Diversity: When Comfort Leaks Ignorance

As we prepare to conduct our first conversations with various groups in the Pacific Northwest, I have been observing the behaviour of Forest Service employees in other regions and in other programs. I have recently noticed some dynamics and I am curious about the underlying structures in our system which produce these behavioural outcomes.

A group of middle managers were together for the third session of a six month leadership development course. They had been face to face together for three one-week sessions and felt a strong sense of rapport. During a discussion about the ladder of inference, the group explored the assumption that "all the good jobs in the agency are wired," meaning that a number of hiring officials had engaged in pre-selection.

During the course of the conversation, meant to illustrate the power of making assumptions, the group circled around to a cultural belief that there are diversity quotas and that sometimes the most skilled candidate is overlooked in favor of what's referred to as "the diversity candidate." There are really two interesting dynamics which became apparent to me as I observed the discussion.

First, the group's comments demonstrate a shared belief that there is a difference between the most skilled candidate and the diversity candidate. This implies that collectively we don't believe that the most diverse individual may also be the most skilled individual. When I frame it thus, the logical mind rejects the thought. Of course there are highly skilled individuals in every race! Therefore, I submit that the individuals in the room were not cognizant that their behaviour demonstrated an illogical prejudice.

Second, of the nearly 40 people in the room, all were caucasian but one. It seemed as if those individuals contributing to the group conversation had no awareness that there was a person of color in the room who may have felt discomfort. (Unlike the others, this man may have noticed the assumption which was exposed in my first point.) Maybe they felt so comfortable together that they did not view the man of color as anything apart from themselves? In fact, that idea by itself is beautiful - why should a group of friends view the one man as anything different from how they view themselves?

The two notions together create an interesting tension in our cultural beliefs (writen in a perspective which may represent the majority of our employees): the people with whom I am friendly are just like me, but the people with whom I must compete for employment are different and less skilled.

As I probe the possibilities in this thought experiement, it occurs to me that employment satisfies our most basic needs for food and shelter. Food and shelter are fundamental to our ability to survive. Competition for a job, then, is very closely assosciated with competition for survival. We could say that these two drives are parallel.

So, then, if the drive to compete for employment is parallel to the drive to compete for survival, then is it possible that while under the influence of these tandem drives, an individual may experience amygdala hijacking? This question deserves a whole new blog post. But for now, this is certainly something on which to chew.

A True American Hero

Mike Parker, the disabled vet in Indiana who called me with a proposal for a wood pellet manufacturing plant in order to create jobs and develop renewable energy, has impressed the heck out of me with his determination. Check out my earlier post, How Exactly Does One Participate with Government, to catch up on this story.

When Mike called me I sent a few emails around in the Forest Service to find out exactly with who he ought to speak. Within 2 emails I had caught up with Mike North, an Enterpriser with the Forest Service Enterprise known as TEAMS. It happens that Mike North works for the National Woody Biomass Coordinator. I'm not sure whether they've spoken with each other yet, but in the mean time, Mike Parker has been busy!

Mike fanagled himself an invitation to Philadelphia to participate in the Middle Class Task Force meeting hosted by Vice President Biden. He also got himself on C-Span a few days before driving to Philadelphia. Mike and I talked the evening before he left for Philadelphia. As I've mentioned in other posts, I feel so compelled to action by Obama's vision that I find I can't help but support Mike Parker. During our evening phone call I helped him craft an "elevator speech", write a question in case he got to ask one at the meeting, discover how to make business cards with his MS Works program, and gave him some techniques to help him stay calm and avoid being stressed or anxious.

He just never ceases to amaze me. Yesterday before the meeting in Philadelphia he got an email that the EPA had declined his proposal. (Somehow he'd gotten 20 minutes on the phone with the Director of Grants at EPA). At the meeting there was no opportunity to ask questions. In his frustration, as the meeting ended, Mike dove out toward Biden. He was quickly surrounded by secret service men, but he recovered and was able to speak directly with the Vice President! Mr. Biden took a copy of the email from the EPA (the one which declined the grant application) as well as taking down Mike's phone numbers.

Mike was elated today as he relived the tale. He said that even if his idea never goes anywhere, and even if they don't build the manufacturing plant in Andrews, IN -- a town which lost 4 factories over the recent past -- Mike is satisfied that he carried this vision as high as any man could... he carried his vision straight to the Vice President of the United States.

Mike Parker, you are my hero!

How Exactly Does One Collaborate With Government?

Obama has declared that Government will be Transparent, Collaborative, and Participative. But exactly how we do that remains to emerge. It seem like I'm not the only one who is experiencing the new administration as a force field with a gravity which is pulling me into formation...

Mike Parker, a disabled veteran in rural Indiana, called me at work last week. He'd found me on the web because of an article which I wrote about the history of the Forest Service Enterprise Program. Mike Parker has an idea about turning woodchips into an energy source and creating jobs in his county, where some factories have recently shut down. Mike Parker wants to be part of the solution. He wants to collaborate and participate, but he doesn't know how to "play the game".

