“Artists Ship!” This quote from Apple’s Steve Jobs captures the powerful urgency of now, not only in a technological marketplace which re-invents itself constantly, but also, and I would argue more importantly, in our communities where each day children, families – in fact, all of us – fall victim to unrealized or un-attempted solutions. In essence, Jobs is asking what value is creativity, is genius, without results?

If it is too precious to become a product that actually gets into people’s hands, so what? 

No one who is a fan of Apple would dispute the art in the product portfolio, but Jobs has leavened “cool” products with products that ship! I have seen so often where the work in our communities is crippled by the genius of the idea (philosophy, habit, method, etc.) having more value than the skill of the outcome. In the search for the silver bullet or the next new thing, we fail to achieve the tangible for our children, the poor or the environment. The communities that do achieve great things: ACT. They understand that “doing good things” when it is more about the actor or their peers or the donors or the volunteers, than the result, is the equivalent of a brilliant idea that never ships. 

“If you are not busy being born, you are busy dying.” Consistent with the bittersweet tone of this entire book, Walter Isaacson uses these Bob Dylan lyrics eulogistically to sum up an utterly creative man who revolutionized six industries – personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing – yet, died way too young.

This is the biography Isaacson was born to write. Though an adequate historian (“Franklin” and “Einstein”), it is Isaacson’s grounding in today’s society that make him such an effective Boswell for Jobs. It took an editor of Time and CNN to fully comprehend the impact, well beyond technology, that Steve Jobs has had on our times. A classic example of a premier historian so totally wrong for another man truly of his times is Edmund Morris’ abject failure as Ronald Reagan’s biographer. Perhaps an historian cannot bring adequate context to contemporary transformations. 

Isaacson appropriately revives Gina Kolata’s 1980’s term of “magical genius” in reflecting on Steve Jobs. Jobs was not a great human being, husband or father. But it is hard to imagine a more creative force on the globe since the introduction of the Apple I in the mid-1970’s. We are blessed to have shared this earthly journey with him. Steve Jobs reminds us of our most unique human freedom, or as his idol, Walt Disney, said: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”   

Finally a book about change that starts with the end in mind. In most of the prior extensive literature of this area from self-help to management categories, authors and gurus extoll the nobility of the effort rather than the achievement of the result. It is also nice to see recommendations based on research rather than the ego-stroking when-I-was-in-charge polemics of many past CEOs of now marginally successful corporations (e.g., "Execution").

The authors pulled from studies conducted over decades in psychology, sociology and other fields to shed light on how we can make successful changes. The power of many of the studies and observations is how counter-intuitive they appear. Thus, explaining why change is so hard -- we are not programed for it and our well-meaning "gut instincts" are often at 180 degree odds of sustaining the change we seek. 

While I am most fascinated with change in a community and societal context, the examples here, which also include individual and organizational levels, are very helpful and instructive. I think this is because, as the authors stress, "when change works, it tends to follow a pattern. The people who change have clear direction, ample motivation and a supportive environment." This aligns very directly with the best practices we present to communities and discussed in our book: "Community Visions, Community Solutions." 

Well, if there's a pattern to follow, why don't we? The basic problem is that "the brain has two independent systems at work at all times," the authors explain. "First, there's what we call the emotional side. It's the part of you that is instinctive, that feels pain and pleasure. Second, there's the rational side, also known as the reflective or conscious system. It's the part of you that deliberates and analyzes and looks into the future." In essence, the rational mind wants change and the emotional mind wants comfort. But don't let the terms fool you ... oftentimes we have seen the rational mind of a businessman in a community gathering embrace the emotional comfort of "lets just do something" rather than invest the process time to draw a clear, rational, path to the solution. 

