We know how to fix the police: the data proves that regulating police behavior results in fewer killings of civilians.

by David Byrne, Reasons to be Cheerful:  https://reasonstobecheerful.world/we-know-how-to-fix-the-police/

Monday afternoon of last week, my friend Bobby texted me that a protest was going to assemble at Grand Army Plaza, on the edge of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, at 6 pm. I rode out there to discover, to my pleasant surprise, that this was to be a bike “march.” Hundreds of cyclists had converged at the entrance to the park. 

We chanted as we rode. Traffic stopped at cross streets, and more often than not motorists honked and waved to salute us. The real surprise came when we reached the Williamsburg Bridge. Some cyclists in the lead blocked the traffic heading into Manhattan, and we swarmed onto the westbound lane and over the bridge. A pretty glorious feeling, I have to say.

Credit: Alex Cascone

My impression is that the police in New York have tempered their initially confrontational approach to the protesters. There were no barricades or cars set up to entrap and enclose marchers. It seemed to me that, slowly, some lessons are being learned. But not everywhere — in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks was murdered, shot in the back as I write this. In many places, nothing has changed.

We talked (distanced) as we rode. We asked each other: What next? What changes can be instituted? (New York is banning chokeholds). Are the changes being considered enough? And maybe, most importantly, are there policies that have shown documented success in stopping the killings, combating systemic racism and fostering better relationships between neighborhoods and the police? 

The answer is: Yes, there are changes that have been proven to work.

There are two types of policies: Ones that reduce the risk of violence during an encounter between a citizen and the police, and ones that reduce the number and kinds of encounters altogether. I’ll start with what happens during an encounter.

Part 1: Less dangerous interactions

8 Can’t Wait

There’s been a fair bit of buzz about 8 Can’t Wait, a list of eight policing reforms recommended by an organization named  Campaign Zero that was formed in 2015 by three activists from St. Louis and nearby Ferguson, Missouri. 

This organization has been name-checked by everyone from Barack Obama to Ariana Grande — deservedly so, as their  research is proof of what works and points to a positive way forward. In a nutshell, their data show that cities that have adopted certain policies regulating what happens when police and civilians interact have seen a reduction in killings of said civilians, and that police violence can be reduced by 72 percent if all eight recommendations are adopted! 

Since black people are nearly three times more likely to be killed by police than white people, these recommended policies are what we need to adopt — right now. How inspiring that these young people have helped galvanize this push for solutions!

Here are the eight reforms they studied and recommend based on the results of those studies:

1. Require comprehensive reporting (every time officers use force or threaten force against someone, they have to report that)
2. Exhaust all other means before shootings (unsurprisingly, this can reduce police violence by 25 percent)
3. Ban chokeholds and strangleholds
4. Require a use-of-force continuum (this limits the weapons or force that can be used depending on the situation)
5. Require de-escalation (officers have to communicate with subjects, maintain distance and otherwise defuse tense situations whenever possible)
6. Duty to intervene (officers must stop other officers from using excessive force, and report incidents)
7. Ban shooting at moving vehicles
8. Require warning before shooting

And here is their chart showing the reduction in killings associated with each restriction:

Credit: Campaign Zero / #8CantWait

The figures show that there is a clear reduction in killings when each of these policies is adopted. Campaign Zero arrived at these numbers by looking at police department records. The information was not easy to get — the police don’t like to reveal internal data (changing that policy is also recommended). But over the course of a year, by using the Freedom of Information Act and even sometimes resorting to lawsuits, they got the information they needed. This information was then cross-referenced with a database of police killings compiled by the Guardian.

Other factors were taken into account for each city: the number of arrests made, the size of the police force, demographics and the degree of inequality. That’s a lot of stuff to factor in, but if they hadn’t folks might not take these findings seriously.

Credit: Campaign Zero / #8CantWait

The good news — and boy do we need some of that now — is that cities where these policies have been applied have shown a significant reduction in killings of civilians. Here is a solution that works, we have proof, and were it more widely adopted we might find ourselves in a better place.

Camden serves as a case study

Camden, New Jersey has adopted some strategies that resemble Campaign Zero’s recommendations. More radically, in 2012 the city disbanded its entire police department. It was then reconstituted with new officers (though 100 of the old ones were kept) as part of a new public-safety force focused on rebuilding trust between communities and the police. 

Camden’s chief of police told Citylab that he wants his new officers to “identify more with being in the Peace Corps than being in the Special Forces.” This means using handcuffs and guns only as a last resort, mentoring local youth and generally acting like members of the community. For instance, every new recruit in Camden now starts out by knocking on doors in the neighborhood they’re assigned to, introducing themselves to the residents and asking them about the important issues where they live.

Camden used to be one of the most violent cities in the U.S. Since 2014, however, its crime rate has dropped by half and reports of excessive force by police have dropped by 95 percent! It’s a complicated story — not as simple as it might seem, and more than can be told here — but it shows restructuring can work.

The not so good news is that, according to Campaign Zero, only two large cities — Tucson and San Francisco — have adopted all of the policies 8 Can’t Wait recommends. These reforms often meet resistance despite proof that they work. Police unions work hard to oppose them, claiming they hamstring officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.

But there is evidence that this argument is false. Many of these reforms, besides saving the lives of civilians, also result in fewer police being assaulted and killed in the line of duty –– a win-win situation.

Credit: Campaign Zero / #8CantWait

Here, then, is where both sides may find some agreement!

