2024-11-13 02:21:00
ONE OF MY FAVORITE WAYS of being with my clients is when the dialogue suddenly time travels into the future. You can almost feel it when it’s about to happen. A tale of a frustrated interaction with a colleague or a terrible edict from the C-suite starts to slow down, and there’s an almost furtive moment when something else pops up—like a little furred creature cautiously peeking their head up above the grass to see what’s out there. If we can hold the space, if we can keep from frightening the messenger back into their den, we may notice something new and interesting out past the treetops, off towards the horizon, where the sun is just now lighting up the space ahead.
I know that moment has worked when the storytelling shifts from what has happened to what might happen in the future. I know we’re getting to the good stuff if what might happen is something wild and seemingly impossible but also specific, something that we don’t usually give ourselves permission to dream about: their organization converting to worker ownership, joining up with their favorite coworkers to start a small business together, taking over that vacant lot down the street and building a community studio, opening a hardware store or a garden shop or an oyster farm.
Those stories aren’t necessarily useful for their plausibility—in the moments when they show up, they are often anything but. Rather, they are useful because they expose some want or desire, one that has probably been kept under lock and key, too dangerous to be let out into the world. We’re wont to tuck our greatest longings away because then we can’t be hurt when they don’t come true. But left untended, those longings can sicken us, they can fester and rot and poison the ground around us. Warded up, the little creature becomes huge and monstrous, armed with tooth and claw, and the labor needed to guard the doors and keep the walls high drains our energy, leaves us exhausted and weary and sad. Our dreams need light and air to breathe and heal, just as we do.
It seems especially difficult to let our dreams out into the world these days. It seems radical to dream at all. But curtailing our dreams in the face of authoritarianism is to obey in advance; it is to relinquish our right to good lives and good work—work that makes change in the world, that serves the needs of the living—before anyone so much as raises a fist to stop us. We may not be able to bring our dreams into the world unharmed. We may have to accept that some of our dreams will be carried not only by us, but by the next generation, and the next after that. But we cannot build towards a future that we cannot imagine. We need to lift our heads up, to see the light on the horizon, to remember that the future is always and forever undiscovered and uncertain—and where there is uncertainty there is also the potential for change.
The thing is that once we let those dreams out, they become a source of energy instead of a drain. Even if they aren’t reachable in their original form—or if we can recognize the escapist fantasy that lurks within—releasing them gives us room to play with them, to converse, to let them shapeshift into something like a direction or intention, the next experimental step. Rather than a caged and dangerous beast, they become a willing and capable sidekick, with all manner of magical powers and enchanted amulets to help us on our way.
All of which is to say, starting early next year, I’m going to gather a small group of people to time travel together. Using the mode of speculative fiction, we’ll write about our work, and then reflect with fellow workers and time travelers about what that writing tells us about our environment, needs, fears, commitments, and dreams of the future. We’ll use storytelling to unlock those long-hidden hopes and release their power to get unstuck in the present—to better understand what work means to us and how we might learn to shape it and shift it in new directions, both in the stories we tell and in the ways those stories manifest in the world. Together, we’ll make space to let our dreams out into the clear, bright sun and learn what incantations and spells and secret passageways they’ve been holding for us all this time.
The first group will begin in late January 2025. Space will be very limited, so get on the waitlist if you want to be the first to know when applications open up.
View this post on the web, subscribe to the newsletter, or reply via email.
2024-11-06 21:36:00
I sent the following note to my current clients this morning, and a few of them asked me to share it more widely, so here it is:
Hi friends,
The news is grim. I want to share two things that have been helpful for me and others on similarly dark days.
First, as you have oft heard from me, grief needs space and attention. Refusing to grieve is like wrapping a wound too tight—it can’t heal without light and air. We need to acknowledge it, to listen to what it’s telling us, to be patient with it. To accept it.
The same is true for fear.
Second, the work is still the work. Even if we had better news this morning, there would still be work to do. There’s the work that brings in wages so we can care for ourselves and our kin, there’s the work in our neighborhoods and communities, the work of our art. All of it is still with us; much of it will be even more critical in the days ahead. And much of that work is truly life-giving, not only in that it creates the conditions for life but that it allows us to use our gifts, to see the change we can make in the world around us. However frightened and sad we are today (and I assure you, I am both of those things!), there’s work that needs doing in the world and we are the ones to do it.