One concept, which the authors present, has fundamental implications, especially in communities, for all three elements of change: clear direction; motivation and environmental supports. They call it Fundamental Attribution Error -- a deep-rooted tendency to attribute people's behavior to "the way they are rather than the situation they are in." This gives rise in community to a whole set of broad-brush dysfunctions: blame, "those people," claims of lack of personal responsibility, etc. For example, we have seen children from the lowest socio-economic strata, who for years were thought of as "those kids" who will never make it, perform equal to their counterparts when the community's expectation changed. We have seen in the communities we have worked with, over time, a desire to know what they didn't know. When they see that so much of our failure in communities is situational and not "those people," they see that in fact they have power over the situations their community has created. And that is the SWITCH.

In the face of raising doubt -- mainly sourced in Washington DC -- about our ability to have a wonderfully optimistic future, Kotkin has presented us with an only slightly Panglossian narrative of our future selves.  He makes the case that we, in North America, are in a much better position for the future than Japan, China and Western Europe. "We can fix some of the problems and learn to live with the rest. We have many traits in our culture that will serve us well in the future.”  
     "The Next Hundred Million" provides a vivid snapshot of America in 2050 by focusing not on power brokers, policy disputes, or abstract trends, but rather on the evolution of the more intimate units of American society—families, towns, neighborhoods, schools, industries. It is upon the success or failure of these communities, Kotkin argues, that the American future rests.  Its greatest power will be its identification with notions of personal liberty, constitutional protections and universalism.”  Beware of policy initiatives that seek to cut us off from these vital birthrights.
     If you had to produce one single defense of Kotkin’s thesis, it is the concept (ironically, Japanese) of sokojikara, which he defines as our country’s “self-renewing power generated by its unique combination of high fertility, great diversity, and enormous physical assets.”       Here is the strongest argument against viewing your community in a passive "glass is half empty" mindset. An exciting future is not winning a zero-sum race of dwindling possibilities...in our near future: community, a sense of place, a connection will carry more power -- both economic and cultural -- than where the factories of the last half-century were located. New eyes and new hope ... the only negative message: if you are not optimistically engaged in this work of community building, step aside for others are.  Build your community; build your future!

I first came across Seth Godin when I picked up last year’s “Tribes.” I’m now a loyal reader of his blog: www.sethgodin.com. Though he addresses marketing, creative passion, and innovation mainly through a corporate / entrepreneurial lens, I have found many of the concepts and prods he presents as very relevant to our work in communities. In fact, that’s the frame – dramatically improved community outcomes -- I am going to use as I highlight two ideas from “Linchpin” which have value far beyond the usual suspects in his audience of serial purchasers of management books.

“Artists Ship!” This quote from Apple’s Steve Jobs captures the powerful urgency of now, not only in a technological marketplace which re-invents itself constantly, but also, and I would argue more importantly, in our communities where each day children, families – in fact, all of us – fall victim to unrealized or un-attempted solutions. In essence, Jobs is asking what value is creativity, is genius, without results?

If it is too precious to become a product that actually gets into people’s hands, so what? 

No one who is a fan of Apple would dispute the art in the product portfolio, but Jobs has leavened “cool” products with products that ship! I have seen so often where the work in our communities is crippled by the genius of the idea (philosophy, habit, method, etc.) having more value than the skill of the outcome. In the search for the silver bullet or the next new thing, we fail to achieve the tangible for our children, the poor or the environment. The communities that do achieve great things: ACT. They understand that “doing good things” when it is more about the actor or their peers or the donors or the volunteers, than the result, is the equivalent of a brilliant idea that never ships. 

This failure to ship tees up Seth Godin’s second important concept that I want to highlight. It helps answer the why. Why is it so hard to act in a concerted way – in a team, system, or a community – to achieve impact? He presents the idea of our “lizard brain” or as he alternately describes it: “the resistance.” As he puts it, in order to achieve great things or meaningful solutions, we “don’t need more genius, we need less resistance.” The resistance or lizard brain is the primordial desire to be safe. To avoid the unknown. To not venture out of the cave. Despite the passing of the prehistoric days of the saber-tooth tiger, the lizard brain still pushes us to fit in, to not rock the boat. Don’t be stupid. “Visibility” is dangerous. Embarrassment is the new saber-tooth. Courtesy trumps impact. The resistance permits you to stay still. 

