Taking Stock, Looking Ahead

Recently at New Profit, we released our 2021 annual report — a celebration of the way our community has come together at one of the most difficult moments in our country’s history. It was a proud moment, and an opportunity to end 2021 on a note of gratitude.

But as I’ve written before, gratitude does not need to be coupled with satisfaction. The end of one year and the beginning of another is a major milestone, and an opportunity for deep reflection. It’s a moment for taking stock, and determining how we approach the work ahead. 

2022 is an important milestone, and not just because it’s a new year. 2022 is America’s 246th birthday — and the first year that the United States has been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. 

Let’s take stock of where we are. Across any dimension of society, from health to wealth to education to climate risk, severe and systemic inequities persist: Black Americans are still almost twice as likely to live below the poverty line as white Americans. Black, Latinx and Indigenous Americans are at least 10 percent less likely to graduate high school than white Americans. Black Americans are 40 percent more likely to live in areas with the highest projected increases in mortality rates due to climate-driven changes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people are dying at twice the rate of white people, and account for a disproportionate number of cases and hospitalizations relative to their share of the population. 

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to predict that 2022 will bring more of the same. Systems are constantly in motion, with each movement reinforcing another. That’s why systemic change is so hard — systems perpetuate their own patterns of behavior, and ensure the same result through countless actions and interactions.

But when we take stock, and we don’t like the direction we are going, we have to resist the tendency to throw up our hands and avoid hard truths. It’s not easy. We’re hard-wired to resist change. Our bodies exist in what science eloquently calls a “complex inertia.” Part of the brain, the amygdala, understands change as a threat, and actually protects you from change — releasing hormones that trigger fear and a fight or flight response. 

But, for the sake of the sustainability of this grand experiment we call America, we have to embrace change, and entertain ways of thinking and working that seem beyond our reach. We have to take a big leap of imagination, and be willing to do things that at one time seemed radical and impossible. And it starts with acknowledging the truth of where we are and anticipating our built-in resistance to change. 

I’m inspired by Rumi, who said “Yesterday I was clever so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise so I am changing myself.” As individuals and collectives, we need to shift our mental models and behaviors to accept that a better world is possible and achievable. This will take time, practice and repetition, and the new year is a great time to start. For a while, it will feel a lot easier to revert back to our old ways of thinking, but backsliding is part of the process. It’s how we know we’re doing something different.

Fortunately, we have a powerful engine to help shift our mental models and capacity for systems change: human connection. We have all the resources we need to effect radical change, we just need the collective willpower. Our relationships, and our ability to live in a way that honors our interdependence, will be what enables us to co-create an America where all of us can thrive.

Now, more than ever, we need to get closer — strengthen our connections with each other, examine our own ways of thinking and being, and stare the hard truths in the face until we can see a way around them. I can imagine a movement building in 2022. But I need you all to get closer to see it too.