The irony of this blog post mentioning a proportional response is wild to me. This whole set of reactions has been disproportionate in nature. https://world.hey.com/dhh/let-it-all-out-78485e8e

Listen, that job is hard. And it is happening at a time in which the entire nature of power is being upended, so that means all the places you can go to for advice are experimenting just like you are or they are preserving power as our institutions have always been.

I have run teams where you encounter major icebergs in doing this work and have to make deeply difficult decisions - but the situation that is being talked about here is not that. This is a level 1 inclusion issue that was just handled terribly.

We have to understand that our experience of power outside of institutions is radically different than it used to be. It does not bind seniority, money, and whiteness to access to information, decision making rights/decision makers, reach of your ideas together.

So folks come into the institution with a whole different experience on the capacity for change. When you shut that down the natural reaction to that is folks providing more and more context to get you to understand how your choice is tied to a bunch of historical choices.

Then you shut it down again and folks will react to that by creating power in the ways the internets/the world is currently creating power externally. Because they can’t accept this is it, they have seen people be more and do more with so much less personal power.

So their responses will pull in more context, enroll more people, make electric an issue until it’s not about the actual thing you are talking about anymore. The feedback loop is trying to tell you, you aren’t managing your power, and now solving the issue isn’t enough.

Changing your relationship to power is what’s on the table. And you can choose to entrench yourself in old models and dismiss any new models. But you can’t do that and retain an identity of being a “good guy”, you will not be allowed to get your personal needs met that way.

You haven’t allowed them what they see and experience as their basic humanity, so no, you don’t get to be a good guy. And yes, it does not look like that to you, but that’s immaterial.

At this point saying, what do you think is the best way to handle this - to several people, won’t work. Because what they have learned from you is getting ANYTHING that deals with inequity requires them creating massive pain. But it coulda worked at the beginning.

The unspoken thing here is that this list didn’t get handled because several white men didn’t think it was a big deal. So the response from a team demanding its leader lives up to its stated values is to make it a big deal.

There is no ownership here about a choice blowing up in their faces and causing a company meltdown because they were ill-equipped to handle it when it was first noted how toxic the thing was and what it means that so many people saw it and couldn’t see that.

The other thing not represented here are the many, many silent people who knew this was wrong before “sensibilities changed” and said nothing because they saw unspoken penalties from speaking up.

When I started being CEO at my previous org, I had the team ask and there was a lot of rumbling that made obvious, the majority of the team wanted to work remote. I was in my first year if CEO-ing and I had multiple learning curves I was confronting. Adding another felt bananas.

And here is where it is good to have built a good team around you. I was walking around just ignoring the energy around it and @mimifoxm gave me feedback that said “hey, that’s totally fair that you wanna not take it up, but you gotta say why.”

And so I did. Team, this is a valuable request and I can’t do it right now cause I don’t have ability on lots of fronts and adding this one feels like too much.

Two years later the whole world went remote and if I’d been able, so much pain wouldn’t have gotten worked through in a national emergency. But we are only capable of so much at once. @mimifoxm led that charge while I was sick and she did great.

But if I had said “working remote isn’t good for collaboration” or “remote work will make us less productive” the team woulda rightly handed me my ass because I would have been making a call without information and expertise. And this feels like that.

With an added layer, right, that making this choice continues a status quo that disenfranchises many, many people. Power is not agnostic it hurts or it helps. But it never just is.

Your personal identity around being a good guy can’t let you admit “hey, we live with segregated workforces and I’m deciding things that will ultimately uphold that cause I don’t have the strengths, abilities, or capital to make different choices”

And I hate to break it to folks, but you think you are avoiding this and it will go away - but it won’t. Your company will have blow ups again. Cause these are world dynamics not just your company dynamics at play. https://twitter.com/karlitaliliana/status/1386818528439767040

Actually, I don’t hate to break it to folks. That’s inaccurate. I love breaking it to you. Love it. And it’s urgent and necessary for folks to contend with the reality. Cause every single moment we don’t people of color pay the price and that’s unacceptable.

Oh and one more thing, cause I think it’s important. Our entire legal system is built to uphold current power and suppress new power. It actually requires ruptures in it to be more equitable. OF COURSE when you call a lawyer they tell you it’s fine.

Living within the bounds of the law is the LOWEST possible bar for this work. And you can’t use it as a validator for your rightness, or your goodness. It is only an indicator of legal risk and liability. Not social risk and liability. And they really conflate those two here.