The resistance is an internal aspect of being human, which would prefer to stamp out any insight or art or change. The Devil’s Advocate is a card-carrying member of the resistance. Here are some of the signs of the resistance (both from Seth and myself) – the lizard brain in dominance – that permeate communities failing to achieve greatness.

1) Procrastinate: claiming the need to perfect.
2) Make excuses about lack of money.
3) Set as a goal to have everyone like you...or in Facebook parlance "fan" you.
4) Spend hours obsessing on data collection.
5) Start another committee versus taking action.
6) Excessively criticize/blame the work of your peers, other institutions or sectors.
7) Criticize anyone doing anything differently.
8) Ask too many questions.
9) Don’t ask enough questions.
10) Wrap yourself in jargon.
11) Search for the next big thing while abandoning yesterday’s thing as old.
12) Have an emotional attachment to the status quo.
13) Passionately reject any attempt at accountability.
14) Blame the victims.
15) Have low expectations as to what is possible; what your clients can achieve; what children can learn
16) Zealously argue for an approach while rejecting any method of measuring results
17) Claim that any measure of success destroys the art.
18) Invent anxiety about the side-effects of a new approach
19) Focus on revenge or teaching someone a lesson at the expense of doing the work.
20) Believe it is about gifts and talents and not skill.

Any direction you go besides the direction of success is the work of the resistance. And it is always lurking; to save you from greatness. 

Artists Ship!

I wanted to be more impressed. But this report falls into the trap of so many well meaning Government Commissions ... they see solutions from a politician's remove -- let us dictate by imposed policy rather than motivate by the clarity of a rigorous objective. In their 10 step recommendation regarding the educational system there is no assurance that the children are better off ... rather the focus is on different programs and things the adults need to do. Where is the central clarity of the measurable outcome?

The Commissioners' assessment of the implications of truly global markets and our degraded educational outcomes on the US standards of living, while somewhat superseded by Friedman ("The World is Flat") and others who gave us a better narrative, is no less valid and concerning. 

The failure is in the prescription for change. An analogous failure can be seen in the Global Warming / Al Gore politician's view of achieving change -- a hugh and unwieldy cap-and-trade imposition specifically focused on carbon -- which forces all the loggerheads regarding subsidies, off-sets and minimal movement to alternate fuel sources. Thus the central reference about whether it is meaningful to the average citizen is the price of a barrel of oil versus the environmental outcome to be achieved. And another 25 years have gone by.

Having said this, there is little in their recommendations that I would disagree with on their face. Rather, I see a risk of the continuation of the disconnect of the policy act and a means of assuring ourselves that we are going to achieve the desired state. Most profound element of "fuzzy thinking" in these political fixes are the the core assumptions made. If we don't hold the focus on the outcome desired, we are led into many cul-de-sacs of well meaning recommendations. For instance, the recommendation for higher teacher pay. Probably a correct assertion, but at the present state of knowledge of what improves the classroom outcome for ALL children; it is surely not the causal fix the Commissioners assume. Our educational research has lagged so far behind achieving solutions that we really don't know what "truly effective" teaching (read: all our kids succeed) looks like. Therefore simply paying teachers more to attract higher quality can be a profound waste. Our Investment Banks pay top dollar -- and are we better off for it? The recommendation has as much chance of impact as paying priests more so that more of us might go to heaven. 

Here's another example: The Commission's call for universal early childhood education. This could be a powerful tool if we have clarity as what is the desired change state to be achieved; how it will be measured and how we will hold ourselves accountable for its achievement. I, unfortunately, have worked in many communities with near universal pre-school and yet still only a third of those children are ready to succeed in kindergarten and less then 2/3s of these children are able to read at a basic level by the time they reach the Third Grade. 