Rest up and take care today, in whatever way feels right to you.
With love and solidarity,
mandy
View this post on the web, subscribe to the newsletter, or reply via email.
2024-10-30 20:03:00
“BUT IT’S SUCH a privilege to even think about this. I should accept that what I have is better than what most other people can ever hope for.” This is a common refrain among people considering big changes in their work, while fascism, climate change, and genocide rage around them. And it’s often true that their waged work is not the place that is really calling for their attention—that it’s work in their communities and neighborhoods that needs more from them, however they can manage to give it. But I want to humbly suggest that this category of statement is one of the ways that the fear of change shows up. It’s a natural response to uncertainty and precarity, to the inability to ever really know what might happen on the other side of a choice. But acknowledging fear does not mean heeding its counsel.
More importantly, privilege is a resource to be used not tossed away. It’s worth too much to discard.
Let’s talk through an example: a senior manager at a tech company is frustrated by changes happening above her. There’s the coercive RTO plan that she knows is going to cause attrition when she can least afford it; there’s the simultaneous hiring freeze that’s left key teams under-resourced, while her own demands to reduce the workload have been rebuffed. There’s the new director who keeps referring to the support engineers as “girls”; the CTO who proudly returned to work after one week of parental leave; the company-wide edict to find new ways to stuff so-called AI into every corner of the product, user needs be damned.
“But the pay is good and I need the flex time,” she says. “And I prefer to work in the office, and this gig is still better than a lot of other things out there. I should just suck it up, right?” That’s fear talking, and it’s both real and justified: even those of us with solid paychecks and a lot of privilege know full well that things could change for the worse with little warning. But the thing about fear is that while it needs you to listen to it—ignoring it only makes it louder—the last thing you want to do is obey its orders. You are not fear’s soldier; fear is your prediction. And a prediction isn’t a tool for divination so much as it is an opportunity to change the course.
And there is so much that we can do to change that course! None of the privileges that too few of us enjoy were won by people who merely did what they were told. They were fought over in big and small ways, in thousands of tiny resistances, by people who saw what was happening and refused to help it along.
Our intrepid manager may not be able to cure her executives of brain worms, but neither must she be a willing accomplice to their foolery. She can tell the new director that his language about the support engineers is demeaning and that she won’t stand for it in her hearing. She can tell her team that she expects everyone to take their full parental leave, and reiterate that she doesn’t care where the work happens so long as it gets done. She can work with her senior engineers to come up with a realistic plan for which services they can continue to support and which ones need to be put into maintenance mode until the hiring freeze is over. She can work with her peers to document and socialize the risks of the new and totally unwanted features. She can use that flex time to make space to volunteer with a group supporting LGBTQ+ kids, or contribute her technical expertise to the local abortion fund. She can reach out to folks in her network, ask how they are doing, and share her own stories in the spirit of both validation and cooperation. She can stay in touch with anyone who quits in frustration, offering to be a support to them if they need it—knowing full well that she may need their support, one day, in turn.
Because the thing about privilege is that spending it doesn’t deplete it—hoarding it does. If you are unwilling to use your privilege, to push back against the unending pressures of exploitation and abuse, then it ceases to be useful. It becomes a prison instead of a tool, a cage instead of a sword. But if you use it, you can build bridges and escape routes, you can find friends and comrades, you can hold some space against those who would prefer to see you cowering and afraid, unable to wield the power that is ever in your hands. More importantly, you can come to see how much capacity you have for adapting and surviving even in challenging circumstances, for putting a wrench in a system that’s trying so hard to squash you down. You will recognize how that capacity is enlarged and renewed when you exercise it with others, when instead of giving up you reach out and realize what you can do together—remembering that nearly every right we have as workers was won by people just like you. And that, in and of itself, is real privilege. Use it well.
View this post on the web, subscribe to the newsletter, or reply via email.
2024-10-29 01:52:00
Emily Bender: “[Satya Nadella]’s argument is not only specious, but also rests on minimizing what it is to be human, have ideas, learn, interact and communicate, so that he can say that the theft by companies of creative works to train their models is simply analogous to the experience of creative works by people.” This is a very important tactic to take note of in the discussion about so-called AI: the move to elevate the “intelligence” of machines serves simultaneously to denigrate the wholeness, creativity, and wisdom of living, embodied human beings. It thus fits in with long-running projects to demean the work of some people—women, people of color, those erroneously labeled as “unskilled”—in order to justify the obvious inequality on display. Stories of “virtual employees” and comparisons of machines to people need to be thoroughly rejected if we, the people, are to have any hope of doing good work ourselves.