I have a soft spot in my heart for people who feel passionate and driven and want to contribute to solutions, so I'm doing what I can to find someone in the agency to talk with Mike about his idea and how to carry it forward. I know that the agency's portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA - the economic stimulus bill) is meant to be used for three main things: 1) create jobs, 2) reduce hazardous fuels (to prevent wildfires), and 3) explore woody biomass as an alternate energy source. So Mike and the Forest Service seem like a good fit, and our new President wants people like Mike to be able to participate.

Here's the frustrating part. Our government is a huge, complex, and unwieldly system which moves very slowly. In order for a citizen to interact with us in an effective way they must possess an extreme amount of patience and some could argue a higher education. I personally think that government is one of many systems which are undergoing major turbulence right now because of its own ineffectiveness, but that's another post altogether.

My team is now getting involved in creating communications products for internal use about the agency's role in economic stimulus. I'm supposted to bend my noodle toward supporting Forest Service employees in understanding our new roles and how to be successful. I'm not exactly tasked with communicating with the public. But tell that to Mike Parker, or to the lady at the coffee shop, or to my neighbors who know I work for the government. Our 35,000 employees are the face and voice of the agency. There's not just a few controllable entry points to pre-packaged and manageable information about the agency's role in Economic Recovery. Any one who wears a green uniform to a grocery store has just become the spokes person for the entire government.

We must tackle our social media learning curve ASAP in order to create containers for all of this stimulating dialogue. We also must support employees in having very basic answers for all their neighbors questions. We are a "can do" organization, we'll find a way to be successful. I just worry that some of us will die trying (stress is one of the top health concerns in the nation).

No power, yet energized

Fifteen days ago we lost our electricity during an ice storm which hit Arkansas and Kentucky. We still don't have power, but I'm presently on a business trip to the Coronado National Forset and am blogging from the hotel. Many of the towns in our area have power again, but in this part of the country our populations are widely dispersed. We have 40 acres and live 6 miles from town. All 6 of those miles are dirt roads. Our driveway alone is one mile. Our electricity is provided by a rural electric cooperative which serves Searcy and Van Buren Counties. Even with the assistance of outside electrical workers, there are hundreds of poles down and thousands of places where the lines are lying on the ground -- just in our county alone.

Our intention has always been to employ renewable resources such as wind and solar power. It has also been our dream to build with alternative green technologies such as cob or straw bale. In 2005 when we first moved to the Ozarks, we built a standard wooden frame house and wired it to the electrical grid. Despite the obvious clash with our intentions, this was our best option for a number of reasons:

1. I telecommute and I needed to have a very stable office environment which would support all the office gizmos.
2. Cell phones don't work in our valley, and the only way to get a land line put in was along side the electric lines on the power poles.
3. The kind of construction techniques we want to employ are in general information and time intensive up front, so we needed time to research and plan our approach so that our creation is in harmony with the landscape and natural energy sources, such as passive solar.
4. I'm an only child and while my parents are quite young (in their 50s), our intention was that this first small house would become theirs as a part time home during retirement and a full-time home during the sunset years. (I think nursing homes are scary and sad).

Along with the regular aspects of living, working, and raising two kids we've been planning our next home since even before the paint dried on the current cottage. One thing we've done in order to prepare for the transition to renewable energy is to cut our power consumption by as much as possible. We use our central heat and air an average of 150 hours per year. We spend about $50 a month on electricity. We heat with a wood stove and open the windows in summer.

A number of positive things are coming out of this experience, and I'll likely mention those in other posts. One which I do want to mention now is that I've seen a complete shift in my father around these green concepts.

Dad is an electrician and a heating/air specialist. He's brilliant and skilled in a number of other trades. He and Steven built our house (too bad I wasn't blogging then, that was an amazing adventure). Like many other people in his age group and profession, he didn't see any reason to change our lifestyles. They were up for a visit a week before the ice storm hit. During that time we had a long family conversation about our plans for building a cob house. Even though we'd talked about it many times before, Dad was listening in a different way because he's facing his second lay-off in 2 years. (He was a construction inspector in Ft. Myers, FL - the town which Obama will visit tommorrow). When he is laid off the second time (not if because there is no building industry in FL) he's going to come up and help us build the next house.

I think that 15 days of my mom worrying about her grand babies, as well as his own concerns for our well-being, AND his desire to support us even if he would choose standard building methods, have led to a most amazing development. Tonight he announced that he's found the average air speeds and is going to build us a wind generator. He's been searching the web for plans, formulas, and the like and has a sound strategy for engineering his own design.

I can't tell you how overjoyed I am about this. Not only because the transition to renewable energy has been a daunting learning curve, but especially because it's evidence of the kind of deep, global shift in awareness which I have been praying for since the early 90s. He shared this with me over the phone after we'd both watched Obama's first press conference, and after an entire day of supporting the Coronado National Forest in preparing to recieve a flood of economic stimulus money which the agency plans to use to create jobs by letting contracts to reduce hazardous fules (wild fire prevention) AND developing renewable energies around the use of woody biomass as a power source.

It is finally all coming together. We're realizing the inextricable connectedness between environment, economy, and society. This is why I'm so hopeful. These disasters, though painful, are providing us with the necessary feedback to transform our entire planetary experience. Hallelujah!