NaBloPoMo

We need Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia to flip. But this. This map is everything.

Previously on 2020 – Worklife Edition: Surprise! You’re getting a new boss!

I can’t really blame CoolBoss for leaving.

As one of the founding members of the design org at Large Financial Institution, she should have been on track to make real headway in how the organization approached design. Unfortunately, her Bohemian style and lack of organization all but ensured she would never be effective.

CoolBoss believed in flat management structures. Large Financial Institution most manifestly does not.

CoolBoss was not a strategic thinker, which is what is required for success in a place that functions on politics and relationships. Large Financial Institution runs on relationships and hallway meetings.

What she had going for her is she trusted her people, her senior people anyway. She gave us the freedom to work at home at will primarily because we made our deadlines and impressed our partners. Watching her learn that her junior people, who took that same freedom and ran with it, was an education I couldn’t have paid enough for.

She advocated for me hard during my conversion from contractor to full-time employee. So hard, in fact, that as she was leaving she told me that the year I converted I made more money in salary than she did.

CoolBoss wasn’t perfect. In fact, she was only good-adjacent.

Sure, she trusted her senior people. And we never got more than even the vaguest direction about the politics and the rumblings among the titans (aka: senior managers).

That meant we were constantly walking into project meetings with partners thinking that the things that had been decided in the last meeting were still the things.  We didn’t know those partners had told her different things in meetings we were excluded from. She was so disorganized we got information too late to avoid looking like fools.

It was super fun being constantly out of the loop on a year-long, multi-million dollar project with 14 executive stakeholders.

She also expected us to figure these kinds of things out on our own.

In a hierarchical organization that functions in silos and on relationships, being expected to figure stuff out on your own, even as a senior practitioner, is a bit like being given the parts in an assemble your own car kit and a manual where 42% of the pages are missing.

Given that our team seemed to get the dregs of projects – which was a combination of poor positioning on her part and lack of understanding of our capacity on our Vice President’s – I really can’t blame her for leaving for a Chief Design Officer position at an agency. She wanted the chance to be a design rock star.

Even with all her flaws, being with CoolBoss had the advantage of being a known quantity and type of chaos. This the logic that causes people to vote for the incumbent even if that person isn’t serving their needs.

We got 15 minutes to process before the rest of the team learned we were getting a new boss. Some of us got a little more because EmpireBuilder Boss was, conveniently, out on vacation.

That gave the 60% of us going to her team time to:

• have real-talk conversations with folks already on her team (Hint: perception is everything. Nothing in that “real-talk” proved true for us)
• obsess over whether we were getting “real-talk” (ibid; or maybe that was just me)
• try to position ourselves to present in the best light once she was finally back in the office (definitely not just me)

My first big clue it was all for naught was when she got back to the office on Wednesday the following week and blithely went through her previously scheduled meetings.

She didn’t even bother to clear 15 minutes to meet with us as a group so she could reassure us that yes, she understood this was sudden, and yes, she knew there would be an adjustment period.

No, she just had her regularly scheduled meetings. For three days.

Then she left to go to a conference in San Francisco, which got cancelled while she was on the flight there because of COVID-19 concerns. Then she got trapped in the hotel because Large Financial Institution, like so many other corporations, makes you buy the cheapest possible travel tickets which usually don’t allow for changes.

By the time she came back to the office on March 9th, sick, and we had a first team meeting, I was already checking the Johns Hopkins University COVID tracking map hourly in much the same way, and for many of the same reasons, people are constantly refreshing the electoral college tracking maps as I write this.

I had my first 1:1 meeting with EmpireBuilder Boss on March 12th and the micromanagement was already in the wind.

We had already been talking about COVID, hand washing, and social distancing in my circles. It doesn’t hurt that I have some really smart friends, one of whom once had a grant from the WHO to study hand washing techniques in rural societies.

That 1:1 meeting was an exercise in boundary setting. My informal agreement with CoolBoss was I would work at home two days a week during curling season (October-April) and one day a week the rest of the year.

She pushed back, of course. Did I have a formal work arrangement filed with HR? Had she met CoolBoss, I asked back.

Then I told her that based on the JHU map, the trends, and my family situation that starting the next Monday I would be working remotely for at least two weeks. She was smart enough to agree to that without much of a fuss.

Later that afternoon, we got an all-staff email saying that to prep for possibly having to work at remotely for an extended period Large Financial Institution would do a phased systems test.

All employees in our DC-metro and regional offices would work at remotely on March 13th. On March 15th, the following Monday, all employees in our Texas office would work remotely.

By 1pm on March 13th they told us they were closing all offices effective immediately and everyone would be working full-time at home until further notice.

While it had the advantage of protecting me from getting COVID-19, going home to work meant that all my interactions with EmpireBuilder Boss now happened via video call.

It’s hard to read body language when someone refuses to turn on their camera, or turns on their camera but walks away from the computer while treating it like a speaker phone.

