Shades of Grey with Jenna Arnold | A Bit of Optimism (Podcast) - Episode 7

We live in a world that is increasingly polarized. Left and right, north and south, red and blue, black and white. If I'm right, you must be wrong. But the reality is we live in shades of gray, Many, many shades of uncomfortable gray, and we have a responsibility to manage that gray. That's why I wanted to talk to Jenna Arnold, the author of Raising Our Hands. She's a pot stirrer and has big opinions about our individual responsibility to contribute to the collective good. This is a bit of optimism.

What I wanted to talk to you about was effective disruption. I think it's a misunderstood concept, what it takes to effect change. And you more than a lot of people, know what it takes to effect change.

What bothers me so much about this term disruption is it feels like it's a jostling of peace. And there's both negative peace and positive peace. And peace, in some people's interpretation, is status quo. In other people's, it's complacency and apathy. And those kinds of things need to get jostled and they need to get disrupted. But the term disruption has always bothered me. I like to think of myself more as a pot stir.

This is what you're so good at. It's the thing that I'm. Of all the things that I'm a fan of about you, my favorite thing is your ability to hold a mirror up, I guess, as you call it, stir the pot.

And so with that mirror held up, and that's what's happening to us now, which is we're all looking in this mirror, some willingly, some begrudgingly, and we're seeing things that are making us uncomfortable about ourselves, realizations. And what are we supposed to do? It's not enough to simply say, fix it, you know, because this is human being stuff, sometimes we may not know how to fix it. How do I remove a bias that I didn't even know I had?

I call it the grace of the gray. It's this concept of the grace of the gray that we are right now sitting in a lot of grayness because we're not actually sure what the next right step is. And so it's this idea of there's going to be 10,000 baby steps between here and wherever it is that we collectively want to go. And so one of the things that I invite us all to do is instead of trying to figure out the book, the podcast, the webinar, the zoom. Yes, to all of those things, is to recognize that one we all, particularly the privileged class, have. It's not 400 years. People keep saying 400 years. It's like thousands of years of assumptions that are baked into our DNA that we have to unpack. We are all here in a time that is extraordinarily complex. There will be departments built around this moment at major universities, and we'll be studying it well beyond our lives. And so what I invite people to do is instead of saying like, I don't want to do the bad thing, I don't want to do the good thing is like, again, remove the binary, right? The binary is how this country has been set up. You're either good, bad, you're Republican, Democrat, you're on the winning team, you're on the losing team. We can't live in that yes or no space anymore. We have to live in the middle. Which means that instead of searching for answers, we have to search for questions. So the next best thing for us constantly is, what do I need to do now? Maybe it is a book. Maybe it is looking at our employee handbooks in our companies. Maybe it is looking at our boardrooms. Are they primarily white? Are they primarily male? Maybe it is looking at our Rolodex and being like, wow, I got a lot of white people in here. Maybe it is the next time you're driving behind a slow driver and you're like, ah, it's probably one of those awful explicit stereotypes, you catch yourself doing that. One of the listening circle participants, and these are the steps that are part of the process, we had had a conversation about racial biases and she emailed me a week or two after the conversation that we had and she said, okay, Jenna, I was in the checkout line in a grocery store and I was standing behind a black man who was in a beautiful cashmere sweater. And we were chit chatting. And while we were in conversation, I thought to myself, if he weren't in a beautiful cashmere zip up sweater, I would not be chit chatt with him. And that's the work, being honest with yourself about those ugly truths. So it's being really honest with ourselves about our biases, which are going to take a lifetime. And I always say this. I'm in first grade on this stuff and I might graduate to second at some point in my life. There's some language that we can put in place that's going to raise the bar for us, but on a personal level, it's asking hard questions.

This idea of the grace of gray is a bigger idea than I think people realize. And I mean, look, it's, it's a human thing. But for at least the last 30 or 40 years, there's been a steady drumbeat in the United States to move away from gray and move towards black and white. We've become more binary in how we view the world. We've become more separated. You know, the idea of cooperation, and you know this from your own career. It used to be in politics that 80% of the negotiating was done behind closed doors. The last 20% was for the cameras. And the goal was that both parties could go back to their constituents and said, we got what we want. In other words, both could claim a win. Now 100%, it's done in front of the cameras. And it's not enough for us to go back to our constituents and say we got what we want. We also have to say, and they didn't.

