Full of Pain, there is Room only for Happiness

I have come to the end of my time here in the Dominican Republic, and I find I have much left still to consider. In one of our reflections sessions with our groups of volunteers, we are asked to define and discuss “Social Justice.” The result is a pantheon of values and opinions but never a concrete solution. Like “solving poverty” or deciding if “development is good”, there are no simple answers because the topics all rely on answering key parts of the human condition. It is a struggle as old as civilization. A struggle that many religions have tried to solve. That we have reached no solutions as humans speaks to how difficult they are to solve.

Here in this one small town in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, I have pondered many parts of these questions daily. I work with and around children who have very little in the way of material goods. I will return with vivid memories of handing small children single hot wheels and seeing their eyes light up and their imaginations take shape as they hustle off to play in the dusty, rocky road. A single jump rope galvanizes a group of preteen girls into action, leading to song and play, with a fervent declaration of “more” from kids less accustomed to having friends and thus not included in the group’s fun. A tube of bubbles elicits the same giggles here as anywhere. There is also much suffering. I have watched many a child without any friendship skills or power struggle as another, larger or older child takes away a ball or game. Here the Platonic explanation of how might does not make right is fully unsupported. If you have the larger share of size or friends, you get what you want. I cannot explain the regular iron taste I get in my mouth, and the tightening in the pit of my stomach as injustice unfolds and a child’s happiness is dashed. There are so many kids here without present parents that there often isn’t even anyone to comfort or succor those in need.

It is as if time and life have passed this village by. Girls getting pregnant at 14, several volunteers remarked a few weeks ago, is medieval. Yet it is the way here. When my English classes faltered and attendance shrank from dozens to a trickle, I was not surprised. I’d already noticed that I had but a small window of grace to teach in. My only viable students were the boys and girls who had yet to reach puberty and who were not athletic enough to play sports all afternoon. The one or two older ones who had already learned some English all had other responsibilities, one ran her family’s small store, another was constantly off to help his father and uncle with farming and husbandry. When I had so many students attending, I knew it wouldn’t last. They came in a crowd, as though a whole clan had left behind the Bachata and sitting in the shade to come see this Americano in action and see what was up. There were women ranging from 13-25 there, and a gaggle of four or five small children who belonged to those ladies. I never got more than a few minutes of attention from my students, as that is all they have to give in a culture where no one has ever expected them to concentrate on learning.

I felt this same lack of discipline whenever I helped the volleyball or baseball teams practice. The kids spend so much of their lives just surviving, there is no room for strength in other less important areas. It’s wonderful and thrilling to have them playing sports together. Truly when the alternative for these girls is sitting around and waiting to get pregnant, I know that whatever this volleyball team gives them is a blessing. As the boys run laps and stretch together more and more before their baseball scrimmage, I am constantly hopeful for how their team will develop over the months and years. However, it is hard to feel the progress and credit it as meaningful in its impact when it falls so short of the potential of people their age. I feel so commonly here a stifling density, a weight of poverty burdening the people that is so heavy that they dare not lift their head or give over their concentration to any other form of diversion lest the load crush them.

The few children who seem to have a possible path out, I wish the best, even though I can feel the draining of resources from an already meager existence. If the smartest children with a little more means to scrape by manage to escape from this town, then what hope do the people left over have. When the hope of change is gone, there is nothing left to do but join together into a tighter family. If everyone has nothing, at least they can have each other. This is the happiness of the Dominican Republic. I have been told here by several people with pride that it is the happiest nation on earth, and that when international surveys are taken, people here have more joy and a better sense of togetherness than other places. Under that pride is a sick, savage reality. Many children here are raised by their grandparents or not at all because one or more parents have died and the other is off making money in the capital and sending it home. So many of these children are completely illiterate and don’t know their own alphabet at 12, 13, or 14, and cannot think in more than one step. I have been overjoyed to lose to a few of them in Checkers or Connect 4, because those that can fathom the strategy and win have learned how to think. There are many kids here who are nine, ten, or eleven and already their chance has passed. Their peers all just say “he doesn’t know” when you try to talk to the child. When I’ve gotten a moment with these kids, they seem simply shy, and downtrodden. Likely suffering in silence because they have some difference or perhaps fall on some spectrum that goes unidentified here. Once fallen behind, they have fallen victim to the Pirates Code and are left behind. They tag along at the edges for now. I can only assume they eventually join the ranks of drunks and crazies that often stumble through town only to have insults thrown their way by the hordes of unattended children, with no recourse but to throw rocks as the peals of laughter and screams of fear echo for blocks.

I reflect here daily on some of the absurdities of American culture and individualism. People here are reasonable to be shocked by parts of American culture that require independence, as it is wholly foreign to them. I have come to a sort of balancing description of our differing cultures that I think sums things up fairly well: In the United States we are more independent and take more individual responsibility for things, but have less group responsibility for the people around us. In the Dominican Republic they have little individual responsibility but take care of groups like family and neighbors. On the flip side, our personal independence and ability contribute to an overall society that is more responsible and productive than the Dominicans. Here much of progress is stifled by what we would call corruption, but to them is far less insidious since it is simply people making short term decisions that help each other look out for their own smaller circles.

