also mentioned sarcasm on the Court as he described his experience listening to oral arguments in the Citizens United case:
First, I was outraged…the questions that were asked, the naiveté of the questions that were asked, the arrogance of the questions was just stunning, particularly Scalia, with his sarcasm.
And then McCain imitated Justice Scalia’s sarcastic attitude. You can listen to it here.
As it turns out, I’m not the first to discuss the use of sarcasm on the Court or to question its appropriateness there. Erwin Chemerensky, Dean of the University of California Irvine Law School, wrote a thorough review of Scalia’s penchant for sarcasm back in 2000, making the case as it concerned law students and attorneys:
Justice Scalia’s opinions are distinctive because of his frequent sarcasm and pointed attacks on his colleagues. No doubt, this makes his opinions among the most interesting to read and teach….But I am greatly distressed by the message that his sarcasm and his attacks on other justices transmit to law students and to attorneys about how it is appropriate to speak and talk to one another in judicial settings.
But the story that provoked me to write my blog post was Totenberg’s March 20th report on the Court’s hearing of two cases about life without parole sentences for minors. Here is some of the exchange, according to Totenberg:
Justice Antonin Scalia noted that 39 states have laws that make life without parole the punishment for murder, even for juveniles. He asked whether he should “just consult my own preference” instead of “what seems to be a consensus of the American people?”
[Attorney] Stevenson contended that in fact, most states have not agreed to subject 14-year-olds to life without parole. Only 18 states have actually imposed the penalty on those 14 and younger. Moreover, he said, state legislatures pass laws that allow juveniles to be tried as adults and then the juveniles are automatically subject to the same penalty as adults — in these cases, mandatory term of life without parole for murder.
Justice Samuel Alito questioned Stevenson’s statement that state legislatures did not know what they were doing.
“If you think these legislators don’t understand what their laws provide, why don’t you contact them?” he asked sarcastically. (My emphasis.)
The final straw for me here was Justice Alito’s snarky remark. It’s one thing for a single petulant personality to bring his invective to the Court (just like some bratty nephew at the holidays, we all somehow put up with Justice Scalia), but it’s quite another to think this is becoming acceptable practice across the board.
The Supreme Court, as I said, depends on its credibility for its authority. Justice Breyer (in a talk he gave at the Aspen Ideas Festival last summer, which I wrote about here) reminded us that the authority of the Supreme Court took some 100 years or more to establish in this country. And although by this point it is indeed well-established, it’s not an impossibility for that position to be challenged in the future – especially if the Court continues to make extreme decisions such as Bush v. Gore and to undermine both its credibility and its position of power with behavior that is so clearly beneath it.
Courtesy of The Christian Science Monitor
There’s been a lot of talk about the recent Supreme Court case on the Affordable Care Act, and good thing, too. The Court seems to be on an unhappy trajectory of proactive decisions that upend long-standing legal precedent or chart entirely new territory under the guise of judicial restraint. It’s a puzzling sleight of hand, which we have to thank for Bush v. Gore, Citizen’s United, Wal-Mart v. Dukes, and others.
But there’s another trend that concerns me – the broader one of the Court’s diminishing credibility.
As this country’s supreme arbiter of what’s legal or not, the Court represents the gold standard on decision-making. It is, interestingly, the closest thing we have to a monarchy: life appointment to sit in final judgment over the most complex and challenging legal issues of our time. But, unlike a sovereign, the Court is comprised of
nine of these would-be monarchs, who collectively share the mantle “Supreme.”
It’s an interesting set-up.
Interesting in particular to me since I’m in the business of collective leadership and decision-making. I support clients of all kinds to develop governance, process, and behavior by which they’re able to achieve big things together. The courtroom has long been, for me, a model for the importance of process, as well as a source of fascination for its rhetoric and code of ethics. Ever since I first sat in on a trial as a teenager (my mother was a juror and brought me along to learn about our justice system), I’ve been addicted to courtrooms.
Not only, then, is the Supreme Court our highest example of shared decision-making, it’s also the courtroom of all courtrooms. For this reason, I follow with great interest the Court’s proceedings and decisions. But for a while now, my intense interest has been tainted by something alarming. In case after case, sarcasm seems to be an increasingly prevalent actor*. And that’s the problem. The Supreme Court is just no place for sarcasm.
I’m adamant on this and here’s why.
First, as the final decision-maker of our nation’s most challenging legal issues, the Supreme Court is, by definition, a serious institution. By the time a case arrives there,
it’s been through years (sometimes decades) of trials, expense and extreme
hardship for the parties involved. A case before the Supreme Court has earned –
as have its parties, attorneys, and the American public at large, since we foot the bill – the right to an audience before the Justices. This audience has, in fact, been granted by the Justices themselves in agreeing to hear it. The Court’s business then is serious business, the most serious, deserving of a level of sincerity and gravity possibly without parallel in this country. Sarcasm, used to mock and ridicule, to convey scorn or insult, is a clear nonstarter in such an environment.
Second, the charge of the Court is to seek understanding of issues so complex that many courts and judges have been tested in their review. If such understanding and decision-making were easily come by, the Supreme Court wouldn’t be needed. Therefore, again, I see no place for sarcasm, which takes as its premise that the person wielding it is of superior intellect to those to whom the remarks are delivered.
The Justices have been given (and we hope have earned), a life appointment on the bench. Nine justices together have the awesome authority (and responsibility) to finally decide these cases. Therefore, no one Justice can presume him/herself above anyone else, and in fact, should endeavor, we would hope, to listen to the many learned colleagues on the bench (not to mention in the role of advocate), with the intent of arriving at a right and just decision. I see no utility in smugness or sarcasm with such a sacred trust shared among such esteemed peers.
