This post is reprinted from The Lab Report, the City of Asheville’s internal data program newsletter.

I manage the data and analytics program for the City of Asheville, but the truth is that I don’t care at all about data or analytics, or even about performance. What I care about is change. The chance to create positive change is what keeps me showing up every day. Perhaps that’s true of you as well.

Change is front and center in our community right now. The reason for that is awful, but it is good that we are looking at our problems and talking about how to address them. There is plenty of anger, but I also sense some hope that we can make progress, that the turmoil of the moment might help make that progress possible.

The last thing I want to do is say anything to erode that hope. But if we are to really succeed in changing things, we need to understand what we are up against.

I heard a story the other day about an interaction in the courthouse. Yellow dots had been placed throughout the courtroom to indicate where people could safely sit and still socially distance. A lawyer at the defense table noticed a yellow dot on a bench just two feet behind her – clearly a violation of the 6-foot standard. She pointed it out to someone nearby, not someone in authority, just another person working in the courtroom that day. The response: “Well, I guess they have to put them somewhere.”

That response has haunted me ever since. It haunts me because it represents the mechanism of the system’s inexorable drive to revert to normal. It wasn’t a declaration that we shouldn’t care about safety, or a refusal to question why people must pointlessly show up each day when nothing can happen with their cases. It was just a normal person’s automatic thought. An automatic thought that carried a powerful set of assumptions about what normal means.

We don’t have to put them somewhere. We can rethink the system. We can question our assumptions and inquire what is really important. We can, but we don’t. We fall prey to the need to just get things back to normal.

“Normal” is the gravity that ceaselessly works against any change to the system, and it works powerfully throughout the system because it works through all of us. The problem is what “normal” actually stands for here. It stands for a system designed to keep people of color at the margins and to create benefits for white people at their expense. It stands for white supremacy [1]. And that system depends, not on the people we think of as white supremacists, but on all of us.

Take policing, since that’s the topic of the day. We all look forward to seeing what Chief Zack and APD will do to transform their culture and regain public trust. Our city, elected officials and the Chief himself have all acknowledged the need for change. Personally I am cheering for my colleagues there.

But their efforts are doomed if they have to do this on their own. Policing operates within a system. It is the same system that leads to our abysmal results in contracting with businesses owned by people of color. It is the same system that leads to our lack of diversity in hiring, and to the inequities in how we engage with our community. Those are ours to change. And if we are to do it, we must understand that the biggest barrier to change is not the resistance of those who disagree.

The biggest barrier is us. We are the system and we will be the gravity that pulls things back [2]. And the way we will do that is through offhand, automatic thoughts and deeds. We just need to get this position filled now. We just need to get this done. We just need to put those stickers somewhere and move on.

So what does any of this have to do with the data program?

My plan for this newsletter was to do an introduction to Google Data Studio. That’s important and I’ll have it out to you soon. But the events in our community and across the country and the world make it important to remember that metrics and charts are irrelevant if they’re not in service to the right questions.

So you can expect to hear as much in this newsletter and in our trainings about asking the right questions as you will about data. Emma Olson [of Culture of Results at the NC Center for Health and Wellness] reminded us in our training last week that questions are the heart of the results-based accountability framework. Questions keep us focused on outcomes, which is important. But questions serve another purpose as well. They help us disrupt the inevitable pull toward the normal that will destroy not just our particular project or program, but everything we’re working toward as a city.

-Eric Jackson

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[1] I get that this language may feel inflammatory. If you feel that it is, please reach out. I would be happy to talk about why I use it, why I am convinced that it’s important to use it.

[2] Thanks to Kimberlee Archie for the words she long had in her signature: “The system is working as designed; we are the system; we must deconstruct and transform the system to work for all.” Those words have kept me thinking constantly about the roles we play in creating or resisting change.

Photo Credit: Asheville Citizen-Times, Asheville’s 7th day, biggest protest: ‘This is a lifelong commitment’.

In a conversation recently someone asked how to tell when you’re in a pivotal moment in history. I don’t recall how I responded at the time, but the question has continued to gnaw at me ever since.

What’s bothering me is that there’s a narrative hidden beneath the question, a story about how things change and the part individuals play. Such stories are important because they covertly shape our decisions about whether, when and how to act or speak on issues we care about.