Part 2: Reducing engagement with police

The reforms recommended above are aimed at reducing risk during encounters between civilians (especially black civilians) and members of the police force. But another way to reduce this risk is to reduce the number of encounters altogether.  Those changes may take more time to put into effect, but they can affect the whole ecology, altering the relationship between a police force and the citizens they have sworn to protect.

Ending “broken windows”

The broken windows theory posits that targeting minor infractions like vandalism creates a sense of orderliness and control that deters would-be criminals. But it has been proven a false assumption. As the New Yorker recently put it, “Perceptions of disorder generally have more to do with the racial composition of a neighborhood than with the number of broken windows or amount of graffiti in the area.” In fact, according to one study, “Aggressively enforcing minor legal statutes incites more severe criminal acts.” The policy has, it seems, exactly the opposite effect intended. 

Increasing diversity on police forces

Whether more diverse police departments are less violent towards black people is a complicated question. One 2017 study found that more racial diversity on a police force led to fewer black citizens being killed — but only once the force was made up of more than 40 percent black officers. 

In fact, until a ratio that at least matches the demographic of the city or county is reached, police forces with just a few black officers were found to kill even more black civilians. The researchers theorized this might be a result of those few black officers trying to show that they weren’t going easy on black civilians. There’s a tipping point, and until you reach it, the beneficial effect doesn’t kick in. A token black man or a woman on the force is not going to do it. But when law enforcement matches the population, then a significant reduction in killings occurs.

The Clinton Crime Bill, a.k.a the Violent Crime Control Act

In 1994, Bill Clinton (and Joe Biden) helped to create the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This bill expanded the death penalty, introduced minimum mandatory sentencing and put limits on parole. It also provided funding to add 100,000 officers to police forces nationally. 

A number of studies have questioned whether these measures actually reduced crime — crime was going down before the law went into effect. But it sure established an adversarial relationship between the police and the black community. States joined in, adding their own mandatory sentencing rules, harsher penalties for adolescents and more arrests for minor drug possession. These policies went a long way toward filling up prisons, even the new ones funded by the Clinton bill. 

Other studies have shown that increasing incarceration does nothing to reduce crime. But you can bet that 100,000 additional cops on the street increased police encounters, especially in black neighborhoods, many of which ended in violence. We have proof that fixing many aspects of this law will greatly reduce potentially dangerous encounters.

Redefining police work

There have been calls recently to defund the police. In fact, Campaign Zero has even acknowledged criticism that the 8 Can’t Wait campaign emphasizes reform over defunding.

I’m not going to wade into defunding, not in the literal sense. But removing cops from scenarios that they are neither trained nor equipped to deal with is something even the police themselves endorse. Mental health issues, drug overdoses, traffic, homelessness, sex work — these issues are often  better dealt with by social workers (who don’t carry guns) than by police who are not trained for them. Taking those responsibilities away from police and making sure trained folks are there to handle those issues will help.

Challenges: Why reform is so difficult

Though the 8 Can’t Wait recommendations reduce police violence, change has been frustratingly slow. There are reasons for this, and fixing these structural issues will go a long way toward making other changes possible.

Lack of federal oversight: With 18,000 police departments in the U.S., each with its own set of rules, reform is like playing whack-a-mole. 

Lack of transparency: Police records are kept secret by statute in many states. It’s hard to reform something if you can’t prove it exists — thank God for cell phone videos.

Qualified immunity: It’s very difficult to sue police officers, which makes it harder to hold them accountable (that may soon change).

Optics

In my opinion, what police look like — and what their tactics look like — has a huge effect on the relationship between a government and its citizens, especially citizens of color. When police surround and enclose a peaceful demonstration (known as kettling, like putting a lid on a pot of boiling water) it says, in effect, “We are not your protectors, and we will use force to dominate you.” 

The same goes for the visual effect of the gear and outfits. Police and other forces aligned like Star Wars stormtroopers with helmets, masks and weapons at the ready are clearly meant to inspire fear. The optics say to citizens, “You are the enemy and we are an occupying army.”

Some cities have wisely taken a different approach. Police at demonstrations and marches in Camden, Newark and Santa Cruz have shown solidarity with the marchers, joining them in normal street uniforms. In effect, this says, “We are PART of the community that we are here to protect.” It’s the opposite of an attempt to surround and contain. 

Connected

I am old enough to remember the protests against what was called the Vietnam War in the U.S. (and what was called the American War in Vietnam). I was in high school, and many of us saw the war as illegal, immoral and illogical. America was bitterly divided. National Guardsmen killed (white) college students in Ohio. I remember when, in 1967, Martin Luther King made a speech about how the war, racial injustice, poverty, workers rights and civil rights are all interconnected: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home — they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America.” 

Many on his team thought this was a tactical mistake — diluting the message, maybe, or risking alienating some followers or what government support existed. LBJ was supportive of the civil rights movement, but he was pro-Vietnam War. The New York Times wrote that connecting the two was dubious.

But, then as now, King was right. To make progress with law enforcement, one has to look wider — at housing, schools, the health care system and, of course, the courts and prisons. Each one affects the others. The remedies outlined above are essential, but the sickness is widespread. Thankfully there is firm evidence of progress here and there. There are partial and proven solutions. It’s not time to give up.

