Midweek Musings - July 24, 2024
Best Practices, Attentional Humility, Library of Congress, Competitive Eating, and Bob Newhart
Supposed “best practices” can suffocate your organization. But disciplines will make it stronger and more effective.
Let me explain what I mean (and don’t mean). I’ve spent nearly all my professional life in some sector of higher or theological education (I’ll leave it to readers’ personal judgment as to which of the two is more transcendent, the higher or the theological). In a given year, let alone a day, I receive more emails than you would imagine pitching some new service, new software tool, new conference opportunity for professional development. And, whether explicitly stated or not, the assumption behind many of them seems to be that these goods and services have the capacity to help the organization I serve move closer to measuring up to “best standards.” Now, it’s never really clear who gets to define those standards, or by what process they are codified. Never mind that. Just buy, subscribe, or set up a meeting to hear how they can help you be like your competitors.
To be blunt, nothing makes me delete an email faster than that messaging. Some of it is the clumsy salesmanship of all of it. But there’s something deeper and it’s on display far beyond my inbox. In a lot of sectors, perhaps especially in non-profits, there is often an operating assumption that there is a standard of “best practices” by which we should all measure our operations, budgets, and programming.
But the problem is that those standards are often distant from our direct mission, our fiscal responsibilities, and quantifiable metrics. More often than not, they seem to be animated by vaguely defined ideological demands. They have the tone of a conversation where your interlocutor’s only ability seems to be to invoke a mysterious “they” or “people” to invoke authority (e.g. “Well, you know what they’ll say…” or “A lot of people are concerned about…”).
Don’t misunderstand me. There are indeed operational standards which we all need to live within. I expect a finance and accounting team to comply with IRS standards and General Accepting Accounting Principles (GAAP). I expect an Admissions and Financial Aid team to be fully aware of federal and state regulatory standards that demand compliance. And I certainly expect that our entire university community be well prepared to demonstrate how we are fulfilling all appropriate standards from our various accrediting agencies. Each of those are plainly codified and baseline standards in higher education.
Furthermore, any healthy organization knows that it stands to benefit from identifying and borrowing from other organizations. So don’t hear me to suggest that institutions should be less aware of those qualities and strategies that are bearing good fruit in other places.
But I find that those who fetishize best practices often are those invoke them to drive an escalation of costs—especially personnel costs and headcount—in areas that either do not drive revenue growth or cannot be measurably demonstrated to advance the mission. So invoking supposed best practices can be something of an institutional blunt instrument, clubbing back anyone that would question them through ideological guilt and opaqueness. Let that happen for a couple budget cycles and you’ll wake up one day with a wicked deficit.
What most organizations need is to define and sustain the key disciplines that will keep them on mission, ensure accountability for capital, and drive sound decision making. That sounds a lot easier than it is. But my experience is that the most disciplined leaders are those who have the ability to say no as much as they say yes. They cultivate a culture that is unapologetic in its resilience and focus, letting distractions pass by and refusing to get pulled into the ditch of whatever glitters at the moment. Instead, they quickly and enthusiastically say yes to those things that align with the mission, that leverage their organizational assets and strengths, and maximize the impact of their teams. Those kinds of organizations create momentum, one that lifts team morale.
So the next time someone invokes “best practices” to you in an attempt to justify an added cost or investment, just ask some basic questions. Who defined those standards? How long have they been around? Do they overlap with our identity and mission? Are they even rational? Is there a better way? You get the idea.
But define and drill down on those organizational disciplines. They have the ability to make your organization far more focused and effective (which, I predict, is what most of your team members actually want!). A disciplined organization stays on mission and understands where it has a competitive advantage. Those kind of institutions, those at the front of the pack, the ones that set the standard of excellence, they don’t traffic in the commodification of best practices, they simply define them in their sector by their evident outcomes.
So please, don’t email me about best practices.
On Attentional Humility
Most of my reading has a certain underlying dynamic about it, one that involves a highlighter and pencil. I find myself reading to capture a key paragraph for future citation, or simply to sort through the coherence of an argument made. But, if I’m honest, the most pleasurable reading I know is one that involves sitting on a beach, with little agenda imposed on the text, and simply reading with no driving agenda.