Finally, sarcasm is defined as an attack – a cruel and malicious one with a single intent: to harm another. Not only is this type of behavior inimical to truth-seeking and the serious business of reaching shared understanding of deeply complex issues, it’s also dishonorable. It is especially so in a Supreme Court Justice.
The reason is simple: due to long-established rules of procedure, the individuals to whom the sarcasm is directed - generally, the attorneys arguing the case – are constrained from responding in kind. It is the very position of Supreme Court Justice, referred to, as if to remind us, as “Your Honor,” that should preclude attack, (including the verbal flaying of sarcasm) – for who with honor attacks someone who is both at your mercy and without the means of retaliation? We usually refer to such people as tyrants.
Sarcasm on the Court, although it may seem to liven up the complicated and at times ponderous discussion, undermines the very role the Court exists to serve. We need to believe in the superior experience, capability, wisdom, and dare I say it, restraint (personal, if not judicial) of the Court to fulfill its role of deciding the nation’s most serious legal issues on our behalf. We depend on this belief because without it we teeter on the perilous edge of anarchy. But if the Court persists in demeaning itself to the level of Judge Judy for the sake of popularity, entertainment value, or worse, to feed the egos of a few Justices, it will lose the credibility on which it and we depend.
I have written before of my concerns about the Court’s diminishing credibility at the hand of its too-often politicized decisions (those signaled by the 5-4 split). But perhaps graver still and certainly more insidious than the issues represented by these cases is the idea that the Court is becoming nothing more than a platform for a few bullies. If this is acceptable behavior on the Court, what separates it from the commons? What indeed.
Remember what happens when people lose confidence in their monarch? Heads roll. Let us all be warned.
*For examples, please click here.
In college, I traveled to Italy for six months to study in the archives. My subject was, of all things, 18th century Italian opera. What I was looking for, namely letters from any of the prime donne (first ladies of the opera house), was not to be found in US libraries. So, I spent a semester planning, reading history, contacting likely scholar mentors, and learning Italian so I could go and search in the Italian archives.
When I arrived in what was to be my home, the small, medieval hill town of Siena, I immediately got to work. First, intensive language study; second, intense social life (I was just 24); third, practice in approaching the archives. Facing the mirror, I rehearsed my introductory sentences about being an American, studying 18th century opera, and looking for letters from singers of that period. When I’d got it down, I headed for the local library – a palatial edifice founded in 1759. I didn’t really expect to find anything there, just to practice, to get the feel of it.
My rehearsal was pointless; the arch fellow behind a monolithic desk barely glanced at me as he pointed, raised arm and index finger, at a stack of what I took for card catalogues. Not bad, I thought. Just like home. At the case, I peered at the tiny white cards on each mini-drawer. And here began the mystery that would engulf me for the rest of my six-month trip.
Each card was written in a sloping, curly que hand that looked like it belonged to the first librarian back in the mid-1700s. The drawers were in alphabetical order, but it was unclear of what. Some entries were name of historical figure, some of place, and some of author, with no obvious system denoting why or which. I was baffled. Upon closer inspection, I found there were also no numbers in the top right or left corner of the cards: no Dewey Decimal system. Egads – it never occurred to me that Dewey wasn’t ubiquitous! What was going on?
Enter Mr. James Gleick and his wonderful book The Information, out in paperback any day now. As it turns out, how we organize information is indicative of who we are. Makes sense. And the way we organized things early on had more to do with the things themselves than with the efficiency of the system. In other words, Gleick explains, information was ordered by subject, rather than by alphabetization (which, by the way, didn’t come into common practice for an astonishingly long time – 1613, to be exact).
What Gleick explained, that seems quite obvious upon reflection, is that humans think about things in terms of their experience of them. And then, bin them up accordingly. (Everything I eat, everything that breathes, everything that grows, etc.) This system worked quite well for a limited quantity of information used by a small and perhaps congenial group of people. So, it wasn’t until the amount of information increased and a larger, more diverse group was using it that the need for a more efficient cataloguing system arose.
This, significantly, would cause information to be separated from experience. Alphabetical order, as Gleick explains, “is unnatural. It forces the user to detach information from meaning; to treat words strictly as character strings.” The Dewey Decimal system takes abstraction a step farther since the number has nothing whatsoever to do with its correlated subject. (At least a letter corresponds with the name.)
With Gleick’s help, I see now that what I’d found in Siena’s small, but centuries old library was the layering on of alphabetical order over what appeared to be a prevailing subject matter system. And, as I would come to learn from living in Italy, Italians hold hard to how things are done – no matter how seemingly nonsensical or inefficient. But then perhaps, so don’t we all.
Back then, as I sat staring into a drawer (and by the way, the cards came fully out, which also made me gasp – how easy it would be for them to be stolen or put in the wrong order!), it suddenly occurred to me that I’d never find anything in Italy. All that way for nothing, simply because I had no idea how the Italians organized things! This was something, in all my preparations, that just hadn’t crossed my mind.
But I was in Italy and for six months too, so I endeavored to figure it out. As I traveled first from Siena to Florence to work in the archives there, and then on to Bologna, Modena, Parma, Verona and Venice, I began to see something I now refer to as an “organizing principle.” All this means is the method by which information is structured or catalogued: by time (date or period) or by subject (name, place, or field), and which is primary and secondary and so forth.
When I’d get to an archive, I’d challenge myself to think of every possible organizing principle with which to conduct my search. I’d try different methods and sequences as I scanned the shelves, the indexes and what card catalogues there were. I’d leave my own organizing prejudices behind and try to imagine how people in the 18th century might think. The more flexible my thinking, the faster I found the key for using each archive. And soon, it became the game, the researcher’s version of hide and seek.