As with the other recommendations, where we have already spent Billions of Dollars on activities, the core consideration must be: Universal Early Childhood Education is only valuable to the degree that it demonstrates improved outcomes for our children. And the Commission falls short of that degree of rigor for any of their recommendations. Don't our children deserve more?

The analogy of how societies collapse and how communities collapse was unavoidable for me. If I were an environmental wonk, I would certainly give Jared Diamond's 2004 classic five stars for the weaving of history, science and great storytelling into a compelling read. But since I was expecting more than an ecological lens, I came away with a feeling of being slightly short-changed in trying to fully understand the subtitle: "how societies choose to fail or succeed." 

Having said that, I must say that Diamond certainly gave us, as he calls it, a "road map" to better understand society/community collapse from varied perspectives. This is perhaps most topically done by his discussion midway through the book of the contrasting realities on the island of Hispanola between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He demonstrates the sharp dichotomy between the two societies even before the recent earthquake, which has devastated Haiti. Positioning himself on the mountain ridge which forms part of the border between the two countries, he describes the view west into Haiti as one of denuded forests and barren landscape. By simply turning 180 degrees you can see the lush forest of the Dominican Republic. In answering the question -- How can two societies sharing the same island have such dramatically different outcomes? -- Jared Diamond gives glimpses of the applicability of his frame beyond the environmental.

One of the most compelling images Diamond summons for us is the thought of what would have gone through the mind of the native felling that last palm tree on Easter Island -- once a island rich in old growth palm and other forests and now a treeless wind-scape. Diamond moves us from the retrospective question: what was he thinking? to an excellent description of how this last act was not one of individual intention or ignorance but rather the last piece in a failure of group decision making.

These failures in group decision making rest broadly on either conflict of interest or group dynamics. For which the author describes three factors: (1) groups fail to anticipate a problem before it arises; (2) groups fail to perceive a problem that has already arisen, and, finally, (3) groups fail to even attempt to solve a problem even after it has been perceived. Though the author is nearly silent on many of the contemporary issues (beyond climate change) to which this framing would be instructive -- education, health care, terrorism, economics -- that doesn't prevent his readers from the application. And I think communities would be well served by doing just that. 

I really enjoyed Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine” (reviewed last April); so when I saw his earlier book, “How We Decide,” in a remainder pile at Barnes & Noble, it wasn’t a tough decision. That might have been my last cavalier decision.

In “How we Decide” Lehrer puts our decision-making skills under the microscope – kind of like the thinking-­person’s self-help manual, promising not only to explain how we decide, but also to help us do it better. 

This is not exactly uncharted terrain. Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” explored a similar boundary between reason and intuition. But a key difference between the two books quickly emerges: Gladwell’s book took an external vantage point on its subject, drawing largely on observations from psychology and sociology, while Lehrer’s is an inside job, zooming in on the inner workings of the brain. We learn about the nucleus accumbens, spindle cells and the prefrontal cortex. Many of the experiments he recounts involve fMRI scans of brains in the process of making decisions (which, for the record, is a little like making a decision with your head stuck in a spinning clothes dryer).

Before you throw up your arms – albeit explaining decision-making on the scale of neurons makes for a challenging task – be assured that Lehrer handles it well and often circles back to his central theme: “Sometimes we need to reason through our options and carefully analyze the possibilities. And sometimes we need to listen to our emotions. As an introduction to the cognitive struggle between the brain’s “executive” rational centers and its more intuitive regions, “How We Decide” succeeds with strong storytelling. The neuroscience medicine goes down so smoothly because Lehrer introduces each concept with an arresting anecdote from a diverse array of fields: Tom Brady making a memorable pass in the 2002 Super Bowl; a Stanford particle physicist nearly winning the World Series of Poker; Al Haynes making a remarkable crash landing of a jetliner whose hydraulic system had failed entirely. These anecdotes are the hooks upon which we non-brain scientists can hang the lessons of “How We Decide.” 