This Shelter Gives Homeless People What They Really Need - Long-Term Jobs

by Sydney Worth, Yes! magazine:  https://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/this-shelter-gives-homeless-people-what-they-really-need-long-term-jobs-20181029

Image: fotofrog/Getty Images

When Kristy Yates’ daughter passed away in 2010, Yates sank into a deep depression and alcoholism that led to a drunken driving arrest. After a slew of health issues and losing all three of her jobs, the Fort Worth, Texas, resident became homeless and ended up checking in at the Presbyterian Night Shelter.

Yates’ new address made it hard to get hired. But after two months of living in the shelter, she learned about Clean Slate, and her life has changed since.

Toby Owen, CEO of the shelter, had long hoped to establish a social enterprise that would address homelessness in Fort Worth. When the city gave the shelter a $50,000 grant, Clean Slate was born.

Launched in fall 2015, Clean Slate hires guests living in the night shelter as janitors and street sweepers.

The project offers Fort Worth’s homeless population an opportunity to obtain financial security and ultimately find a permanent home. While not a foolproof answer to homelessness, Owen believes it’s a step in the right direction.

“There’s not one silver bullet that’s going to end homelessness,” Owen said. Still, he said, Clean Slate does a good job of helping the homeless people who come through the night shelter.

Kirsten Ham, the director of Clean Slate, defines the program, often called a social enterprise, as a business that seeks to employ homeless people.

“It’s truly just starting a business where your mission is equally as important as your revenue,” Ham said.

In addition to staffing residents to street sweeping and janitorial work, Clean Slate provides contract employees to multiple locations across Fort Worth, such as office buildings or churches, for various kinds of jobs.

Yates started off in janitorial work, but now she works in the shelter as a client-service specialist, giving new guests the rundown and helping with their transition from street to sheltered living.

“I may be that one employee they can confide in,” Yates said. “To be able to get somebody through a difficult time is very rewarding.”

Ham said Clean Slate employs about 50 people per week. Interest in the program has increased so much that the shelter has had to set aside time on Mondays and Wednesdays for candidate interviews with Clean Slate’s success coach, who handles the training of new employees.

Clean Slate’s employees also work with a case manager from the Presbyterian Night Shelter, who designs a course of action so they can succeed in their jobs and eventually move into their own homes.

The case managers are also responsible for helping employees recover from an addiction or offering support for mental illness.

Addiction and mental illness don’t preclude anyone from gaining employment with the program, though. Owen said, “That has no bearing on their employment.”

The idea to develop programs targeted at employing the homeless gained traction with a project in Albuquerque that paid panhandlers to clean up litter near the highway. Other cities such as Portland, Maine, and Lexington, Kentucky, began implementing similar work programs.

Owen said the Fort Worth program focuses on building a strong foundation for guests to successfully end their homelessness—something that a day job doesn’t do as well on its own. In fact, a job might not provide any stable foundation at all.

“They want what I call walk-around money to spend how they want,” Owen said. “Often, it’s not a positive thing they’re spending it on.”

Clean Slate employees also receive benefits typical for full-time jobs, such as vacation and health insurance. While the goal is to provide an opportunity for the shelter’s guests to leave the program and resume independent living, it doesn’t limit how long employees can work in the program, unlike some other job services offered to homeless people, which focus on day labor or shorter-term contracts.

Even if employees eventually work their way out of the shelter, they’re still entitled to jobs with Clean Slate. “It’s a bona fide job that comes with benefits,” Owen said.

In fact, more than half of the employees who participated in those social enterprises had a job a year later, according to research conducted by the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund.

The opportunity to turn homelessness around has led to the operation’s rapid growth.

Clean Slate’s budget has grown in three years from its $50,000 grant to about $1 million.

The program earns most of its income from fundraising and maintaining multiple work contracts in Fort Worth. Owen hopes to expand Clean Slate’s reach into moving companies or provide groundskeeping and lawn care to keep up with demand for the company’s services.

While Clean Slate gives the homeless a chance to rebuild their lives, Yates said, it hasn’t been an easy journey.

Living in the shelter requires working with many different personality types, which can often prove challenging. Yates also described feeling uncomfortable being “brand new and female” when she first came to the shelter. New guests have to sacrifice privacy and independence when they move in.

“Nothing happens overnight,” Yates said. “Everything is a process, but they do work with you.”

Yates left the shelter and has been living independently for 13 months—a milestone she attributes to her work in Clean Slate. She said the program was a blessing when nobody else would hire her after her conviction.

“It’s possible to work from the ground up. Just don’t give up hope,” Yates said.

Sydney Worth wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Sydney is a solutions reporting intern for YES! Follow her on Twitter.

What a Society Designed for Well-Being Looks Like: Economic Justice Goes a Long Way Toward Improving Mental Health Up and Down the Socioeconomic Ladder

by Tabita Green, Yes! magazine:  https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/mental-health/what-a-society-design-for-well-being-looks-like-20180912

Image: Mark Airs / Getty Images

In early June of this year, the back-to-back suicides of celebrities Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, coupled with a new report revealing a more than 25 percent rise in U.S. suicides since 2000, prompted—again—a national discussion on suicide prevention, depression, and the need for improved treatment. Some have called for the development of new antidepressants, noting the lack of efficacy in current medical therapies. But developing better drugs buys into the mainstream notion that the collection of human experiences called “mental illness” is primarily physiological in nature, caused by a “broken” brain.