That's right.

We have to win and they have to lose. Which in a game that has no finish line, is a preposterous idea. There is such thing as two winners. Like in business, more than one company can make money and be successful selling the same product. There is enough.

That's right.

There's enough success to go around. And so I think there's so many things that are happening in this moment in politics, in business, in social movement that is the result of an extreme amount of pressure and tension of a human animal that by its very nature lives in gray. All relationships are gray. All interactions amongst humans are shades of gray. And we now, in this modern day, both good and bad, not to be binary about it, want to put everything in a bucket. That's right, right, wrong, good, bad, yes. No, winning, losing, winning, losing. And if I'm right, then you have to be wrong. And this idea of gray, and I love this, this idea of gray requires asking questions as opposed to having answers. This idea of gray has to involve listening unless talking. Has to have empathy over judgment for ourselves too. All around, all around. And this idea of gray is for all parties. This is for police and the community. There's a lot of gray in all of these. It's for black and brown and white. There's a lot of gray in all of this color. And the binary flare ups, if we want to call it that, is very important to get the mirror up, to stir the pot, to start the conversations. But then the gray must be allowed.

To exist in perpetuity.

In perpetuity. And to your point, at best, we're in first grade, Most of us are still playing with blocks. And we will spend our lifetime with good intentions, working on this. And if we're really lucky, to your point, by the end of our lives, we might as a nation and as individuals get to second grade. And the point is, this is not a race to be won. This is a movement or a cause to be advanced. We are moving ever and ever closer to an ideal that we imagine knowing full well we'll never get there. Martin Luther King's dream will never be realized, but we will die trying to get there. That is the point. The point is that we can look backwards and say we have moved, we have made progress, and there is still work to be done. You know this in marriage. Marriage has gray and is never perfect, but it is, it is a striving. And that's what gray is, striving.

That's right. One of the things that binary has come out of, and I want to make sure that this isn't a permission slip. I'm not pardoning us and our behavior and our ignorances, which people have been asking for centuries for us to pay attention to, but one of the causes of them are our textbooks and the narrative about our country. We've been told for centuries that the people who founded our country were 7 foot tall white men who always knew what to do, they always made the good decisions. And so far, for the most part, we've been victorious enough that the victors got to tell their stories. And so if you look in our textbooks, the victorious have told their stories in ways that make their very difficult decision making right all the time. And so when we're suddenly in a place of insecurity and I don't know, Ness, when we're suddenly being pushed back into a gray, there's this belief in this narrative that we've been told that you're supposed to know the answer to this. And if you don't, find the person who does and a little bit follow them blindly.

This is interesting to me, this binary, Ness, how it shows up in leadership in terms of pretending that you know all the answers even when you don't. Because if I don't know the answers, then I must not be a leader, right?

And. Or someone's going to figure me out.

Or that someone's going to figure me out. And there's great irony in this because leaders are the ones that are extremely comfortable in the gray. The best leaders are the ones who are able to say, I don't know, trying to figure it out, here's what I think, here's what I hope, but I don't know. And one of the things I learned from Dr. James Carson, who wrote finite and infinite games. Is that a finite mindset, when you see the world in black and white, right and wrong, win and lose. The finite mindset hates surprises. Uncertainty scares them completely, which is why they try to exert control and which is why timeframes become very short, because we can exert control over short timeframes, we can exert control over long timeframes. And an infinite mindset is the total opposite. Infinite mindset sees surprises as an exciting thing and sees opportunity in uncertainty. And whereas the finite mindset, one of the reasons they fear newness and uncertainty is because the finite mindset think of it like a baseball game or combat, where they practice and practice and practice and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. Or it can be the same thing. For begins at the moment of surprise, the infinite mindset, the creativity begins at the moment that we don't know what we're doing. And that is embraced as a magical moment rather than fear.

