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Getting the Pace Right

Getting the Pace Right

Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire famously said Festina lente or “Make haste slowly.” Does this seem quaint today? Or does it still make sense in a 24/7 world moving at the speed of a smart phone? Several years ago, the author and business leader, James Sudakow wrote in a blog that he had participated in meetings “where key leaders are literally working on their laptops on something else during important decision-making processes—not because they are trying to be disrespectful but because there is always something else that is urgently pulling them away.”

As leaders, we all understand this pressure.

Management consultants, McKinsey & Company, in a 2018 blog on leadership by Cornelius Chang and Robin Groeneveld, point out that speeding up isn’t the answer. “Most leadership theories continue to be based on—and most leaders still live and work on—the Newtonian world view where leaders strive to control and structure their challenges and guarantee outcomes. Engaging in a quick discussion and moving as fast as possible from A to B in a controlled and straight line fits this world view perfectly.”

But does that model of rapidly moving from A to B hold in today’s complex environment?

Because we work on many goals and projects simultaneously moving quickly throughout the process, it is crucial that we realize the difference between arbitrary and urgent. Slowing down in a focused way may actually be the path toward achieving the right pace and thereby making the right decisions. The logic that Chang and Groenevld offer: “Accept that your challenges are complex, pace the speed of your work, trust that intelligent, in-depth discussions lead to solutions, and set the right attention and intention by being present and directing your energy.”

As we strive for sustainability, relevance and impact at The Fedcap Group, we see the need for, and the value of, leadership moving at the same pace. We are making critical decisions that depend us being in sync. As leaders we are asking ourselves: Did we take enough time to thoroughly review various scenarios before making a decision? Did we have the right people in the room? Did we allow for differing perspectives to have voice? Did we slow down enough? In a new book called Slow Down to Speed Up: Lead, Succeed and Thrive in a 24/7 World, published by Business Expert Press, business advisor and consultant Liz Bywater, Ph.D., reminds her readers that being mindful is learning how to be completely focused on present conversations and present realities.

It is crucial that we form a strategy to find a balance to our fast-paced work environment so we can lead with clarity, thoughtfulness, and purpose.

The nine to five world is long gone, a time when we turned off the desk lamp, pushed the chair back under desk, and closed the office door. We now live in a 24/7 world and may still be a bit shaky about how to make it work. Festina lente!

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America Has a Health-Care Crisis — in Prisons

America Has a Health-Care Crisis — in Prisons

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Prison is no place to get sick. The nation’s incarcerated population is aging rapidly, with nearly four times as many inmates 55 or over as there were at the start of this century. That’s led to increased rates of diabetes and heart disease, among many other problems. Younger offenders are hardly the picture of health, given their high rates of addiction. Altogether, prisoners make up 1 percent of the population, yet they account for 35 percent of the nation’s total cases of hepatitis C. “They are the most expensive segment of the population,” says Marc Stern, a public health professor at the University of Washington, “and they are the sickest.”

For all the care that inmates need, they’re unlikely to receive adequate medical attention. Over the past dozen years or so, a majority of states have contracted out prison health care to private companies. The leading vendors have all been on the receiving end of hundreds of lawsuits. Some are frivolous, but some have led to multimillion-dollar judgments and court orders to change their practices. It’s a problem that could get worse.

Horror stories of needless deaths abound. From Arizona to Florida, prisoners with cancer have been treated with nothing more than Tylenol. A recent Columbia University study found that 97 percent of inmates with hepatitis C do not receive the expensive medication they need. Inmates routinely have to complain of the same symptoms multiple times before they even get to see a doctor, sometimes waiting weeks. There’s no doubt that prisoners have faked illnesses, and escape attempts during medical transfers to hospitals are a real problem. But too often the default attitude among guards and other staff is that inmates are lying about being sick, says Susan Lawrence, a physician and attorney who has worked in prisons.

Lawrence once had a patient in prison with liver cancer. Staff videotaped him working out in the yard to prove he was a fraud. He died a month after she was finally able to treat him. “The man had had rectal bleeding over a year. It was never taken seriously,” Lawrence says. “They didn’t understand how you can still function with metastasis. ‘How bad could it be? He’s working out. How can he have terminal cancer?’”

