“Not just existing, but engaging”: Meet Member Marc Rettig
In this series, we are spotlighting our community members. In the Adaptive Space, we make room to receive the insights our community members have to offer. This series is where we will discover each other’s gifts! We will be spotlighting one story per week. Please engage with our star of the week by participating in the conversation below.
Our next spotlight is on member Marc Rettig! Marc is dedicated to advancing the implementation of systemic social change, and is excited to be joining us in the Adaptive Space this year. He hopes to make more connections with like-minded professionals in Pittsburgh and around the world to get an idea of how to better serve his community.
Name: Marc Rettig
Lives: Pittsburgh, PA; Fort Benton, Montana
Affiliation: Fit Associates, Carnegie Mellon University, School of Visual Arts
Superpower: Finding the common thread
Tell us how you stumbled across your professional path.
It’s been a chain of events, really. I’ve always followed my curiosity rather than a specific career motivation. I had done anthropology and linguistics in undergrad, with computing, and computing was one way to make a living. I had a 15-year career in software, then became dissatisfied. I had met some designers and became jealous of what they do, so I started working my career in that direction. That led to another almost 20 years of marrying design with methods borrowed from anthropology, and that became more and more strategic — cars, medical devices, home finance, home health aids…I got into all kinds of fields. Then about 10 years ago, I realized again that I was uncomfortable. The real job was almost always generating more revenue. But what’s the impact? I determined that I’d start with social questions rather than business or product questions, and that made me realize that the tools in my hand were dull for the kind of complexity that occurs when something is made mostly of people. That led to 10 years or so of study and practice to see if I could gear up for that kind of complexity. And here we are!
Who is the first person who believed in you?
I had a linguistics professor in undergrad who, before he started teaching, had done sort of a crazy thing. He had gone and spent 10 or 15 years among a group of people along the Amazon River who had no written language, and no one outside of their group spoke their language. He lived with them and learned the language and created a writing system with grammar so that they could start writing down their stories. It went from zero to everything is written and documented. I had a lot of respect for him. As I was about to graduate, he looked me in the eye and said, “Marc, you can do this; please consider it.” That was somebody having confidence that I could do something that seemed beyond me. I wasn’t used to seeing myself as able to do something big.
How do you define success for yourself?
That word “success” makes me a little grumpy. It has a performance connotation and I gave up on that quite awhile ago. I have to believe that me being myself in the world, being in heartfelt relationships with other people, and having questions is what matters, and that that’s enough. I don’t want to operate off of somebody else’s agenda. I don’t want somebody else to make up a story for me. I feel that since I’ve adopted that point of view, I am more consistently conscious of the fact that I’m “on the way.” I’m not just existing, but engaging.
Give us a typical day in your life.
I wake up somewhere between 6:30 and 8:30, and might lie in bed and read, but then I get up and make coffee and unlock the door — our studio is on the third floor of my house, so eventually my colleague will come walking in. I’m trying to spend even 15 to 30 minutes in a chair in the corner with poetry in the morning, to remind me that there’s something else going on besides the to-do list. Poetry gives me language for these stories that are bigger than my to-do list. Then I go upstairs, and it’s a mix of making things and teaching. It’s a lot of Zoom time, and lots of preparing, and lots of PowerPoints and documents and videos. There’s often a lot of making sense of things, or trying to find a direction. That may mean drawing on big pieces of paper or using lots of sticky notes and sketches, in a mix of working alone and with my colleague, Hannah. Usually we take time to make lunch. This is garden time, so we get the challenge of “what are we going to do with these vegetables?” So, sometime during the day there’s usually cooking, which I love. And in the evenings, I’m pretty good at shutting off. Sometimes there’s something I’m doing that has me excited and it’s hard to let go of. But a lot of times I just stop and have one cocktail, dinner, watch shows, read, whatever!
What has been the most important skill you’ve developed throughout your career?
In all of these projects that I’ve been involved in, we need lots of points of view. No one point of view is sufficient. We aren’t even qualified to say what the stories mean — the people who lived it need to tell us what the stories mean. When you wind up with all of this narrative, and all of these stories and documents and things, what are the themes? What are the patterns? What bubbles up? Whether that’s big walls and big paper and lots of stickies, or spreadsheets with way too many columns and rows, it’s a thing I’ve done a lot and love to do. I’ve become pretty good at it, because I’ve done it probably a couple hundred times in the last 25 years.
What do you think has been your greatest challenge?
Self-confidence. I’m not good at blowing my own horn, and I often assume that someone else is better or has more right to take the stage than me. It’s not crippling, but it’s something that I’ve just grown into a different relationship with over time. I just have to choose when to step forward and when to step back as opposed to defaulting to stepping back.
What do you think has been the greatest reward in the choices you’ve made?
Many of my friends and colleagues are either employed at non-profits or in corporate jobs, so a gift I notice most when I talk with them is the freedom I have to align what I do during the day with what I believe in, and with what excites me. It’s not always perfect, and there’s times we have to meet clients where they are. And there are prices to pay sometimes. But I wouldn’t trade it.
Tell us a story that gives us an idea of who you are.
I grew up on a wheat farm in Montana. At its peak we were working 6000 acres of cropland, which is something like nine square miles. One of the fields was 720 acres, which is still a little over a square mile. And at the time I started driving tractors to plow the field, we were pulling 20 feet of plow at four miles an hour — you’d go around the field twice and have lunch. Then you’d go around three or four more times and go to bed. You’d just be sitting and staring out of the window all that time, and you’ve gone 40 feet. It seems like you’re never going to finish this. But then you get up the next morning and you sit on the tractor again all day long, and watch the birds follow you and look at your dust trail and make up stories in your head. And then you go to bed and you get up on the third day and just keep going and one day, it’s done.
I do think about that a lot because the kinds of challenges we’re working on are not project sites. We’re not going to shift patterns of oppressive racism in one generation. I’m not sure I’ll live to see the outcome. So I think, “I’m going to get up and drive the tractor again today.”
What are you excited to learn from this community?
My colleague, Hannah, is more of a networker than I am. She has really woven herself through a lot of different communities in Pittsburgh, and I’ve done less of that. I’m excited to see the Pittsburgh that cares about moving itself to part of a better story, and to see it from many points of view. Secondary to that is figuring out how I can be of service. I have things I can do and ways I can try to offer that, but I want to see how that specifically connects here in Pittsburgh.
What are the big themes that have woven through your journey?
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