I do not mean to imply that our individualism and personal responsibility mantra is without fault - for there are many Americans left behind by our creed, and many more subjected to daily micro-aggressions as a result of ignored privilege from those perpetrating the micro-aggressions (or blatant bias or racism, but I have the privilege of always trying to give the benefit of the doubt). Many a Bernie supporter would tell you that our system needs to be dismantled. Most of those people also come from a position of privilege and would be well served by coming here to learn more about their own privilege and the true power and value of our supposedly malignant institutions. There is certainly room for improvement to our system. You need look no further than the Black Lives Matter movement to see the need for accountability and an end to racial violence amongst our honorable men and women in uniform. Likewise, for an apt comparison to the problems faced here in Derrumbadero, you need only look at the suffering of many lower and middle class Americans through the Rust Belt who voted for Donald Trump because they see in him a strongman who will try anything and speak up for their forgotten and missed lives and livelihoods. People here in Derrumbadero voted in their own corrupt mayor for another term last year because he distributed bags of rice and beans on election day. To put it in a way that seems to get through to many of our American volunteers here, planning for the future is a privilege, and people don’t have that privilege here. If you spoke, patiently and with deference, to Trump supporters who voted for him as a means of grabbing the bull by it’s balls, they might be able to figure out some of the longer term damage he is capable of, or connect the dots between his reductivism and reactionary Twitter use with the reasonable fear of putting him in charge of a nuclear arsenal. You also might find that many of those people couldn’t get to that logic. They’d stop somewhere along the line of “but he’s going to change things and that means I might have a chance again”.

Culture and change are messy affairs. Here in the Dominican Republic I have had several conversations with people who voice legitimate gripes about the current president (for example he said during his Independence Day speech in February that there are not poor people in the Dominican Republic). These same people also have voiced a desire to keep him in power, or at the very least gratitude that he is the president. In this country, there have been many terrible presidents, some dictators, and occupations by various countries (including the United States). Danillo, the current president, may enjoy a good photo op more than he enjoys the hard work of solving problems, and he may be disastrously out of touch with some of the problems in the southern part of the country, but what he lacks in strengths, he also lacks in vices. With luck and time, the next president may be better, and help lead this country forward. There are, after all, many trees being planted here to help forestall the erosion and damage like they have experienced in Haiti, and many roads have been built. Unlike the slogans ironically shackling every town’s entrance, poverty has not been eradicated in our generation. I have little hope of that here. But with a youth center, a new road, potentially running water again by year’s end, and the dedication of a few forward thinking families, this town can grow and prosper.

Ultimately I have gained here in Derrumbadero some lessons I hope to grow on for the rest of my life. I have another family. Flor, my host mother, is always taking in more. From what I can count, she has three adopted children who she simply started feeding and housing because she could. No matter what anyone has, they can always give. It reminds me of the Bible passage (Mark 12) where Jesus praises a woman who gives her only coin to the temple while chastising the rich men who gave only a small portion of their vast wealth. It is not what you have but what you give. I have learned how deep my education goes. I continue to learn how much I owe to my parents and their diligence in raising me to be a thinking, reading young man. If the children here were as lucky as I am in the parents I have, I am certain that the world would be at their fingertips. Every time I read a book to the smallest children here, I felt the weight of my parents’ and siblings commitment to reading that helped me learn so strongly to love books. I have learned here an expression for pain and happiness that I wish I’d known sooner, for it so aptly describes life’s waxing and waning emotions. It comes from the graphic novel Persepolis, and since I have not read it in years, sadly I am paraphrasing: A person only has so much room for pain. When they are filled, there is nothing left but to be happy.

Learning from the Masons

There is a lot to be learned both for and from the masons here in the Dominican Republic. Building something in the United States involves a trip to a well-stocked hardware store. Having wood is a matter of choosing which type of tree you’d like to use, balancing cost with durability. My New England born instructor of all things construction quickly taught me to pick up the smaller hardware before the larger wood so you don’t have to schlep wood all around the store. And of course, always stop by the contractors’ entrance for your free cup of coffee!

While building a house is fundamentally the same here as it is in the US, you need the same roof, walls, supports, windows, doors, and a foundation. But there are so many little differences. There are different size nails, but we don’t use screws, as there are no power tools. The one drill that the masons have uses a nail as a drill bit, and it’s only used for very small pieces of wood you don’t want to split when you nail into them.  When choosing screws or nails in the US, you take the total width of your wood (say, 3”) and then buy something that is a little shorter (say 2.5” or 2.75”) so that the screws don’t pop out on the other side. While the nails here come in several sizes, none of those sizes have anything to do with the width of the wood you are using, simply how secure you need the wood to be. If the nails you are using poke through, either you don’t bother making it safer, or if you’re really feeling ambitious, you bend them downwards and upwards, roughly alternating.

