Entitlement, Fear, and Cultivating the Changemaker

Americans are a very entitled bunch. Food (as much as our hearts desire), comfort ($2-million-dollar homes overlooking the sunset over SF bay), entertainment (oh, but we need that 47-inch flatscreen!), and even health care (we deserve whatever we can afford). Across the globe, Americans are being universally criticized as greedy, wasteful, self-righteous. Indeed, today I learned that the the developed world, including the U.S. and Western Europe, has 12% of the world's population but accounts for 60% of its consumer spending. The developing world, on the other hand, accounts for a mere 3.5% of such spending. The difference is enough to make anyone wince.

But I'd argue that there is an interesting psychological consequence to this chronic condition of "I deserve." For those with a more global and humanitarian inclination, it's a kind of unquestioning confidence that people have a right to certain things - clean water, adequate nutrition, safe environments. For the average American, they've grown up with these as givens. They have never worried about the tap water they drank, when they were getting their next meal, or if they were going to get raped on the way home from school. It shocks them, turns their world upside down, when they hear that such things exist elsewhere in the world. When they act, there's a conviction that propel them confidently forward to make change.

However, consider a child who grew up in the slums of Bangalore, or rural China, or the Bronx. Day after day, she's surrounded by poverty, hunger, violence, sickness, and worst of all, the resignation and fear of her elders. It's not their fault; their lives, and those of their parents, were etched out, fought for tooth and nail, against even more desperate circumstances. They've grown afraid, like anxious little mice, of losing the little they've worked so hard to gain. All they want, and all they can imagine, is for their child to be free from the desperation that plagued them. And most inherit not only poverty from their parents, but the disabling fear that snufs out any youthful hope they might have had, keeping them poor.

But as the developed world is beginning to see, people at the bottom of the pyramid have potential beyond what is often ascribed to them. With the right resources and inspiration, humans are capable of fantastic dreams. Let's say that this particular child dared to dream of a world, for herself and others, not just a life without debilitating suffering, but one with fulfillment, joy, meaning, and freedom. She longs to make this vision a reality.

What stands in her way are a number of possible obstacles - access to education, getting fed and clothed, gender discrimination, disease, economic expectations from her family. But let's just say this girl has overcome these challenges by a combination of her efforts and a good bit of luck. She now has the resources at her disposal to carry out her dreams. But there is one last barricade that stands in her way, however, and it's quite possibly the darkest of them all because it's in her head. It's the lack of a sense of entitlement.

In order to survive, she's had to adapt like her parents and grandparents. Evolution is still alive and well in the psychological ability of survivors to accept realities they cannot change, which is the first step to adaptation. To some degree, she has had to accept the dire circumstances and pain she witnessed that she couldn't change. Children's natural joy and maleable minds prevent them from experiencing true desperation. To her, dying infants and battered women were part of her childhood reality. She feels a sense of injustice, but no outrage like the entitled Americans around her. She cannot be outraged at a world that was once her own, one that offered joy along with suffering. On top of this, having feared all their lives, her elders at first frowned upon, then outright forbode her to continue pursuing her vision. To them, this was frivolousness. How dare she risk her and their lives for a mirage? How could she stick her head in the clouds while her family was hungry?

So she's caught in this impossible tug-of-war - does she answer to the dream she holds in her heart, or does she play it safe and provide for the family that gave their own lives for her? She still sees a better world in her mind's eye, but she also lives with the world's flaws that she accepted early on. Without an unshakeable sense of entitlement, she wavers. She begins to believe that maybe it's ok to take progress one step at a time -- feed the children first, dreams later. So she backs away from her vision, generations of fear and heavy sighs blinding her once bright eyes like an illness, and the world is never changed.

What kills the potential of children in poverty, children of immigrants, and children from rough-and-tumble neighborhoods who didn't grow up with the same entitlements as the middle class American? What could have altered this picture?

Mentorship and resources. A child with larger-than-life aspirations needs a light beyond the desperate world she's always known. Knowing others who have succeeded in similar struggles gives her more confidence to defy her reality. It's also a resource that she can utilize, along with economic support, education, health care, and help with other problems in her daily life. If we begin to tell disadvantage children around the world that they are entitled to life and hope, and we help them and their families achieve at least these basic rights, we would see a lot more fantastical dreams becoming reality.