States often pay private companies on a per-inmate, per-day basis. That creates an incentive to cut costs. The market forces that discipline private providers on the outside, however, don’t apply in prison. There is no consumer choice. An inmate who doesn’t think medical treatment is up to par can’t switch to another prison, let alone a different hospital. And if the state, not the prisoner, is the customer, state officials don’t always know what they’re getting. Record-keeping is notoriously poor, and in some states, the department of corrections doesn’t even receive annual reports from its vendors.

When prison health care was first privatized in a major way, there was little reliable actuarial data, so it wasn’t clear what a reasonable price structure would look like. Over time, governments figured that information out and started writing better contracts, but that led to shrinking profit margins for vendors.

There have been other stresses on the business model. What was a growth area a decade ago is now stagnant. The state systems and large jails that are likely to privatize have already done so. With few new contracts out for bidding, providers low-ball one another in order to get business. That leaves yet less money available for care.

There’s been considerable consolidation within the prison health-care field. At this point, there are three major players — Corizon Health, Centurion Managed Care and Wexford Health Sources. States unhappy with their services don’t have many other places to turn. In December, Maryland gave its business to Corizon, having grown dissatisfied with Wexford. A few months later, Corizon was replaced by Centurion in Arizona. That state, which is embroiled in legal battles with a federal court about monitoring and performance measures in prison health, has now used all three companies. “It’s like a game of musical chairs, but there are only three chairs,” says David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “States tend to switch but they can pretty quickly run through all three.”

A change in contractors doesn’t necessarily lead to a change in care. Medical personnel often keep their jobs, particularly at remote rural facilities. The vendors co-opt each other’s staff and cannibalize each other’s business. None of that is good for care. It’s not clear, however, how many prison systems would be able to build their own medical teams back up, even if they wanted to. Having states provide health care themselves is no panacea anyway. Prison health care in California has been under receivership since 2006, when a federal court found that the state’s delivery of medical care did not meet constitutional standards. That’s why Stern, the public health professor, says, “if we focus on [the faults of] privatization, we’re not going to solve the problem.”

Some argue that prison health would improve if it were treated as part of the local community health safety net system. Communities are not immune to what happens inside their prisons, whether it’s opioid addiction or infectious disease. But most taxpayers on the outside don’t see prison health problems affecting their own well-being. The reality may be that treatment for those people society wants to punish will never become a top priority.

Originally Published by Alan Greenblatt in the August 2019 edition of Governing.

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The Right Talent as a Catalyst for Innovation and Impact

The Right Talent as a Catalyst for Innovation and Impact

Over the last few weeks, I’ve written about the strategic risks leaders must address to thrive in a competitive environment. Recently, I’ve discussed the importance of creating and sustaining a positive culture that helps drive innovation and change.

Critical to creating and sustaining the right culture is the sourcing, finding, and cultivating the right talent is another key catalyst for driving innovation and impact.  

Our people are our most strategic resource.  We have just implemented a new Human Capital Management system, as employing state-of-the-art technology around talent acquisition and management is critical to recruiting and retaining top notch staff.

The ability to recruit top talent stems from being known as a premier employer and building relationships with feeder institutions such as business, universities and local chambers.  And with that we have developed a description of the DNA of those who are successful in The Fedcap Group.

      • Passionate: They are driven to create/identify and resource the most effective ways to solve problems for people with barriers.
      • Informed: They are current within their respective fields.
      • Credible: When they speak, people listen because of their depth of knowledge and expertise.
      • Smart and Fast: They can see the end result and take quick, thoughtful and decisive action.
      • Creative: They generate innovative and often unexpected answers to difficult problems.
      • Curious: They thrive on new information and opportunities.
      • Dedicated: They run a continuous campaign to advance the position of The Fedcap Group and the people we serve.
      • Understands the concept of “Good to Great”: They constantly look for opportunities to improve the work of The Fedcap Group, searching for best-in-class practices–not reinventing the wheel.
      • Flexible: They are able and willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done.
      • Fun: They take their work seriously, but not themselves.

Once recruited, the interview process demands its own structure and expertise.  When hiring for top positions in the agency, I ensure they spend time with every key leader.  I invite them to one of our “Corp Weeks” – where key staff from throughout the company come to New York to discuss corporate health, emerging trends in our areas of practice, review data about our company’s performance and brainstorm potential areas of innovation.