There is strong ingenuity for recycling resources, and a strange stupidity in organizing supplies and tasks. We unbend hundreds of nails, making sure to get the most use out of all of them. And to save money, instead of filling the concrete walls with rebar to reinforce, the Dominicans use barbed wire stapled into the posts. The plywood that we use as a mold for pouring concrete was partially used when we started, and we use it over and over. Through our construction of concrete molds, we made sure to nail almost every nail in mostly, but then bend the last 1/8 of an inch over so that once the concrete had set, we could remove the nails (unbend them for reuse), and then pull the plywood out without ripping the nails through it.

The organizational skills that are lacking are quite frustrating from the American perspective. It is on the volunteers, many of whom have never done this work before, to anticipate where the masons are going to not think ahead, and try to get things done before them. Putting up a wall requires a bunch of steps, some of which take longer than others. Tacking in the barbed wire takes time, as does making the plywood moldings and reinforcing them. Carting sand, gravel, and concrete into a big pile and filling the walls with concrete doesn’t take as long, and neither does prying off moldings from completed sections. Yet somehow for every wall we have made through two different weeks of work, the masons instruct all the volunteers to focus on removing plywood and piling resources. Those of us who see the error in this thinking end up starting work crews to do the tasks that take more time under our own initiative, and often against resistance from the masons. It is a strange dance of having them needing to be right and in charge, but it being obvious to an American’s eyes that the process is inefficient.

There are other glaring examples of both ingenuity and lack of it. The Dominican soil around here is filled with rocks both small and large. Anywhere that the wall needs a few inches of concrete where there is no way to pour it in easily, we will fill the space as much as possible with rocks before adding tackier concrete that we’ve mixed without gravel. This way you can use less concrete to fill the space and still get a smooth(ish) finish. On the other hand, the masons insist on mixing all the concrete on literally the hardest to reach area from the piles of supplies. The piles of sand and gravel are right by the front of the house, where the dump truck could put them from the road. For some reason the masons insist on mixing concrete behind the house so that every wheelbarrow, bucket, and shovel of sand and gravel has to be carried the longest possible distance to a pile before being brought back most of the distance as mixed concrete to be put into the walls.

Not a day goes by where I am not made happy by the companionship and irresistible humor of my Dominican hosts, and also frustrated by the dearth of initiative and problem solving techniques. The whole thing epitomizes the American phrase of taking two steps forward and one backwards. Of course here, after you’ve done that, it’s time for a break to dance to some Bachata.

Using Emotions to Temper Decisions

Our days are filled with decisions. Some are important, but most just involve the minutiae of what we eat, wear, say, or do. Chances are you don't even notice many of the decisions you make each day. How we decide is a combination of our emotional state and our logical expectations about the social and practical functionality of the options. As a culture, we are against deciding things entirely because of emotion. This comes from Enlightenment thinking, colonial survivalism, and the threat of extinction due to an overly emotive leader with access to nuclear warheads. 

Modern consumers are subjected to a daily barrage of surreptitious emotional messaging designed to make us buy things we don't need, but surely want. Two recently effective advertisers have been Apple and Coca-Cola. Apple sold "cool" for many years when the iPod and iPhone first came out, while Coca-Cola still has a stranglehold on the idea that when you open a can of coke, it brings happiness, family, and unbridled joy.

These nuclear and consumption based reasons might make you hesitate to ever use emotions when making decisions. However, I think that there is a space where you can use your emotions to make incredibly effective decisions.

We tend to ignore metallurgy in our expressions about 'temper.' People 'lose' their temper, can be in a 'bad' temper, or can have a 'fit' of temper. When talking about metal, it means to harden by heating and cooling. Imagine if we spoke about our emotions in terms that involved self control, strength, and conditioning, rather than unbridled fire. A blacksmith knows that a low and slow temper produces the hardest and brittlest metals while a hot and fierce temper produces softer, more flexible metal. So when you "lose your temper" it means you've lost control of your temperature and are either too hot or too cool.

When you are making important decisions, they should involve logical assessments about the costs and benefits of each option. This analysis should compare and contrast the short and longer term effects as well as who will be effected. One common method parents teach their children for important decisions is a pros and cons list. This involves a logical and equivalency based approach to deciding.

One of the most important decisions we make each summer at camp is our cabin assignments. Many camps assign their counselors different cabins based on seniority, or allow them to apply for a specific age group. Since our camp is small, and puts so much weight on community, we wait until most of the way through our staff training week before assigning cabins. Each cabin gets two counselors, who live and work together for the following 8-weeks.

This decision process always has a similar formula, but feels very different depending on the temper of the administrators. We will try to figure out the cabin pairings for one gender, then when emotions are overtaking logic, we switch genders. It takes 2-3 passes to get to a point where everyone is comfortable with the cabins. Sometimes the process can get contentious, and erupt in shouting and crass words. Far more often it is a passionate but reasoned discussion where we try to use our feelings about individuals, their histories and prospects, and the needs of the campers and camp to combine into a logic storm of happy goodness.

