Why Good People Aren’t Enough
credit: envato elements
Three weeks ago, much of the mainstream media, led by Ezra Klein, engaged in calls for civility following the Charlie Kirk assassination. Waleed Shahid wrote an article called "Our Crisis Isn't a Failure of Manners." I have been unable to stop thinking about it. I've read it at least five times.
In the article, Shahid—a progressive strategist who has worked for Justice Democrats, Bernie Sanders, AOC, and many more—reminds his audience that the pain of this moment is not a failure of behavior but of infrastructure.
"What we need isn't nicer talk but different incentives. The point isn't to end conflict; it's to build a system that can carry it. Proportional representation—built here with multi-member districts and ranked-choice ballots—lets a diverse country step out of binary, zero-sum combat. Instead of two parties fighting for total control, several parties have to bargain in public; more voters see themselves reflected, and fewer elections hinge on destruction. Candidates must earn second-choice support, so reaching beyond a narrow base pays. Defeat still stings, but it no longer means erasure—and when losing is survivable, people stop looking for answers outside democracy. In other words, it makes nihilism costlier and coalition more rewarding—which is why it cools the temperature without asking anyone to whisper."
Shahid quotes civil rights icon Bayard Rustin, who understood this decades ago:
"But in any case, hearts are not relevant to the issue; neither racial affinities nor racial hostilities are rooted there. It is institutions—social, political, and economic—which are the ultimate molders of collective sentiments. Let these institutions be reconstructed today, and let the ineluctable gradualism of history govern the formation of a new psychology."
Shahid is writing about democracy, but this is the exact crisis I see in workplaces and communities every day: we're trying to build multiracial and multicultural institutions on infrastructure designed for segregation.
These systems were created when the people with the most power had a vested interest in keeping things separate and unequal. They were built to insulate the most powerful people from accountability, distribute risk to the most vulnerable, and encourage assimilation and complete deference from entry-level employees and those new to the community. Think about compensation systems where the CEO is making orders of magnitude more money than the least paid employee - an employee living on poverty wages, systems that encourage feedback from a manager to a direct report but have no systems for holding a leadership team accountable, or the lack of clarity most people carry inside of institutions around decision making rights. These systems produce outcomes that divide our teams and create winner-take-all conflicts at the institutional level.
And yet, when the rifts inevitably appear, what do we do? We organize all-team or community retreats. We deliver speeches. We preach to the congregation. We hope the good feelings of spiritual connection or intimacy will smooth over the causticity that results from brutalizing American labor infrastructure and the social norms of homogeneity. We set no new expectations. We define no actual new way of operating together. We do not provide the systems necessary for people to know what they are getting into, nor do we clarify how or if they will get taken care of on their way out. We just expect "good people-ing"—the assumption that hiring good people with good intentions is enough—to do the work.
"Good people-ing" can help people in a good system continue to be good to each other, especially when times are hard. It cannot, however, fix bad infrastructure.
Our whole society is rewriting the social and economic contracts that have governed our institutions for hundreds of years, just as the internet has supercharged the toxicity of those contracts. It is a job. If we don't take that job seriously as a part of what we do, we won't need segregationists to break us apart. We will do that to ourselves.
The work of dismantling the horrors of this moment starts by investing in our own ability as institutions. We cannot do it at the national democracy level when we haven't figured out how to do it inside our own communities of practice. Institutions are the places where we learn to be with each other across difference and power. It is the defining challenge of our time to build the infrastructure of the future in the present. I worry that our tendency to play down these problems as non-critical to our work makes the future into some mirage we can only reach if we're good enough at winning the current fights.
We can be more than that. The work begins now, in our own institutions, with the courage to redesign the systems we've inherited.
Questions to contemplate:
What are you noticing about the systemic patterns that regularly blow up your organization's culture?
What are the dynamics inside your institution that surprise you?
What could you reimagine about the agreements we make in institutions to make everyone more clear about what they are signing up for, what they can count on when they have signed up, and how we are all cared for when we decide to part ways?
Shahid ends his piece by stating that the work of democratic institutions is to “channel conflict into rules and outcomes, not rituals of deference”. I’d love to hear any reflections you may have on steps you’re taking to practice democracy in your own institution. I’ll share a collection of insights in a future newsletter. You’re welcome to respond directly to this email.