When I assess talent, these are the things I look for in prospective candidates:

      • How does the candidate think? What is important to them?
      • How does the candidate keep current on trends in their area of focus?
      • What do they see as trends over the next 5-10 years?
      • How do they use information to advance new ideas?
      • How have they made a difference?
      • How have they built effective structure in the past? How do they know they were effective?
      • Is the candidate one who consistently considers “what if?” scenarios?
      • How comfortable is the candidate with ambiguity? And if comfortable, how do they bring clarity and structure to that ambiguity?

The vision, the talent, and the ability of the staff to execute all combine to create the catalyst for driving—and realizing—innovation and ultimately impact in the lives of those we serve—creating a legacy for current and future generations to come.

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The Long Term: Sustaining a High-performing, Positive Culture

The Long Term: Sustaining a High-performing, Positive Culture

Last week, I wrote about the importance of creating a culture by focusing on the things we value most and being deliberate about translating that focus into behaviors that reinforce our key tenets. This week, I examine the keys to sustaining a positive, high-performing culture.

Culture can sometimes be described as a “soft” aspect in an organization. But in fact, culture is driven by “hard” organizational components—including infrastructure, data, reporting and analysis, talent acquisition and management, risk management, financial stewardship, and day-to-day communications.  Each of these components must be aligned with the values and vision of an organization in order for the culture to stay consistent.  

As I wrote last week, accompanying these “hard” aspects of culture are the vision and the ensuing expected day-to-day behaviors that sustain positivity.  Sustaining a positive culture is, in itself, a body of work that requires reinforcing the vision, breaking the vision into expected behaviors, clearly articulating what those behaviors look like, acknowledging and encouraging the named behaviors, and calling out those that do not reflect the named culture. It means naming the values as a part of our job descriptions, performance reviews, and articulating them in ongoing one-on-one and team meetings.  

Also essential is an ongoing and consistent process for measuring adherence to the values that comprise our culture.   Every one of us is responsible for upholding the vision and the behaviors that accompany that vision.   We are all “owners” of the business—in other words, we are stewards of our vision, our values, our behaviors, and the structures that embody our culture.

Who we are internally reflects who we are externally to every stakeholder—from vendors to corporate and contract partners to every constituency we serve.  Our culture and the accompanying structural and behavioral building blocks are the keys to organizational success, credibility, and our ability to manifest the Power of Possible in concrete and measurable ways—leading to better lives for those we serve.

I welcome your thoughts. 

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Shifting Culture as a Strategic Imperative

Shifting Culture as a Strategic Imperative

“The building of a culture requires a thirst for knowledge about what is….”   J. Bennett

Last week, I wrote about the imperative of establishing an organizational culture that embraces change as an essential key to managing strategic risk and accomplishing organizational goals. Over the next few weeks, I will be examining the mechanisms for identifying and analyzing organizational culture and ways to systematically shift the culture as required.

Shifting culture is not necessarily easy—but it is possible—and it can be done with the right process that is emphasized and supported over time. That process includes: 1) clearly identifying and acknowledging the prevailing culture; 2) setting a vision for culture and establishing accountability mechanisms to advance expected behaviors; and 3) ensuring that our employees are acknowledged and supported as they begin to make the necessary behavioral and attitudinal shifts.

Acknowledging the prevailing culture: As leaders, we must be aware of the prevailing culture. This means that we understand what is happening two, three, four layers down in the organization.  Some leaders may make the mistake of assuming that the way people treat them, respond to them or interact with them is the norm across the agency.  Often it is not.  

I do this in several ways. 

First, we talk about culture and its inextricable link to organizational success.  I make it a point of talking with our senior leaders and staff how an innovative, responsive and data-driven culture is a foundation for successfully carrying out our long-term strategy.  That successful and high-performing organizations have a culture that is purpose-driven, performance-focused, and principle-led. 

Then I ask—how do we compare?  I make no assumptions but instead invite feedback and honest assessment from employees by asking very specific questions that speak to culture—sometimes in quick and informal settings and sometimes in more formal gatherings.

I call for honesty around what might be identified as subterranean cultural issues that might interfere with the organization achieving its goals.  For example, I ask…do people respond in a timely manner to one another?  Does the field feel supported by corporate services?  Do they get the information they need, as rapidly as they need it to do their work, manage their budgets, hire good people? I work hard to create a safe place for people to speak directly to the issues of culture and engagement. With every conversation, I listen carefully. This listening establishes trust, which in turn, engenders direct and honest feedback. I want to hear it all. Sometimes I hear things that are difficult or in direct contrast to the kind of culture that is required for success. I invite the truth, and I am not afraid to hear it.  I encourage senior leaders of the organization to be equally as inquisitive, as interested in the day-to-day experiences of their staff.  And I want to know what they learn. 

