Category — thinking about

My first response to a thread on Detroit’s Urban Innovation Exchange (UIX) about celebrating failure as an intimate partner to innovation. The original article that spurred the thread is here.

From the website: The UIX is ”an initiative to showcase and advance Detroit’s growing social innovation movement. Led by Issue Media Group withData Driven Detroit, The Civic Commons and a coalition of media and community partners, UIX is made possible thanks to funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.”

Here’s a profile they did on me and my work at FoodLab.

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I agree that it’s a good idea to create a culture where it’s okay to fail — this ethos was drilled into me early in my professional life working in the tech industry. I’m sure you’ve heard the mantra: “fail early, fail often.” It’s why good angel investors invest in PEOPLE not in IDEAS.

I think for me, failure’s intimately tied to two of the things I value most: humility and constant learning.

When we fail (and recognize our mistakes as such), we realize that not we’re not Gods, we can’t predict or control everything (bad OR good, as Claire pointed out above), but we can strive to pay attention to what we want and whether what we’re doing is actually getting us there… if sometime we’re doing doesn’t serve us, if we’re failing, we try something else. If we pretend we never fail or we’re afraid to, we’ll never innovate, never improve. Einstein supposedly said “Insanity is trying the same thing again and again and expecting different results” — but sometimes trying something different requires messing up.

On the other hand, if we try things willy-nilly and we don’t learn when we fail, though, there isn’t a whole of point to it. There are plenty of examples that we might call failures of society (some really big ones) that we haven’t really learned from. There are plenty of instances where we try to build things from scratch when we could have learned a whole lot from someone who has done something similar before. I’m not sure that type of failure is noble or useful.

How can we harness failure to learn from our mistakes and do better? I think the non-profit/foundation world has a whole lot to contribute here. How do we build a system that doesn’t just reward success, but successful iteration, learning, capacity to change, resilience? Getting rid of “stagnation” as Tunde puts it… but not just no stagnation for the sake of movement but for the sake of betterment. When it comes to social enterprise, SO OFTEN we only talk about what’s working while covering up the things that haven’t worked or the parts of an existing enterprise that are particularly challenging, troubling… One of the things I really admire about the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund is the work they’ve done to document some of the enterprises that just haven’t worked out, and how dedicated they’ve been to working with many of their grantees through problems, not just giving up after one grant cycle…

I also want to mention that we can’t ignore the size of risk & resources involved in an operation. Failure is more tolerable in a fundraising experiment for a small community project, but maybe less tolerable when you’re building a ship or performing heart surgery. In those cases, you’ll want to get all your failures out of the way on LOW-RISK experiments up front before you commit to the real deal.

I’d also point out that we have a tendency to allow some kinds of people the luxury of “failing” and not others. But more on this some other time…

When I look at the list of months in my blog archive, it strikes me just how little I’ve written over the past 2 years and a bit, especially compared to my time in Cambodia and on the farm in 2008 and 9. I suppose writing varies inversely to the amount of stuff filling my days.

I’ve noticed, though, that I need write (and talk) to learn. Life over the past couple of years has been so so full of experiences, people, places. I’ve been on the move, constantly changing to the point where it’s hard to describe to people (or sometimes even know myself) who it is that I am and what exactly it is that I do.

Thankfully, I have incredible friends in my life who humor me and listen and help me untangle the sometimes frenetic thinking and doing into something that’s more comprehensible and sometimes even beautiful. They make sure I don’t take myself too seriously (it’s a flaw!) and that I pay attention to the things (usually people) that matter the most.

Even so, with all that reflection in real time, sometimes I feel like I could retreat somewhere and simmer in the sum of life til now… like I could keep myself occupied and become wiser just by being quieter. I’m hoping a 10-day silent retreat in May gives me a little piece of this, and I’m planning something longer — maybe three months — sometime in the next four or five years. A time for silence and ripening.