All of us are familiar with the “hero narrative,” which tells us that change happens when an individual shows up at a critical moment and undertakes some particularly courageous act that changes the course of history. In this narrative, for example, civil rights happened because of heroes like Rosa Parks who, tired after a long day, suddenly became fed up with the discrimination and heroically remained seated for her rights. Because of her and Martin Luther King, Jr. and a handful of others who seized the moment and took heroic steps, everything changed.

David LaMotte challenges this narrative in his book, Worldchanging 101. As LaMotte points out, one problem with the narrative is that it is completely wrong. It ignores the years of preparation by hundreds of people, including Rosa Parks, and it misunderstands the quite careful and deliberate choices of time and place. Perhaps more importantly, the hero narrative undermines our sense of agency. It disempowers us because it requires that we wait for just the right moment and then heroically seize it. The result: we do nothing because we have no idea when the moment is and most of us are quite aware that we’re no heroes.

The narrative behind the pivotal moment is related, but also stands on its own. Let’s call it the “ripeness narrative”. It says that there are times that are “ripe” for change and we need to keep our eyes open so we know when to act. Once again, this is actually a very disempowering narrative – it’s the hero narrative without the hero. It again demands that we recognize the “right moment” for action. The subtext, of course, is that action is mostly pointless the rest of the time.

The LGBTQ movement provides an excellent example of how this narrative misses the mark. When same-sex marriage was recognized as legal by the Supreme Court in 2015, to many of us it felt like the change came out of the blue, that a dramatic shift occurred over just a few short years. There clearly had been a pivotal moment in there somewhere!

But look at the graphs of Gallup polling on attitudes toward gays and lesbians and toward same-sex marriage over time. Yes, something significant happened around 2011: the percentage of people supporting same-sex marriage exceeded that against. But it didn’t happen because of some dramatic reconfiguration of things in 2011. It was simply the crossing point determined by the slopes of the lines. Same-sex marriage saw support increase and opposition decrease fairly steadily over more than a decade, and in general attitudes toward gays and lesbians over more than two.

The real question is what determined the slopes of those lines?

In his recent book, How We Win, George Lakey contrasts the LGBTQ movement’s strategy following the conservative revolution of the 1980s with those of other movements on the left:

When Reagan faced a strike by the air-traffic controllers union, he fired the workers — 11,000 of them. It was a shot heard by all the movements in the United States. Organized labor went on the defensive, and so did other movements: women’s rights, civil rights, school reform, environmental. The goals of those movements changed: to hang on to previously achieved gains …

One big exception stands out in the defensive retreat of the left in the 1980s: the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transexual rights. … [E]ven while some homophobes talked about sending gay men to camps to isolate “the gay disease” of AIDS, the movement stepped up to confront Reagan and the medical-industrial complex.

After winning, LGBTQ people stayed on the offensive, demanding equal marriage, then equality in the military. More recently the push is equal access for trans people to public facilities like bathrooms.

The slopes of those lines were the result of steady efforts over decades to change the attitudes of people and institutions; there never was a pivotal moment. In fact, what appears to be a pivotal moment is a time when taking action is perhaps least important simply because the tipping point has already been reached and it really doesn’t make much difference whether you join in or not. It was probably far more important to pitch in when things looked bleak, as they did in the 1980s. As, in fact, they do now.

Which brings me back to the question that sparked this, how to tell when you’re in a pivotal moment. I suspect the question really being asked is something like: how do I know that my efforts matter?

I am privileged to work every day with amazing people, the questioner among them, people who pour their hearts into work that is very, very hard, and that often feels futile. How are we to keep hold of hope when despair is always tugging, to maintain enthusiasm in the face of repeated frustration? It’s hard and we need something to hang on to that assures us that it’s worth it, that shows us how the day in, day out work we do matters.

In other words, we need a story. It’s part of being human.

Unsurprisingly we tend to grasp at the stories that are close to hand, the ones regularly repeated in novels and in the media, in movies and in marketing. They’re easy stories that help us make sense of reality and see that it’s not just a mess.

In reality, though, reality is a mess. We need stories that somehow acknowledge this, but also give us both hope and a part to play, a part that doesn’t require supernatural abilities or an infallible sense of timing.