This learning provides us with the opportunity to act.   We have a sense of where there are gaps—in communication, trust, accountability, and delivery of expected results—and we can respond. 

As we continue to explore culture next week, I will speak to the setting a vision and establishing accountability mechanisms to advance expected behaviors at the leadership and line staff level.

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Stop sending men to prison for addiction treatment, group recommends

Stop sending men to prison for addiction treatment, group recommends

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A state advisory commission has recommended that the Legislature put an end to the practice of incarcerating men who are civilly committed for addiction treatment.

The nonbinding recommendation by the Section 35 Commission, released this week, may bolster proposed legislation requiring that those ordered into treatment receive care at a licensed facility. Meanwhile, the state is facing a lawsuit with the same goal.

The moves reflect the trend toward regarding addiction as a health problem rather than criminal or immoral behavior. Commission members heard from former patients who described the trauma of being locked up even though they had committed no crime.

“I want anyone with addiction to be treated in a health care facility, not a criminal justice facility,” said state Representative Ruth B. Balser, a Newton Democrat who served on the commission and also sponsored one of two bills that would carry out the recommendation.

If the Legislature takes the recommended action, it would effectively close down a decades-old and much-maligned program run by the Massachusetts Department of Correction, now located at a Plymouth prison.

It could also shutter a year-old program run by Hampden County Sheriff Nicholas Cocchi, which takes a different approach and has been widely praised. That prompted the lone negative vote, from state Representative Michael J. Finn, a West Springfield Democrat.

Finn said he didn’t object to closing the Plymouth prison facility, but considered it a wasteful mistake to shut down Cocchi’s well regarded program, which the state has already invested in building. “Correctional settings can be a part of the solution,” he said.

The 29-member commission, which included state officials, legislators, advocates, and addiction specialists, specified that if these prison-based programs are closed, an equal number of beds should be opened in other programs. It also called for expansion of “low-threshold, treatment-on-demand models” in which patients are provided immediate access to care, including medications.

The commission’s recommendations don’t seek to end the civil commitment process, but do call for limiting its use and studying its effectiveness.

“The thrust of this, and some of the other recommendations, is to be building a more robust system of care, to make it more accessible, so we don’t have to be sending people involuntarily,” Balser said.

Under Section 35 of Massachusetts law, a family member, police officer, physician, or court official may petition a judge to force a person addicted to drugs or alcohol to go to treatment if the person is likely to harm themselves or someone else. Some 6,000 people a year are ordered into treatment through this process and can be held against their will for as long as 90 days.

The Legislature voted to end the practice of incarcerating women under Section 35 in 2016 but has continued to allow it for men. All women and some men who are civilly committed get sent to treatment facilities; but the majority of men end up in a program run by correctional officials.

Many states have laws allowing forced addiction treatment, but Massachusetts courts resort to it much more frequently than most other states. And Massachusetts is the only state that sends men so committed into correctional settings.

Section 35 has long been seen as a last resort for people who couldn’t get help elsewhere. When a proposal to shut down the prison-based program was floated in 2009, parents streamed to the State House in protest, saying it was needed to prevent young people impaired by addiction from dying in the streets.

But in recent years, the state has vastly expanded treatment programs and supported efforts to make it easier for patients to connect with care.

And there is very little data on the effectiveness of involuntary treatment.

Mark Larsen, director of mental health litigation for the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which provides lawyers for those needing legal representation, said that a significant portion of people committed to treatment don’t object to the proceeding. Some have even asked a relative to have them committed. Yet even these people are often treated as criminals, he said.

The commission favored narrowing the Section 35 law so it can’t be used in cases where people are willing to go to treatment and would apply only when the person is in danger of harms “above and beyond the harms that are routinely attendant upon the abuse of substances, such as death by overdose.”

Cocchi, the Hampden County sheriff, said the commission is taking a hard-line position against all jail-based programs without considering quality or regional needs. Before he opened his program, there were no Section 35 beds in Western Massachusetts, forcing patients from the region to travel hours in a police van to facilities in the eastern part of the state.

For a little over a year, Cocchi has run two Section 35 facilities: an 85-bed detox in Ludlow, which is locked, and an unlocked 32-bed unit in Springfield that offers longer-term therapy after detox.

