The day belongs to her

I don’t know when this thought first occurred to me, but for as long as I can remember I’ve never been especially interested in celebrating my birthday. The day always seemed like something that should be celebrated, but not by me. The celebration belongs to the person who gave me birth.

It feels less like a conclusion I’ve reached than something I’ve always known.

The birthday is a feast day for the mother, not the child. The child is mostly passive in the event: she did the work and bore the risk. I just arrived.

Yet birthdays are relentlessly directed toward the self being honored. That vector seems backwards to me. The day points not forward toward the person who emerged, but back toward the one who made that emergence possible. Toward an origin. Toward a gift that asks only to be remembered.

Merci, maman.

What the Builders Know: on a recent Encyclical and what it doesn’t settle

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has been out for a few days. The image being received most readily as reassurance is from the presentation: an AI founder standing beside the Pope, saying that people outside need to remind those inside of the humanity they cannot see. The sentiment has been received as noble.

The founders of the major AI companies are warning publicly about the dangers of what they are building. The warnings are not vague. Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the architects of modern AI, assigns a 20 percent probability to catastrophe. Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and the field’s most cited voice on existential risk, has suggested it might be sensible to stop altogether. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote before founding the company that this might be the greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence. These are not hedged statements from cautious men. They are alarms pulled by the people who built the building.

And yet the proposed responses are almost entirely technical: better alignment, stronger safety protocols, governance frameworks, etc. The logic of the solution is the logic of the problem. What these companies mean by “ethics” is not the question of what this work does to the person performing it, or what it will do to the persons it reaches. It is another line of code.

A Spanish expression names what I think is actually on display in that image, though I have not found a satisfying English equivalent. The expression is dejación de deberes. It does not mean negligence, which implies a failure to notice. It does not mean error, which implies a good-faith attempt that went wrong. It names the relinquishing of one’s duty, of what one is expected to carry.

The founders know the stakes: they are the ones who published the warnings. The knowledge is not missing. Sincerity of alarm does not discharge the duty it names.

What is missing is the willingness to let that knowledge be constitutive: to make the question of the human person not a downstream ethical consideration but the premise from which the work begins.

Outsourcing that question to encyclicals and ethics boards while development accelerates is not collaboration. It is the appearance of responsibility in place of its exercise. Hiring philosophers does not resolve this. The question is not whether there are philosophers in the building. It is whether the anthropology carries the freight.

The technology being built operates by producing outputs statistically indistinguishable from understanding, without understanding. It is trained on the full recorded output of human thought while having none of its own. The output comes across as being from a person; the system is not a person.

The technology denies interiority by construction. The people building it deny it by choice.

painting: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

The one belief that generates all the others

Gary Hamel closed a recent LinkedIn post with a genuine question: What elements of the managerialist mindset are ripe for a rethink?

It’s the right question. But answering it as a list misses something. The beliefs Hamel names (that KPIs can guarantee right behavior, that competence tracks with rank, that employees are “resources”) are not independent errors sitting side by side. They follow from it. They are what you get once a more fundamental belief is already in place.

That belief is this: a person is a type of thing.

Not a subject. Not an agent with an inside that no system can reach. A thing. A unit with properties. Something that can be measured, allocated, optimized, and if necessary, replaced.

Once that belief is installed (quietly, structurally, before anyone arrives at work), everything else follows with a certain logic. Of course, you measure performance. Things have measurable properties. Of course, competence correlates with rank; someone had to assess the properties and sort accordingly. Of course, you call them human resources; resources is what things are when organizations need them.

Hamel is right to reach for Kuhn. But there is a floor below the assumptions.

Scientific revolutions happen because anomalies accumulate (things the reigning paradigm cannot explain) until what the paradigm cannot explain outnumbers what it can.

The managerial paradigm has been accumulating anomalies for decades. You already know what they are. The engagement survey whose results surprised no one. The transformation initiative that consumed two years and changed nothing that mattered. The knowledge worker (perhaps yourself, in an earlier role, or a current one) who gave exactly what was measured and protected everything else.

They are what happens when you govern persons as though they were things.

This is not a case against metrics. A well-designed KPI can protect a worker from a supervisor’s prejudice; in some contexts, quantified evaluation is more humane than subjective judgment, not less.

But a system that offers that protection still cannot see the internal assessment a person makes about what the relationship on offer is worth, and what to give to it. That calculation happens below any system’s threshold.

Hamel asks which managerialist beliefs are ripe for a rethink. There is one and it is the source of most of what isn’t working.