There is an instructive controversy happening right now around the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and especially Nikole Hannah-Jones’s opening essay. A group of historians, led by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, submitted a letter to the New York Times challenging the project as having errors “of verifiable fact” and calling on the organization to publish a correction. The editors published the letter together with a detailed rebuttal.

Adam Serwer of the Atlantic explains that the conflict is actually not over facts, but is fundamentally one of competing narratives about American history:

The clash between the Times authors and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society. Was America founded as a slavocracy, and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself through its founding principles? …

The letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain march toward a more perfect union. The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation, in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may never fully realize.

The historians’ position is a version of the “progress narrative,” the idea that things inevitably get better and that right and justice win in the end. The best modern formulation is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assertion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. It’s a narrative that offers hope, although it can also be used to excuse individual inaction.

What’s worse, though, is that it can be easily twisted to discourage boldness in challenging the status quo. It is a classic response of white liberals in America to any attempt to really grapple with current-day racism: things are getting better, what is needed is patience, don’t get loud, don’t rock the boat. It is not really logical, but it allows us to avoid facing things that are truly ugly not just about this country’s past, but about its present. In other words, about ourselves.

Hannah-Jones’s counter-narrative provides a fascinating contrast. She doesn’t simply offer a darker vision of the past; her narrative offers a powerful role for those who have been oppressed by that past. She casts black people as the primary force for the development of democracy in America, “the perfecters of this democracy.”

It’s powerful, but is it true?

I think that’s the wrong question. Historical narrative is always created from a subset of the facts and artifacts available. It can be quite useful for understanding how change might have happened. It can illuminate and inspire. On the negative side, it can fail to fit the facts and in that sense be false. But it cannot be objectively true. Historical narratives are like models in economics: simplified versions of reality that try to illuminate the particular mechanisms that may have led to historical outcomes. They can have explanatory power and thus be useful guides to strategy in analogous circumstances, but they remain highly simplified fairy tales compared to the mess of reality.

But Hannah-Jones’ narrative is less an attempt to explain history and more a way to frame that history as bestowing a special role on African Americans. I could easily argue that it’s accurate. I can just as easily argue that it’s seriously incomplete. But if I see it as an inspiration and call to action, perhaps my best response is simply to applaud and then move on to seek my own narrative. I obviously can’t sign up for this one – not only am I not black, I’m a member of the privileged group that has been the source of oppression.

Which brings me back to the question. How do I tell if my work matters?

As should be obvious by now, I don’t know how to answer that question in an absolute sense. All I know is that each of us needs a story that tells us how the world as a whole works, and then places us as individuals within that larger narrative. This essay is an opportunity to try to articulate and share mine and, perhaps, give you some ideas for yours.

Mine draws from the conviction of King and Gandhi that we are called to participate in an essentially spiritual struggle, and that progress in the struggle requires understanding the world as a set of structures and systems that are created and maintained by people. The spiritual call is to dismantle systems and structures that are unjust and to replace them with just ones.

I suspect I differ somewhat from both King and Gandhi in that I’m not confident progress in the large is inevitable, although I hope for it. What my own spirituality tells me, though, is that progress in the small is always possible and that it matters deeply.

Because I personally draw from a Christian tradition, it’s natural for me to think in terms of Jesus’ kingdom of heaven (which he clearly implied was not something far off and after death, but a reality in the midst of our current reality). However, I have no need to impose that frame on anyone else. Another more secular way to put it might be that I see myself as a collaborator in helping my community fulfill its true identity, one that is naturally inclusive and equitable, interconnected and loving.

For me that is not an abstraction, and it is not something that happens at scale. It’s local and concrete. It always connects the systemic and structural with the personal and frames the bureaucratic processes of institutions as interactions in a relationship with individuals and with the community. And that’s a big part of what makes the work sustainable for me. Sometimes I get to see success and that is wonderful. But sometimes all I have is the opportunity to forge a real connection with a neighbor or a fellow worker. And that’s enough to carry me through to struggle again tomorrow.

I work for the City of Asheville, a formal governmental institution that operates within strictly defined geographical boundaries. It operates within functional boundaries as well, with responsibility for things like streets and garbage, water and zoning, public safety and community spaces.