“We don’t treat any clients like inmates,” Cocchi said. “They are not cuffed. They are not shackled. They’re not strip searched.”

The program employs addiction professionals who are in recovery themselves, includes a mental health unit, connects patients to services upon discharge, and even offers visits by a therapy dog.

Of the 770 people admitted to Cocchi’s program, only 21 left without completing treatment and only 39 were committed a second time — a record Cocchi called dramatically better than the Section 35 facilities overseen by the Department of Public Health.

“The guys in Hampden, they’re doing a very good job, they’ve got a very good program,” said state Senator Cindy F. Friedman, a Democrat from the Fourth Middlesex District and commission member. But, she said, “It’s still in a jail. It just doesn’t compute.”

Balser, the Newton legislator, said she regrets that one voice remained unheard in the discussions: that of the Baker administration. Because of the lawsuit, the four members of the executive branch who served on the commission were required to abstain from opining or voting.

Originally posted in the Boston Globe by Felice J. Freyer.

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Managing the Strategic Risks That Come with Change

Managing the Strategic Risks That Come with Change

Change is inevitable in today’s market place.  If The Fedcap Group—or any other nonprofit—is to survive we must remain relevant and attuned to the evolving demands and the competitive environment.  I have learned that there are strategic risks leaders must address to ensure an ability to respond to a changing market.  This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but it hits the imperatives: 

Culture. It is imperative that leaders pay attention to the prevailing culture within the organization. We all know the phrase “culture eats vision for lunch”.   It is the truth.  Culture is really understood by spending time talking to people from throughout the organization.   Do not assume that you have a responsive culture because people are responsive to you as a leader.   Do not assume that you have an innovative culture just because people tend to be positive about change in a meeting.  As leaders, we have to work hard to develop a culture that embraces change as a way to improve the outcomes for those we serve.  We have to tie every decision, every new leadership position, every operational change, and every organizational improvement to this goal.   It has been my experience that the majority of staff will get behind an idea or a change effort—even if it is significant—if it is founded on improving the outcomes for those we serve.  

Talent.  While we may not start the change process with all of the right people at the table, it is imperative that as we move forward, we secure people with the needed skills and experience to execute and maintain a change initiative.  Recruiting and onboarding high-quality talent takes some time—so start now.   You will need both leaders and doers—and hopefully the same person does a lot of both. 

I look for people who are able to obtain buy-in from critical stakeholders, individuals who are able to dissect the effort and then structure the work to accomplish the tasks and who effectively create a sense of urgency.  

Technological Investments That Produce Data.  Lack of data is often a critical constraint to effectively undertaking organizational and programmatic change. Core legacy systems may not be able to provide timely and accurate information and analysis for business decision making. In other cases where organizations have grown inorganically through acquisitions, (such as The Fedcap Group) critical systems and data sets may not be seamlessly integrated to give comprehensive real-time insights on key business issues. Thus, often, core data and IT infrastructure have to be improved –and this often occurs AS process and operational changes are occurring.

Alignment in Priorities.  Effective response to the changing marketplace requires commitment, alignment and sponsorship from key corporate players.  Without the right level of commitment by all critical parties, change efforts can be delayed or become harder to execute. Misalignments do not always occur due to major disagreements or conflicts among stakeholders. Instead, they can occur because different key staff prioritize their work differently.  Thus, aligning the agency primary goals and change processes is required for organizational success. 

Clarity. Change efforts can also fail due to ambiguity about the end goal for the change.  When there is ambiguity of purpose—the project and system requirements may not be precisely specified. The programmers and developers of the system may provide their best interpretation of user requirements, but specific needs may be lost in the interpretation. This can lead to the development of systems that do not meet end user needs.

Getting Comfortable in the Unknown.  Prior experiences can be a very powerful constraining force. That ubiquitous phrase “this is the way we have always done it” is the death knell for effective change and response to an evolving marketplace.  It is imperative that staff at all levels become increasingly comfortable operating in the “gray”.   It’s natural to desire a clear direction and sense of control in our day to day work.  After all, the unknown can be intimidating.  But while it’s certainly comforting to have specific instructions provided at work, a constant need for clarity can limit the potential of any team. Changing habits can be hard and removing enablers of old habits is a critical talent shift if positive change and response is to occur.

