Teardown or Remodel?

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Teardown or Remodel?

I am reluctantly leaving the topic of love. Obviously, never completely and, for sure, not permanently. I loved thinking, writing, and digging into love the last few weeks. By the overwhelming response, it seems like we all love love! Thank goodness. 

I promise I will return soon and often. And hopefully, everything I do and write is in the color of love. Otherwise, please let me know!

Obviously, another reason I write each week is out of concern for the world around us. There is no doubt we are living in challenging times. There are disruptive forces all around us. Some very good and promising, and some very alarming and concerning.

My answer to most questions about change can be distilled into to confusion around our destination. Where are we really going? Do we know for sure? As the old saying goes: If you don't know where you are heading, any road will take you there. 

I think it is the lack of a well-defined future state that is the most troubling part of today's unrest. Our shared sense of destiny has been fractured—partly by us all seeing the future less clearly. We’ve all heard the phrase “Obstruction of Justice”. I see this as Obstruction of Expectations.

Most people know what they don't want. They are clear about injustices, grievances, inequities, and trends that are threatening the very lives we'd like to live.

But we are a lot less clear as to what the answers to these concerns are. And since so many want SOME kind of change, many are increasingly turning to ANY kind of change.

One mentor of mine used to say that the purpose of leadership is to bring order to chaos. Then, chaos to order.

I think there is a lot of wisdom there. As humans, we need friction. We need problems to solve. It's amidst productive discourse that the best ideas are shaped and emerged. And it is only through broad engagement and inclusion that most people feel satisfied with outcomes. No one likes to feel left out.

But then there are times when few can agree on anything and change begins to unravel us, rather than bring us together. In those times, we need a steady hand that can calm things down and brings more order to the plans ahead. I certainly believe we need more order than chaos today. We have plenty of the latter.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying Tim Urban's new great book, What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies. It's really worth a read. It's thoughtful, and provocative, and does a wonderful job explaining and summarizing what we are going through right now. It offers perspectives on why it feels so frustrating, and what we all can do to change both our attitude and our aptitude to help steer society in the right direction. It's a big task, of course, and I admire Tim for taking it on and for the way he is laying the issues out.

One really helpful framework that inspired me to write this post was thinking about our society as a house. It's clear that most people see the need for remodeling, upgrading, and refurbishing our house. It is far from perfect. It's worn. Torn. And doesn't even fit all of us. The foundation needs stabilization, and the roof is also leaking. Lots to fix.

However, do we remodel it or do we tear it down?

Many seem so disenchanted with the state of our world that they prefer demolition. Control-Alt-Delete. Tear it all down. Wholesale change is the only answer, it seems. 

But I think we are all better off if we treated our house as something worth building from, rather than replacing. There is a lot to like about our somewhat-dilapidated house. 

First, it has history. And the past is prologue. Ignore and throw it away at our peril. As Mark Twain (supposedly) said: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes". 

But our house has a lot more than history. It has established institutions, norms, structures, and processes that have led us to a level of progress the world has never seen. And tearing down this house seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Or, perhaps, killing the goose that lay the golden eggs. Pick your metaphor.

The desire to reject or remove any signs of our past is perhaps understandable. But it is not wise. I am convinced we'd all lose.

I think our society as a house is a good metaphor given what we are dealing with. Our public discourse would improve if we all committed more to rebuilding rather than rejecting. There’s value, too,  in acknowledging that not everything about us is so bad that it has to be torn down. We are all better than that. 

You can find more about Tim's great work here. Bari Weiss's interview with him is also a great way to go deeper. I also found Ezra Klein's podcast with Jennifer Pahlka about her new book, Recoding America, to be very relevant to the ideas here. We can consider three levers when designing change. Politics (who gets to decide), policies (what are we trying to achieve), and delivery (how exactly is this going to happen). We tend to get lost in politics, and sometimes policies, but almost never sufficiently focus on the delivery (or execution). As my friend, Dov Seidman, for so long has insisted: "How we do anything means everything". The government house seems ready for a tear-down, but after reading more about Jennifer's experience, I saw things differently. Rather, by fixing the plumbing (the how) we can make a ton of progress and make government work so much better for all. 

We are all rebuilders. And it's our house. Let's do it.