This decision is made without a time limit (besides getting tired) and with the promise that we will be unified at the conclusion. So while the stakes are high and potentially the success of the whole summer program lies in the decision, we can take our time, think things through, and rely on our cumulative wisdom to find a good solution. In this way, we can let emotions temper our decisions.

In an emergency, two things you don't have are time and the ability to come to consensus. You need a plan and a straightforward set of directions so that you can produce the most reliably good result that helps the most people and hurts the fewest. To prevent rash decisions you should bottle up your emotions during a crisis. Despite this, emotions have an important role to play in emergencies.

In general emotions are more useful in situations where there are multiple possible correct decisions, each with marginal benefits. We use a system of values to guide us in how to apply our emotion. If we feel strongly about something it may mean a particular solution’s marginal benefits should be chosen or discarded.

For 10 months spanning 2009 and 2010 a friend and I prepared for a 5-week trip to the Alaskan Bush. We weighed gear, compared caloric contents of various substances, and read volumes on wilderness survival and Alaska. We also created an emergency plan. We listed as many potential emergencies as we could, and then, from the calm of our own computers thousands of miles apart, debated and doctrinized our responses. This method allowed us the chance to inject emotion and values into our emergency responses without accessing that emotion during the emergency. We had already agreed what we do if one of our backpacks gets washed downstream, or if some of our food spoiled. This meant that as frustration or anger or hunger clouded our vision on the trip, we would still have the tempered response available.

The Weight of Cultural Norms

Traditions and rituals are really cool. As any athlete (or serious fan) will tell you, it is of the utmost importance that pregame rituals are followed exactly. As any serious camper will tell you, it is of the utmost importance that we sing a song before each assembly, that we cross our left hands over our rights during Friendship Circle, and that each cabin have an introductory gimmick for each campfire.

Rituals are part of what connects us with our pasts, and help us convince ourselves that how we lead our lives is valuable and will mean something to those who come after us. It doesn't actually matter if a pro ties their shoes the 'right' way before the game any more than it matters if a NHL player's beard has been grown out all playoffs long. If we sang songs at the end of assemblies at camp, it would be fine. We changed the location of the Assembly Area, which necessitated changing all of the meeting trees, and none of the activities suffered, nor did the Wee Little Tree suddenly wilt and die.

Rituals and traditions should have a purpose, or should be used for a purpose. And you should make sure to look over your big and little traditions in your workplace and see if they have value, or where they can be tweaked to add value. If we let traditions without value stay, we risk becoming culturally moss-covered as we join Kodak in the museum.

One of the things that gives traditions at camp so much weight is that the property and culture feel stuck in time. It is impossible to be at camp and not feel as though the barefoot fun is exactly the same today as it was in 1928 when camp was founded. Because of this, traditions and rituals cut both ways. We can tell people that "This is how we do things/treat people" and have them believe it is important because that's how it's always been. But we are also limited in what we can try out and do if it doesn't fit existing cultural expectations.

I was reminded of this cultural limitation today when I saw a post on Facebook from an alumni from the 50s and 60s showing a Brown versus Green canoe challenge sheet. In my 20 years at camp, we have strongly opposed the idea of having a "Color War" under the premise that fixed-pie competition has little place at camp. While we've added a few things like a new version of Crew Olympics with individual champions, and the new running game Into The Deep with a single champion of camp, we still chaff against any hint of labeling anyone a winner at the cost of labeling someone else a loser.

In the end, cultural norms are delicate and finely crafted, which few people realize. It may seem like the Mean Girls' cafeteria has always been stratified that way, but remember how much work Regina had to do to keep control. All it took to unravel her was a few calteen bars and a rule about sweatpants. Take a long look at the big picture values you want for your culture, and then think of ways that you already do things that can embody those values, and ways you can tweak your norms to further those values. Ask others for their input in this process, toss up ideas, give away credit. Take culture seriously and it will reward you and your business.

Helping Chidren Learn Self-Awareness and Self-Reliance

Kids don't get very many chances to find out about themselves or choose for themselves at school. They wake up and get put on a bus at the ass-crack of dawn, often spending more than an hour commuting to school. When they arrive, they sit in assigned seats in carefully arraigned rows to prevent them from interacting overmuch with their friends. They are shuttled silently and in a line from a class on one subject to another, with a mental costume change expected promptly, and no idle chitchat in transit.

If they're lucky, they get to choose their own seats at lunch. For some kids today, even their recess has become a dirge of walking on a track like a donkey in a smithy. At the end of the day, they ride in assigned seats on the bus home. Rich kids then get paraded about to all sorts of classes, lessons, or clubs, finally arriving home to waffle down some dinner and do an hour or two of homework that may or may not be useful in academic, social, or developmental ways.

No matter what we teach in schools, and whether or not it directly relates to the life our children go on to live and the adults they become, this system is bad, wrong, and broken.