This notion is misguided and distracting at best, deadly at worst. Research has shown that, to the contrary, economic inequality could be a significant contributor to mental illness. Greater disparities in wealth and income are associated with increased status anxiety and stress at all levels of the socioeconomic ladder. In the United States, poverty has a negative impact on children’s development and can contribute to social, emotional, and cognitive impairment. A society designed to meet everyone’s needs could help prevent many of these problems before they start.

To address the dramatic increase in mental and emotional distress in the U.S., we must move beyond a focus on the individual and think of well-being as a social issue. Both the World Health Organization and the United Nations have made statements in the past decade that mental health is a social indicator, requiring “social, as well as individual, solutions.” Indeed, WHO Europe stated in 2009 that “[a] focus on social justice may provide an important corrective to what has been seen as a growing overemphasis on individual pathology.” The UN’s independent adviser Dainius Pūras reported in 2017that “mental health policies and services are in crisis—not a crisis of chemical imbalances, but of power imbalances,” and that decision-making is controlled by “biomedical gatekeepers,” whose outdated methods “perpetuate stigma and discrimination.”

Our economic system is a fundamental aspect of our social environment, and the side effects of neoliberal capitalism are contributing to mass malaise.

In The Spirit Level, epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson show a close correlation between income inequality and rates of mental illness in 12 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries. The more unequal the country, the higher the prevalence of mental illness. Of the 12 countries measured on the book’s mental illness scatter chart, the United States sits alone in the top right corner—the most unequal and the most mentally ill.

The seminal Adverse Childhood Experiences Study revealed that repeated childhood trauma results in both physical and mental negative health outcomes in adulthood. Economic hardship is the most common form of childhood trauma in the U.S.—one of the richest countries in the world. And the likelihood of experiencing other forms of childhood trauma—such as living through divorce, death of a parent or guardian, a parent or guardian in prison, various forms of violence, and living with anyone abusing alcohol or drugs—also increases with poverty.

Clearly, many of those suffering mental and emotional distress are actually having a rational response to a sick society and an unjust economy. This revelation doesn’t reduce the suffering, but it completely changes the paradigm of mental health and how we choose to move forward to optimize human well-being. Instead of focusing only on piecemeal solutions for various forms of social ills, we must consider that the real and lasting solution is a new economy designed for all people, not only for the ruling corporate elite. This new economy must be based on principles and strategies that contribute to human well-being, such as family-friendly policies, meaningful and democratic work, and community wealth-building activities to minimize the widening income gap and reduce poverty.

The seeds of human well-being are sown during pregnancy and the early years of childhood. Research shows that mothers who are able to stay home longer (at least six months) with their infants are less likely to experience depressive symptoms, which contributes to greater familial well-being. Yet in the United States, one-quarter of new mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth, and only 13 percent of workers have access to paid leave. A new economy would recognize and value the care of children in the same way it values other work, provide options for flexible and part-time work, and, thus, enable parents to spend formative time with their young children—resulting in optimized well-being for the whole family.

In his book Lost Connections, journalist Johann Hari lifts up meaningful work and worker cooperatives as an “unexpected solution” to depression. “We spend most of our waking time working—and 87 percent of us feel either disengaged or enraged by our jobs,” Hari writes.

A lack of control in the workplace is particularly detrimental to workers’ well-being, which is a direct result of our hierarchical, military-influenced way of working in most organizations. Worker cooperatives, a building block of the solidarity economy, extend democracy to the workplace, providing employee ownership and control. When workers participate in the mission and governance of their workplace, it creates meaning, which contributes to greater well-being. While more research is needed, Hari writes, “it seems fair ... to assume that a spread of cooperatives would have an antidepressant effect.”

Worker cooperatives also contribute to minimizing income inequality through low employee income ratios and wealth-building through ownership—and can provide a way out of poverty for workers from marginalized groups. In an Upstream podcast interview, activist scholar Jessica Gordon Nembhard says, “We have a racialized capitalist system that believes that only a certain group and number of people should get ahead and that nobody else deserves to … I got excited about co-ops because I saw [them] as a place to start for people who are left behind.” A concrete example of this is the Cleveland Model, in which a city’s anchor institutions, such as hospitals and universities, commit to purchasing goods and services from local, large-scale worker cooperatives, thus building community wealth and reducing poverty.

The worker cooperative is one of several ways to democratize wealth and create economic justice. The Democracy Collaborative lists dozens of strategies and models to bring wealth back to the people on the website community-wealth.org. The list includes municipal enterprise, community land trusts, reclaiming the commons, impact investing, and local food systems. All these pieces of the new economy puzzle play a role in contributing to economic justice, which is inextricably intertwined with mental and emotional well-being.

In Lost Connections, Hari writes to his suffering teenage self: “You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.” Mental and emotional distress are the canaries in the coal mine, where the coal mine is our corporate capitalist society. Perhaps if enough people recognize the clear connection between mental and emotional well-being and our socioeconomic environment, we can create a sense of urgency to move beyond corporate capitalism—toward a new economy designed to optimize human well-being and planetary health.

Our lives literally depend on it.

Good Eating: Scottish Café Chain Builds Village for Homeless

by Lee Mannion, Thomson Reuters Foundation: 
http://news.trust.org/item/20180517171037-g0lr4/

Image: Lee Mannion

LONDON, May 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A cafe chain that employs homeless people and runs a scheme to provide free food to rough sleepers has gone a step further, building a village of 11 houses in Scotland.

Up to 20 homeless people will be given accommodation in the new village to the north of the Scottish capital Edinburgh built by Social Bite, which was set up in 2012.