New directions

I'm currently pondering about some interesting cross-sections:

- Health care
- Traditional business (organizational management, business strategy, vision, profit model)
- Leadership studies
- People-oriented design processes
- Visual arts
- Web 2.0/technology
- Communication, rhetoric, and storytelling
- Creation/seeking of new knowledge through research

...and how in the world I'm going to make sense of all these connections.

For joy banishes the darkness
If you are so lucky to hold it
A fragile, warm little bird
Sitting calmly in your hands
Its small body radiant with a strange light

Do not cage it selfishly
It does not belong to you
You are merely blessed
Set it free, roaming
Let its song soar across
Its sapphire eyes see
Barren plains
Restless seas
Tired women
Hungry children

Open your hands
It will travel the globe
Without ever leaving your outstretched palms

Practicing for a vision

Practice makes perfect. This one is the quintessential mantra that is so cliche that it can't be anything but true. Athletes, musicians, chefs, artists, and students all practice to gain proficiency, and as anyone who's ever been on a sports team or taken music lessons knows, it's not always a pretty process. As a singer in a college choir, I've had this experience time and time again. Every Tuesday night for two hours, I sat in the basement of our music building for rehearsal. There was always some paper to be written or problem set to be solved, yet there I was, tackling some obscure bit of German music that our quirky Welsh conductor had chosen. The first read-through has all 50 of us stumbling through the notes, more in a mumble than song. "He's done it again," I would always think, "What the heck is this?!"

But the vision always magically appears. As the quarter progressed, I would become more and more familiar with the individual notes, transitions, cadenzas, movements. The uncertainty was slowly replaced by confidence, then anticipation, then feeling. Inevitably, a favorite movement or phrase would emerge and lodge itself in my brain. I would, whether I admit it or not, hum it silently myself when I return from rehearsal, go to class, shower. The music, which had so shortly ago been random black dots on a page, took on a kind of life and personality with familiarity.

The magic continues on performance night. Something about being in the spotlight, joined by the non-human voices of the orchestra, facing a dark, waiting audience lends a kind of anxious energy to the music. Standing there, I would be grateful that hours of rehearsal had made it no longer necessary to concentrate on the notes; my mind was free to soak up the energy and let it reverberate through my voice.

Again and again, from the stage of our university church where we performed our quarterly concerts, to the stages of the Great People's Hall and "The Egg" in Beijing, I saw this process happen quietly, organically, this magic that emerges from chaos and doubt into a coherent, expressive whole. And when it happens, its enormity never fails to surprise and delight.

In the arts, it's easy to see the relationship between practice and vision. Practice allows you to gain mastery over the details that clog the mind and hold you back from experiencing the work as a whole. Only when the proficiency part of performance becomes automatic can the brain begin to understand the bigger picture, tease out nuiances, to offer an interpretation. But my recent thoughts on leadership makes me think that leading is not unlike mastering an art form.

Both begin from the ground up, whether it's with musical notes or organizational details. The learning process is alternately nerve-wrecking and mind-numbing, but successful people learn to charge on beyond the immediate. And they don't stop there. What separates a good musician from a great one is not proficiency; the few great ones practice because they have visions they want to carry out, but they understand this cannot be done without absolute proficiency. On top of that, a great musician needs a flair for performance and drama to communicate her vision to the audience. Similarly, a successful leader needs both the details (knowledge, skills, experience) to ground them as well as a vision for grander things to come. She also needs to convince others to join her vision. It's this talent for contradiction and multiplicity that marks success, in the arts or in organizational leadership.

Meaning of leadership

One thing that I'm grateful about my work is that I get to sit in on meetings where executives debate future directions of the hospital. These are people, many of them doctors and surgeons, who have had a lifetime of experience in patient care and organizational leadership, who are endlessly energetic and impossibly organized thinkers. This is the kind of conversation I thrive on, the kind about vision and change that makes the numbing data analysis somehow worthwhile.

Listening to our charismatic (if a bit irratic) CMIO try to convince others in the room of his vision for information security, my mind began to drift away from the conversation itself. Instead, I thought about what I've observed about his role as a leader. Other than his title, what makes his word so influential? How did he come to that title anyway? Did he come to influence by the wealth of his experience or the boldness and succesful outcome of his ideas? What is his primary function as a leader -- is it a manager of change, utilizer of people and skills, or a grand visionary?