View this post on the web, subscribe to the newsletter, or reply via email.
2024-10-17 19:44:00
ONE OF THE HABITS of language that I look out for when I’m listening to someone’s story is that little phrase I have to. Sometimes what follows that phrase isn’t terribly interesting, simply the acknowledgement of a commitment or chore. But at other times those three words can do a lot of work to obscure some agency or choice, perhaps one that we are uncomfortable being honest with ourselves about. “I have to enforce this RTO policy even though I think it’s foolish,” is really a cover for, “I choose to enforce this RTO policy because I don’t want to get fired over it.” It can be awkward to admit the reasons we do things, so we tuck that admission behind the door of “I have to,” where we don’t have to see it.
I use an RTO policy as the example here because it’s part of a related pattern. Policies are useful mechanisms for delegating choice and accountability. An engineering manager doesn’t have the time or inclination to determine what the vacation policy should be, or how to accommodate all the possible scenarios in adjudicating it, so she follows the policy that her peers in HR create, and defers to them when anything is unclear. That’s fine and expected and the normal course of events in most organizations, most of the time. Where it gets interesting is when that policy bumps up into beliefs and values that the engineering manager holds, or when circumstances emerge where a plain application of the policy would obviously do harm: does she simply comply with the policy, as that’s what she’s been told to do? Or does she admit that she has some agency, that to comply is a choice, one that she is making for herself?
There are many other circumstances when that agency can either show up or be hidden away: when we witness something that strikes us as wrong or harmful (“I have to stick to my lane,” vs “I choose to stay silent because I don’t want to risk my promotion”); when we’re under pressure (“I have to work late to meet the deadline,” vs “I choose to work late because I’m afraid of being laid off”); when we’re overwhelmed (“I have to do what the boss says,” vs “I choose to do as I’m told because I’m too tired to figure out what else to do.”)
I’m not passing judgment over any of these choices; they may very well be the right ones, or at least the best ones, in any particular moment. But it’s worth peering behind the “have to” shield to understand what’s really going on.
Because there are two narratives here, each with different resources and accompaniments. The “have to” narrative positions us as repositories of instructions made elsewhere, as if we were just programs following the code we’ve been given. It conditions us to accept more and more instructions over time, as we become accustomed to that programming. It’s debilitating, and it often feels debilitating: as if the wind were knocked out of us, or our limbs become too heavy to move.
The “choose to” narrative has no illusions about our power and recognizes that we are small players in a bigger, and certainly unjust, world. But we are not machines. And maybe we don’t like the choices available to us, maybe we wish there were others within reach. But once we accept that there are choices to make, we may notice where we have some room to maneuver, some space to play with, some opportunity or avenue or loophole we can exploit.
Because even when your back is up against a wall, there’s usually some elbow room. You might let your team know that you disagree with the RTO policy, and that while you can’t stop the office keycard system from documenting their presence, you have no intention of nagging them about it. You might continue to put video calls on every meeting and politely fail to comment on who seems to call in more often. You might suggest that your immunocompromised engineer make a request for an accommodation, or offer to be a reference for anyone who needs to move on. You might start making some plans to move on yourself, or at least to be ready to, should the need arise.
None of these choices will exactly halt the machinery of capitalism in its inevitable march through our lives. Most of them won’t even noticeably slow it down. But what happens when you refuse to acknowledge your own choices is you eventually forget who you are: you become accustomed to having so much decided for you that you forget what it means to decide for yourself. You have a hard time knowing what it is that you want, because it isn’t presented to you as an available option. Refusing your own agency time and again is like disconnecting from a power source—the energy is still there, latent and ready, but the plug dangles inches from the outlet.
Of course, accepting that you have some agency might hurt: you bump up against the systems that constrain your choices; you see more clearly how other people’s choices limit (or expand) your own. But it keeps you connected to that source, that font of energy that is yours and no one else’s. It keeps you hooked up to who you are, and to what you want. And likely there’s some grief there, because what you want and what the world can give is not always the same thing. But if you know what you want—if you can name it and see it and understand it—you’re several steps closer to making it happen. One choice at a time.
View this post on the web, subscribe to the newsletter, or reply via email.