"Something special has been created," said Angela Constance, the Scottish communities minister at the launch on Thursday.

"Not just building houses, but building homes, building community – a community that will provide support and enable folk to rebuild their lives."

Next month the first six residents will move into the village, which sits on land loaned by the Edinburgh city council for four years.

If they decide not to renew the loan the prefabricated houses, which last for up to 100 years, can be moved.

Social Bite founder Josh Littlejohn said homeless people had been ignored politically for too long.

"They're not a demographic of people that would vote and it's not a big vote winning issue, so I think if we keep pushing the political focus on the issue, the statistics are solvable in a country like Scotland," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

There are 11,000 homeless households in Scotland, according to government figures, and the number has been rising steadily since 2015.

Last year the Scottish government pledged 50 million pounds ($67.53 million) to fund homelessness prevention schemes over the next five years.

The charity Shelter says as "a conservative estimate" 307,000 people are homeless in Britain.

Social Bite opened its first outlet in 2012 and now has five shops and a restaurant in Scotland. One in four staff at the chain is homeless, and customers can pay for meals that homeless people can claim later.

It distributed nearly 100,000 items of food last year and engages with more than 300 homeless people per week.

Social Bite is one of a growing number of social enterprises in Scotland - businesses that aim to help society as well as making money.

The country had 5,600 social enterprises last year, up from 5,199 in 2015, according to campaign group Social Enterprise Scotland.

The government has a a 10-year strategy to support social enterprise, including making funding available and expanding education about the sector in schools.

The village will be operated in conjuction with Scottish homeless charity Cyrenians, which is assessing applications for residents.

"The mark of any society is how you look after those who are most excluded. This village says an extraordinary thing about how we all want the world to be," said Cyrenians chief executive Euan Aitken in a speech marking the opening of the village.

($1 = 0.7405 pounds) (Reporting by Lee Mannion @leemannion, Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)

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If they decide not to renew the loan the prefabricated houses, which last for up to 100 years, can be moved.

Social Bite founder Josh Littlejohn said homeless people had been ignored politically for too long.

"They're not a demographic of people that would vote and it's not a big vote winning issue, so I think if we keep pushing the political focus on the issue, the statistics are solvable in a country like Scotland," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

There are 11,000 homeless households in Scotland, according to government figures, and the number has been rising steadily since 2015.

The charity Shelter says as "a conservative estimate" 307,000 people are homeless in Britain.

General view of a village built for the homeless in Edinburgh by the cafe chain Social Bite 17th May 2018 (Thomson Reuters Foundation/Lee Mannion)

Social Bite opened its first outlet in 2012 and now has five shops and a restaurant in Scotland. One in four staff at the chain is homeless, and customers can pay for meals that homeless people can claim later.

It distributed nearly 100,000 items of food last year and engages with more than 300 homeless people per week.

Last year the Scottish government pledged 50 million pounds ($67.53 million) to fund homelessness prevention schemes over the next five years.

The village will be operated in conjuction with Scottish homeless charity Cyrenians, which is assessing applications for residents.

"The mark of any society is how you look after those who are most excluded. This village says an extraordinary thing about how we all want the world to be," said Cyrenians chief executive Euan Aitken in a speech marking the opening of the village.

($1 = 0.7405 pounds) (Reporting by Lee Mannion @leemannion, Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth and Commitment

by James D. Showkeir, Jamie Showkeir and Maren Showkeir, syndicated from bkconnection.com, Oct 22, 2017, Daily Good: http://www.dailygood.org/story/1790/authentic-conversations-moving-from-manipulation-to-truth-and-commitment-james-d-showkeir-jamie-showkeir-and-maren-showkeir/

The following is an excerpt from Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth an Commitment, Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2008

We were consulting with a large East Coast newspaper grappling with a multimillion-dollar shortfall and the plagues of the industry in general: declining circulation, shrinking advertising revenue, and increasing newsprint prices. The problems of this newspaper were compounded by changes in the region’s demographics, which raised questions about whether the paper’s content was relevant to the readers in their market. Layoffs seemed inevitable. Hundreds were likely to lose their jobs.

In preparation for a large group meeting about the crisis, we followed the publisher for an entire day as he met with small groups of employees from advertising, circulation, production, and the newsroom. Everyone asked similar questions: “What are you going to do about this crisis, Joe? How are you going to fix it?” They complained about being unable to be productive because they were so stressed about the possibility of losing their jobs. They angrily told Joe they blamed him and other senior managers for “getting us into this mess” and demanded to know what he was going to do about it.

Joe encouraged the employees to focus on the long term. “We will get reestablished,” he assured them. “We will develop new strategies to build circulation and advertising. We will find ways to make our stories more relevant to readers. We are negotiating with corporate for leniency regarding the profit demands.” All day long, we heard him give one reassuring message after another: “Don’t worry, I’m going to make you safe. Don’t worry, senior leaders will take care of it.”

Joe was a bright, capable, and caring man. He was passionate about his job and committed to his employees. He wanted to do the right things. But in our estimation, he was saying all the wrong things. His conversations were making the situation worse. By making promises he couldn’t possibly keep and sending a message to employees that they were off the hook for resolving a difficult situation, he was exacerbating the problems the company faced.

We gave him our frank assessment of the damage he had been doing. Joe, obviously taken aback, was thoughtful and silent as he contemplated our feedback.

We’ll get back to Joe’s story, but first let’s look at why we paid such close attention to the conversations he was having with the newspaper’s employees.