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‘I Kind of Redeemed Myself’—College Programs Aim to Shift the Odds for Prison Inmates

‘I Kind of Redeemed Myself’—College Programs Aim to Shift the Odds for Prison Inmates

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The scene inside this sweaty gymnasium would be familiar to most Americans: new graduates queuing nervously down the aisle as their names were called one by one.

But this was no ordinary graduation, and these were no ordinary students. The gym is one of the few recreational areas of the sprawling prison complex at Parnall Correctional Facility in south central Michigan, and underneath their purple robes, the students—all in their 30s, 40s and 50s—wore dark-blue prison jumpsuits with an orange stripe down the sides of their pants.

Over the past 30 years, as tough-on-crime laws led to a boom in Americans being locked up, the country has faced a vexing question: how to handle people once they are released. Last year, about 630,000 people were released from federal and state prisons, according to federal figures, compared with about 160,000 in 1980.

People who have served prison time face notoriously difficult odds readjusting to society. They frequently deal with discrimination from employers and landlords. Most return to the communities where they are once more surrounded by the people and social circumstances that initially led them astray. Many return to prison within a few years.

The graduation ceremony, which took place here one late June morning, was an attempt—by the prison and the local community college—to alter the inmates’ trajectory via a college education.

That was the case for Michael Ellis, a 37-year-old student who never received much of a conventional education. He dropped out of high school in ninth grade, in part because he was teased for his ratty clothes, and began selling drugs. A few years later, he was sentenced to 20 years in state prison for shooting and killing an abusive brother-in-law who had repeatedly broken a restraining order.

Once behind bars, though, Mr. Ellis wanted to change. He began reading whatever he could find: philosophy books, old textbooks, the dictionary. When college became an option, he enrolled and earned two degrees.

“It’s stereotypical that men come to prison, then they come out of prison and their bodies are different but their minds are locked in the same place. I didn’t want to be that,” he said.

The partnership between Jackson College and area prisons arose under a larger experiment, launched in 2015 by the U.S. Department of Education, to see what might happen if the federal government gave inmates enough financial aid in the form of Pell Grants to cover the cost of a community-college degree. Under the program, known as Second Chance Pell, 64 such community-college partnerships have sprung up at prisons across 27 states.

It is too early to say definitively whether the program has made a difference—the first possible students graduated just last year, and many haven’t yet been paroled. More broadly, though, research suggests education behind bars carries benefits, both in inmates’ employment prospects after prison as well as their critical thinking.

“Any amount of college has a positive impact,” said Ann Jacobs, executive director of the Prisoner Reentry Institute at John Jay College. “It improves people’s health, it improves their family functioning, it improves their employment prospects.”

One analysis of available research conducted by the Rand Corp. in 2013 suggests that inmates who enroll in college education are 43% less likely to return to prison.

The Trump administration, which has backed other criminal-justice reform efforts, has already announced it intends to expand the experiment, and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress support making Pell Grants universally available to prisoners.

 

But the idea of offering government funds to educate incarcerated students hasn’t always been so popular. The 1994 crime bill, authored by current Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, banned federal financial aid from flowing to people behind bars, reflecting a belief that people sent to prison forfeited their right to public benefits, including higher education.

 

Before then, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Jackson College operated a version of its prison education program. It was shut down in the wake of the 1994 crime bill.

“We stopped teaching because of the climate,” said Lee Hampton, Jackson College’s chief diversity officer. Mr. Hampton recalled community leaders in Jackson approaching him to ask: “Why are you focused on prisoners when there are people outside who still need help?”

In 2010, the school’s top officers held a meeting to puzzle out why so few of their black male students were making it to graduation. A significant proportion, they realized, were either going to prison or had served time before they enrolled in school. Soon after, they resumed offering some classes.

Then, in 2015, the Obama administration picked Jackson College as its single largest experiment site, allotting it more than a thousand Pell Grant slots. The federal assistance has allowed the school to expand its offerings—it now offers two associate degree programs, in general studies and business administration—and the extra 700 students who have enrolled so far have helped the school reach its own enrollment targets.

There are obvious logistical challenges to teaching inside a prison. Schools must have buy-in from the warden—not always an easy task—and faculty must be able to reliably get inside, which can be unpredictable if a prison goes under lockdown. There is no internet. Students don’t have their own laptops, and they can’t buy their own textbooks.

 

At Jackson, an art history professor was thrown for a loop when her chosen textbook was rejected for containing too many images of nude statues. After teaching his standard course one semester, a sociology professor said he opted to water down a lecture on sexual abuse for fear it could serve as an unwitting how-to guide.