That's right. And the uncertainty and the surprise that's happening all around us is. I'm very careful not to use the term opportunity, because the opportunity we have right now came at the expense of lives. Came at the expense of a tremendous amount of lives and horror and suffering like this is like centuries of suffering. But what's unique now is that there is this moment of, well, can we fast forward some of the infrastructural systems that can be adjusted. Removing police officers from schools, pulling down Confederate statues, renaming elementary schools or major highways. And now this isn't like a new idea that surfaced a month ago. I signed a petition about pulling down a Confederate monument, like, 25 years ago. Right. There have been people on the front lines of this and people on the front lines of police reform for many, many generations. And they're still. All the many organizations are still trying to figure out the right thing to do. There's an opportunity for us to reconsider systems instantly, and there's an opportunity for us to get highly creative. But we are at the precipice of tremendous creativity where I cannot wait. And like, I could jump up and scream, I'm so excited to see what comes out of this. It is time to throw down on the conversations that we have been having for centuries and start really thinking about the creative solutions and be raising our hand and willing to do it. Six weeks ago, nobody was willing to put the term white and supremacy in their mouths and suddenly say, wait a second, how am I a white supremacist how is my boardroom? How's my P and L sheet? And now my family members who voted for Trump called me and they're like, yo, can we talk about this reparations thing? And I'm like, did you just say reparations? Like, we have a moment to leap, and it requires all of us to sit in the. I don't know ness and sit in the constant front row and paying attention. So much is going to have to evolve right now, and we all have to be very willing to sit in the. I know what I can do on myself. I'm not sure what that's going to look like in my relationship with my Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving. I don't know what that's going to look like in a presidential. I don't know what that's going to look like from a societal perspective. I'm very curious to see how that's going to change my power and my freedom to move and go chase my dreams. But we all have to sit in this, like, sacred gray of I know I want to do better and I don't know yet how to do it.

Yeah.

This idea of leaning into your relationships with vulnerability. People are always like, okay, so how do we have our conversation with Uncle Bob, who at the Thanksgiving Day table might say something misogynistic? I'm like, all right, well, y', all, it's not just one time at a Thanksgiving table. It's, you know, decades of comments that no one's ever caught. But oftentimes what I say to people as they're both catching themselves calling themselves in and calling other people in is to lead with that vulnerability. And what I do is I'll call that person up and be like, hey, I have a question for you. I'm struggling with something you said, and I'm trying to figure it out. Do you have thoughts? So this idea of calling somebody in and saying, I'm really wrestling with something you said. Do you have thoughts about why?

I love this idea of calling someone in versus calling someone out.

We have to stop this, because whenever we're calling out, it's about us performing for ourselves. It's about us reminding ourselves that we are smart enough and therefore we are worthy enough for our own love.

And it's binary, too. I am right and you are wrong.

Oh, it's totally binary. I'm right, you're wrong.

This goes back to the. What we were talking about a moment ago about admitting that we don't know and that to your point, and I saw those same Things. And there are people who only know about policing from the outside who are telling the police, here's what you have to do to fix it. Now, no one can debate that some of those things are good. But the question is, is can they actually work? Can they reform police forces? And the thing that I love about what is happening right now, it's a tension that has been released. You know, nature abhors a vacuum. Nature abhors imbalance. And we see this in financial markets. When it becomes too imbalanced, there is a correction. We actually call it a correction, where gross imbalance is rebalanced. And sometimes it causes pain and huge financial loss because it's a stock market crash. But it's a balancing of imbalance, and that's what's happening now. This is a correction. We were in a period of massive, massive imbalance.

And inequality.

And inequality, yep. And there's only so much tension a system can take because nature abhors imbalance. And to the point where it just snaps. And nobody knows exactly the time or the place, it's gonna snap. But if you leave imbalance for too long, it's gonna snap. And by the way, this is the same between two people.

That's right.

When there's a tension, at some point somebody slams their fist on the table and say, why won't you just listen to me? Or why do you keep doing it? Happens. At some point somebody snaps. And that's what we're watching. We're watching a massive correction.