Conversations Create Culture

James A. Autry, businessman, author, and poet, says, “We do make things true by what we say.… Things and people are what we call them, because in the simplest terms, we are what we say, and others are what we say about them.”

Simply put, a conversation is an exchange between two or more individuals, but that simple definition obscures a conversation’s complexity. Words and language are powerful tools, and conversations are so commonplace in our daily lives that we don’t pause to contemplate their inherent power.

First, conversations reveal what we see in the world and what meaning we attach to what we see. Second, as Autry says, we name things and create reality. Third, we invite others to see what we see, the way we see it. And fourth, through conversations we either sustain or change the meaning of what we see. All these things play a commanding role in creating and defining an organization’s culture.

The term “culture” refers to the universal capacity that human beings have to classify, codify, and communicate their experiences symbolically. In other words, culture dictates our beliefs, behavior, language, and social interaction. Nonverbal communication and unwritten rules play a large role here.

Edgar Schein, a professor at the MIT Sloan School for management and the man credited with coining the term “corporate culture,” talks about culture as being a pattern of shared basic assumptions. Schein defined organizational culture as “the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.” He wrote that these norms “prescribe appropriate behavior by employees and control the behavior of organizational members towards one another.”

Culture tells us what is acceptable and unacceptable. It alerts us to whether it is okay to show up a little late for a meeting, how we should be dressed when we arrive, and whether bringing up difficult issues in the room will be viewed favorably. It influences how we treat each other, talk to each other, and is a factor in the way we view and interact with our coworkers and customers.

Culture shows up as a similarity in the way people behave at work, regardless of their rank, title, or serial number. As Margaret J. Wheatley writes in Leadership and the New Science, “I am often struck by eerily similar behaviors exhibited by people in an organization, whether I’m meeting with a factory floor employee or a senior executive. I might detect a recurring penchant for secrecy or for openness, for name-calling or for thoughtfulness. These recurring patterns of behavior are what many call the culture of an organization.”

Changing the Culture Requires New Conversations

The overarching creators and carriers of an organization’s culture are the conversations in which the members of that organization engage. The ways people see and talk about things such as cynicism, hope, helplessness, and resourcefulness, their customers, and the work itself reflect organizational culture. Statements about the culture are seen in what we say as well as through our behavior. Culture influences decisions such as whether to share or withhold information, whether it’s more important to defer to a person’s position instead of authentically stating a point of view, and whether we see our coworkers as collaborators or competitors.

In an organization where power is concentrated at the top, compliance is highly valued, and parent–child roles are established, the cultural norm looks like this: “When my boss tells me to do something, even if it doesn’t make sense to me, I don’t push back. Dissent marks me as uncooperative and threatens my future.” Or “When my morale is low, it is management’s job to figure out what’s wrong, find the solution, and implement changes. People’s unhappiness is a statement of faulty leadership.”

In an organization where business literacy, choice, and accountability are distributed widely and deeply, where flexibility and innovation are highly valued and the dominant roles are adult–adult, the culture norm is “When I see something is wrong, I want to attend to it. I am expected to attend to it and I am accountable for doing so. My boss and coworkers expect me to push back and challenge their thinking. Dissent and accountability are the lubricants of this organization.”

Conversation is the primary way of learning and sharing cultural norms, especially those ways that are informal and implicit. Messages are transmitted both in the words we use and in the relationship dynamics that drive how we talk to each other.

For this reason, common workplace conversations can sabotage any attempt at significant organizational change. How we talk to each other in business settings and the way we deliberate decisions are revealing. In addition, some of the most powerful conversations take place outside the boardrooms, the auditoriums, and the meeting rooms. They happen in restrooms, coffee rooms, during smoke breaks, in people’s offices, on the assembly line, and during chance encounters in the hall. They continue in bars and cafés after work. Those ordinary conversations that people have thousands of times a day ultimately define the culture.

Establishing new conversations is the most effective way—and the most underutilized—to create ongoing, long-lasting change in our lives, our organizations, and society. New conversations require us to see each other in a different way, and create an awareness of our role in perpetuating habits and behaviors that don’t serve us well.

To illustrate, let’s return to our story about Joe and the conversations he had been having with employees. This is the feedback we gave him before his big meeting with employees: “In all the meetings you had with people today, you were reassuring them that things would turn around and that you were going to make it okay. Joe, how are you going to do that?” In the type of culture we advocate, it is likely that one or more people would have already asked this question directly in the small group meetings. But the existing culture did not support asking this difficult question of senior management. Nor did the culture encourage introspection about individual accountability.

Joe was silent for a while, and then he finally said, “Well, I want to make it okay. Everyone is expecting me to make it okay. If I tell people the truth, that I don’t know what the solution is yet, this paper might fall apart today, right now. It is my responsibility to figure things out and to reassure people.”

We asked, “Who are these people you’re talking about? Are they children or are they adults?” From our perspective, he was stuck in a traditional way of looking at things and choosing the same old conversations to talk about a difficult situation. He was reinforcing the parent–child relationship embedded in the culture. By choosing words of reassurance, by promising to define and solve the problems and telling employees they shouldn’t worry about the company’s future, he was treating employees as children who needed caretaking and protecting. However, what he needed in these circumstances were capable adults who would participate in creating a successful organization and own their accountability for finding solutions. We suggested he try a new conversation by changing his view of the people who show up to work every day and the words he chose when he talked to them.

