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claiming full citizenship.         Our workplaces are major testing grounds for the expression of our values because they are not designed to affirm idealism, invite more intimacy, or encourage depth. In fact, they are breeding grounds for barter, virtual technology, and speed. If we want a shift from focusing on methodology to focusing on purpose, we will have to bring it to work.

Acting on what matters is the act of making change in the world through a set of personal values that define who we are. These values reside beneath the clothing of personality, style, vocation, and the myriad other features that are visible to others. The next few chapters offer ways of rethinking our relationship to our workplace, ways to step outside the patriarchal mindset that still characterizes most of our organizations, despite years of sincere efforts to change it.

The discussion applies to all of us—core workers, supervisors, and senior executives—because the struggle for our freedom does not get any easier as you move up the organizational ladder. Those at the top of the hierarchy are as constrained by it as those entering it today, perhaps more so. The belief that top management is free, and the middle and bottom are not, is pure fantasy. The top may be rich and powerful, but they struggle as much as anyone with finding their own voice, their own purpose, and their own value.

Defining Ourselves as Citizens

To be a citizen, in the political sense, is to have voting rights, membership rights, and the right to create systems that support, not deny, our freedom. In the workplace we do not have the right to elect our leaders, and I do not suggest this. We do, however, vote with our feet, our hearts, our energy, and our care or indifference toward how the institution fares in the world.

We must decide whether to give full service or lip service. We may be called employees, but we can choose to define ourselves as citizens.

Deciding to act as citizens means we are the cause of our environment, not the effect of it. We are not consumers of the organization, waiting to see what management has in mind for us, or wants to sell us. We decide what this place will become. As citizens we have the capacity to act on ideals, to be intimate, and to go deeper, even if our institutions don’t reward it.

I entertained the idea of calling this chapter “Growing Up,” but the term seemed a little wrong and carries its own baggage. Part of growing up means realizing we are on our own and this calls us to see what is around us with as few illusions as possible. Citizenship means we have claimed our political rights, while growing up is about our emotional freedom. Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing. When we grow up emotionally, or claim our citizenship politically and organizationally, we lose the protection of the parental world.

Acting on what matters means that we will consistently find ourselves feeling like we are living on the margin of our institutions and our culture. This calls for some detachment from the mainstream. It means we have committed ourselves to a state of eyes-open innocence designed to change the world we have inherited. The dominant culture will never fully appreciate the choice we make. This is the cost of citizenship, it is neither free nor cheap. It is a counter-cultural path, treating our work life and personal life as experiments of personal accountability.

Willing to Be Radical

Freire’s call to arms for full citizenship is a strong statement. Most of us do not think of ourselves as radicals fighting oppression. The oppression that we might consider, however, are those things around us that do not support the values we care most about. There is much in our collective lives that does not support freedom, or compassion, or creativity, or justice. To be radical is simply to find a way of thinking that is unique to each of us. Acting on what matters will place us in the radical’s position as soon as we create our own way of affirming our deepest values. Accepting risk and discomfort is what growing up means. Full citizenship in a high-control institution and culture will always be a radical act. Our challenge is to find a way of being radical that eliminates the violence and egoism that has come to be associated with the term.

This is easier said than done. Just because we talk about growing up into full citizenship does not mean that we have experienced it. I have grown older, but am not sure I’ve grown up. In fact, for much of my early life I didn’t want to grow up. Being grown up seemed like an unbearable burden. The grownups I knew seemed weighed down with responsibility and appeared to be in a mild state of depression. As a child, I had to live with the fact that grownups had the power, and they didn’t use it to my liking. I also associated being grown up with the loss of dreams, which seemed like a huge liability. It represented a loss of freedom that began with coming of age and ended with being responsible. And growing up appeared to require that I leave the world of natural impulse and do whatever it took, first and foremost, to make a living. I knew the economist and engineer ruled, and I knew that I must become their subject.

Looking back, I think I had it about right. But only about. What I could not see was that the willingness to bear the burden of being adult—of claiming the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship in the world—did not necessarily mean the end of my dreams. It did not require abandoning my ideals or sacrificing my freedom or disengaging from my connection with those around me. It only seemed that way. In fact, at some point in my mid-thirties, my dreams were transformed into a sense of purpose. Still, it had always been a struggle for me to see the possibility of finding freedom that I thought was only available by not being responsible—in other words, by not growing up. Oblivious to the advantages of adulthood, I wanted to stay a child as long as possible, and I have been rather successful at that. It is one of the highlights of my resume.

Creating the World

Growing up means seeing the world as it is. Really growing up means realizing that the world really may be as I see it. Seeing the world as it really is becomes a two-sided coin: It is an honest look at what is out there, and it is knowing that whatever meaning I give to the world is for me to decide. The world comes to me as a fact, but I decide what to conclude from there.