Once inside, though, Jackson faculty say the inmates are model students—often outperforming their students on the main community-college campus.

Most of the students who enrolled in prison education and have since been released have gone on to study toward their bachelor’s degree, program leaders say. But students aren’t always as successful on the outside. The factors that allowed them to succeed inside prison—books and other course materials handed to them, embedded tutors, few other demands on their time—melt away once they leave.

Kristi Fraga, 43 years old, completed most of an associate’s program before she was released from prison two years ago, and finished her degree when she got out. But the transition has been rocky. She wasn’t sure how to find an apartment or how to make rent payments once she secured one. It took her several months and nearly 40 applications to land a part-time job as a waitress.

Just this spring, she enrolled at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, to work toward a bachelor’s in economics and women’s studies. But, she said, she is taking it slow.

“When I first left prison, I was a cannonball shot in the air,” she said. “I’ve learned some hard lessons that I am not superhuman anymore.”

Still, the men who graduated last month say their education has had at least one lasting effect. Randy Rogers, a 43-year-old who has served 18 years of a 20-year sentence for multiple armed robberies, said his studies had transformed his self-image.

“Coming to prison, I felt like I let a lot of people down, including my mother and my family and even myself,” he said. “And now it’s the feeling of, I kind of redeemed myself.”

Originally Published in The Wall Street Journal by Michelle Hackman.

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What Kids Need to Learn to Succeed in 2050

What Kids Need to Learn to Succeed in 2050

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Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirtysomething in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100 and might even be an active citizen of the 22nd century. What should we teach that baby that will help them survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or the 22nd century? What kind of skills will they need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and navigate the maze of life?

Unfortunately, since nobody knows what the world will look like in 2050 — not to mention 2100 — we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans have never been able to predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains, and minds, we will no longer be able to be certain about anything — including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.

A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of human society were not going to change. If you lived in China in 1018, you knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans might invade from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be about 40, and the human body would remain exactly the same. For that reason, in 1018 poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk; wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy, or fight on horseback, and they taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious that these skills would still be needed in 1050.

To keep up with the world of 2050, you will need to do more than merely invent new ideas and products, but above all, reinvent yourself again and again.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution, thanks to bioengineering and direct brain-to-computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.

At present, too many schools focus on cramming information into kids’ brains. In the past, this made sense, because information was scarce and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspaper, or public library. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts. The Spanish empire heavily censored all texts printed locally and allowed only a dribble of vetted publications to be imported from the outside. Much the same was true if you lived in some provincial town in Russia, India, Turkey, or China. When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the basic facts of geography, history, and biology, they represented an immense improvement.

In contrast, in the 21st century, we are flooded with enormous amounts of information, and the censors don’t even try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies. If you live in some provincial Mexican town and have a smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED Talks, and taking free online courses. No government can hope to conceal all the information it doesn’t like. On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to inundate the public with conflicting reports and red herrings. People all over the world are but a click away from the latest accounts of the bombardment of Aleppo or melting ice caps in the Arctic, but there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe. Besides, countless other things are just a click away as well, making it difficult to focus, and when politics or science look too complicated, it is tempting to switch to some funny cat videos, celebrity gossip, or porn.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and, above all, to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

In truth, this has been the ideal of Western liberal education for centuries, but up until, now even many Western schools have been rather slack in fulfilling it. Teachers allowed themselves to focus on imparting data while encouraging students “to think for themselves.” Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools have had a particular horror of grand narratives. They’ve assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world, and even if this generation fails to synthesize all the data into a coherent and meaningful story about the world, there will be plenty of time to construct a better synthesis in the future.

We have now run out of time. The decisions we will make in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can make these decisions based only on our present worldview. If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.

The Heat Is On

Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing students with a set of predetermined skills, such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea what the world and the job market will look like in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050, artificial intelligence can code software far better than humans and a new Google Translate app will enable you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese, or Hakka, even though you only know how to say “Ni hao.”

So, what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” — critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. To keep up with the world of 2050, you will need to do more than merely invent new ideas and products, but above all, reinvent yourself again and again.

If somebody describes the world of the mid-21st century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false.

For as the pace of change increases, not just the economy, but the very meaning of “being human” is likely to mutate. Already in 1848, the Communist Manifesto declared that “all that is solid melts into air.” Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.