First, we advised him to stop sugarcoating the situation and tell employees the truth about the difficult circumstances the newspaper faced.

Second, we asked him to stop promising them a safe and secure future that he knew was impossible to deliver.

And finally, we advised that he help employees realize that their issues of safety and security were something they were going to have to manage for themselves. In fact, they were the only ones who could.

Joe found our suggestions daunting. He wrestled with the ramifications. But at the end of the day, he stood up in front of a large group of disappointed, scared, and angry employees who were looking for reassurance, and he had a new conversation with them.

He began, “I have been doing a lot of thinking since our departmental meetings today, and I have some tough things to say to you that I didn’t say when we met earlier.” He then explained clearly and directly the full gravity of the situation they all faced in making the newspaper profitable in the current market. He admitted that he had made the situation worse by implying he had answers to those difficult issues when he didn’t and by reassuring employees that things would be all right when he couldn’t be sure. He was clear with them about the costs of failure and said he needed them to begin taking responsibility for finding the answers. Joe was emphatic about the necessity of everyone working together to turn the situation around.

He finished by saying this: “The final thing I have to say is the most difficult. I can do nothing about your happiness. I can do nothing to make you feel safe, and I can do nothing to make you feel secure. Those things are in your hands. You will have to choose what you are going to do to account for your own future here and the future of this newspaper. I will do everything I can, and I hope you will too, but stop tap-dancing on my head about your happiness as if I were accountable for it. I am not.”

There was a moment of tense and bewildered silence. Then the employees spontaneously stood up and applauded—for a long time. It was a crazy moment of relief. They had been told the truth for the first time in years. Joe had acknowledged that they were adults, and he had talked to them as adults. He made it clear that he could not resolve the paper’s problems by himself. In effect, he was saying, “I am going to stop the empty, reassuring message. Nobody believes it anyway. Let’s start getting straight about what is going on here.”

It was a wonderful moment for the organization. Joe stopped the old conversation and created a new, authentic way of talking to the employees. He changed the culture in the room.

Organizational Culture and the Business

When we begin working with a client organization, we assess the culture and other things by interviewing people throughout the company. One of the first questions we ask is “What is it like to work here?”

When enough people say, “This is a difficult place to work. The pace is hectic and demanding, they don’t really care what I think. Nothing ever changes and I feel like all they want me to do is show up and do what they say,” we can draw some solid conclusions about the culture. We can deduce that the work is fast-paced and people work long hours, but they don’t understand why and they don’t like it. We hear that they are afraid to speak out or feel unheard if they do. They feel their ability to contribute is limited and attempts to overcome dissatisfaction have failed. They feel like victims and justify those feelings. We can conclude that the culture is riddled with parent–child conversations.

The ways in which people view change are also signals of organizational culture. People say things like this: “When someone suggests a change, someone else says, ‘We tried that before, and it didn’t work.’ Pretty soon everyone is talking about what happened in the past and how change never works rather than the proposal on the table.”

Statements such as these tell us a lot. They tell us that people in the organization have been disappointed by change efforts, and the culture is marked by a lack of hope and optimism. People see themselves as victims of an inept organization, and the culture accepts and supports their helplessness. And because their conversations are centered on disappointment, injustice, and not being taken seriously, rather than the demands of the business, we can conclude that serious issues that affect success aren’t being addressed in the way they should be.

In one large health care company where we consulted, for example, employees who worked in billing were being hammered by a series of difficult business problems that threatened to shut the department down. Outsourcing was a possibility. During our interviews with employees, most of their comments centered on issues such as how unfriendly some of the supervisors were, whose turn it was to clean the coffee station, and whether the window blinds should be open or closed. They said very little that led us to believe they were concerned about, much less actively trying to solve, serious business problems that threatened their employment.

The first, most critical step to creating a healthier, more productive culture is to change the conversations. Changing a conversation in the moment can change the culture in the room, the way Joe did when he told the truth about a difficult situation. Changing the culture in the room in any given moment is the best any of us can do. If new conversations change the culture in the room enough times and in enough rooms—the organization’s culture will change.

We can learn to talk about cynicism, for example, as the choice that it is rather than as a predetermined outcome of disappointment. By having that conversation, we can reveal what we see and what we make of the choice for cynicism. We can invite others to see it in the same way, and by doing so, we seize an opportunity to confront cynicism and change the point of view in the room.

Changing the culture with new conversations can create a more mature, resilient organization with a capacity for creativity, innovation, and transformation in the face of unyielding marketplace demands. Through new conversations, we can establish organizations that people believe in, where they take accountability for the success of the whole, where people find meaning in the work they do and achieve the necessary results to succeed.

A New Conversation

Joe’s new conversation with the newspaper employees had four powerful elements that are not typically heard at traditional organizations:

First, he honestly acknowledged the problems and named the difficult issues. The newspaper was in deep trouble; he didn’t have all the answers and did not expect the answers to come fast or easily.

Second, he owned his contribution to the difficulty. He admitted he had clouded issues by understating the crisis and offering empty reassurances to those who should have been engaged in finding solutions. He acknowledged he had wanted to make people feel safe and secure, even when he knew he couldn’t.

Third, he stated the risks and acknowledged the possibility of things not working out. He was telling it to them straight when he said, “I don’t know how we are going to solve these problems.”

Fourth, he presented them with a choice. He confronted the fact that everyone had a choice to make about what they were going to do and how they were going to face the future.