Over at The Hedgehog Review, Derek King has a helpful essay on much of this, largely drawing on the work of Iris Murdoch and CS Lewis.
“Lewis and Murdoch advocate for what I call attentional humility. The move to “unself” (Murdoch) or “get ourselves out of the way” (Lewis) is a subspecies of humility because it is an orientation outward, toward another object in the world. Despite this overlap with the Christian virtue of humility, neither is strictly identical with it. A humble person may, of course, be more likely to engage in attentional humility. But we can also imagine a humble person failing on this front. Attentional humility is rather a habit of the mind, a habit of consciousness, that reflects in some ways the Christian virtue of humility. It describes, primarily, a posture toward another that is eager to receive rather than use.”
But it’s King’s reflections on reading as moral formation that I find especially insightful. He writes: “We do not read, first, to extract moral wisdom from texts that we then apply to become moral. Rather, reading itself—whatever we read—is moral instruction. No doubt, what we read can be morally formative, too.”
For those of us in higher education, especially Christian higher education, that surely has profound implications.
It’s Not Hoarding if It’s Archives
I’m not a trained librarian or archivist. But I’ve worked with a lot of librarians in my career and, like most historians, I’m convinced that the archivist fulfill a sacred vocation. God bless them.
But I also know how hard it can be for an institution to determine what they actually hold onto in their collections and what acquisitions (and ongoing future commitments) they make for their special collections and archives.
So I was interested to read this interview at Scientific American with two administrators with the Library of Congress. In terms of the scope of facilities needed to house all of their collections, this is archival work at another level.
How much space do you have to store all this material?
NADAL: There are three buildings on Capitol Hill: the [Thomas] Jefferson Building, with a capacity of seven million items; the [John] Adams Building, which has a giant block of books in the middle of about 12 million volumes; and the [James] Madison [Memorial] Building, [which] has a number of our special format units, such as manuscripts, maps, prints and photographs and music. We also have a facility at Fort Meade in Maryland, with roughly 100 acres, where we’re planning for our eighth building, and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center down in Culpeper, Va.
If you’re not interested in libraries or archival work in the digital era, you may not find the interview of personal interest. But for eccentrics like me who still get a dopamine rush every time we smell anything from archival collections (IYKYK, as the kids say), this is like an interview with Willy Wonka himself.
Competitive Eating as a Vocation?
Well this one is not exactly high brow stuff, but I still found myself reading it the whole way through. I suppose that kind of approach is fitting for an article about the world of competitive eating.
Here’s how Oliver Bateman’s article begins:
I’m staring down at my second 12-egg omelet of the day, a behemoth the size of a small child. It’s August 2008, and I’m at Beth’s Cafe in Seattle, a glorious dive that constitutes one of the final stops on a south-to-north cross-country drive that began in San Diego. My stomach was empty and the first omelet had gone down rapidly and with ease, a delicious, belly-lining blend of eggs, cheese, and various fillings, laid atop a mound of buttery hash browns and a fluffy biscuit. It was so satisfying and went down so easily that I couldn't resist ordering another. You only live once, right?
I mean no disrespect to Mr. Bateman, but eating like this and you won’t live long, even if only once.
Bob Newhart, aka the GOAT
I’m young enough that I missed the apex of Bob Newhart’s career, but old enough that I grew up with his shows on reruns and his appearances here and there since the 1990s (yes, his MAD TV appearance was that iconic). The former accountant and ad copywriter turned comic was the master of deadpan delivery, immaculate timing, and the best vintage of dry humor. And for my money, the 1990 series finale of Newhart is one of the best ever, brilliantly tying together two great shows.
But one of my favorite stories about Bob Newhart that’s come up again since his death was about his longtime close friendship with Don Rickles. Their friendship, which included their wives, was somewhat legendary. It even became the subject of a documentary. In a world overrun by crazy these days, it’s refreshing to be reminded of the gift of enduring friendships, especially among couples. When that magic strikes, marked by a lot of laughter, it’s a rare gift.
What I’m Reading
Eugene Peterson, Run With the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best (InterVarsity)