Some thoughts about policy work
Agnes Callard
I am at a point where I flip between reeling from impostor syndrome and trying to tell if the lessons I think I have learned are real or not. Here are a handful of them, in the first of an occasional series.
1) Steal
There are times in your life when ignoring the fact that someone else already has the correct answer to a problem and figuring it out yourself is worth doing for the practice. But usually not. In general if you are doing your job conscientiously you will be faced with enough challenges where there is no readily available answer that you should 100% steal other people's solutions to problems where there is an available answer.
To be clear, this doesn't apply to situations where doing so would be dishonest or harm the person being "stolen" from—please don't pass off their work as yours. But does a colleague have a writing or tracking template you like? Did they handle a difficult conversation with deftness or a particularly elegant phrase or framing? Steal it. There are no bonus points for figuring things out the hard way.
2) Give credit
When you steal—or just when someone has done something you find helpful, insightful, etc—profusely and eagerly give credit. Spread the good word. Work is hard and there are a never-ending series of disappointments and little failures and reasons to be frustrated or discouraged. Tell people when you see them doing something that you find useful. Tell other people that that person figured it out.
This is related to the later item about a positive-sum view of power. When you praise someone's work you are building their power and you are building the power of the people you are praising to, because now they'll have access to whatever great thing the praised person created or thought of or figured out. Another way of thinking about this is that you are building community. Another way of thinking about this is that you are making your corner of the world a bit more hospitable and human.
3) Seek and acknowledge power
If you are in a given line of work to "make a difference," you are in the business of seeking and wielding power, because power is the thing that makes things happen or change. The way to be effective is to be successful at seeking and wielding power.
Power is not the same as domination, and it accrues to networks and systems as much as to individuals. (See below, power as something positive sum.)
But if you are not seeking power, then you are not taking the job seriously. And if you aren't acknowledging the power you have, in whatever form it takes (influencing others' opinions, making decisions, establishing consequences for others' actions), you are probably wielding it ineffectively, and possibly in ways that are harmful or dishonest to yourself or others.
A corollary to this is that you should be clear about when power you have access to truly belongs to a network or community, and when it belongs to you and you are trying to use it on behalf of a network or community. If a given action or decision depends on you (or your organization, etc) but you are "listening to" some other group of people who you believe should actually be in the position to make the decision or take the action, that is not the same thing as you not having the power. Deciding who to listen to, and what to do about what they say, is part of having power.
4) Power is positive sum
One way of viewing power is zero-sum: I want to do thing X, you want to do thing Y, and when one of us establishes the power to get our way, the other necessarily loses.
There are some problems where power dynamics fit this description. But usually not, and it's almost never the only relevant dimension of power.
Most policy efforts are not—at least not primarily, and certainly not exclusively—a head-to-head competition. They are, instead, about the ability of a person, organization, ecosystem to bring into being the conditions its members want to see. You may be working to pass an ordinance, and there may be people working to stop it from passing, but beyond that binary are a whole constellation of people and organizations who may or may not be totally aligned that need to have the productive power to conceive of, design, and administer or enforce that ordinance. That productive power has many component parts, most of which are probably not directly focused in the direction of you passing the ordinance over your opponents, but all of which are necessary and need cultivation. You can win and not have the productive power to bring the consequences of the ordinance you imagined into being. You can lose and build productive power that can be brought to bear on other problems, or on the same problem in the future.
5) Be nice
There are very few circumstances where being personally mean to someone helps to build power. This doesn't mean being deferential—you can be nice while being quite direct, including about disagreements. Nor does it mean that the person on the receiving side of your nice directness will take it well, or that you won't make people angry. But it is almost always to your benefit to allow them to react how they will, and engage with people relationally, as if they are members of your broader political community who you will need to have repeated interactions with and who at one point or another it may be to your advantage to be able to work with, because usually that is who they are.
That said, if you are like most people (including me) you will sometimes have the urge not to be nice to people. It's worth cultivating the discipline not to indulge that impulse, even just wallowing in the feeling without acting on it, but I do recommend nursing a small number of grudges as an outlet in the likely event that you can't get rid of it entirely.