Business Implications of Telling the Truth

For Joe, the business implications of telling the truth were enormous. Everyone in the room that day was looking for leadership from the boss—and he had a choice to make. On the one hand, he could continue caretaking and encourage employees to look to him and senior management for answers and reassurance. But if he did that, people in the organization would remain stuck, unable to act for themselves. They would get the message that they were off the hook for finding solutions. In the end, he was likely to have a room full of people who were deeply disappointed, raging against the injustice of having to bear the outcome of inadequate leadership.

On the other hand, he could tell them the truth and acknowledge their betrayal. He could communicate the expectation that they work as adults who could, and should, contribute to the success of the organization. This speaks to the adult nature of everyone’s existence and the fact that we alone choose what we make of our future.

At least in the moment of Joe’s speech, employees at this newspaper heard the message that the survival of the paper was as much in their hands as it was in senior management’s. They recognized that their contributions to resolving the difficult marketplace issues in circulation, advertising, editorial, and production while managing costs would have a bearing on their futures. Rather than demanding, like children, that Joe solve the problems for them, they could choose to grow up, have hope and optimism for the future, and put their energies toward making a difference.

Learning to Grow Up

Organizations have been built on the notion that people must be held accountable and that someone else is in charge of doing that. This kind of thinking, more than anything else, creates and maintains parent–child conversations in the workplace that foster cultures relying on compliance rather than commitment.

The idea that we are all responsible for our own commitment is radical. It requires people to acknowledge each other as adults who are ultimately responsible for the choices they make. We must abandon the thought that others can be the source of our motivation and morale. Then new conversations must begin to engage and support that new worldview. This shift is profoundly difficult, and it is absolutely essential.

If you don’t believe it, ask yourself this basic question: “What is best for this enterprise—people who are treated and behave like children, or adults who are resilient and capable of responding to difficult circumstances?” The answer is so obvious that it makes the question seem ridiculous. Yet organizations are still deeply entrenched in workplace philosophies, policies, and procedures that reinforce parent–child conversations and cultures without realizing the cost to the business.

Anyone who has worked in an organization has stories to tell about changes that were introduced in the workplace and how they failed. Even when everyone seems to be aligned and committed to a change, it only takes a few months before people start realizing, and maybe even complaining, that everything is back to “normal.” The desired organizational transformation has failed to take root.

People ask what went wrong. They diagnose the situation and scratch their heads, puzzled by what caused the failure. Some blame upper management, others blame the rank and file. People point a blaming finger at the training staff or consultants. Others assert that the thinking, methods, processes, or technology were flawed or that the proper resources weren’t brought to bear.

What almost always gets overlooked, however, is one of the most powerful forces in the organization. It is a force so common and so taken for granted that it is almost too obvious to see. No one thought to change the ways people see each other and the ways they talk to each other.

Change will not survive or thrive if we continue having the same conversations. Parent–child conversations and cultures are undermining our organizations’ best chances for success in the marketplace. In this book, we explore the myths and traditions that have created and maintained parent–child cultures. We provide information and tools to help transform the harmful parent–child dynamic into authentic adult–adult conversations. We take a look at the importance of intentions, language, and confronting difficult issues while maintaining goodwill.

Changing the conversations has many personal and organizational ramifications. It’s critical because it acknowledges the essence of individual human experience—choice. Authentic conversations honor this, and people truly become instrumental in creating a place where their work has meaning. It is also good for business. Disaffected, disengaged employees who are treated like children are not likely to be committed to customer satisfaction, use company resources wisely, or work with other departments in partnership to further business goals.

Three distinct parent–child relationship dynamics are supported and perpetuated by conversations, and we’ll examine the outcomes they generate, their effect on people and culture, and the price the organization pays for their continuance.

How is language used for manipulation and effect? By focusing on our intentions and choosing different language, we explore how to create conversations that center on disclosure and engagement. We will show you ways to identify harmful conversations and the subtleties of manipulative intent, and provide outlines for generating honest, productive conversations.

While the new conversations themselves are relatively simple and straightforward, they are not for the fainthearted. Continued use of these conversations creates a world where there is no place to hide. It creates a world where we each see our responsibility and are required to take accountability for ourselves, our organizations, and the world in which we live.

Leadership implications for using conversations to change the culture are enormous and have nothing to do with the size of your office or the importance of your title. Leadership is no longer viewed as the responsibility of those with the largest offices and the best parking spots. It becomes an act of living and interacting in a way that personifies the culture you want to create while engaging others in this creation—and doing it now, in this moment. It no longer serves you to find better ways of manipulating so that you can get “them” to do something.

True leadership also means building knowledge and literacy instead of managing people, and anyone can do this by being as generous and distributive as possible. Today’s business environment is marked by an abundance of data. We are rich in information, yet information is often hoarded in organizations as if holding it close will keep people from starving when the business fails to thrive.

Choosing authentic conversations to create an adult culture focused on personal accountability is a challenge for every single person in an organization. Were it not for risk, there would be no need for courage. The absence of courage is sleep. It is time to wake up.

The secret for sustaining successful change in organizations lies in consciously changing the nature of workplace conversations.

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Excerpted from Authentic Conversations: Moving from Manipulation to Truth an Commitment, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008Maren Showkeir and James Showkeir are the principals of Henning-Showkeir and Associates, a consulting firm whose work centers on harmonizing the demand for business results with creating a culture where individuals can find meaning and purpose at work.