The City obviously also has a role beyond the areas it strictly controls, such as housing and economic development. And, as the largest municipality in western North Carolina, it has influence outside its formal geographic boundaries as well.

Nevertheless, for the most part, its responsibilities lie within relatively well-defined lines. Which means of course that my job and those of my colleagues at the City are also defined or constrained in important ways by those same lines. This is a perfectly logical and reasonable way to divide up the work, albeit one that is generally confusing and irrelevant to the community we serve.

In fact, it can be worse than irrelevant and confusing. To us working in government the lines are convenient fictions that let us get our jobs done. But they can turn sinister if we begin to actually believe in them.

These artificial boundaries necessarily disrespect the continuity of the lives of those we serve. Our lines of convenience can become real obstacles and barriers for people who have no margin in their lives to handle the extra burden. And however exact the lines between jurisdictions, believing in them obscures the reality that these are organic spaces, spaces with an integrity that we may endanger when we only think in the categories of jurisdiction and control. Perhaps worst of all, artificial boundaries in both space and function create barriers for us in tackling the real complexities of the challenges we face.

Yet we still have to get our work done. How are we supposed to respect the integrity of spaces, the continuity of people’s lives, and the intertwining of multiple dimensions of challenge without violating legitimate restrictions on our actions or becoming completely overwhelmed trying to solve all of every problem?

There are a number of ways to come at that question, but I’m intrigued by one in particular that emerges from two stories I encountered in the last few months.

The most recent arose in a chat with Jim Blanton, the director of our county library system. He mentioned that the libraries have partnered with Homeward Bound to have a nearly full-time resource person work with the homeless community. Libraries are both a popular and a natural access point for resources for the homeless community and so the program makes perfect sense.

But it’s not obvious that a library would look at things that way. A natural boundaried approach might be to think more narrowly about the library’s mission and to assign the responsibility for these patrons elsewhere, to call in the police or some other agency. Instead, the Buncombe County libraries chose to define themselves as a place where all members of the community gain access to resources of all sorts, and then connected with partners who could help them realize that vision for this particular group of patrons.

As it happens, the second story also relates to homelessness. It came up in a conversation with Amy Cantrell, a local pastor and community advocate. A few years ago a woman named Janet Jones died of cold on the streets of Asheville. Amy powerfully described the way the community sat with what had happened, talked about it and about what they could do. They decided first to hold a public funeral. Homelessness is often treated as a public safety issue; they used a public funeral for a woman who died alone on the street to reframe it as a public health emergency.

They didn’t stop there. Rather than sitting in anger and pointing fingers (and as Amy says, “there’s a lot of fingers that could have been pointed and should”), they focused instead on a question: “We are one another’s closest community. What is it that’s within our power to do? How can we change this?” Their answer was the Homeless/Formerly Homeless Street Medic Team which carries out weekly street outreach, crisis preparation, and health fairs. I recently attended a meeting of healthcare providers and nonprofits where the Street Medic Teams were cited as one of the clear successes in community health in our area.

The common element in these two stories is a decision to think beyond lines of responsibility and jurisdiction by asking a simple question: What can we do? What is our part?

It’s easy to come up with objections, of course. For one, local governments, community groups and non-profits are already stretched thin. Doesn’t this just pile more work onto already over-burdened people?

Perhaps. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that both stories are about people finding a creative way to deal with issues that already touched them. The library needed to decide how best to interact with a particular group of library users. The homeless community was asking how to contend with a threat to its own members.

Clearly too this isn’t about taking full responsibility for every problem. In fact, asking “What is our part?” explicitly acknowledges that it is only a part. We are not taking ownership of the whole problem, but are simply exercising agency at the intersection of the problem and our domain. In fact, the act of doing so invites us to ask what other partners might be invited in or notified? The libraries connected with Homeward Bound. The Street Medic teams get training from and coordinate with health services and emergency personnel.

Another objection is that we are somehow giving those responsible a pass. But let’s be clear. Asking the question does not absolve responsible agencies of their responsibility. As Amy puts it, what it does is open up an imaginative space where we can discover truly creative solutions. In both these stories, by locating themselves within the larger system, thinking in terms of networks and spaces and systems, people came up with new solutions that helped address their particular challenges while bringing benefit to the broader community.