The happy outcome of my Italy trip was finding seven letters from my favorite prima donna, Caterina Gabrielli, on which I based my thesis. The letters were hidden away in the Vatican Archives…but that’s another story.
The true treasure of that trip was the notion of the organizing principle. We all have them. And which ones we use dictates how we organize our worlds – both our physical one and, more importantly, the one inside our minds. Knowing this has proved invaluable in my leadership, collaboration and strategic planning work over the past 20 years (not to mention my travel).
Little did I know that dusty Italian archives would prove a useful training ground for a consulting career. Or that a book, with an unassuming cover, called The Information, would help explain a mystery a quarter of a century old.
Do you know how in a group there’s often one person who won’t get on board? He or she just seems to be interminably skeptical and constantly throws stones at whatever the group is working on. And pretty soon, the work feels like a large rock is tied to the back of it, putting a major drag on forward movement.
The group inevitably grows weary. And depending on the situation, the rock’s drag may win out and the project gets dropped. Or in other cases, people will start to look back at the rock and give it nasty looks, shake their heads at it and maybe even come around and cut the rope. In some cases, the group just slogs on, dragging the rock forever.
What’s up with the rock?
At first glance, the rock appears to be the skeptic. Those who sit apart from the group, mutter under their breath or roll their eyes, and when they do contribute, speak out loudly with sarcasm or confrontation – all in the name of skepticism.
But not all skeptics employ these tactics. For instance, accountants and attorneys often play the skeptic role, and do so by calmly explaining legal or financial reasons for rethinking what everyone else is enthusiastically supporting. Although this can feel like a “wet blanket”, people are generally glad that someone bothered to “kick the tires” to prevent driving off in a lemon.
The skeptic then, is not a person or a set of behaviors; it’s a role. A valuable role that keeps us from doing things that we’ll regret, cause us harm, or waste resources and effort. We all use skepticism to protect ourselves: we are skeptical of politicians’ promises, skeptical of advertising claims, skeptical of things that seem too good to be true – some of us are skeptical if too many people endorse something.
In fact, we need the role of skeptic. It’s hugely helpful in situations involving large investments of money, a high risk of bodily harm or that defy generally established norms (remember the Wright brothers?) The adage “a healthy dose of skepticism” reminds us all to use this critical faculty in our daily lives. The “healthy dose” refers to using it appropriately to the situation.
So, the question is, how do we gain the gift of the skeptic in a way that’s
constructive and additive rather than destructive and an impediment to
progress?
First, design the role into group process. When the group recognizes the value of the skeptic’s gift, this role can be designed into group process, in a “healthy dose” appropriate to the situation. (For example, experimental brain surgery requires a bigger dose of skepticism than, say, exploring new restaurants for a dinner party.)
Designing the skeptic role into process means identifying the most opportune times for the full group to apply the skeptic’s perspective. In this way the role of skeptic is shared and the burden for tire-kicking isn’t left to one person or to a small minority. This also frees the group to be visionary and innovative together, to be practical and methodical together, and to be critical and skeptical together – each of which are equally important to the creative process. With everyone taking on the role of skeptic together, the group’s cohesion is increased, with outliers able to join in.
Second, distinguish the role from the behavior. Once process has been designed to include the skeptic’s role, the next step is for the group to create normative standards for participation and to clearly communicate what these are. Explain that the skeptic’s role has been designed into the process, and there is no need for one person to take it on him/herself. Nor will it be useful to play the role of the skeptic (i.e., interject criticism) when the group is still in the learning or idea generation phases. Once group process and norms are clear, the next step is to enforce them.
Finally, openly address “rock” behavior. When a process is new, it may take a bit of road testing to get it right. So if “rock” behaviors begin to appear, they need to be addressed right away, as a demonstration to all that the process is now different from before. The group needs to make clear that indeed there will be the opportunity to evaluate and critique as part of the development process, but not at this time. In other words, the mis-timed skeptic behavior should not go unchecked.
This can be done by group participants, the group’s designated lead, or, depending on the size, nature and track record of the group, this may be done best by a neutral facilitator. The point is, groups that do not check this “rock” behavior allow themselves to be held hostage by it.
* * *
So, the group develops its process to explicitly include the skeptic role, communicates this from the outset, and monitors that everyone is clear as the process unfolds. What if then some people still take on the lone skeptic role? What if these individuals continue to sit outside the circle, pitching rocks in, rolling their eyes, and even jumping up every now and then to rant and rave, or stomp out?
One reason for “rock” behavior by the skeptic is that the group isn’t really playing the role. In many groups, the majority of people will seek convergence. This is a human trait: we are relationship-oriented. This can lead to acting too quickly or to “group think” resulting in the status quo. In these situations, the skeptic may resort to “rock” behaviors to get the group’s attention. Since the skeptic role is essential to achieving effective and lasting results in anything, but particularly in something new, groups need to be sure it is given real attention. When this happens, many times the “rock” behavior will simply disappear, because it’s no longer needed.
Sometimes the skeptic needs more certainty before acting than others – s/he is more risk averse. Or the skeptic may have specialized knowledge that causes them to see risk that no one else does. In such cases, even if the group dons the skeptic role, this may not feel sufficient to the skeptic, so s/he will continue to tire kick long after everyone is well-enough satisfied to give whatever it is a go. The key here is to try to understand if the skeptic has a valid point the group hasn’t considered, or if the individual’s risk tolerance is really at issue. The more self-aware the individual is – the more able to identify this for him/herself – the more easily the situation can be resolved.