I had the opportunity to go to an alternative style elementary school in Philadelphia called Project Learn (PL). While PL had many flaws, and I would not suggest it as a viable model for large-scale use, there were several aspects of it that gave me an opportunity that every child deserves. We should do our best as a society to create the kind of environment that PL did so that every child can have these opportunities:

At PL, while everyone "knew" what grade people were in, classes were referred to based on the teacher's name rather than the grade level. Instead of an impersonal fact like date of birth determining  grade, a combination of age, maturity, and acumen were used. Because most of the homerooms had children from more than one year, and quite a few students stayed in the same homeroom for two years before moving on, it was impossible for the bullies to tell if a student was matched with a homeroom teacher because of symbiotic temperament or academic proficiency.

Likewise with academic classes. Math classes happened at the same time school-wide, and students were placed in a class based on their abilities. This was an incredible choice that allowed PL to teach all classes at much higher levels than in a typical school. They did this with language arts as well.

As a school teacher (and this was at the current 6th ranked school in the country mind you) I found that in each 22-child sections of science I would have huge disparities in ability. A teacher is forced to either let the smart kids get bored, or let the dumb kids not learn. What ends up happening is a lame reduction to the mean where teachers hope most kids get it, stress about the ones who don't, and try to give extra challenges to the smart ones without turning them into pariahs.

A final choice that PL made, and one that I believe would make the most difference if adopted by more elementary, middle, and high schools, was an elective course structure. Starting in 3rd grade, students got to choose several elective classes based on their interest (and the teacher's offerings). The whole school did electives at the same time, and many (but not all) of the elective classes involved students of different ages. There is so much going on here that is beneficial, but here are a few highlights:

Children getting to choose a class increases their buy-in and agency, giving them invaluable practice making decisions and sticking to them for a semester. Working in a class with students of other ages lets younger ones model their behavior based on peers who have matured, and lets older students pretend to be adults and practice leadership.

Teachers love electives. Electives give teachers a chance to share their passions with students, explore new ideas and topics, and design new curriculum. This keeps their lessons in their other areas fresher, and constantly broadens their knowledge base; allowing teachers to model the process of learning for their students. Job satisfaction is also increased because teachers often get stuck in a rut. Many elementary schools are feudal. Career teachers slowly accumulate gravitas and authority as they build political factions around them and compete in a zero-sum game with other tenured teachers. Electives uproot this by encouraging change, adaptation, and giving teachers a constantly random set of students to teach.

Electives also give more legitimacy and accountability to pursuits that would often be placed in "clubs" at the middle school and high school level. I personally participated in and loved the school newspaper elective.

A school administrator could also develop an electives slate that catered to a regional or local need. I can imagine an incredibly effective course offering in a blue-collar town that helped prepare middle and high school students for vocational jobs by giving them a chance to learn what options they were most passionate about. Likewise, in a school district with high teen pregnancy there could be electives focused on things like childcare or parenting.

In order to become more self-aware and self-reliant (both values that I ascribe to and believe to be an integral part of the American Dream), we need to do a better job helping our children learn and practice those skills. If a student never gets to make a choice, and is often held back/left behind in regimented classes, they won't learn to dream.

Run to the Middle. Every. Time.

Winning in wrestling is about discipline. I learned that lesson over and over again through my time as a high school wrestler and as a coach. For my junior and senior years, our coaching staff was graced by the panther-like presence of a man we called Coach Shoops. We usually had three coaches, our head coach was the middle weight, and then the assistant coaches would be split one for the little guys and one for the big boys. Shoops was big and quick. He weighed around 200lbs and was constantly carrying around a med school textbook as he studied for whatever exam was next.

Shoops had a variety of little techniques he added to my repertoire. Because he was technically sound where I was quirky, and much quicker than I, I don't remember picking up too many larger moves from him. What I did learn was a style of thinking and gamesmanship that helped me win matches.

Like I said, winning in wrestling is about discipline. The head coach, Quilty, made sure we worked hard enough to have physical discipline, and were sufficiently drilled in techniques to have technical discipline. Shoops made sure we were ready to get inside our opponents' heads and grind them into the mat. He made sure we had competitive discipline.

Some of his ideas were a little quixotic, but worked with practice. It took me a while, but eventually I managed to get good at pointing towards an opponent's shoe to make them think it had come untied, so I could strike while their attention was away from defense. One of my favorites of his was The Handshake Maneuver. If you act scared while warming up and then give a dead fish handshake, your opponent will underestimate your confidence and technique. If you are reading a book at the side of the mat and give him the double-handed nerdshake, chances are he will underestimate your strength. If you make exceptional eye contact while shaking hands, he might still be looking when the ref blows the whistle and you can strike first. The Handshake Maneuver was straight up fun for me.

The most effective and hardest of his recommendations was that whenever the whistle blew, no matter the score, run back to the middle of the mat. Some matches this wouldn't have much affect because it would only be at the end of the first and second periods. Other matches you'd be going out of bounds every ten seconds and having to restart over and over.