And I was uniquely positioned to be a difficult employee for EmpireBuilder Boss.

I am one of two people in my group who do what I do. I’ve spent that last two years building up a subject matter practice inside this design group. Socializing what I and the other SME do, why it matters, and what value we can add to the design process.

I’ve essentially been in sales mode for two fucking years.

And since I am not a people manager but a senior individual contributor, something EmpireBuilder Boss “doesn’t believe in,” she excluded me from all her senior leads meetings while simultaneously expecting me to know and react to things said in those meetings.

As the other SME and I started having meetings with EmpireBuilder Boss, the cracks started to show.

She had zero interest in the subject matter area my colleague and I specialize in.

We laid out the year-long plan we’d made for the community of practice we run and she immediately began to make changes as if she knew better what we do and what the designers we’d already been working with needed.

We had project update meetings during which she talked about my colleague instead of to her while she was literally on the call.

Instead of trusting us to turn in good work we’d get impossibly short deadlines, no responses to requests for feedback, and then she’d just change stuff back to the way it was ignoring best practices.

After two years of making progress with getting visually oriented people to understand that the words in the things the design matter to the user experience, I found myself having to justify my existence all over again. Every day.

In retrospect, I’m surprised it took me until April to realize there was no way I could work for this woman and stay sane.

And since I am an introvert, a bit reserved, and largely a private person, the idea of trying to sell myself and my colleague to another Boss inside the organization or, even worse, look for another job in the middle of a pandemic made me want to vomit.

I used the data instead.

I took a hard look at the projects my co-worker and I were on and realized that 85% of the work we were doing was for another team.

And this is how I ended up with Nerd Boss.

Nerd Boss saw this and ended up exactly where I wanted him to go: It made more sense for me and my colleague to be on his team than to be on EmpireBuilder Boss’ team.

Nerd Boss is not a dream. To refer to conversations with him as “word salad” is all too often accurate. He sometimes gives vague, confusing directions expecting us to find our own way through the thicket of expectations.

But Nerd Boss respects his team. He sees the value in what I and my colleague bring to the team.

He lets the people in his group make mistakes. It’s okay to ask questions, to be genuine, uncertain, and need help.

He absolutely wants us to do the work and he sees his team as a team. I think he really believes we can do good things if we all row the metaphorical boat in the same direction.

Not to mention that on our Friday huddles, funny hats are the dress of the day.

My colleague and I moved over to Nerd Boss in June. And because I am not a people manger, she got her third manager in 6 months. Everything was great.

In September my entire group got moved into the Marketing & Communications roll-up.

Next time on 2020 – Worklife Edition: I don’t think that word means what you think it means

This is pretty much my mood today.

Does this mean I am advocating for violent overthrow of the U.S. government? Absolutely not.

For one thing, I’m about 30 years too old to think violent revolution sounds like fun. For another, who is doing the violence?

The forces that would like to keep this country enslaved to the idea of white supremacy are far better armed than those of us who’d like to have a society that benefits all. I find their lack of faith in a system that was designed by people like them for people like them fascinating.

One of those indicators of Americans’ lack of skill with systems thinking is our inability to grasp the concept of “enough.”

How much is enough?

I make a rude amount of money for someone who grew up in a pink-collar household where we did the switching the checks in the bills envelopes on a regular enough basis for me to notice as a child.

I make enough, in fact, that because my wants and needs more oriented to my upbringing than to something you’d see on MTV’s Cribs that when I want a book I don’t really have to worry about what it costs. Yeah, the cable bill stings but in my situation the alternatives aren’t any cheaper so I grimace and pay it every month.

Grasp the fact for a minute that I have enough to be thinking in terms of what my totally-optional-to-survival-entertainment costs me every month instead of worrying about balancing paying the rent against buying food or hoping that I can cure that cough with off-brand cough medicine I bought at the dollar store so I can avoid the hospital bills associated with COVID treatments.

Do I want more? Absolutely. I would love to have enough cash that instead of putting on outside clothes and sitting down for my job later this morning I could work on my fiction, actually for once get some exercise, and mop my mother’s floors, which I haven’t done since August because I work about 60 hours a week.

I’d love to be stupid rich. The kind of rich that doesn’t have to think about the bills because you never see them. You have someone handle that for you.

The kind of rich that has the chauffeured car drop them off at General Aviation at DCA instead of taking the hit on Daily Parking and hoping there are some spaces on the second level near the B terminal.

Of course I want to be that rich. Anyone who says they don’t probably also lies about masturbating.

Abraham Maslow created his hierarchy of needs in 1954. I met this idea about 40 years later in psychology class in college.

If you look at American society objectively, we act as if we are all functioning in the bottom two layers. We act as if we have the trauma of never having enough safety, that our physiological needs go unmet on a regular basis.

For some people in our society this is true. To see that, though, to compare your situation with someone else’s and realize what you have meets your needs and then some, you have to be functioning up at the top of the pyramid.

