UnHero
Rethinking Leadership for Our Times
Peter T. Coleman, PhD
Columbia University
Here’s a quiz: As a leader, who do you aspire to be?
a) Wonder Woman
b) Warren Buffet
c) Mother Theresa
d) Steve Jobs
e) Nelson Mandela
f) Tenzing Norgay
Everyone wants to be a more effective leader.
Fortunately, stacks of scholarly tomes have been written on effective leadership. They advocate for transformational leadership, participatory leadership, values-based and servant leadership, and adaptive or contingency models that recommend using different approaches in distinct situations. These texts have offered many useful insights into effective leadership styles, habits, values, strategies and practices.
Popular media has weighed in as well. A recent article in Inc.com suggests effective leadership involves goal setting, communicating, delegating, making time for employees, recognizing their achievements, thinking about lasting solutions, and not taking things too seriously.[i] Forbes Magazine adds the qualities of honesty, confidence, commitment, positive attitude, creativity, intuition, and customization of different approaches to dissimilar employees.[ii]
This is sound and useful advice.
But the vast majority of writing and research on effective leadership is flawed in two ways.
First, leadership is often viewed too narrowly. For example, although it has been defined in many ways, leadership is often essentialized as influence.[iii] One scholar summarizes several definitions by claiming, “Leadership is about influence — the ability to influence your subordinates, your peers, and your bosses in a work or organizational context”.[iv]
But is it? Is influencing others the essence of effective leadership? Certainly it is an aspect of it, but the essence?
I argue that the essence of effective leadership is not influence, but rather is, well, efficacy. It is the ability to bring about an intended result. Yes, that result may involve getting others to do or to refrain from doing certain things. But usually it is so much more.
Second, much of the advice on effective leadership is based largely on what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error.[v] This is the tendency to attribute other people’s behavior or outcomes to internal factors, such as their personality, style or habits, and to largely underestimate the influence of external factors. The entire field of leadership studies has been built on this leader-as-individual assumption since the beginning.
I suggest that our deeply ingrained ways of thinking about effective leadership — as personified by the heroic Captain Jack Aubrey leading at the helm of the embattled HMS Surprise in the book series and film Master and Commander — or by Steve Jobs staging a coup against the board members at Apple that had previously ousted him — is, well, very cool, but only half the story when it comes to efficacy.
Of course powerful people in positions of authority often play a vital role in getting it done. But focusing solely or primarily on individual leaders masks the reality that effective leadership is often distributed among a team or network of people with different talents, skills and degrees of influence, and takes place within a context of other countervailing forces that can severely inhibit or enhance the leader’s actions and intentions.
Often leaders and followers alike prefer the idea that the leader is in firm control — they find it comforting and reassuring for a range of basic psychological reasons (Mommy! Daddy! Is that you?).[vi] This is particularly so under conditions of instability or uncertainty.[vii] But more often than not it is just not the case (witness, for example, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and virtually every president of every country ever who struggled to get things done).
Our Hero obsession misses half of the story of effective leadership — the power of the situation. This article will focus on those types of leadership challenges where the power of the situation is so strong or erratic that they require a fundamental rethinking of what it takes to be effective. These types of leadership trials — that take place in context-heavy situations — have frustrated leaders for years. In fact, it was exactly these types of situations that fifty years ago drove pioneering scholar Warren Bennis to write his now famous book Why Leaders Can’t Lead.[viii]
These situations are also on the rise. In 2016, Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon interviewed 60 leaders across the corporate, government, military and humanitarian sectors and found that one of their most commonly expressed concerns today was a feeling of “being overwhelmed by multiple, intense pressures.”[ix] That same year Jean Marie Guéhenno, former head of UN Peacekeeping, warned of a similar “crisis of complexity” in the international sphere, where multiple economic, technical, geophysical and political trends are interacting in complex ways and rendering our current thinking, policies, practices and institutions obsolete.[x]
These types of challenging environments are fruitfully understood today as complex dynamic systems. In fact, technically, they are a particular type of complex system known as tightly coupled systems, because their various components are strongly linked and interact with one another in strange and unpredictable ways. Fortunately, decades of research on complex systems in all areas of science have taught us a great deal about how these systems can get stuck in strong patterns that resist change. Unfortunately, there is a big gap today between understanding complex systemic problems and being able to make a difference with them — between systemic thinking (I can now see that this is a complex web of related problems reinforcing one another) and systemic leadership (So now what do we do?).
The approach outlined in this article addresses this gap. It cherry picks from the best research and practice on leadership and decision-making in complex systems to date to offer practical steps for addressing these more entrenched challenges. It will show how leaders can learn to work with the power of these situations — in more indirect, minimalist, and UnHeroic ways — to enable positive change to occur. In other words, it will introduce an alternative theory of leadership and change — a sort of jujutsu form of leadership for being more effective in particularly demanding situations.
Clockwork and Cloudwork: Two Divergent Leadership Challenges
In a brilliant lecture in 1965, Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science of the last century, argued that how scientists — and all humans for that matter — think about problems metaphorically matters, and proposed a crucial distinction between two fundamentally different types of problems: clock problems and cloud problems. Clock problems are those, like “a very reliable pendulum clock,” that are of a more mechanical, knowable, controllable, and predictable nature. Accordingly, they can be readily disassembled and analyzed — broken down to their component parts, precisely measured and studied, to reveal the source of the problem — and then can be repaired and reassembled to resume their original functionality. Typically, problems with automobiles, jet engines, and even traffic and city planning can be categorized as clock problems. Similarly, many problems leaders face are more clock-like, such as most contractual obligations, legal and HR matters, technology and production issues, and many aspects of human social dynamics that are amenable to more standard forms of analysis and problem solving.