In the meantime, for the summer, I’m going to hold myself to a stricter schedule of writing. I’ve been trying to maintain a radical openness since coming to Detroit, but recently I’ve been thinking I need to focus in more and process things I’ve heard and overheard, passing thoughts, feelings, into something more coherent (not static or final, but connected… like a mind map, a network of connections).

I guess this is a reminder that this particular blog space isn’t a place where I intend to preach, influence or educate, but to have a conversation with myself and people who care about me who happen to be far away and others who resonate with the questions I’m asking about food and equity and relationships and change in the world.

Making space to actually write things down won’t always be easy, but I think it’s worth it if I can learn something new.

Some things I’d like to take on…

• Social justice and entrepreneurship — tensions between the individual and the collective. Does the fact that a tension is unresolvable mean that the mechanism is flawed, or perhaps even more important?
• Brokering roles & the role of social structure in unlocking creativity
• Arne Naess and the ecological self — is this possible? desirable? true altruism?
• Does creativity require limiting someone else’s capacity to create?
• How do we remind ourselves that every story is incomplete? Is there a prayer? A song?
• Emergence  versus scale?
• Does financial sustainability in a “social enterprise” have to be based on markets as they exist today? (Must we achieve “profits”? What about grants? Unpacking the financials of that biodynamic farm on Lopez Island)

And some more mundane things about day-to-day life and cooking and some creative projects that I’m working on.

I’m getting more excited as I write about it. That’s a good sign

In response to a post by an inspiring friend:

I’ve been thinking about this a whole lot lately in the context of my own work and life here in Detroit. I moved here in part for a sense of *community* and connectedness and I find that many of the people close to me are drawn & remain in the city for that reason — and yet that interdependence, that rich social web, that “deep participation” is so complicated, and often a source of discomfort.

I wonder how to motivate and manage participation, collaboration, decision-making in “flatter” systems and networks…. how greater interdependence & “richness and diversity of one’s experiences and the strength of one’s social bonds,” while magical on the surface, can be exhausting in practice… the constant give/take/brokering of our values/needs/actions within our networks is a lot in itself. Given our technology as a species, we are no longer operating at the scale of tribes, so we’re negotiating an ever increasing number of connections at varying scales… not to mention the fact that different people are able/willing to “enroll” to different degrees and those who have stronger ties end up being asked to give more than they can sustain as individuals or businesses or organizations (e.g. studies on entrepreneurs with stronger family ties being alternately a blessing and a burden on the business)…

So I guess I just wonder how we deal with this complexity?

When we move out of more bureaucratic, hierarchical command-based approaches to leadership to more participatory, emancipatory, democratic, distributed/chaordic models … and when we move from linear, cumulative models of progress or development to a systems approach focusing on sustainability and resiliency, what are the new kinds of tools (technological, cognitive, emotional, social, political) that we need to manage these changes?

Network modeling? Systems analysis? Ethnography? Facilitative leadership skills?

Spirituality and religion!?

Amory Starr’s “17-point guide to graduate school” or “phds for radicals in the humanities and social sciences.”

Some incredibly sage and practical advice. I need to make my schedule less busy so I can put more of it into practice. (e.g. learn to be a plumber and find a non-academic partner… though maybe that’s less of an issue since I’m not convinced I’m going to be an academic at all )

I feel like a poor excuse for a “Radical” or “Activist”… I don’t know if I fit that role necessarily, but I’m pretty clear that I want my life to be about figuring out how to contribute to/participate in creating a more just and equitable world and specifically supporting people to feel useful and fulfilled … and I want to be able to do this without driving myself insane… in fact do it in a way that’s generative and full of joy…

Click here to read the rest.

“Activists experience the intellectual-political work of scholarship as part of the struggle. It’s a war. We have to fight. I’ve come to understand the academy as a place where I do some outreach and networking, and sometimes try to transform the institutions to be more liberatory, but for the most part my job is not part of THE struggle. This job is a way to support me and the work I want to do.”