Why Did I Write This Book? Part II
Often, it takes a significant shock to the system that creates the most waves and most change. My personal shock happened Halloween week 2018, and it set ripples of change in my life — and led me to write this book.
At the time I was serving as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF), an entrepreneur-in-residence in the White House to “solve our nation’s biggest challenges.” The program brings forward-thinking leaders from the private sector to partner with senior government officials to lead change. We serve for up to four years where we’re often sprinting as quickly as we can to make change at the speed of Silicon Valley innovation when everyone around you is running a marathon. It’s like being shot out of a cannon — all eyes are on you to enact change quickly.
I joined the PIF program in the final 18 months of the Obama Administration, and during that time advised a collaborative new project to study exactly the kinds of innovation that had been implemented throughout Obama’s tenure. Two weeks before the 2016 election, I took on a new role as the director of what was to become Innovation.gov and an Innovation Toolkit to help us scale these practices across government.
Throughout 2017 I co-created a shared language and practices around public sector innovation, while also building the Better Government Movement with hundreds of volunteers who I had the privilege of organizing and inspiring to create a government we are all proud of having. This involved focusing on who we are serving, embracing change and experiments, increasing collaboration, having data inform our decision-making and frame our story, and molding strategies around their specific needs and complexities. We were operating a grassroots movement with an underlying core value of an open, transparent, participatory government. By late 2018 this movement quickly grew to 5,000 people.
The Oath — and the Fallout
Around this time I was offered a new opportunity: to form a new Center of Excellence on Transformation out of the General Services Administration. This is one of a total of seven Information Technology Centers of Excellence — the only one that was focused on the people side of change. This was now a time for us to move from the grassroots to the mainstream, with the vision to change or “transform” full government agencies with humans at its core. It was an exciting prospect to have real scale and impact, yet I was also quite burnt out from nearly three years of working around the clock to have the impact with the movement.
Early in my tenure I asked for a meeting with the Director of the Office of American Innovation to understand his vision. Within the first few minutes of my meeting, he stopped me mid-sentence and said: “you’re thinking about everything wrong…you need to think about how you fit into what we’re doing.” It was invalidating all the work of the hundreds of public servants. By the end of the meeting, he made it clear that I “worked for him and worked for this President.” Our conversation was over in his mind.
In that moment I remembered the oath of office I took as a public servant: “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…” I had allegiance to the Constitution, to the American people, yet he was telling me I had to fall in line with him. It was clear our values were misaligned and I was not going to be the “yes” person that they demanded.
A few weeks later, Halloween week of 2018, I was removed from my post, and in retaliation, the White House ordered GSA to dismantle Innovation.gov and blocked me from convening anyone with The Better Government Movement again. Years of work by so many people had been destroyed in that week along with the hope that the government might actually be better.
Crash and Burn
The weeks that followed were some of the darkest moments of my life. I had poured my heart and soul into co-creating a community and seeing the fruits of all our work pay off in a big way. It gave me purpose and direction in life. I measured my value by what I created, and when that thing ceased to exist, so did my perceived value. What happened to this work was happening to me. Passing sympathy along, a friend and former Fellow said, “I would be drunk in a ditch somewhere had that happened to me.”
What happened here was significant, traumatic, and frustrating on a personal level, and it was also teaching me a lesson professionally: about power, control, and future change. As I started peeling back the layers of this multifaceted onion, I started to unravel a few things:
- Those in power were purposefully destructive because they were threatened by a movement of people working to change government, something they couldn’t control; and
- This leadership did not value or give empathy. Command, control, and top-down leadership was the nature of the beast.
I was both a product of and affected by a dysfunctional system that I was holding up but couldn’t hold anymore.
Unpeeling the Onion
Following this experience, I took a sabbatical in Fall 2018 for an undetermined amount of time to regroup, heal, and do an “Eat, Pray, Self-Love” tour around the world. In Summer of 2019 I started writing what would become Empathy for Change: How to Create an Understanding World. This journey got me thinking about the state of our world, the lack of empathy, and what it means for our future. We as a society need to change our behaviors and values to shift toward empathy for ourselves but also for the bigger world.
It also taught me so much about the forces and systems that led me to burnout. The little voice inside of my head was saying that I needed to stop the carousel and get off, but my heart was thinking about all the impact that we could make both inside the government and for the public. The quote “finer spirit of hope and achievement” was floating in my head, which was the quote that I keep coming back to (see Part I of “Why Did I Write this Book?).
To be honest, I was struggling to pay attention to what I needed. Although I was going to therapy and support groups for my mental health — I was still not eating well, exercising, or setting the boundaries I needed to set to sustain myself. I was throwing everything I had into my job. Guided by my desire to make an impact, I was looking down the long and very dark tunnel with a new role that I was incapable of maintaining.
Looking back on this experience now I can see that this all happened for a reason. The universe knew that this was not a battle I needed to fight anymore, and the decision was made for me. Taking care of myself and finding inherent worthiness is far more important than the things that I build. It’s helped me reflect and imagine what a better world could be — and led me to write Empathy for Change. It proves that sometimes in the end the darkest moments almost always have a glimmer of light and new opportunity.
Empathy for Change is coming out on January 25, 2021. To get the latest updates on the book and join my newsletter, visit EmpathyforChange.com.