No one ever gets to the top of the pyramid fully. No one.

Sure, rich people have their physiological needs and safety needs largely met. Money buys a lot of things after all. That love & belonging layer and that esteem layer, those are always problematic. For everyone.

Until we stop thinking about enough as the top of all of these layers and start looking at these needs as slices, we’ll never be able to see that people who don’t look like us and don’t think like us deserve to have their slices just the same as us.

We still don’t have a declared winner for President. Notice I said “declared” because the place the winner will be decided is in the courts.

I still have faith in the system. To a certain extent, it was designed for me.

This is what the digital front page of The New York Times looked like this morning when I got up.

And this is what the digital front page of The Washington Post looked like about forty minutes later.

Each of these looks about the way I expected. Because, really, did anyone expect a decisive, clear message from the electorate? In 2020 the year of nothing being certain?

Anyone who has been paying attention knew this was what we’d wake up to. And here’s the thing about knowing: Humans have an almost infinite capacity for self-delusion.

In its most benign form we call it hope. The thing about hope is that it is dangerous.

See, people are basically lazy. We want eat all the cake and have six-pack abs without going to the gym. Take a pill and learn French. Have a democracy without doing the work.

The map looks like that the day after a presidential election that will, I’m betting, be the largest voter turnout in modern history, because we brought this on ourselves.

The myth of Cassandra says she was  gifted by Apollo the power of prophecy, and cursed by him that her prophecies would never be believed. And why was this?

Because that gift of prophecy was something Apollo promised her in return, as the Encyclopedia Britannica says so demurely, “if she would comply with his desires.” It was only after receiving the gift and then refusing to give Apollo “her favors” that he cursed her with being disbelieved.

Americans, in particular, don’t like unpleasant truths. We ignore them. Just as we ignore the cancer this country has had since it was founded, the cancer we see played out in the media and on those maps today.

We treated our democracy as background. We expected it to last, to just keep going and going, blissfully, perhaps willfully, ignorant of the fact that there were forces pulling levers and pushing buttons and playing the long game.

This result was entirely predictable. Entirely. Yet to say that would be “negative” or “unhopeful.”

At least curmudgeons are rarely surprised.

America has been sick for a long, long time. Now that its finally dying we, and by we I mean white people, are starting to pay attention.

Election day 2024, assuming we still have an election, is November 5th.

Americans are breaking voting records in every state and territory. Early voting numbers surpassed 2016’s early vote count in most places by October 22nd, according to the Washington Post. In Texas, early voting numbers are more than 100% of the total vote count for 2016.

That’s a lot of people voting.

I admit I participated in GOTV efforts for the first time this year. And it was a struggle for me. Vote Forward had a program that was perfect for a pandemic:

• print a form letter
• personalize it by hand with your story of why voting is important
• sign by hand
• address the envelopes by hand
• mail on the selected date

It was a struggle for me to write the 50 letters I did not because my inner cynic kept laughing and drinking gin and telling me expect the worst. The struggle was trying to articulate why voting is important.

Maybe it’s because I was born and raised in Washington, DC. Maybe it’s because my grandmother was a news junkie before the 24-hour news cycle was a thing. Seriously, ask me about our Super-8 home movies of JFK’s funeral which she filmed while watching it on TV. This is how I ended up having one of my earliest childhood memories be Richard Nixon’s resignation speech. Maybe it’s because I spent the Reagan years watching my mother and my step-father go to the polls and cancel each other out.

No, it was a struggle for me because I don’t understand how anyone fails to see that voting matters.

Americans aren’t taught to think systemically. It benefits those with power – rich, white men – to keep us thinking tactically.

Systems thinking requires strategy. It requires stepping back to see what levers can be triggered now to get a desired result a decade from now.

This type of strategy is how anti-choice, anti-abortion forces won the culture war; being “prolife” requires a lot more empathy than most of these people show when it comes to the social safety net.

These folks saw that controlling the language would buy them at least a decade, maybe more, to position themselves politically to pack courts with conservative judges and legislature with people sympathetic to their cause.

Voting matters because it is participation on the long game made visible.

Voting matters because the people who control your city council control your quality of life – everything from how frequently your trash gets picked up to if your street gets plowed when it snows to whether or not developers are allowed to fake their density numbers to get building permits.

I said in 2017 that the 2020 presidential election didn’t matter. It was a broad, sweeping statement, and not entirely wrong.

The 2020 election matters dearly. But how much better would our lives have been for the past two years if we’d understood the system, if we’d paid attention to the damage not caring about how state legislatures look or who is in Congress could really do?

And, assuming every single race in the country turns over to the Democrats, how much of a mess will we be left with because we paid no attention to the smaller races earlier?

Voting manifestly matters because if it didn’t those people in power wouldn’t try so, so, so hard to make sure that people who don’t look like them don’t vote.