In those cases, you could win a match simply by running back to the middle. The first time you do it, your opponent might just think it's weird as he staggers/crawls back the 10ft to line up. The second, he might be a little irked by your unnecessary expenditure of energy. By the fifth or sixth, all he's thinking about is what it's going to take to make you break. If your whole team is doing this, you can track the morale of the other team as it sinks further and further. I know from personal experience that it's not easy to run back to the middle. It's even harder if you're losing. But if you can be disciplined enough to do it, you will win the mental battle and eventually, the physical one as well.

I mention all of this because I think if you cultivate discipline in any area, it will give you almost superhuman abilities. This doesn't take skill or money. All it takes is dedication and a desire to perform (and perhaps peers and mentors to help you get back up again when you mess up). If you want your employees to aspire to excellence, you have to teach them the basics and the techniques like Quilty did. You also have to give them the hard-knuckled fight and gamesmanship that Shoops taught.

A Retrospective Resolution - Carrying Around Luggage

Last year my New Years' Resolution was to make use of Scott Arizala's wisdom about unloading buses. As a camp director for years he had been frustrated by the lack of coherence and organization at his camp as kids arrived on buses and their stuff was carted to their cabins. While the kids were doing get-to-know-you activities and eating dinner, the bags would all be brought to cabins. One or two kids would "lose" their stuff for hours every week.

Scott hated how unwelcome it made the kids feel when they walked into their cabin and couldn't find their bag. For years he would remind staff on change day to be careful with the bags, but would spend his day all over camp while someone else coordinated the bag moving. It all changed when he got in the face of one young counselor who had made a mistake and the counselor cheekily replied: "If you care so much about the bags, why don't you do it."

So for the rest of the summer and all the years since, Scott has directed camp from the parking lot on change days. Personally welcoming every camper, and making sure no one's stuff gets lost. It may be a little trickier to deal with problems that arise with just a radio and a quick wit, but the kids feel welcome.

The lesson he taught (and I tried to internalize) was twofold: As a manager you have limited time, you can't be in charge of everything, and have to balance which things you do based on what needs to get done and what will give you satisfaction to complete. Secondly and more importantly, you will get better results from people if you realize that they may not care about the same things you do and calibrate your leadership accordingly.

Scott had many solutions available to him, and likely tried some or all of these:

• He could have added an object lesson to his staff training by having several of his staff's possessions get "lost" en route to a staff trip and then getting them to talk to the rest of staff about what that felt like (thus increasing staff motivation to do a good job with the bags). 
• He could have created or helped another staff member create a more organized method for bag moving - like drawing chalk lines in a grid on the pavement for each cabin (thus adding agency to a staff member). 
• He could have organized the registration communication with parents to include a request for color coded tape/ribbon on each bag depending on the child's cabin (thus showing parents his camp cared how their possessions were treated). 

In the end, he chose to take charge of the task himself. This past year, I tried hard to listen to myself when I got bitchy and either take charge of the project or task that was making me upset, try out an alternate method for fixing it like mentioned above, or let it go.

Using Biases to Win

Whether you're preparing for a meeting, changing your organization, or attempting to corral unruly employees/campers, you will be much more successful if you make use of people's cognitive biases. People like to feel street smart. They like to feel important. They like to believe that they have understood what is going on and have made an informed, intelligent choice based on that comprehension.

If you set things up cleverly, you can take advantage of this and are more likely to get people to choose whatever results you want. In addition to getting the result you desire, you are also giving people a feeling of agency, which enhances their buy-in and perseverance.

For a few marketing examples of decoys, check out this blog post. For a comprehensive and easy to read list of cognitive biases, read this.

I have often found that you can blend together a bunch of biases to get things going your way. Before you jump to some kind of "wow that's manipulative" conclusion - check yourself - this is how we do things all the time, I'm just talking about being more deliberate and increasing your effectiveness. If you genuinely care about people and want the best for you/them/the institution, then you're not being manipulative, you're being effective. Here are a few examples I've found useful over the years:

• I take really good notes for each staff member's exit interview each fall/winter. This helps people feel like they are important and that they have a say in how things go.
• Once I have a library of notes, I make sure to quote people to each other as often as possible. This means frequently re-reading the notes and is a time commitment, but people can imagine you quoting things they've said to others, which ensures people feel like they have agency and importance. It also makes people want to be mentioned in the future by you so they will focus more and try harder to impress you or be memorable.
• If I had an idea of a change I wanted to happen, I would ask a bunch of people what they thought about it. After the first person, I would be able to use the quote method mentioned above too! When I instituted the change later on, no one would question it, as most of them had already had a chance to express their opinion - and their opinion was tempered and massaged by the fact that I chose to quote peers whom they respected who agreed with the change or peers whom they didn't respect who disagreed with the change.
• People prefer to be happy - if you emphasize positive aspects of something in a way that expresses how long it will make them happy, they will be more likely to believe you. Since we start and emphasize that "Camp is for the Camper", I will also often mention how what you do with kids this week will stay with them for the rest of their lives. If your extra little bit of effort today results in lifelong positive changes for a kid, you are likely to put in that extra little bit of effort.
• People will take risks to avoid negative outcomes. If a counselor is worried about their cabin  not getting along or meshing, they are much more susceptible to suggestions that involve creative solutions. This doesn't work for positive outcomes, if a counselor is optimistic about being able to get their cabin back on track, suggest things that involve less risk. This logic works exactly the same when dealing with a camper - if they are afraid of not making friends they are willing to take more risks to get friends, if they expect to make friends, they will be more likely to respond to suggestions that don't involve as much social risk.
• Say it in a new and inventive way and people will remember it. Say it with a pun or a rhyme or an unusual physical flourish and it will be embedded in people's memories.