So here's my hypothesis, and I would actually change the language a little bit. I don't think think nature allows things that are inauthentic to thrive. Think about all of the relationships you've been in. Unless it's an authentic love, it's not gonna work. Yeah, of course, that is the truth with a love relationship. That is the truth with a business. If it's not moral, it's not gonna work. It's the same thing with a constitution. Nature does not let lack of authenticity survives because the species can't make it. It will extinguish itself. It's like the frogs in the rainforest. They stop reproducing when there's not enough puddles to hang out in. I don't think you're going to see the population boom of the next generation that we might have previously, very literally because of climate change. If you look at a constitution that we all revere, that has exactly zero pronouns referencing her and she, it's not going to survive.

The thing that I think people Forget about a nation state is that it's a culture. And cultures change with politics and technology and time. I mean, culture adapts. And to invoke Dr. Carse again, he said, I don't like belief. And of course I was like, well, uh, oh, I built a career on the importance of belief. And so, of course, my first question for him is, well, what's your definition of belief? And I love it. He said, belief is where thinking stops. Belief is where your thinking stops. And I believe in this and beyond that, it cannot be. And I said, well, if you don't like belief, then what do you embrace? And he says, I embrace culture because culture is malleable. And that doesn't mean you abandon the values, and that doesn't mean you abandon foundations, but it does mean that you can change it to keep it more relevant and let it grow and survive. And survive. And America now is still America from 1776 or 1781. If we want to talk about the Constitution, it's still the same nation. America's still the same nation. But of course we have to adapt and we have to change, which is why the Constitution is interpreted, because it has to be interpreted through a modern lens, which I think our founding fathers intended. And a nation state is not a thing that you put in formaldehyde and you preserve it in its original form for a thousand years.

Well, you do if that allows you to keep your power.

Fair point.

And then let's also talk about what freedom actually means, because going back to the language in the Constitution, it has only ever referenced white Christian men and who still are at the top of the org chart, be it in political office, in boardrooms, on air, it is white Christian men. The Constitution is working. And if I leave your audience with no other ideas other than sit in the grace of the gray, hold the sacred, and we can deal with two contradicting ands at the same time.

What is the sacred end?

The sacred and is the truth and the knowing that both things that can contradict each other can exist at the same time. This idea that I want to be a good mom, but I also snap if I have to ask my kids to brush their teeth after four times. This idea that I want to be well intended, but I might also cause harm. The idea that, oh my gosh, I am now realizing I've been driving by that Confederate statue for many, many decades and I never realized what it represented. This idea that you can be a white person that has given up all of your resource and just because of your race. And the way that it has been constructed with and without language in this country, you can still cause harm. It's part of the gray. It's part of this idea that, like, you have to hold the sacred, and you can have loving parents that you trust so much but not want to talk to them about sex.

So the sacred end is the acceptance that paradox or opposing points of view or thoughts can exist simultaneously, and that's.

Okay, and we don't have to sometimes choose. Right?

Right.

So this idea that, like, parents have to check every single box or that partners have to check every single box, or friends have to check every single box. My mom gave herself the permission as a mom. She said, you know, Jenna, I knew I could only raise you 57% of the way. I had to let the world do the rest. It's the same thing here, Right. Like the roles that we play.

My favorite sacred end, and I talk about the paradox of being human, and I now know what this is. It's a sacred end. The paradox of being human is every single moment of every single day, we are both individuals and members of groups.

Yep.

Every day. Families, churches, schools, communities, whatever it is. And we're individuals. And every single day, we're confronted with sometimes small, sometimes big decisions. Do I prioritize myself at the expense of the group, or do I prioritize the group at the expense of myself? And there's an entire school of thought that says you always put yourself first because until you're taken care of, you can't take care of the group. And there's another entire school of thought that says, no, no, no, you have to take care of the group first, because if you don't take care of the group, there'll be no one there to take care of you. And you're both right and you're both wrong. And it's a paradox.

