Ask what's possible.

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"Ask what's possible, not what's wrong. Keep asking." - Margaret J. Wheatley

A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross says that there are only two primary emotions: love and fear. She also suggests that we can't feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time.

"They're opposites," she says. "If we're in fear, we are not in a place of love. When we're in love, we cannot be in a place of fear."

I wonder if the same is true of imagining what's possible instead of focusing on what's wrong. There's a lot going wrong these days. Is this blinding us to what is possible?

Because that would suck.

Happy Friday.

Leadership, Listening
"Learning and listening to people’s stories—in a company or a community—is a great way to bring people together."

Still from La Haine, 1995. Director Mathieu Kassovitz, Director of Photography Pierre Aïm

This week Ari Weinzweig of the Zingerman's Community of Businesses wrote about their companies' longtime reliance on Servant Leadership. He's been building on the idea with a corollary he's calling Folklorist Leadership.

"...Our focus would be on the work of listening deeply and open-heartedly to the stories of the people we work with. To show them how much their stories matter. To help them to make those stories ever more effective, positive, and meaningful. Folklorist Leadership in this sense is not about just being a good listener when people start to talk, but rather making time to actively seek out their stories. To allow our conversations to go deeper than we would typically do in the course of a workday. To make time to really sit with the people we work with in ways that have them feeling confident enough to share the parts of their story they want to share. And, to more effectively include those stories in the “common humanity” of our company’s past, present, and future."

Article: A Call for Folklorist Leadership

Culture, Change and Transition
Effective, lasting change is a “long game of pursuing audacious ideas by listening, extending trust, and patiently empowering others".

"In The Slow Lane, social entrepreneur Sascha Haselmayer guides the reader on a meditation about what it takes to achieve and sustain social change and address systemic issues like racism and climate change. The popular approach to problem-solving, he explains, has been dominated by a mentality of 'dealing with change by finding shortcuts.' Haselmayer calls this approach 'the fast lane,' which is epitomized by the 'move fast and break things' mantra of Silicon Valley that has since been adopted across industries. In the start-up world, Haselmayer observes, the playbook is unambiguous: Investors celebrate short-term, 'one size fits all' solutions that are easily scalable for profit.

"Instead, Haselmayer proposes the slow-lane approach of listening, extending trust, developing relationships, and shifting power dynamics to solve systemic problems. Slowing down, he acknowledges, runs counter to 'a world that celebrates only quick fixes [that] often end up doing a lot more harm than good.' Unlike the quick-fix mindset of people in the fast lane, people in the slow lane, Haselmayer says, “create solutions that don’t simply patch over a problem but take aim at the injustices and broken systems that keep producing failure in the first place.”

"...While The Slow Lane takes inspiration from existing approaches to social change, such as systems change and empathy-driven design, its most defining feature is its emphasis on the undeniable and consequential role that people’s humanity plays. Haselmayer argues that we must invest in our human relationships—only by becoming vulnerable and open to human connection will we be able to pause, listen, and share the power to act and effect meaningful change." - Sophie Bacq

Book Review: Exiting the Fast Lane

Related Article: Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change

Commerce, Buisness Models
Using design and architecture to address colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, houselessness, disinvestment, and environmental degradation.

Impermanencias is a research project by New York– and Mexico City–based practice Studio Elsa Ponce to reimagine spatial creation as a direct response to community needs rather than market demands. It asks what the architect’s role might be within a process where communities self-determine their spaces. Courtesy Studio Elsa Ponce.

Designers Verda Alexander and Maya Bird-Murphy are launching a new initiative "in response to our shared frustrations about the state of the design field and our world. Alternative Practice is on a mission to reprioritize the values that drive business and design solutions."

Says Alexander: "There seems to be a shift afoot—a reprioritization of values that drive business (and design solutions); the centering of love and gratitude, valuing the collective over the individual, embracing slowness, and challenging growth. We want to know more about the practices, agencies, labs, collectives, and research teams that are operating outside traditional modes and leading this shift. We aim to collect, archive, and share the knowledge held by the hundreds such alternative practices that exist today so designers can ultimately create liberatory futures for all."

Last fall she moderated a panel talk on the topic that brought together three designers whose practices challenge the status quo. It's a good opening to an important discussion.

Article: How Can We Rethink Architecture and Design Models?

Centering, Resilience
Resilience is the ability to reach beyond certainty to our capacity for hope.