Large organizations genuinely require systems: budgets, accountability structures, operational metrics, and role clarity. Complexity without coordination is just chaos with good intentions. The problem is subtler.

Optimize a machine component and it does what the optimization requires. Optimize a person and they notice that they are being optimized, they notice what it means to be treated that way, and they respond to that.

Not necessarily by resisting. Sometimes they calibrate. Other times they give exactly what the system measures and protect everything else. And the system registers it as compliance. In reality, it is closer to the minimum viable performance of a person who has understood the terms of the relationship on offer.

No system can reach the inside of that transaction. The belief that it can is what’s wrong.

On Any Given Day

How are they feeling today? Are they after a big win that’s taken a lot of time and energy, or a quick win from being clever and nimble? Are they after a loss, a big loss, like a major project they worked on, prepared, pitched, and got a no? Or a little loss, something they thought they would get at the last minute, but the client said no?

Are they rebuilding because someone left or someone got fired? Are they still working out the kinks of who’s who and what’s what; not in terms of titles, but in terms of the informal culture? What’s the age composition? Do you have more people closer to the exit than the entrance? And those closer to the exit – are they looking at their work, or are they looking at the calendar counting down the days?

How often do your people call on each other for help or counsel or expertise? How often do they recruit each other for their projects? Do they socialize? Do they like being in the presence of each other?

How’s their health? Are they eating well? Are they sleeping well? Or do they just look like they’re eating and sleeping well? Are they calm and rested, or do they need caffeine and Red Bull to pump them up?

Are they engaging in extraprofessional activities and community activities, and do they do so regularly, consistently? Are they involved in forms of service: community, church, or otherwise? Do they perform acts of service at work?

What are the ages of their children? Is it kindergarten time? Is it high school time? Is it time to pick a college and pay for it?

How do they talk about their work when they’re not at work? Do they tell stories about what happened, or do they change the subject? When they mention it, is there energy or flatness? Do they seem to carry it with them, or do they set it down completely?

What do they do with silence? When there’s a pause in a meeting, do they fill it immediately, or can they sit with it? Do they look uncomfortable, or do they seem at ease? Do others wait with them, or does someone else always break it first?

How do they handle being wrong? Do they adjust when new information arrives, or do they defend their original position? Can they say “I don’t know” easily, or does it come out with qualifications? Do they circle back later, or move on as if it didn’t happen?

What’s their relationship with time? Do they act like there’s never enough, or do they work as if they have what they need? Are they always running to the next thing, or do they finish one thing before starting another? Do they protect margin, or fill every gap?

How do they respond when someone else succeeds? Is there genuine interest in the details, or quick congratulations before moving on? Do they ask questions about how it happened, or shift to their own similar experience? Do they celebrate differently depending on who succeeded?

What do they notice? Do they see when someone’s struggling before being told? Do they pick up on shifts in the room? Do they comment on what’s happening beneath the surface, or stay focused on what’s being said? Do they notice patterns over time, or just what’s immediate?

How do they make decisions? Do they gather more information first, or decide with what they have? Do they involve the people affected before deciding, after deciding, or not at all? Do they announce decisions or propose them? Do they revisit when circumstances change, or stick because they already decided?

What’s their tolerance for mess? Can they work when things are unclear, or do they need everything defined first? Do they categorize quickly to move forward, or sit with complexity longer? Do they simplify when they talk about it, or keep the complications visible?

How do they treat people who can’t advance their work? The security guard, the custodian, the contractor brought in for a day? Is there eye contact? Do they learn names? Does their tone change from how they speak to colleagues?

What do they do between meetings? Do they check their phone, talk to whoever’s nearby, or sit quietly? Do they prep for what’s next, decompress from what just happened, or something else entirely? Are they present in hallways and elevators, or already somewhere else?

photo by Stephane Gagnon

Be human to human beings

Whether it’s Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, mass shootings, massive firings in some industries, the war in Ukraine, or the war in the Middle East… it is reasonable to expect that any, some, or all of these events -and others- have impacted and still impact the minds and hearts of the people in your charge at work.

I invite you (and keep in mind that I am not beyond imploring or begging) that you do not turn a blind eye to how your people are affected, and that how they are affected impacts their ability to perform. I’m inviting you to be human. Being human to another human being is not a sign of weakness nor does it entail a loss of power.

And why should you?

Well, because they are human. They’re not things.

Call me a master of the obvious and I will say that there is enough evidence to show that managers and business owners often override this with the doctrine of some dead economist to the effect that “everyone is looking for their self-interest” or “employees have contractual obligations”.

That, by the way, is eons away from the other discourse they hold for the gallery: “We’re a family”, “people are our most important asset”, and -wait for it- “We’re all in this together”.

