cost of COVID‐related sanitization and claimed other schools were doing the same. A quick‐witted faculty member did a Google search that revealed other nearby schools were planning to open, using a split schedule and limited hours to accommodate demand. The administrators were surprised, and then my friend realized: “They have no idea. They don't have a plan.” They froze instead of having a plan, then defaulted into the familiar – shut down everything until everything is back to normal.
There isn't a perfect or simple answer. In Chapter 2, you will read about how the complex challenges of closing during the pandemic are distinct from reopening. However, recognizing that the problem is complex is the first step to adopting a new mindset for better decision‐making.
May 27, 2020: Still a Target, Still a Leader
In the core of my 2016 letter “Company Talk about Police Shootings, as Target and CEO” I acknowledged my own painful emotions after the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Stewart.28 I hoped to create space for our employees, to feel theirs. In the two days after May 25, 2020, I felt the same emotional, exhausted haze from the footage of the murder of George Floyd. It was a reminder: I'm still a target, and I'm still a leader. I wrote this in my blog:
We are a different company now, five times larger across 20 states, maintaining ~55% she/her pronouns, 35% BIPOC, and 23% LGBTQIA+ folks among the 125 professional staff. We've navigated the challenges of scaling a distributed company, while staying connected through crises like #metoo, detention centers, and now COVID. I remain impressed that most of our fundamental distributed connection practices were conceived, designed, and executed by Trussels, whether individually or in affinity groups and facilitation guilds.
Despite this, I've learned how hard it is for employees to claim time to be human, especially in the last few months. We've been programmed with so many powerful messages that “good employees are quiet employees,” that it takes repeated, insistent invitation before people will admit the emotional turmoil and burnout underneath. Only then will they respond to the nudge to take a 5‐minute meditation, a 20‐minute walk, a 50‐minute virtual therapy, or an 8‐hour PTO [paid time off] day.
There's a lot of overdue talk about “taking care of your people,” sparked by how to keep employees connected during the pandemic. The idea that we are human seems to be intruding into our work consciousness. There's greater awareness and access to mental health resources as well as the recognition that psychological safety is a fundamental premise for great performance. The leaders I admire are addressing the new reality with new tools, whether it's communicating a layoff or helping people adjust to working from home. It's hard, emotional, necessary work for leaders.
And then there are days when it's harder.
Proposal: Adopt a New Mindset for Making Decisions
Consider the following perspective: At the start of the 2020s, we have been presented with a worldwide experiment that affects everything from education to health policy. We have a global control condition – what happens when you shut down offices and confine people to homes? Academic and leadership careers will be made because these conditions reveal some basic assumptions that we could never explore in depth before. For example, most of our beliefs about work and productivity assume a building, whether it is an office, store, or factory. Many of our so‐called best practices assume face‐to‐face interaction. How many of our theories of innovation assume in‐person serendipity like the proverbial water cooler conversation? Challenging these assumptions opens up multitudes of options to observe, experiment, and rethink. But if being confronted with the evidence that our offices were not founts of creative innovation, but of status‐enforcing, energy‐sapping activity without meaningful output, leaders may not make the best decisions for themselves or their companies.
Instead, imagine a different mindset. John DeGioia, Chancellor of Georgetown University, was hired with a “simple” task – create the twenty‐first‐century university.29 Sounds exciting, except there was the constraint that this modern university must respect over 200 years of academic history and 2000 years of Jesuit / Christian history. In other words, his mandate was actually a complex problem – is there a singular answer to “What is a twenty‐first‐century university?” He believed there were changes needed that they could not predict in advance, and thus not plan for in a traditional way. Instead, he encouraged his team and department heads to collaborate, experiment, and iterate. He knew this would be a challenge for professors and department chairs, and he needed to create room for them to fail – not the usual mandate for proud academic departments.
In a speech where he described the project, Chancellor DiGioia reflected that he told his teams: “We have a result that's not what we expected, and we will have to do something different … will you follow me anyway?” We've been trained to assume systems are complicated when they are complex. We often have reflexive reactions to stress, and as a result, we can make poor decisions. In particular, the simple, but profound decision to take a public stand on a controversial issue can render the most experienced leaders silent with fear of making a mistake. However, my proposal is that we can practice methods to explore uncertainty and complexity with curiosity, create processes to enable others to follow, and train ourselves to sustain our efforts without burning out. Move to the Edge, Declare It Center doesn't protect you from making mistakes. It doesn't ensure that you will always have the best answer. What I hope you get out of this book is that intentional practice, both exterior with our teams and organizations, and interior with ourselves, will enable you to make better decisions.
Notes
1 1. Allen C. Bluedorn, Scientific Management (comprising Shop Management, The Principles of Scientific Management, Testimony before the Special House Committee, New York: Harper, 1947), Academy of Management Review 11, no. 2 (April 1, 1986).
2 2. Mark Hamilton, The ad that changed advertising, Medium.com, March 20, 2015, https://medium.com/@marathonmilk; Bob Garfield, Ad Age Advertising Century: The Top 100 Campaigns AdAge (March 2, 1999), https://adage.com/article/special-report-the-advertising-century/ad-age-advertising-century-top-100-campaigns/140918.
3 3. Samuel Arbesman, Overcomplicated, Portfolio, Reprint edition ( June 20, 2017).
4 4. Peter Ho and Adrian W. J. Kuah, “Governing for the Future,” Prism 5, no. 1 (2014), https://cco.ndu.edu/Portals/96/Documents/prism/prism:5-1/Governing_for_the_future.pdf.
5 5. Reader, please note that I do none of these things, but I admire those who do.
6 6. Regarding the planning fallacy, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), p. 251.
7 7. Two related perspectives that discuss complexity are from John Allspaw and the fallacies in statistical analysis, Twitter, April 30, 2021, https://twitter.com/allspaw/status/1388156075015381000?s=20.