In 1848, millions of people were losing their jobs on village farms and going to the big cities to work in factories. But upon reaching the big city, they were unlikely to change their gender or add a sixth sense. And if they found a job in some textile factory, they could expect to remain in that profession for the rest of their working lives.

By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to cyberspace, fluid gender identities, and new sensory experiences generated by computer implants. If they find both work and meaning in designing up-to-the-minute fashions for a 3D virtual reality game, within a decade, not just this particular profession, but all jobs demanding this level of artistic creation might be taken over by A.I. So, at age 25, you might introduce yourself on a dating site as “a 25-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop.” At 35, you might say you are “a gender-nonspecific person undergoing age adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before.” At 45, both dating and self-definitions are passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you. As for drawing meaning from the art of fashion design, you are so irrevocably outclassed by the algorithms that looking at your crowning achievements from the previous decade fills you with embarrassment rather than pride. And you still have many decades of radical change ahead of you.

Please don’t take this scenario literally. Nobody can predict the specific changes we will witness in the future. Any particular scenario is likely to be far from the truth. If somebody describes the world of the mid-21st century to you and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then again, if somebody describes the world of the mid-21st century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.

Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial, life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of life, you accumulated information, developed skills, constructed a worldview, and built a stable identity. Even if at 15 you spent most of your day working in your family’s rice field (rather than in a formal school), the most important thing you were doing was learning: how to cultivate rice, how to conduct negotiations with the greedy rice merchants from the big city, and how to resolve conflicts over land and water with the other villagers. In the second part of life, you relied on your accumulated skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to society. Of course, even at 50, you continued to learn new things about rice, merchants, and conflicts, but these were just small tweaks to your well-honed abilities.

By the middle of the 21st century, accelerating change plus longer lifespans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life will come apart at the seams, and there will be less and less continuity between different periods of life. “Who am I?” will be a more urgent and complicated question than ever before.

This is likely to involve immense levels of stress. Change is almost always stressful, and after a certain age most people just don’t like to do it. When you are 15, your entire life is change. Your body is growing, your mind is developing, your relationships are deepening. Everything is in flux, and everything is new. You are busy inventing yourself. Most teenagers find it frightening, but at the same time, it is also exciting. New vistas are opening before you, and you have an entire world to conquer.

By the time you are 50, you don’t want change, and most people have given up on conquering the world. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You prefer stability. You have invested so much in your skills, your career, your identity, and your worldview that you don’t want to start all over again. The harder you’ve worked on building something, the more difficult it is to let go of it and make room for something new. You might still cherish new experiences and minor adjustments, but most people in their 50s aren’t ready to overhaul the deep structures of their identity and personality.

There are neurological reasons for this. Though the adult brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the teenage brain. Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses is hard work. But in the 21st century, you can’t afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job, or worldview, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whoosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant — not just economically but above all socially — you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like 50.

The best advice I can give a 15-year-old is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyze it all? How do you live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug but a feature?

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and learn to feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown while maintaining their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. Teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the 21st century demands since they themselves are the product of the old educational system.

The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town, there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with 30 other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a scalable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in wealthy California suburbs.

Hacking Humans

So the best advice I can give a 15-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India, or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the 21st century is going to be different. Because of the increasing pace of change, you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.

So on what can you rely instead? Perhaps on technology? That’s an even riskier gamble. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda. Thousands of years ago humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny elite while enslaving the majority of humans. Most people found themselves working from sunrise till sunset plucking weeds, carrying water buckets, and harvesting corn under a blazing sun. It could happen to you too.

Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you. Have you seen those zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them?

Should you rely on yourself, then? That sounds great on Sesame Street or in an old-fashioned Disney film, but in real life, it doesn’t work so well. Even Disney is coming to realize it. Just like Riley Andersen, most people barely know themselves, and when they try to “listen to themselves” they easily become prey to external manipulations. The voice we hear inside our heads is never trustworthy because it always reflects state propaganda, ideological brainwashing, and commercial advertisements, not to mention biochemical bugs.

As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, or the government knows how to pull the strings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, will you still be able to tell the difference between your self and their marketing experts?

If you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life.

To succeed at such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard at getting to know your operating system better — to know what you are and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years, philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the 21st century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account; they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s not even half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.

The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they can control and manipulate you, and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the matrix, or in The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it yourself, authority will shift to them.

Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Originally Published on Medium by Yuval Noah Harari on September 13, 2018.

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