In some cases, the skeptic role has become so second-nature to the person that s/he no longer distinguishes between the role and self. This type of person has become the role. The person has come to identify with it and to use “rock” behaviors as self-expression. This is an unfortunate state for the individual because any skeptic that’s unaware that skepticism is fine as long as it remains in a “healthy dose” risks becoming the boy who cried wolf: ignored by his peers and ostracized to the back of the room. Coaching can be very helpful with this kind of individual, with the aim of increasing self-awareness and options for self-expression.
In other cases, the skeptic is playing the role to prevent change. Some will even continue the skeptic role into the implementation phase, looking for opportunities to say “I told you so” to undermine the process. This is the worst type of skeptic behavior because the criticisms are really masking a hidden agenda. Most groups can sense this, even if it’s not openly discussed. This shouldn’t go unchecked if a group desires to make progress. But even this skeptic has something s/he is concerned about protecting – whether for the greater good or for him/herself, and listening to what this is can bring valuable information to the group.
* * *
In summary. The issue is not with the role of the skeptic. The role has the inestimable value of avoidance of pitfalls. The issue is with how, when and by whom the role is played. The skeptic role is far more productive if openly recognized for its value by the entire group and then designed into group process. The skeptic role is also more effective if it doesn’t get played by the same one or two people in every situation. And finally, the individual who seems trapped in the role and/or in “rock” behaviors should be coached to see that the role is a choice and that other roles can bring just as much satisfaction.
Remember: A little skepticism goes a long way. And “rock” behavior is really only suited to preventing something from going over a cliff.
This is a follow-up piece to Collaboration: What to do about Politics and Power Plays?
Last weekend, I visited the new memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington DC. This followed a trip to Anacostia, MD to see Frederick Douglass’ home – who came 100 years before King, and both visits came on the heels of a recent trip to South Africa, where Nelson Mandela lives still. Civil rights have been on my mind.
Civil rights. Two little words for such an enormous concept, such an important idea. The idea that we all need food and water to survive; we all want some voice in how things go in our lives; we all want to LIVE – to express ourselves, to discover, to work, contribute, relate, find meaning and connect. A grand idea, I notice, reduced by these two words to a legal concept – that of rights.
When 
I entered the MLK memorial, my first sight was King quotations, writ large across granite walls that hug the landscape, the letters of which are made crisp by the play of sun and shadow. What struck me about these words was that King wasn’t really talking about rights. He wasn’t talking about a platform or legal precedent or even a group of people.
He was talking about truth essential to us all – deep truth, as basic as bone.
He said things like:
“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.”
And:
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
As I moved along the wall, I came upon the monument itself, made of massive granite chunks. One of which has King’s body emerging from its end – like a ship’s figurehead, facing into the wind of the future, eyes wide and standing tall. King’s visage stares across the Tidal Basin toward the Jefferson Memorial, out of a bright whiteness of stone. I wondered at the choice. His face, his lips, his massive hands, holding in place arms folded across his body, all seemed a bit wrong. I longed for the warm tone of his skin; I longed for his open arms, his hands reaching out to us all.
But instead, the memorial casts him in hard lines, imposing, stern, and seemingly miffed at us. Arms crossed as though holding back, keeping his distance. Why? Was this who he was? Or who we need him to be? Is he posed this way to let us know there is more to do? A stern father towering over us with authority and disappointment?
Maybe that is comforting or inspiring to some, but I hoped to look into the countenance of the man representative of the words carved deep into the rock behind him. The words reminding us all that we are one.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”
It struck me that rights are an unnecessary concern in a world where unconditional love prevails. We need only be concerned with rights when they are in jeopardy or worse, being transgressed. But the entire idea of rights rests on the notion that we are fundamentally different from each other. That some of us are different, and because of that, deserve to be treated differently.
As long as this difference remains the ground we stand on, we will continue to have to fight for equal rights. Whether it’s poor, uneducated, one color or another, large, small, male or female, this set of beliefs or that, across a river or an ocean, these differences appear, in retrospect, so terribly arbitrary and archaic. And yet, we persist in justifying our obsession with difference with whatever current rationale for this group’s inferiority or wrong or lack of some fundamental sameness the rest of us share. Yesterday were those with black skin; today those who love people of the same gender; tomorrow it’s me; the day after it’s you.
When will we begin with the idea that all people, in fact, all life, is made of the same stuff? And the differences so much smaller than the sameness, they are very nearly inconsequential? When will we accept that our focus on difference is our undoing? This is not a political or legal position, although great politicians and lawyers have espoused it. This has been the stuff of spiritual teachers since time immemorial, but more recently has been argued by philosophers and proven by science.
And in this moment, when our lives across the planet are being pushed closer together with globalization and King’s “inescapable network” is the very real internet, it’s time to rethink “protection of rights.” King presaged the way:
“If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective.”
These words today seem so simple and right, and even obvious. Maybe that’s the irony of Truth. The bigger it is, the simpler it is in the abstract, but the more challenging, even impossible it seems in practice. So, although Martin’s loving words, from the heart of a deeply spiritual man, are the surround of his memorial, it is King as stark, harsh, massive presence that commands its central position. And isn’t this just exactly our problem? We take what is so tender and lovely – our sameness – and make it so hard and brutal – our fight for right against which we must fight for equal rights.
For me, the real feeling of King’s memorial is evoked not by his massive, stalwart, near-grimacing presence, but rather by the expanse of the space surrounding it. Four acres nestled among walls of such beautiful words, where visiting people look up, out and through a lens, the narrow focus of the mind as it penetrates meaning. They cast their reverent gaze on the man, his idea, and each other. And his legacy is reflected in those faces, laughing, reading, chatting, all the while, perceiving the gift. The gift of what is right. What is true. Against which, all the tyranny and smallness and meanness of spirit, all the torture and brutality and disregard simply look petty.