For me, perhaps the most challenging objection is that we are essentially forcing those who shouldn’t bear the responsibility in the first place to patch up and prop up a fundamentally broken system. In the case of homelessness, this is true even of the agencies that have jurisdiction. Homelessness is not caused by ineffective homeless assistance programs. Such programs may work well or badly, but they are contending with a problem created outside themselves.

Homelessness is most closely linked with the affordability of housing in the area and the availability of jobs that cover the cost of that housing. Housing costs and employment opportunities result from the interaction of local, state, and federal policy with the decisions of individual buyers and sellers, entrepreneurs, developers and investors. More broadly, it results from the way we choose to organize our society and world and the way we prioritize and approach the issues that arise.

We can’t solve homelessness without engaging all of these dimensions and levels and you can argue that prioritizing efforts like these allows society to avoid doing that.

The most obvious counter-argument is that it may realistically be the best we can do. At least these solutions make a difference in individual lives. Because of the Street Medic team, for example, someone this year or next has a chance to build a life that otherwise they might have lost.

But I think there’s a more important reason to take this perspective.

I wrote last year about rebuilding the infrastructure of democracy, asserting that democracy isn’t about voting or a particular “set of structures and procedures. Democracy is people doing democracy.” But what does that actually mean? I think these stories represent part of what it means: people and organizations claiming and exercising agency in the working of their community as a whole.

In his classic book Democracy in America [1] Alexis de Tocqueville attributes much of what is unique and powerful about American democracy to the peculiar civic conditions of small New England towns where “much artful care has been taken … to … disperse power in order to interest as many people as possible in public affairs.” One effect of such distribution of power is to engender a sense of agency, one reflected in a second uniquely American tendency observed by de Tocqueville:

Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools … Everywhere that, at the head of a new undertaking, you see the government in France and a great lord in England, count on it that you will perceive an association in the United States.

While never true of all places, even early in our history, I suspect that both the reality and the mythology of this ethos, this idea that we can and should take our challenges and our opportunities into our own collective hands, rather than wait for a government or powerful individual to do it, are responsible for much of the dynamism of American democracy, a dynamism that I see as born of connection and a sense of agency.

It is a dynamism that has become seriously eroded in our own time.

We can’t simply return to the democracy of early 19th century New England towns, nor to the civic, religious and social community associations that helped carry this ethos through the middle of the twentieth century. We need to find a new way that can work in our twenty-first century reality, one that finds twenty-first century ways to claim agency and forge connections.

In a recent essay [2], Danielle Allen argues that rebuilding democracy requires “bridging ties” that bring ”diverse communities into positive relations while also individually forming personally valuable relationships across boundaries of difference.” I would submit that one of the most effective ways to build such ties, to rebuild social connectivity and the vital accompanying sense of agency is through work on shared challenges. I think the two stories I’ve referenced here offer two of many examples of what that can look like.

It might seem strange that one of the examples I cite is a government entity partnering with a non-profit, not the most innovative connection you might look for. But the choice is deliberate.

For one thing, while organizations can encourage or discourage collaboration, real creative agency within them is a function of individuals, and of course it is only with individuals that the bridging ties Allen talks about can be forged.

Equally importantly, the goal is not to replace formal organizations with grass-roots efforts, but to strengthen the entire ecosystem. Grassroots organizations are a vital part of that ecosystem, but so are governments and non-profits, media and private enterprises. We need to create bridging ties not just between different parts of the community, but between all those communities and the myriad organizations that collectively make our community function.

And that to me is at the heart of what it means to rebuild democracy. Rebuilding democracy means rebuilding its ability to function, rebuilding our ability to face challenges and make decisions in a way that is inclusive and grounded in the experience of every part of our community. And I suspect that accomplishing it is less a matter of policy or political organization than of shifting perspective by shifting the questions we ask. The right simple question at the right time is one of the most powerful tools there is.

Notes

1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004). Originally published in French in 1835 and 1840.
2. Danielle Allen, ”Toward a Connected Society” in Our Compelling Interests: The Value of Diversity for Democracy and a Prosperous Society, eds. Earl Lewis, Nancy Cantor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).