This is not a Zen thing, it is just a complicated thing. Here is a summary of what it means to hold onto the idealism of a child while bringing it into the consciousness of an adult citizen:

1. We continue to articulate our own intentions and dreams. We hold onto the voice of our own desires. This means we stop identifying so strongly with what we do, and stay focused on who we are. The question “What do I do next?” is not a question about desire; it draws us back into method. Only the clear intention of who we are, with whatever degree of clarity we have at the moment, can replace the effort the culture makes to define us by what we do, or by what we are good at. The culture is not going to change unless we deliberately pursue our intentions. It still may not change, but at least we will have stopped digging the hole.

2. We trust our own eyes and intuition. We see things for what they are. This means we are willing to see the world as it is, not as it is presented to us. The painful part is feeling the suffering within us and seeing the suffering around us clearly, and not rationalizing it away—even if we are unable to change it. This requires a certain tragic sense of life. Positive thinking too easily becomes a form of medication. The more we have to remind ourselves to think positively, the more immersed we are in the business of denying our despair at the struggles we see around us.

We decide to move far enough to the edge of the culture to see it clearly. What is the norm and normal does not serve us well. Many of us have tried hard to live a “normal” life, and how is it going? I have taken vows that I have broken, I have hurt people that I have loved, and there is no self talk that will change that. If I can accept these struggles in myself, then my chances of seeing the struggles of others compassionately increases. This means we have to be willing to be abnormal and imperfect. We have to be willing to see clearly and to question what others seem to condone. Any answer given by the dominant culture will never suffice.

3. We become the subject, not the object. We act on our freedom more aggressively. We recognize the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer. The difference between subject and object. Citizens have the capacity to create for themselves whatever they require. Citizens have power, customers have needs. We have been reduced, like bones in a stock pot, to beings with a set of needs to be satisfied. We have desires, not needs—and we can satisfy our own desires. Needs give rise to products that create the illusion that they can give us what we desire. Consumers surrender their freedom for the sake of convenience, safety, personal gain, superiority, pleasure, material value. Pretty appealing, but not worth the price.

So we act as citizens, being accountable for reconstituting the world around us. This means we stop complaining. Complaining is the voice of our helplessness. For example, we love to complain about government. If we grew up, we would stop this. There is no reason to complain about government because a citizen owns and creates the government. Government is there to do the things we cannot do for ourselves. When we complain about government, we are complaining about ourselves. It is our government and when we become responsible for our own safety, our own neighborhood, our own children’s education, we will stop complaining.

4. We search for intimacy. We seek to reestablish an intimate connection to the world. We see our institutions as an expression of ourselves and so act to humanize them. We know how important it is that the room we inhabit has signs of life. Of nature. We claim nature as our own and move away from simulated versions of it. We do not have dinner in glass-domed villages, we want to know what the weather outside is like. We care about the environment in small and large ways, for the boundary between our own body and the external world is arbitrary.

This also means I pay attention to the details. Why hand them over to the devil? It is the small moments—the way a question is phrased, the quiet voice of doubt in another, the feeling of discomfort with a decision, the nonverbal messages in front of me— that are clues to what matters. Our values are lived out in small ways and if we miss the details, then we lose the values.

5. We choose activism. We dive into the world and swim beneath the surface. We become activists, moving out of electronic enclosures into the neighborhood, into the community, acting to raise the consciousness of everyone we contact. We are a convening agent of human beings in human settings. Wherever people gather, first and foremost, we connect them with each other. We are peers joining together to change the world, not individuals negotiating with our leaders. We become expert at facilitating large-group methods, so that vision, strategies, and accountability are chosen by communities of people answerable to one another. These are strategies of engagement that lead to change. The key is to go more deeply into whatever question we confront, and to do it with other people whenever we can. This means we structure time for reflection, for the exchange of doubts, for considering what really does matter to us. Perhaps we decide to write in a journal instead of making a list of action steps. The actions that matter to us most are the ones we will remember. What is critical is to choose activism and depth as our strategy. This is Paolo Freire’s call to arms: to fulfill our capacity to change the world we have inherited and do it by transforming ourselves.

6. We expect our values to be embodied in all that we do. We do not check them at the door when we go to work. What matters most to us is possible as well as important. Let our lives exemplify what we believe in. This means there must be room for uncertainty, and we must also accept the fact that more tools and methodology will not help. What matters to us does not suffer from lack of knowledge or skills. To say we need more skills before we can do anything is usually an excuse. We must keep learning, true, but as we will see later, it is the humanities that we lack, not more technical training.