We think about rights as a way to get to equality – when in fact, our sameness, our fundamental equality, as King would say, is where it all begins.
The other day, I got to thinking about myth. Not the myth of legend or metaphor, but the myth of falsehood masquerading as truth. I was writing about stories I’d heard while on safari, some of which were true and some of which seemed only to border that territory. As I wrote, I started to contemplate the nature of truth and fiction, what makes a good story. I then realized that some of my own travel stories involve things I was told in earnest, that is, believed by the teller (or so I thought), but that turned out not to be true.
This phenomenon of how falsehoods become common truths fascinates me. If essential falsehoods can be presented (and believed) as real, what in the world can we ever really know? This question is the stuff of sages and philosophers – and perhaps, politicians. But when I consider truth, fiction, fact and falsehood, I think what we often take to be the bright line between them is more like a dance, with Truth and Falsehood trading the lead in syncopated time.
Three stories: about a building, a President and a puff adder. And even though I think I unmasked these falsehood to find the truth at last, it may just be that the leads change roles again, and the lie becomes truth once more!
While meeting with the Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Network (AGLN) in South Africa’s sunny wine country, our group convened one day in a boma. The boma was a short walk from the main conference center, with unobscured views of the Hottentot Holland Mountains. The boma is a round, thatch-roofed structure with twig walls that let the breeze blow through, and AGLN staff explained that we’d use it as an adjunct to traditional meeting spaces inside. As I approached the boma, it looked to me like an African version of a Hogan or teepee – and I assumed it was, similarly, a structure indigenous to Africa used on the savannas.
When I arrived a week later at the game lodge for safari, there too was a boma, only this one was without the roof. 
Still round and made of tall and thin standing twigs, it had a fire pit at its center. Two nights later, back from game drive, we were escorted to the boma. Dark had descended, so the brilliance of the fire dancing in its pit dazzled as it lit up the pretty table and buffet nearby. Our truck of passengers, all fast friends after bonding over the terrifying and disgusting sight of four lions eating a rotted buffalo carcass, began toasting our endurance.
To our delight, our ranger sat down and set in regaling us with stories of game drive legend. In the midst of his telling, someone asked what a boma was. I looked to our ranger, waiting for the explanation I’d already sorted out for myself. Instead, he said that boma was in fact an acronym: B-O-M-A, which stood for British Officers’ Mess Area. How silly I felt, thinking the BOMA was a type of sacred vessel for millennia of lives in the bush…
When I returned stateside and wrote my holiday letter, I briefly described my misimpression, giving the correct origin of the word and spelling it BOMA. But at the last moment, something made me look it up. In my quick internet search, I discovered that a boma is indeed a boma (not a BOMA), and is in fact a structure indigenous to Africa. And, what’s more, the fact that boma stands for British Officers’ Mess Area (or Management Agency, or any number of other MA words) is a common tale told to tourists.
As I re-wrote my holiday missive, I wondered, what was the intent of this seemingly inconsequential deception? And was our ranger in on the long tradition of goofing tourists or had he believed it himself? And how could the hoax possibly still persist if I was able to unmask it so easily with Google?
The AGLN group took time out for a field trip to Robben Island; the place Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years incarcerated for activism against apartheid.
When the bus disgorged us at the entry gate, razor wire still topped the high fence, and I felt a chill despite the day’s hot sun. Our guide explained the different cell blocks, telling us that Mandela was kept in a building with single cells instead of the group ones that held 40 men. We filed down a narrow corridor that reminded me of my elementary school because of the aqua green paint. On either side of the hall, barred windows looked into small cells. Soon our group bunched up in a knot: Mandela’s cell was just ahead.
It was an eerie feeling, looking at the modest rectangle where Mandela spent so many years. A hushed silence fell, broken only by the intermittent camera click. As my turn came to look through the bars, I noticed a small black and white photo of the cell as it had been when Mandela lived in it.
In the photo, the bed was against the wall at one end, with a small table beside it. On the table was an 8×10 photo of, I could just make out, a naked woman. From behind me, I heard a man explain to another that Mandela had kept a nude picture of his wife, Winnie, in his cell. The notion struck me. It seemed at odds with how I thought about Mandela, how I’d always heard him portrayed. But then I thought that he’d been a young man when he was sent there, and perhaps the picture gave him solace of a sort – who was I to judge?
Days later I traveled to Johannesburg and decided to tour Constitution Hill, the old Johannesburg Fort with its medieval prisons used to incarcerate South Africans who resisted apartheid. Mandela was among the many held there, and a room was dedicated to his story. Our tour group wasn’t given much time to peruse the exhibit, so I did a quick pass, stopping at what most caught my eye. In a Plexiglas case toward the back, there was a copy of the photograph I’d seen in the picture of Mandela’s Robben Island cell. I leaned in for a closer look. A beautiful young black woman running naked down a beach, looked at ease and completely unaware of the photographer. And then I noticed next to it a copy of a typewritten letter.
The letter was to Mandela from a friend who’d been imprisoned with him on
Robben Island. The letter told of the day Mandela had seen the photo in a National Geographic Magazine while on the Island, and how he’d been struck by how perfectly the woman epitomized freedom. For his birthday, his friends cut the picture out of the magazine and made a frame of wood shards they found around the prison. This was the picture that Mandela kept by his bedside.
I wondered how the story of a naked Winnie got started and, even more, how it still persisted after all this time, especially when the National Geographic picture makes so much more sense.
