Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others (12 page)

In his book
Thinking, Fast and Slow
, Kahneman describes how he discovered his first cognitive illusion. “Many decades ago I spent what seemed like a great deal of time under a scorching sun, watching groups of sweaty soldiers as they solved a problem,” Kahneman begins. He was doing his national service in the Israeli army, with an undergraduate degree in psychology to his credit, when he was assigned the job of evaluating candidates for officer training. In theory, the way group members responded to virtually impossible tasks would reveal leadership potential. (Think it through for yourself: Haul a log to a six-foot-high wall, then get both the log and the group to the other side. The log can’t touch the ground or the wall. The group members can’t touch the wall, either.)

As they watched the officer candidates struggle with the challenging group tests developed by the British army in World War II, evaluators came to the same conclusion: “
The soldier who took over when the group was in trouble and led the team over the wall was a leader at that moment. The obvious best guess about how he would do in training, or in combat, was that he would be as effective as he had been at the wall. Any other prediction seemed inconsistent with the evidence before our eyes.”

Doubt crept in only when the evaluators received feedback from the officer-training school, based on assessments by the commanders in charge of the cadets. As Kahneman put it, “
Our forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not by much.” But the real surprise was that the feedback had “no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated candidates and very little effect on the confidence we felt in our judgment. . . . We continued to act and feel as if each of our specific predictions was valid.”

We are all potential victims of our overconfidence in guessing the
future. Yes, you are, too. And even if you acknowledge your own fallibility, you’ve probably bought into the notion that some other people—“experts”—have extraordinary abilities to predict the future. Take the 50 percent of Americans who have money in the stock market. Many believe that they are entrusting their money to skilled investors, people who have the expertise to “beat the market.” Alas, based on Kahneman’s observations, these Wall Street gurus often perform no better than dart-throwing monkeys.

The head of an investment firm whose advisers worked with very wealthy clients hired Kahneman to give a seminar about his work. Like any good teacher, he wanted to incorporate information about his audience. “I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarizing the investment outcomes of some 25 anonymous wealth advisers, for eight consecutive years,” he said. “The advisers’ scores for each year were the main determinant of their year-end bonuses. It was a simple matter to rank the advisers by their performance and to answer a question: Did the same advisers consistently achieve better returns for their clients year after year? Did some advisers consistently display more skill than others?”

Kahneman correlated the rankings of each adviser year by year. He had expected each adviser’s results would vary, but he was still shocked by what he discovered: “
While I was prepared to find little year-to-year consistency, I was still surprised to find that the average of the 28 correlations was .01. In other words, zero. The stability that would indicate differences in skill was not to be found.”

Disturbing, eh? Yet in the tradition of overconfidence, the head of the investment firm—and the traders themselves—simply disregarded what the statistics showed. “
Facts that challenge such basic assumptions—and thereby threaten people’s livelihood and self-esteem—are simply not absorbed,” concluded Kahneman. “We are normally blind about our own blindness. We’re generally overconfident in our opinions and our impressions and judgments. We exaggerate how knowable the world is.”

What all of this means is that genuine hope lives in a psychological sweet spot, and it requires a very special kind of mental balancing act. In the sweet spot, our thinking about the future overlaps with our thoughts about what needs to happen today. In the sweet spot, we believe in our ability to make the future better than the present, while at the same time we recognize the limits of our control.

When we live in the sweet spot, we acknowledge that we don’t have access to all of our thought processes and that we can’t always predict our feelings. That puts a premium on the small chunk of our thinking and behavior that directs our active attempts to shape the future in a meaningful way. We try to learn as much as we can about the situation we face, but we’re aware that we can’t wait until we know everything to act. We are alert to the difference between helpful critiques and challenges (which we can use as tools) and the messages that create doubt and sap our energy. We also know that the better we get at understanding our cues, habits, and thought processes, the more we can energize ourselves and others.

One of the most hopeful—and riskiest—things we do in life is to have children. I know parents who start saving for their child’s college tuition in the first trimester of pregnancy. Some of us commit more time to picking our children’s preschools and elementary schools than we spent choosing our own colleges or shopping for our family homes. The truth is, I find myself thinking about my son’s college choices almost every day—even though he only recently lost his first baby tooth.

Two of the smartest people I know are economists and colleagues of mine. They have full knowledge of the psychological and economics research that says that our behavior as parents doesn’t matter as much as we like to think it does. I know—I don’t like the idea of that, either—but the evidence is clear.
Our small parental behaviors, based on the decisions we agonize about daily, do less to improve our children’s lot in life than we want to believe. (The upside is that our little parenting screw-ups don’t ruin our children’s lives, either.)

And knowing this hasn’t kept my colleagues from obsessing over finding just the right babysitter, enrolling their toddler in art and music classes, sending their tiny daughter to preschool prep courses, and trying to balance her academic life with her social life. Why do they do this, even though it won’t have a significant effect on their daughter’s intelligence, college prospects, or chances at future happiness? They do it because they want to exercise the little bit of control they do have. They do it because they are compelled to think about their child’s future, and they’re willing to do anything that might make her life a little bit better.

Now multiply that energy by two, then eight, then hundreds, and you have the story of a group of parents in Chicago who hit the sweet spot and made a major difference for their own children, other people’s children, and their entire community.