I think I'll have to do a series of posts moving forward digging deeper into how we use cognitive biases in a variety of ways and settings. Most social interactions are filled with overlapping biases, and people who are aware of and make use of the biases in themselves and others are powerful and effective.

Teamwork Combo-Platter

Hire the right combination of people and set up your professional environment correctly and your team has the best chance of producing incredible results.

Today I'd like to talk about creating smaller working groups for a particular project that use individual's personalities and preferences to your advantage.

My dad has done a lot of work with insurance companies analyzing the risk culture they exhibit, and which management strategies are best suited to their individual challenges and existing team. He often talks about the four types of approaches to risk that are most common to managers in insurance companies. I've used a basic version of his logic in helping formulate a lot of the culture I have tried to perpetuate as a manager. In simple terms, the four types of risk approaches outlined in the paper above are articulated in the following diagram:

In case this type of drawing doesn't scream applications at you, here are a few for a camp setting:

• Each summer we take the whole camp on several trips to the beach. This trip is fairly straightforward but carries several health and safety risks. Big worries include losing a kid, a car crash, or inclement weather. Medium risks include injuries (assuming it's like broken arm or less, otherwise, push that one into major worries category!), sunburn, or a venue being difficult. Small risks include scarce or incorrect food, or counselors not doing their job well enough. The leader needs to be someone who will proactively solve minor problems and won't freak out if things start to go wrong. I would put a type 2 person in charge if possible and send a type 1 and type 3 for counsel in emergencies.
• We run several theme days at camp where we transform camp into a particular magical world. This summer one of them was Spooky Halloween themed. These days are planned out over several weeks and incorporate sets, costumes, vignettes, an overarching story line, and often several completely new major activities. The biggest challenges include practical assessments of progress-to-goal in terms of set, writing, and costume construction and lack of buy-in from campers or counselors. For a team of people running one of these days you want a type 3 in charge of the day, with assistance from a type 2 and type 4. You would want the type 2 person to help push the timetables and a type 4 person to help with a lot of the creative engineering of the day. Keep type 1 people busy on smaller, goal-oriented tasks that let them feel stability and believe things are going well, don't let them near the brainstorming meetings if possible.

Over time the people who you manage will change, and it is important for you to look over your team regularly and make sure that you have all four of these types of people represented. Depending on your workplace, it may also be important to stack the team with more of one or more types of people since you know more situations will arise that call for a particular type.

"I've Never Been Promoted; I've Promoted Myself Several Times Though"

Pushing employees to be their best involves making sure they realize when their decision making and ability to take on responsibility is greater than what they currently do.  It's not hard to tell when people are smart or talented enough for more of a challenge, what is hard is making sure that they create opportunities to take charge of things.

Fear of stepping on your boss' toes might make you hesitate to push for more responsibility. However, once you establish a role, you will be expected to do that next time. Your boss isn't going to be upset when they have less work to do, so stop being afraid to take on something.

Recently a Baby Boomer told me a story about an employee of hers (who she doesn't directly manage) who is talented but plateauing. When she asked that employee who would be giving lower level staff performance reviews, the employee said she assumed it would be her boss, even though she directly managed those people. The Baby Boomer told her to just put together materials for the reviews and then when the moment came up, she would be ready to tell her boss "I'll handle this." Then the next time she'll be assumed to be in charge of it.

The Baby Boomer concluded with the powerful thought: "I've never been promoted, I've promoted myself several times though."  As a manager it is your job to help your employees with talent and smartsmanship take those moments and grab more responsibility.

Personal Kryptonite and First Impressions

One of the most successful millennials I know explained to a group of us that her professional kryptonite is incompetence. She further defined that to include people who don't try, saying that when someone is trying hard, she can work with them to improve. Getting people to try is the hardest and most important aspect of management.

While she was being a big sarcastic and bombastic, it got me thinking a little bit more about how our personal preferences influence the way we get our staff to be intrinsically motivated to perform at their best. First impressions are key, both for the employer and the employee, and it is important that we stay true to ourselves in how we present in those key moments, otherwise we will create unsustainable personas that people will soon see through.

If you, like my friend, truly value competence, make sure that is communicated through your attire, body language, and opening words with new employees. You can do this for any value you have. You should also make use of your physical surroundings.


Assuming you have succeeded in engendering your intended values with an intentional first impression, you still have to actively create an environment that continues that value and regularly use implicit and explicit methods of keeping that value around.

