Cathleen, I appreciate your heroic effort. If I ever started a world-saving organization (which is unlikely), you would probably be the only person from Leverage that I would want to hire.
Now please forgive me for armchair psychoanalysis, but it feels to me that when people criticize Leverage, you probably hear it as a criticism of your work in Leverage. Which would indeed be completely unfair! My impression from reading the article is that without you, Leverage would probably have fallen apart many years sooner. But the entire project was so psychologically unhealthy, that it was doomed to fall apart at some moment. Your efforts could only buy them a few extra years, at the cost of you burning out. And instead of using this time to fix itself, Leverage became more toxic instead, and finally even turned against you.
Something happened to switch that, and I’ve never figured out what or why. The people I’d been supporting seemed to stop appreciating my efforts and were quick to come to harsh judgments about my motivations and limitations that led them to exclude me or circumvent me and blame me for perceived shortcomings instead of looking for solutions together. Negative implications of things my trainers had come to believe about my mental setup were sometimes hinted at but never made explicit.
It was deeply destabilizing to have some of my closest collaborators and friends seem to update so negatively towards me with no apparent way that I could interface with those negative views or the resulting change in how I was treated.
In the intervening years only one other person from the Leverage ecosystem has reached out to check in on me (though others have been friendly when they email to ask for help with things or in their responses to me reaching out).
This is not okay. You set the bar so desperately low that even “being friendly when asking for help” counts, but come on. This, from people who tried to save the world together, who lived in the same house with you for years?
Like, when I saw the words “something happened to switch that, and I’ve never figured out what or why”, my first thought was: “So why don’t you just pick up the phone and ask them? The financial incentive is no longer there; they do not have to undergo regular thought-debugging with their bosses anymore; now they could give you a honest answer with no repercussions.”
But either the thought never crossed your mind (unlikely, but possible), or you ex-Leverage people simply do not have the type of relationship where you could call them and ask a personal question. Despite spending years in the same house and doing amateur mind surgery on each other. What the fuck?
I remember at some point an advisor telling us that she’d heard that for every negative piece of feedback, you need to give five pieces of positive feedback because of the outsized effect of negative updates. I don’t know that anything like that would’ve been possible in a project where people were so dedicated to rooting out flaws in themselves and others and in the project itself.
I’d like to recommend the book Don’t Shoot the Dog which explains how to teach using positive feedback alone.
But this problem goes deeper. It seems to me that there was a general lack of niceness in Leverage. This, combined with the “intention research”, turned out to be a deadly combination; people became paranoid and started to see the worst in each other.
(Sorry, I have much more to add, but I am out of time for now.)
Cathleen, I appreciate your heroic effort. If I ever started a world-saving organization (which is unlikely), you would probably be the only person from Leverage that I would want to hire.
Now please forgive me for armchair psychoanalysis, but it feels to me that when people criticize Leverage, you probably hear it as a criticism of your work in Leverage. Which would indeed be completely unfair! My impression from reading the article is that without you, Leverage would probably have fallen apart many years sooner. But the entire project was so psychologically unhealthy, that it was doomed to fall apart at some moment. Your efforts could only buy them a few extra years, at the cost of you burning out. And instead of using this time to fix itself, Leverage became more toxic instead, and finally even turned against you.
This is not okay. You set the bar so desperately low that even “being friendly when asking for help” counts, but come on. This, from people who tried to save the world together, who lived in the same house with you for years?
Like, when I saw the words “something happened to switch that, and I’ve never figured out what or why”, my first thought was: “So why don’t you just pick up the phone and ask them? The financial incentive is no longer there; they do not have to undergo regular thought-debugging with their bosses anymore; now they could give you a honest answer with no repercussions.”
But either the thought never crossed your mind (unlikely, but possible), or you ex-Leverage people simply do not have the type of relationship where you could call them and ask a personal question. Despite spending years in the same house and doing amateur mind surgery on each other. What the fuck?
I’d like to recommend the book Don’t Shoot the Dog which explains how to teach using positive feedback alone.
But this problem goes deeper. It seems to me that there was a general lack of niceness in Leverage. This, combined with the “intention research”, turned out to be a deadly combination; people became paranoid and started to see the worst in each other.
(Sorry, I have much more to add, but I am out of time for now.)