The parents who sat around the sandbox in Roscoe Park talked endlessly about where their toddlers would go to school. Publics, privates, magnets, charters, admissions tests, lotteries for places—when did kindergarten become so complicated? Most of the moms and dads didn’t even consider their neighborhood school, the Nettelhorst School, despite the fact that it was once among the most prestigious elementary schools in Chicago. As relative newcomers to up-and-coming East Lakewood, all they saw was a dark building with wire barriers over the windows, a reputation for administrative chaos, unruly bused-in kids, and terrible test scores.

But one mother, Jacqueline Edelberg, decided to visit Nettelhorst to see if it was really as bad as she’d heard. During the summer, with her two-year-old in tow, she circled the school grounds looking for an entrance. She finally found an unmarked side door where a security guard waved her in. A moment later, a woman rounded a corner and screamed at her to leave immediately.

Undeterred, Jacqueline decided to call for an appointment, which also turned out to be a challenge. Finally, after a week of phoning at various times every day, someone picked up, and she set a time to meet the principal the following morning. She took along a friend, Nicole Wagner, as backup.

To the women’s surprise, Principal Susan Kurland greeted them warmly, gave them a tour of the building, and conducted a three-hour show-and-tell about school initiatives. They learned that Kurland had come to Nettelhorst two years earlier and was determined to turn it around. She’d made some headway improving student discipline, but she was struggling to get her teachers on the same page and to spark parent engagement. The latest setback was a collapsed roof that had required teachers and students to relocate. (Jacqueline then realized that the screaming woman had been shooing her away from a danger zone.)

At the end of the meeting, Kurland asked the two women a direct question: “What do I have to do to get your kids to come here?” Their stunned reply: “We’ll come back tomorrow and let you know.”

That afternoon, the “Big List” was born—nearly twenty stretch goals that led with two nonnegotiables: academic rigor and low teacher-student ratios. When Jacqueline and Nicole presented the list to Susan the next day, she read it through, thought for a moment, and said: “Well, girls, let’s get moving; it’s going to be a very busy year.”

Susan was on board, but now Jacqueline and Nicole knew they needed to take stock. Did they have the energy and resources to take on this huge project? Several of the park parents insisted they’d be wasting their time on a dysfunctional school system. When they consulted a former district alderman about their plan, his first response was to laugh out loud. He said he’d tried for years to fix Nettelhorst and concluded it was a lost cause. But the principal at a successful public school nearby had a different message: “
Get parents in, and you can achieve anything. Sit down with your principal and make a game plan together. Aim for the moon. If you don’t reach it, you’re sure to land pretty close anyway.”

Despite the naysayers, Jacqueline and Nicole themselves had started
to envision how bringing a renaissance to Nettelhorst could improve their lives (bye-bye competing for slots at private schools, commutes to another neighborhood, and hefty tuition bills!) and how they could also make the lives of other families better and easier. Parents united around a revitalized school could bring civic life back to their little corner of town.

Jacqueline and Nicole recruited neighborhood friends to captain teams that would each take on a specific part of the Big List. Their official title was the Nettelhorst Parents’ Co-op, but they called themselves the Roscoe Park Eight. Chanting the mantra “We do more during naptime than most people do all day,” they went to work.

The Roscoe Park Eight figured they had just seven months to get the school in good enough shape to woo parents and convince them to enroll their children in Nettelhorst’s kindergarten the following year. They decided to begin by tackling the school’s dreary façade. Soon all the exterior doors were painted bright blue; the front door was flanked by plants, and wrought-iron lamps (donated by a local store) replaced the prison-style fluorescents. Superficial changes? Sure, but at least no one would have to guess where the entrance was anymore, and it was clear that something was afoot at Nettelhorst.

No playground parents could escape the Roscoe Park Eight’s pleas for volunteers, and with these extra hands, they took on a new infrastructure project green-lighted by Susan Kurland: renovate the huge, empty library, which had been neglected for years, before school opened. The Eight started cold-calling local merchants, begging for furniture, books, paint—any leftover items that a volunteer could come and carry away. Old finds were transformed into creative ways to spark the children’s imaginations. The walls and ceiling were painted in sky blue with puffy white clouds. A claw-foot bathtub became the most sought after reading spot in the restocked library. There was even a sailboat with an orange sail afloat in the middle of the room. And because the volunteers worked Labor Day weekend, the library was ready for the first day of school.

Months of unremitting work later, there was a new vibe throughout the school, the halls were lined with colorful murals (both materials and talent having been donated), and a new community kitchen (also donated) was being used by teachers, students, and parents. But there were failures, too, and plenty of challenges ahead. Most of the teachers still regarded the neighborhood parents as unwelcome interlopers who were staging a hostile takeover. The parents, in turn, discovered just how hard it was to dismiss underperforming teachers, even when the principal agreed with their assessment. (Later on, many disgruntled teachers left voluntarily, and Susan invited parents to join the hiring process, resulting in a stellar faculty.) The parents’ first big funding win, a three-hundred-thousand-dollar grant to establish a community center within the school, triggered chaotic scheduling and territorial problems that came close to sinking the project. And when kindergarten commitments were due for the following year, some volunteers who had given hundreds of hours to the school decided to send their own children elsewhere.