One of the most important values to me is working hard and working efficiently. One way I like to show to my staff at camp that I value those two things is that I will try to identify whatever task in a given situation or project will be the hardest or most complicated or involved and publicly work on that task whilst teaching staff (and campers since I know the campers will one day be staff so it's never too early to get them competent). Since a large portion of jobs at camp are dirty or gross, this often means doing my best Mike Rowe imitation and getting dirty.

You don't always have to get dirty, and you don't always have to do the hardest task publicly, but showing your staff that what they are doing matters and is not beneath anyone is a powerful method of motivating them, since it validates their effort and allows them to picture themselves transitioning from their entry level job into a manager or executive. The new CEO of JC Penny, Marvin Ellison, is a paragon of this executive virtue, and it's paying off.

How do you reward/appreciate planning?

Today the PD did a really great job planning things out. It was her day off starting at 9:30am this morning, so she had to appoint someone to be PD. The counselor she picked was a fantastic choice; full of ideas and energy, a third year counselor, and was very honored to get to be PD.

The PD also wrote her schedule to be mainly rain-adaptable since it was supposed to thunderstorm all day, though we somehow just managed to be be "dry" but sticky all day instead. Her schedule featured things like dining hall bowling, makeovers, board and card games, puppet-making, and a slew of other activities that were tailor-made for indoor weather.

I'm just not sure how to properly appreciate her for a job well thought out. Maybe I'll give my Reinforcement Award at staff meeting to the counselor, and mention her being PD on that (which she did a great job at, so duh), and then make sure to tell the PD how much I thought her planning led to the counselor having a good day and that she was an excellent choice. That way I get to thank/appreciate them both in different ways with the same Award - and since it's another of my administrator's award system I've adapted, all of the awards also stand as a testament to his good idea.

The Process of Cultural/Organizational Change

Change is hard until we get started, then Newton's first law takes over.

So - how to get going? Well, start with realizing that change happens through a series of your actions and diffusion of social responsibility. Reverse engineer your change in whatever medium you prefer and identify broad steps. Here are several methods to navigate your plan:

• Gather interested people for a low-stakes brainstorming meeting with the intention of redesigning/re-imagining some aspect of your organization that you believe would result or point in the direction of your current broad step (keep the topic narrow but meaningful). Conduct the meeting and hope for new ideas - don't forget it wasn't penicillin Alexander Fleming sought. Prep your notes and take good notes during the brainstorming; try to only interject when you have to to restart or recenter. Afterwards, collate and tabulate - honestly, but with a purpose. Report to the larger group or organization what the low-stakes session concluded with excitement. This method of positive democratic creativity co-opts organizational conservatives because people feel pressured to accept the will of the group.
• Conduct semi-annual or annual "talkfests" with each employee. While time intensive, these debriefing sessions are a panacea for change. If you want to add a concept or problem solving strategy to your culture, start by asking a question the answer to which is your change. Take great notes about their answers and freely quote employees to each other as often as possible. This method allows you to make rapid progress, as you have a monopoly of information compared to each employee who only had one meeting. Each employee also believes they are important because you took the time to listen, both to them and to their peer whom you are quoting (they also desire to be quoted by you).
• Codify everything. Especially things that only happen periodically. This will give you the same claim as every conqueror - the ability to write history. As was so eloquently put by Terry Goodkind: "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."  As a result, people want to believe that whatever history says happened, happened. This method is only useful narrowly, as people will only let this cognitive dissonance stretch so far before they cry foul.

Change involves Discourse. President Obama is a Master

Of course a general would match their strategy to their army, opponent, and geography among many other considerations. To do otherwise would be foolish and potentially disastrous. So too should a manager. If millennials are lacking in a skill or personality trait, don't just get angry. Get a plan and take action.

President Obama on "How Change Happens" during Howard Commencement Address:
"You see, change requires more than righteous anger. It requires a program, and it requires organizing. … We remember Dr. King’s soaring oratory, the power of his letter from a Birmingham jail, the marches he led. But he also sat down with President Johnson in the Oval Office to try and get a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act passed. ...Brittany Packnett, a member of the Black Lives Matter movement and Campaign Zero, one of the Ferguson protest organizers, she joined our Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Some of her fellow activists questioned whether she should participate. She rolled up her sleeves and sat at the same table with big city police chiefs and prosecutors. And because she did, she ended up shaping many of the recommendations of that task force. And those recommendations are now being adopted across the country — changes that many of the protesters called for. If young activists like Brittany had refused to participate out of some sense of ideological purity, then those great ideas would have just remained ideas. But she did participate. And that’s how change happens."

Manage with Dirty Hands

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Doctor Who Quote: S5E5
"There's a plan?" "I don't know yet, I haven't finished talking."

Sometimes we have to think fast, and working with millennials, especially in the summer camp industry, involves lots of performance and improvisational moments. I have found many times that their urge for there to be a plan is so strong that even if they know you are making it up as you speak, they want someone to be responsible.

Teaching millennials how to take this mantle for themselves is one of the most challenging aspects of managing them.