Elliot Washor's TGIF 12.05.2025

Are you with me now? A. J. Ryder

As we gear up for next week’s BPL’s Staff Meeting in Dallas, I’m looking forward to spending time with everyone around collectively getting more and more clear about the Impact Campaign. It will be great spending this extended time together in a city, I don’t really know and want to learn more about.

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

- Milton Friedman  

I’ve always held onto this saying by Milton Friedman when I think about our work and how most policies are judged by their intentions i.e. College for All, Not Child Left Behind, and not by their results. I’m hoping we can turn this statement around with the Impact Campaign. Both our intentions and our results speak for themselves because they are grounded in and emanate from simple and yet complex practices in communities that are sometimes difficult to measure because they matter. Our results show up not just in quantitative but also qualitative data as personal stories from of the lives of young people and adults who are with them and how they are not just stand-alone incidents but generate change in others. And yet going forward, our work will be judged by how it scales.

The world at large looks at Mr. Machine type scaling where people are widgets and scale is done in a linear fashion but we have an opportunity to scale in an organic way. All day long I have been in conversations about fractals. Nature scales in fractals, think snowflakes, broccoli florets and ferns and tennis balls on walkers (half-kidding). Fractals produce simple patterns with infinite detail. Here complexity emerges from simplicity where you don’t solve problems but generate a way that the fractals can take off on their own in communities. This is certainly a challenge to figure out but a good challenge for BPL design. How do we figure out child homelessness in NYC where 140,000 school age children are homeless? Or, change a system where it is OK for 12-year-old children to work on large industrial farms in California at low wages and yet, the same state does not allow young people out on internships because industries won’t allow them in work settings? I do believe that the individual approach that causes the ripple through fractal agency and energy is a way to work through these problems to make the changes we want rather than approaching these problems through mandates that don’t measure what matters in a way that time again the results have shown even with good intentions their policies don’t work at scale because of how they are implemented in this industrial top-down model.

I’m tending my garden for Dallas and ready to turn into Romanesco broccoli

Be well!