Again, why should you?

Well, because you are human too. As managers and business owners, we work with people, not through people.

We work with what’s there – now. And that changes from day to day as people have successes, are tired, have children, are worried, navigate grief, move from one city to another, go back to school, etc. It also changes based on what is going on in their environments, close and remote.

Over the years I found that the best teachers and the best managers and business owners all work from the same premise: you teach/manage the people in front of you. Not the ones you wish you had, but the ones you have, the ones that are there.

And not only are they different from one another in abilities and readiness, but they are also different from one day to the next. That is who you work with. Every day.

People are struggling.

There is a lot going on and they carry quite a bit from the recent past.

On the odd chance that you feel this might be too touchy-feely for you, I will say this: Emotions exist. They affect what we think about and how we think. The reasonable thing to do is to acknowledge emotions and work with them. To dismiss them altogether is, well, irrational.

So the invitation is this: be human to your fellow human beings, in difficult times and always.

I know you can. I trust you will.

===

I originally published this text in the October 2023 issue of my monthly newsletter.

Go HERE for more essays.

Power doesn’t corrupt. It reveals.

Parul Verma:

Power doesn’t corrupt, but it is a phenomenon that is monopolized by the agency of an individual.

Power amplifies and exposes cognitive and behavioral predispositions that already exists within you.

It merely reveals your innate tendencies, but it does not corrupt.

Discernment: paying attention to what you pay attention to

for anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. that's pretty much all the info u need.

— Amy Krouse Rosenthal (@missamykr) March 15, 2013

Suggestions for 2022

Take wrong turns.

Talk to strangers.

Open unmarked doors.

And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing.

Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out.

You’re curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off.

There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan.

To find them, look for tiny interesting choices.

And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.

— Randall Munroe

The job candidate selection process is a fail. Try this.

The job candidate selection process does not work. Even Google has taken back their famed clever interview questions. There is just no data to support that the job candidate selection process is effective at screening for success or at predicting that candidates will remain with the company.

A few years ago I worked with a large, successful engineering firm (it might have been the largest in the country at the time) that had a unique way of selecting and hiring candidates.

The owner of the company told me that their approach was based on two observations:

There is no telling from a job interview, or a series of interviews, whether a candidate will be good at the job, be happy in the company, and will remain for longer than x years. And, if as a company these three criteria (or any other you identify) are important to you, then job interviews are useless and a random process is just as good.
Nor can you tell whether we will want a a person to remain in the company once we get to know the person and the person gets to know us.

The process

So the process they established was as follows:

Identify a series of criteria that any candidate should meet. Because no criterion has proven to be predictive then pick the ones you think/feel might work;
Once you have received applications, pick out the ones that meet all criteria;
From those who meet all criteria, pick one randomly.

The interview

Then the owner would invite the candidate for a chat in which he would explain to the candidate what type of work they do at the firm, how they work, and what type of values they try and uphold. The owner would then ask the candidate if they can see themselves working in such an environment. If the answer is yes, the person was hired under the following terms: You are hired for six months with full benefits.

After six months

At the end of the six months you and I will meet again and you will tell us whether

What we told about the type of work they do at the firm, how they work, and what type of values they try and uphold is true; and
You can see yourself working here permanently.

And we will tell you

How well you did during the six months: your work, how you work, and how you understood and embodied the values we try and uphold based on surveys and interviews with your manager, the co-workers on your team, the peers you interface with, and (when applicable) the customers you interface with;
Whether we want you to stay and, if yes,
- We will be discussing the type of projects you would like to work on in the future; and
- Offer you a permanent position.

The added benefit

Imperfect and incomplete as it is, based on its premise of nothing being predictive of anything in matters of hiring, it is as good as any other process I am familiar with.

And I just read in the FT that it also a great way to boost diversity.

See also: How IBM does it, Writing a good (emotionally-intelligent) job posting helps, and there’s always the Monthy Python way.

Nicholas Winton – the power of good

Sir Nicholas George Winton is a British humanitarian who organised the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from German-occupied Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War. Winton found homes for them and arranged for their safe passage to Britain.

Winton kept his humanitarian exploits under wraps for many years until his wife Grete found a detailed scrapbook in the attic in 1988. The scrapbook contained lists of the children, including their parents’ names, and the names and addresses of the families that took them in.

After sending letters to these addresses, 80 of “Winton’s children” were found in Britain. The world found out about Winton’s work in 1988 during an episode of the BBC television programme That’s Life! when Winton was invited to be an audience member.

You can read the whole story here.