Mycorrhizal fungi encourage natural system resiliency by facilitating mutualistic partnership with trees and other plants. Image of mycelium of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (with false color) by Oyarte-Galvez via CC

Stowe Boyd pays attention to "the economics and ecology of work, in a time of accelerating uncertainty in our lives, society, and business". In this essay he focuses on the role of personal resilience in organizational health. Resilient people, he says, have a strong social network, and they "don’t ignore problems, (and they) work out plans to recover from setbacks or loss. These skills, along with a strong social network, mutually reinforce personal resilience".

And resilient people, and in turn resilient organizations, rely on hope. He cites a definition of hope by Rebecca Solnit as "the embrace of the unknown and unknowable".

"Resilient individuals — in part through psychology and in part through practice — have greater self-awareness and awareness of the thoughts of those around them, they are more socially connected, and they are more extroverted. But most especially, they are naturally inclined toward the future, and toward hope."

Essay: Resilience and Hope

Civics, Social Messaging
Curt Bloch hid from the Nazis in an attic in the Netherlands. Every week he published a satirical magazine of art, poetry and song.

Bloch was given water, food and essentials by his hosts, as were thousands of other Jews hidden during WWII. But his protectors also supplied him with newspapers, pens, glue and other supplies. Each week, he used those materials to create a new issue of his own satirical magazine.

Next month an exhibition of a little-known wartime publications is going on display in Berlin. All 95 issues of Het Onderwater Cabaret will be shown in “‘My Verses Are Like Dynamite’: Curt Bloch’s Het Onderwater Cabaret,” a free exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

Article: While Hiding From the Nazis in an Attic, a Jewish Man Created 95 Issues of a Satirical Magazine

Commerce, Innovation
Most people would not expect to find tasty plant-based foods at a bodega. Hello, opportunity.

Plantega debuted in 2020 as a line of plant-based sandwiches, subs and burritos at three bodegas in the Bronx and Brooklyn in 2020. Today the brand is in more than 60 locations, across all five boroughs and Yonkers.

Nils Zacharias is the founder and CEO of a plant-based food company. "During the earliest days of the pandemic as he read about restaurants closing while the city’s corner shops and bodegas remained open after being deemed 'essential businesses,' something clicked: These are the stores that New Yorkers depend on and these are the places where most of us buy at least some of our food each week...This, he realized, was an opportunity, to meet people where they already buy paper towels and to launch a company that capitalizes on the connection customers have to their bodega guys." - Chris Crowley

Article: The Company That Veganizes Bodega Favorites, at Your Favorite Bodega

Learning
Sarah Manguso on keeping an open mind

Sarah Manguso. Photograph © Beowulf Sheehan

"Certainty is the opposite of thinking. I'm certain of it."

Book: 300 Arguments

One-liners

Article: “Wokery”, “safe word”, “forever chemical” and “swear box” have all been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in its latest update.

Article: Why investing in inclusive corporate well-being improves retention and company performance

Article: Why women say hybrid working enhances productivity, while men don’t

Article: Until the 1800s, merchants, lawyers, and aristocrats each wrote in their own distinctive script .

Article: Atlanta is west of Detroit, 60% of Canadians live south of Seattle, and New York City is further west than Santiago, Chile.

Article: Historic, all-woman St. Paul City Council sworn in. All the council members are under 40. And all except one are women of color.

Playlist

Video: Slow Pulp - Cramps (Live on KEXP)

Part of the recipe for great indie rock is a DIY attitude. Slow Pulp was started in Madison, Wisconsin when three childhood friends decided to make a band. By 2017 they had made two self-released EPs. The second, EP2, featured another member, Emily Massey. Since then the foursome has made two albums. The second, on Anti-, is titled Yard, and they've been touring to support it.

In October they stopped by the KEXP studios to share their midwest spin on a sound that never gets old.

Weekly Mixtape
Rock by any other name.

Playlist: Words and guitars

Image of the Week

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Survival Map, 2021. Acrylic, ink, charcoal, fabric, and paper on canvas, 60 x 40 in. (152.4 x 101.6 cm). Arte Collectum. Image courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. ©️ Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

"Raised on the Flathead Reservation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is deeply connected to her heritage. She creates work that addresses the myths of her ancestors in the context of current issues facing Native Americans. Her inspiration stems from the formal innovations of such artists as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as traditional Native American art.

"Smith works with paint, collage, and appropriated imagery. Through a combination of representational and abstract images, she confronts subjects such as the destruction of the environment, governmental oppression of Indigenous cultures, and the pervasive myths of Euro-American cultural hegemony." - National Museum of Women in the Arts

Profile: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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Centering, Resilience Resilience is the ability to reach beyond certainty to our capacity for hope.

Centering, Resilience
Resilience is the ability to reach beyond certainty to our capacity for hope.