While at the game lodge, I walked from my room to the main hall for breakfast. We could walk unaccompanied during the day, whereas after dinner, an armed guard escorted us to our rooms – protecting us from visiting wildlife. But even in the morning sun, I was still a bit wary as I walked the distance to the hall. I also followed the advice of closed-toed shoes whenever on game drives and in the evenings at dinner. Even though my feet were hot, I bore it so I wouldn’t have to worry about my footing. But this morning, I’d changed into my sandals, the cool air on my hot toes delicious.
As I approached the hall entrance, I felt relief: no encounters. No crazy baboons, no monkeys jumping overhead, no Heavens-knows-what lurking in the shadows. Just as that thought entered my head, I caught sight of something at my feet. I stopped just in time to see a small and beautifully patterned snake cross my path. I stood still and watched as it slithered by and into the garden, winding itself around a small yucca.
At first, I was taken aback. But the snake’s petit size made me think it must be like a garter – cute and harmless. After a few moments gazing at its gorgeous markings, I strode inside. The staff greeted me, and I told them in reply that I’d just seen a snake. With wide eyes, they asked where. I said right outside, in the garden – did they want to see? I turned around and headed out the door, standing by the yucca and pointing. The four staff members crouched in the doorway, leaning to look where I pointed. One of them gasped, that’s a puff adder. Another said, a baby. I said I’d figured a baby was harmless. Another staffer confirmed it; a baby wasn’t much of a worry. With that, we all went back inside.
Later on game drive, I mentioned my find to the ranger. He gave me a look. He told me that the baby snakes are, in fact, much more worrisome than the adults because the young ones haven’t learned how much venom it takes to stun, wound or kill. So, they just keep pumping it out till they’re spent. I shivered at the news. He also informed me that the puff adder is one of the worst: the venom works by eating the prey’s skin. Your skin rots away until you’re left without your hide. It’s a horrible death, he told me. Needless to say, I thought.
I wondered if the camp staffer had just been trying to make me feel at ease, or if he really believed the babies are less dangerous. In any case, I treaded much more gingerly after that, and started to think consulting several authorities might be in order before deciding what exactly to believe.
After all, it is each of us who decides just what is and what is not true, isn’t it?
Photography by Rebecca Reynolds, 2011.
I spent Thanksgiving in South Africa this year. Of course, it wasn’t Thanksgiving there. In fact, it was early summer and didn’t feel a bit like Thanksgiving.
On Monday of Thanksgiving week, when normally I would’ve been buying turkey, making final decisions about table setting and menu and otherwise preparing for the family feast, instead I was exploring Cape Town with my guide, Jackie. We topped Table Mountain in a rotating gondola and drove the coastal road down to Penguin Beach and Cape Point. We lunched at an out of the way seafood place in Kalk Bay, with catch so fresh I could see the women de-boning it on the docks below. And as we drove, walked, and dined, we talked of South African politics. It wasn’t really an option – everyone was.
You see, the following day, Tuesday, a vote was to take place on the Protection of State Information, commonly referred to as the Secrecy Bill. The African National Congress (ANC) was the key proponent of the bill, which would, according to many, roll back freedom of information to intolerable levels. According to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the bill threatened to outlaw whistle blowing and investigative journalism, and, as the bill states, subject “offenders” to up to 25 years in prison.
People I spoke with characterized the bill as another step farther from the dream of the Apartheid-era ANC, Nelson Mandela’s party, the one that led passage of one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world – which, by the way, includes a Bill of Rights that says: “Everyone has the right of access to any information held by the state.”
South Africans against the bill had named the vote day “Black Tuesday” and planned to don the color to symbolize their protest. When Jackie and I went out again on Tuesday, sure enough, shop keepers, students, people dining and more were decked out head to toe in black. But, even with the dour dress code and opposition from such luminaries as Mandela, Tutu, and Nobel Prize winning author Nadine Gordimer, the bill still passed.
This was a hard moment in South Africa. It was one of a people’s profound disappointment after the promise of democracy was chiseled down by a vote of 229 to 107.
When I went on Facebook that evening, posts about Thanksgiving dominated the space. So much glee about food preparation, family gathering and general thankfulness was tainted by my experience that day of a people’s anguish. I felt it, too. I felt it for them – a long-suffering country’s dashed hopes by the party of so much hope it had inspired the world.
And then I saw it. A post about Black Friday. I’d forgotten all about it until that moment. And the contrast hit me hard. In South Africa, a country is fighting for freedom of information against a corrupt and opaque government and is using the black moniker to gather solidarity for the cause. In the US, we too use the “black” to rally the masses, but the rallying cry is not for freedom, not for democracy, not against the powerful hiding their secrets. No. Black Friday is a call to shop. To get up early and get in line to be the first across the threshold to buy whatever.
I then felt my melancholy closer to home. For our US democracy, flagging under the weight of too much – too much privilege, too much complacency, too much information – a gluttony that Thanksgiving brought into stark relief.
We Americans enjoy unprecedented freedoms, comforts and convenience. We have been the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. We have reveled in the fruits of our innovation and our ambition, and our ability to speak our minds and do as we please.
But we are poised at a precipice – the precipice of choice. We can gather ourselves up and look beyond our borders at what the world is becoming, and choose a course more hospitable to it. Or we can continue to shuffle along the way we have, in the fog of our own undoing. An undoing symbolized, in my mind, by Black Friday – a term of dubious origin, of misplaced priority, of misguided intent.
How long will we continue to lull ourselves to sleep in the rapture of consumerism? When will we awaken to our awesome potential as members of the burgeoning global community? And begin to use the tremendous power of our freedom for great good rather than, say, to pillory Coca-Cola for changing the color of its Coke can?
Or will we wait until we are crushed under the heels of our own Black Friday mobs, while the rest of the world takes its freedom seriously?
From our holiday newsletter…stay tuned for more from South Africa.
