The finding that engaging in ‘diversity-valuing behavior’ reminds people that a woman is in fact a woman perhaps explains how Sanders came to think that all Clinton said was ‘vote for me, I’m a woman’ – because the data shows that she certainly didn’t. A word-frequency analysis of her speeches by Vox journalist David Roberts revealed that Clinton ‘mostly talked about workers, jobs, education and the economy, exactly the things she was berated for neglecting. She mentioned jobs almost 600 times, racism, women’s rights and abortion a few dozen times each.’ But, pointed out US writer Rebecca Solnit in her London Review of Books piece on the election, ‘she was assumed to be talking about her gender all the time, though it was everyone else who couldn’t shut up about it’.
Yesterday’s ending launched today’s success, and today will have to end if tomorrow’s changes are to take place. Endings are not comfortable for any of us. But they are also neither unprecedented breaks with the past nor attempts by those in power to make people’s lives miserable.
People seem to “overreact” to a change when they are reacting more than we are. But when we think that way, we overlook two things: first, that changes cause transitions, which cause losses, and it is the losses, not the changes, that they’re reacting to; and second, that it’s a piece of their world that is being lost, not a piece of ours, and we often react that way ourselves when it’s part of our own world that is being lost. Being reasonable is much easier if you have little or nothing at stake.
The failure to identify and get ready for endings and losses is the largest difficulty for people in transition. And the failure to provide help with endings and losses leads to more problems for organizations in transition than anything else.
One of the most startling challenges I will put to a client comes from my bastardization of a Zen aphorism: This being so, so what? Things being as they are, what will you do about it?
When author and gamer Jordan Belamire tried the VR game QuiVr in multiplayer mode, she was sexually assaulted by another user called BigBro4 42.40 ‘Virtual’ makes it sound like it isn’t real – but it felt real to Belamire. And no wonder. VR is meant to feel real, and it can be so successful at tricking your brain that it is being explored as a treatment for PTSD, phobias, even phantom-limb syndrome.41 To be fair to the male designers of QuiVr, they had an excellent and proactive response to Belamire’s blog.42 They immediately redesigned their ‘Personal Bubble’ setting (in which other player’s hands disappear if they come close to your face) to cover the entire body and so make such groping impossible. But as they themselves noted, while they had thought ‘of the possibility of some silly person trying to block your view with their hands and ruining the game’, they hadn’t thought of extending the fading function to the rest of the body. How, they asked, ‘could we have overlooked something so obvious?’ Fairly simply, to be honest. Henry Jackson and Jonathan Schenker are clearly well-meaning men who don’t intend to shut women out. But it’s Sergey Brin and the pregnancy parking all over again: even the best of men can’t know what it’s like to go through the world as a person with a body which some other people treat as an access-all-areas amusement arcade. This just isn’t something that Jackson and Schenker have to face on a regular basis, and therefore it really isn’t all that surprising that they missed ‘something so obvious’.
Before and after don’t matter. Now matters. You cannot help the people you love before and after, you can only choose to cause them pain or take on their pain now.’