Yes. And I would say, though, to the latter, that every religion, every poet, every philosopher, and Simon's last book, whenever that is, in 40 years from now, is going to say the latter, not the former.

If you're asking me now what that balance is. And by the way, this is the same reason that I disagree with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Right.

Which is too often invoked. Right. The mistake that Maslov made, he put the primary that the number one thing that we all need is food and shelter, and then number three was community and relationships. Third rung up. But I've never heard of anyone committing suicide because they were hungry. They committed suicide because they were lonely. That's Right. And the mistake that Maslov made is that he only thought of us as individuals. And if you only think of us as individuals, he's right. Food and shelter absolutely come first. But if you think of us as members of community, he's completely wrong. So he's only half right. And so if you're asking me, you know, if I were to produce a new hierarchy of needs where I put social, deep, meaningful relationships and a sense of belonging, community first. Now, how do those two pyramids coexist? I'm not satisfied to say that one is right and one is wrong. It is not binary. It is gray. It is uncomfortable. However, I do believe, because there's no such thing as equal, because sometimes you make decisions where one thing has to be sacrificed, that there has to be bias and that bias has to tilt towards community. Because when push comes to shove, as social animals, as human beings, we are recognized and want to be remembered for the contribution we had in the lives of others.

That's right.

No one wants on their tombstone what they did for themselves.

That's right.

We want on our tombstones what we did for others.

That's right.

We talk about legacy. Legacy is a contribution to others. And so we all inherently have a sense that there is a bias towards community, towards somehow sacrificing our individual interests for the good of others, even if it's our children that there's a passing on. And so I think we inherently know it. Practicing it is an entirely different story.

Or practicing it in a country that's prioritized binary.

We talk about bias. A country that has over emphasized rugged individualism.

That's right. Square footage, likes cars, which is all about me.

And all the bonuses in our companies are given to you and your performance, even though none of us did well by ourselves.

That's right.

It took our bosses, it took our colleagues, it took our friends, it took support, it took sometimes our families. It took a village to help us be successful so that we could hit our numbers to get our bonus at the end of the year. And yet we're celebrated as you're wonderful. Look how good you are.

That's right.

Would you please tell us the things you want everybody to remember and to learn?

Okay. We're in really hard times. We're in miraculous times. Stick with it. Stay in the front seat. Raise your hand. Don't beat yourself up. Question yourself harder. Live in the gray. Hold the sacred end. I'll see you on the other side.

Here's what I've learned from talking to you. The thing that I'm taking away from this is I love this idea of figuring out the questions to ask and being comfortable not knowing the answer and not even knowing how to find the answer. And that the only way to find answers to extremely difficult questions is to tell others what our questions are, tell others that we don't know the answers to our own questions, and tell others that we need help to find those answers. And that's called the journey. That is what it means to be human. That's what it means to build great companies, what it means to build great organizations, what it means to build great nations. And our leaders are to model behavior because the rest of us will follow our leaders. That's what we do. We model the behavior of our leaders. American men stopped wearing hats because John F. Kennedy was elected and he didn't wear a hat. And that's it. We just stopped wearing hats. We follow our leaders. It's not political. And until our leaders get really good at saying, here are the questions, I don't know the answer and I need help to find that answer, then the rest of us will get better at it, and anyone can be that leader. It does not require the people in positions of authority to do that. It requires any of us to do that amongst our friends. And we will lead our friends to do the same. Because if we are comfortable ourselves to express that level of uncertainty and vulnerability, our friends will follow.

Yeah, and. And it's a real. It's a real gift that you'd be giving to yourself and to other people to role model that. I don't know. Now it invites other people to also.

Not know the I don't knowness. That's what this is about. This is about the I don't knowness and that the I don't knowness. The gray is good. If I can be binary about the gray.

Yeah, exactly.

The gray is good.

Way to wrap it up. Sigh.

All right. You're wonderful. Thank you so much for this.

I love you.

I love you too. I hope you enjoyed this bit of optimism. If you'd like more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. I hope you'll join me next time. Until then, take care of yourself and take care of each other.