Dear Friends,
As we approach the final days of 2011, the sense of satisfaction of a year well-lived is upon me. 2011 has certainly been a big one at RRC, full of milestones and new ventures.
First, the company turned 20, an achievement that snuck up on us in all our flurry of activity! Then, in February, I began a sabbatical to explore who and what is on the cutting edge in leadership, and planned travel to Aspen, Boston, Colorado Springs, D.C., and New York to participate in a wide range of leadership events. I also started this blog to share my experiences and reveries along the way – and have been so gratified by your readership and comments.
The culmination of my leadership sabbatical was a three-week trip to South Africa. I traveled there to take part in Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Initiative with 60 leaders from around the world. My itinerary also included individual meetings with prominent South African leaders, tours of the country’s rich history and culture, and finally, safari in the famed Kruger National Park area. It was a “trip of a lifetime”, opening my mind to new ideas and grand possibilities with amazing people.
Following are some tidbits from my travels, illustrated with a few of the more than 2000 pictures I took while there.
It is indeed a year for gratitude at RRC – for the bounty of what the year has brought, which includes our relationship with each of you.
Season’s best to you and yours,
Spending time in the bushveld of South Africa’s Mpumalanga province affords not only incredible wildlife viewing, but also some quiet lessons. First, the word safari is Swahili for “long journey,” bringing new meaning to what a safari portends. Next, the hours spent on game drives watching animals in the midst of their daily lives – taking a drink, preening, knocking down trees, nursing, rolling a matrimonial dung ball, or slithering across the road – bear witness to how great are the gifts each of us is given.
Every animal, no matter how small, has its ability, its camouflage, and its distinct role in the order of things. And they are, surprisingly, adept communicators: the impala snorts at the leopard, telling it that it’s been seen. The leopard grunts back, “Ok, relax, I’m not hunting you.” Simple, straightforward messages are key to getting along.
And finally, despite the enormous power of these animals to harm, there’s an understanding that allows humans such privileged access. The bush: an uncommon place for leadership learning.
RRC is in its 20th year – yes, that’s right, 20 years of partnering with our clients to achieve great things though visionary, collaborative processes. To celebrate, we launched our new homepage, that features images that reflect the enormous breadth of our work over the past two decades: buildings built, watersheds cleared, balance sheets balanced, homeless sheltered, performances sold out, forests renewed, refugees protected…and so much more. Many of you will recognize photographic representations of your projects!
2011 also marked new levels of RRC involvement in a wide range of organizations doing good in our world: Colorado Public Radio, Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Museum of Nature and Science, to name a few. We are indeed grateful for this rich and varied history, and look forward to the next two decades of dreams becoming reality!
Aspen Institute’s Globalization Seminar took place in Stellenbosch, just outside of Cape Town, assembling 60 world leaders in dialogue. Three groups of 20 convened in a boma, an open air, thatch-roofed structure indigenous to Africa, that allowed the breeze to ruffle paper and billow minds. The topic was leadership in the age of global
ization, which was addressed through a series of readings from Seneca to Conrad, Thomas Friedman to Desmond Tutu.
What the immersive conversation showed was that, although the challenges are great in this time when the world is truly becoming one, there are far more similarities among us than might be expected. Economic prosperity, environmental justice, cultural expression, resource sustainability, and social well-being are priorities no matter who is talking. The question is, how will we create a new model of global governance through which these shared priorities may be realized equally for all?
Standing at the bottom of the African continent (okay, actually Cape Agulhas is the most southerly point) is a place conducive to historical reflection.
The first European to name the rocky point was Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias, who called it Cape of Storms in 1488. But later, John II of Portugal changed it to Good Hope. Dias must’ve encountered the vicious weather that prompted the namesake. And perhaps, the name also aptly described his mood since his crew forced him to turn back before he could proclaim the spice route for Portugal.
For King John, on the other hand, Dias’ adventure proved that the King’s tremendous investment in exploration would, in fact, pay off – he had plenty of good hope for a future maritime voyage to India. The cape’s name, then, is a case of perspective – and the optimist’s won the day.
As we stand at the end of 2011, gazing out to the open seas of 2012, let us appropriate the name for the coming New Year. 2012: the Year of Good Hope. Let’s raise a glass to it – Cheers!
View of Table Mountain with its cloud "tablecloth" from Robben Island.
Robben Island (robben is Dutch for “seal”) is a stunning sanctuary within sight of Cape Town. The island’s vantage point affords spectacular views of Table Mountain and its famous roiling “tablecloth” of clouds. Visitors from all over the globe arrive at Robben Island on a modern ferry equipped with refreshments and video entertainment on the interior decks. Plentiful bird flocks play in the surf and a charming village is marked by a guest house and a church built in the pleasing Cape Gothic architectural style.
Mandela's Cell, Robben Island.
All of this picturesque beauty, however, belies the island’s three-century history as a place of extreme isolation and harsh punishment. Home to thousands of outcasts from lepers to criminals, military prisoners and finally, political dissidents from South Africa’s apartheid era, its most famous prisoner is, of course, Nelson Mandela. He spent 18 of his 27 years incarcerated on the island, along with many others, including current South African president, Jacob Zuma, whose own stay lasted a decade.
In contrast to Robben Island, Constitution Hill, site of Johannesburg’s old Fort and a warren of prisons located in the heart of downtown, was built specifically for the purpose of incarceration. There is no splashy surf or inspiring view to fool one into thinking this is anything but a place to deprive people of their humanity.
Separate prisons within the Constitution Hill complex divided women from men, and blacks from whites, but not hardened criminals from conscientious objectors. The women’s prison, built in 1907, was a model of innovation at the time, using British penal reformer Jeremy Bentham’s two-story “roundhouse” design to put prisoners under the constant watchful eye of authorities. Bentham’s theory remains the basis of prison architectural design today.