Lehrer’s insights go well beyond the name-that-neurotransmitter trivia. Perhaps the most interesting suggestion is that the more complex a decision, the more we should rely on our emotional brain, which is much better at synthesizing from past failures than our rational mind is at constructing future “right” decisions.

It takes all the way to the Epilogue to hear Kozol’s message that he has been honing through 25 years of interviews with children of urban poverty: “Charity and chance and narrow selectivity are not the way to educate the children of a genuine democracy.” I agree.

Unfortunately, this comes after of book of revisiting many children he has introduced to us over the past several decades, some with sad and fully expected derailments and others like “Pineapple” and “Jeremy” who have achieved academic breakthroughs despite coming from “neighborhoods of widespread destitution” principally because of charity and chance. By not giving his readers this message frame, this book, as his others, can reinforce a very different and debilitating message. 

Jonathan Kozol has been called America’s premier chronicler of life among children of societal neglect. Though we tend to forgive Kozol’s aren’t-I-empathetic style and his I-have-a-relationship-with-these-poor-kids tone, I do believe that his style and tone have contributed to a response to his stories that is at conflict with his central hope: these kids deserve better. (Notice how many failed Colleges of Education he has been invited to address/commiserate with or in how many “post-modern,” navel-gazing Education courses his books are assigned reading).

In fact, I have seen/heard too many use Kozol as a justification that because of their circumstances, we can’t expect as much from these kids. “Developmentally Appropriate” is the guise of denying stimulation/expectation because these kids are so unfortunate. This is in the face of research that shows that these kids are more than capable of succeeding academically without do-gooder props or preference. There is a stronger relationship to their success with our (especially teachers’) expectations than with the children of poverty’s capabilities.

It doesn’t have to be the minority of Kozol’s-kids who succeed. And here is where Kozol is pitch perfect: we should not “celebrate exceptionality of opportunity,” but rather we can achieve transformative outcomes, irrespective of ethnic or economic background, for all children if we “give to every child the feast of learning that is now available to children of the poor only on the basis of careful selectivity or by catching the attention of empathetic people like the pastor of a church or another grown-up who they meet by chance.” 

Evonne Goolagong, a stand-out women’s Grand Slam tennis player from Australia in the early 1970’s, was held back from greatness, by her own accounting, by her all too frequent mid-match “walk-abouts.” She used this Australian colloquialism to refer to her loosing concentration when the match was on the line. Like Evonne, Jonah Lehrer, despite my five stars, could have achieved even more with his wonderful “Imagine.” Unfortunately, in the middle of the first third of the book he went on a walk-about by being inconsistent with his premise and somehow unintentionally underscoring the disconnect between mind altering drugs and meaningful creativity.

But I digress. This is like perseverating on whether the model for the Mona Lisa was cross-eyed. The central point is that Lehrer has written a great book for those interested in knowing why and how man creates.

The power of a new pair of eyes, whether they are an outsider’s or yours freed from the constraints of your own expert consistency, is perhaps the single strongest tool to innovation. In my work, this means bringing folks from all sectors together to think about education outcomes, for example. The power of “not knowing it can’t be done” should never be underestimated. 

“Imagine” is rich with examples – from the invention of post-its to the creative multi-part cocoon of Pixar. One of my favorite examples is the InnoCentive website. Founded by Eli Lilly in trying to understand which problems were unsolvable in its search for breakthrough drugs. With millions in R&D spending, how to allocate resources is key. But if technical issues your scientists said were impossible were actually possible (think education, poverty etc. where all the experts of the last generation seem stumped), then you could predict outcomes much more readily. To tap these outside eyes, they set up a website where Eli Lilly posted its hardest scientific problems online and attached a monetary reward to each problem. After a month of nothing, “the answers just started pouring in. We got great ideas from researchers we’d never heard of, pursuing angles that had never occurred to us.” 

Creativity means getting out of your own way – by either avoiding walk-abouts or the preconceived constraints of expertise.