Now Constitution Hill is a National Heritage Site and museum, and also the seat of South Africa’s 17-year-old Constitutional Court, the highest in the land. The site was chosen to serve as an intentional and bold reminder of the country’s transgressions under apartheid. These included horrific prison overcrowding that led to unsanitary, dangerous and debilitating conditions; divisive food rations where the blacker the skin the less was given; and a wide range of humiliations such as depriving women of undergarments and forcing new prisoners to dance naked in the prison yard.
As many as 2000 black South Africans were sent to the prison each day, including Africa’s first Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Luthuli, Pan-Africanist leader Robert Sobukwe (also held in solitary confinement for six years on Robben Island), activists Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Barbara Hogan, in addition to Nelson Mandela. Even Gandhi served time in the black male prison known as Number 4 for protesting Pass Laws in the 1950s. But many more were non-activists, incarcerated for minor violations like making beer.
What is so instructive – while at the same time so deeply unsettling – about visiting these South African prisons is the immediacy of their history. Unlike most memorials and museums dedicated to human atrocities, South Africa’s tortuous past is too recent to offer any relief. Although Robben Island’s prison history began at the end of the 17th century, its most poignant period under apartheid ended just 17 years ago. The tour guides are among its former political prisoners, who convey first-hand the systematic brutality and degradation they experienced there.
The prisons of Constitution Hill, I was somewhat relieved to hear, were closed in 1983, 11 years before the official end of the apartheid regime. I was in college at the time, first learning that such a thing existed. But the tour guide’s clarification quickly dispelled my hopeful assumption: the prison wasn’t closed out of recognition of its inhumanity, but simply because, in its dilapidated condition, it was too costly to maintain.
I hesitated visiting Constitution Hill after having gone to Robben Island – after all, how much cruelty can one person bear? In the end though, I’m glad I did. As I looked up at the puffy white clouds easing gently by just beyond the barbed wire overhead, I thought that I must never forget that human cruelty is not a thing of distant history; it is a possibility alive and present in every moment. It begins with our judgment and alienation. It ends when we choose something different. And it is our awareness of the terrible consequences illustrated by Robben Island and Constitution Hill that helps us get there. This Mandela learned, taught, stood for and modeled for his country. Let us all be students of the lesson.
This is part of an extended series on South Africa. Photographs copyrighted 2011 by Rebecca Reynolds.
This is Part I in a series on my experiences in South Africa.
I left for South Africa just three weeks ago, flying from Denver to Frankfurt to Cape Town for a three-week stay. The trip was the zenith of a ten-month journey into the subject of leadership, which I started as part of a sabbatical.
I’ve worked with leaders my entire career, partnering with them and their teams to solve big problems and achieve big goals. In the last few years, I’d noticed that many of the principles that are core to my work – strategic thinking and big vision, broad collaboration and innovative governance, and the idea that working toward the greater good can be profitable in ways a balance sheet can’t count – seem to be gaining traction in our increasingly complex and changing world. I set out on sabbatical, in part, to validate this impression.
The sabbatical would involve travel to a wide range of leadership enclaves: the World
Business Forum in New York, the Aspen Ideas Festival in the high mountains of Colorado and the Management of Change Conference in Washington DC. But I also hankered for an international component to add a global perspective to my study. Then, on a phone call a month or so into it, the invitation to South Africa was presented.
In that moment, South Africa sounded at the same time ideal and impossible. Ideal because it involved spending a week with world leaders exploring my very topic. Impossible because I had no previous experience of South Africa, no connections to it, and not even much of a desire to go – or at least, not at the time.
The invitation came from the Aspen Institute. It involved joining a group of fellows from the Institute’s global leadership network for a week’s exploration into leading in this age of globalization. An opportunity ideal for me, to which I said yes.
As the months passed, I went on the other trips and heard all kinds of people talking about leadership. Big names like Bill Clinton, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, media monarch Arianna Huffington, and many others less well known, but just as passionate and articulate. At each leadership forum, I’d mention South Africa, and from this, the trip began to plan itself. One person led to another and then more,
sprouting opportunities, ideas and connections that steadily grew into an itinerary.
The first week was spent with Aspen Institute in Stellenbosch, famed wine country known for its Mediterranean-like climate. The seminar was hosted by Spier, a wine farm and conference center with an ecological mission. In that spirit, Spier donates land to two conservation projects: a Cheetah protection effort and a Raptor Sanctuary.
During the seminar, we took time out for an excursion to Robben Island, where we toured the island and then the prison in which Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, and many more anti-apartheid activists were incarcerated up until the early 1990s.
The second week I was in Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg for meetings with prominent South African leaders, whom I interviewed about their road to leadership and their challenges as leaders today. Interspersed with these were various tours, through which I gained a deeper understanding of the rich history and culture of South Africa.
My travel consultant, Sandy Salle of Hills of Africa, provided exceptional tour experiences with guides who were the perfect combination of knowledgeable and personable. Visits to Table Mountain, Cape Point, Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, the townships and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg were all memorable and meaningful.
The final week was for safari. Two different bush camps adjacent to Kruger National Park were the base for forays into the wild of wilds, to experience life at its most essential. In just five days, I saw, not only the big five, but many more species ranging in size from dung beetle to leopard to hippopotamus.
Careening down tawny dirt roads through brush as green as green can be, with intoxicating fragrance and the music of a thousand birds filling the air, I felt life’s magic bursting all around me.
And most magical of all was the reminder that, for all humans have accomplished, we are still children of the veld, so vast and mighty it dwarfs us with its presence. Now that’s a leadership lesson worth traveling half way round the world for.