At the other extreme are cloud problems. These are challenges of a highly irregular, disorderly, uncontrollable, and unpredictable nature. They include leadership challenges like chronic patterns of low productivity and morale, or change-resistant types of corruption, unemployment, homelessness, political polarization or violence. These are not simply more complicated problems, but are considered complex because many aspects of these problems interact over time in unpredictable ways and therefore they evidence erratic behavior. They are usually of a highly unstable nature and so typically prove unresponsive to standard, proven solutions or attempts at analysis and problem solving. As a result, often our good faith attempts to address them have no identifiable effects whatsoever, result in problems going away in the short term but resurfacing in the longer term, or actually serve to make matters worse.
Despite the fact that clock thinking fell out of fashion in the hard sciences in the 1920s (when Quantum theory first challenged Newtonian mechanics in physics), the assumption that all problems are clocks is still prevalent in many societies today. The popular tendency to worship technology and engineering today, particularly in the era of smart phones, the Internet, genetic engineering, big data mining and artificial intelligence, is a testament to this. Despite the warnings of everyone from Isaac Asimov to Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk on the potentially dire consequences of such technological idolatry, many of us are still clinging tightly to our clock assumptions, affecting how we think about problems, change, leadership, and our future.
Ultimately, Popper believed that most of our problems lie on a continuum somewhere between clouds and clocks, with our more complex and volatile problems closer to clouds. However, he cautioned that we must be careful to approach predominantly clock-like and primarily cloud-like challenges with different strategies that are fitting with their distinct natures. If the problems leaders are facing increasingly today are more like cloud problems, then thinking we can “fix” such problems directly by administering one or more technical solutions is like thinking we can use a screwdriver to fix a cloudy day. The fix is totally inappropriate for bringing about the change we desire. However, we are much more familiar and comfortable with “clock-tools” like linear planning models and reductionist thinking that give us a feeling of being in control of seemingly uncontrollable problems. On the other hand, we lack the same level of familiarity and comfort with “cloud-methods.” And, without these, we are left thinking and working mechanically with clouds.
Heroes and UnHeroes: Two Alternative Approaches to Leadership
Based on years of experience working with leaders trying to promote change in complex, volatile environments around the world, my colleagues and I developed the UnHero framework. Facing these types of situations is like getting caught in a strong riptide at the beach. When this happens, our instinct is to save ourselves by swimming as hard and fast as we can directly toward the shore. But doing so in fact places us in the middle of the rip current, which will only drive us farther out to sea and in time exhaust our energy. So long, Hero!
But if you understand how the system of currents that create riptides work, you’ll know how to work with the power of these situations. You’ll know to swim parallel to the shore (which is in fact swimming with parts of the tide) until you are sufficiently out of the pull of the current, and only then back to shore. In other words, you’ll know how to leverage the forces of the rip current itself to produce your desired result — survival!
The study of complex systems can help us understand a few general principles for identifying and leveraging the internal forces of strong situations for positive effect. In the long run, however, any lasting solution to specific problems will need to employ these principles in a manner informed by and fitting with local circumstances (e.g., exactly how fast and how far away from a riptide one must swim is always determined by local conditions). In other words you need both good local information about the nature of the situations you are facing and general principles for making sense and leveraging them effectively.
Why is this UnHeroic? Because it holds that in these settings, rather than trying to envision, design and impose new solutions (as Heroes do), leaders learn to identify existing remedies and trends and then to work in sync with the people and forces behind them to bolster and amplify their effects. In this way, being an UnHero is like acting as a Sherpa — someone who helps take people on an extremely difficult journey, who taps into their passions and aspirations when encouraging them onward, and who provides the necessary techniques and support along the way. The Sherpa is both an elite technical mountaineer and intimately familiar with the peaks and passes of their terrain, with local seasonal weather patterns, and with the pace and timing of a secure climb. They understand the critical importance of working in sync with local people, current conditions and other powerful forces within their environment. They also tend to play a much quieter role and mostly defer to the interests and preferences of the journeyers (Who today knows the name of the Sherpa guide who accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary when he first summited Mount Everest in 1953? Answer: Tenzing Norgay).[xi]
The UnHero approach offers a set of basic steps for leaders that we have found offer a more effective alternative for addressing particularly cloudy problems. They are outlined below and then illustrated through a case study.
Heroic versus UnHeroic Leadership
UnHeroic Leadership
UnHeroism begins simply with clarifying what you and the community you are serving are hoping to achieve. However, in contrast to the more narrow goals of the Hero approach (fix the darn problem!), the UnHero approach recommends aiming more broadly toward improving the functioning and wellbeing of the system that is giving rise to the problem by enabling it to self-correct. This entails specifying a more distant Guiding Star goal (a goal that is a navigational tool to help you adapt) before identifying Nearer Star or more readily achievable goals. For instance, rather than trying to fix a pattern of chronic enmity between two departments in an organization, perhaps aspire to establish an organizational culture where departmental relations tend to complement one another and thrive together and destructive tensions are uncommon. This more general orientation shifts us from a focus on problem-centered outcomes to more systemic-process goals.
Of course, this form of goal setting probably contradicts everything you were taught about targeting and planning (identify moderately difficult, achievable, measurable goals). This process remains useful when addressing clock problems, but the game changes with clouds that are infinitely more unpredictable. A broader formulation of the goal helps direct us to address the systemic causes rather than just the presenting symptoms. And, because cloud problems inherently take more time to address, a Guiding Star goal is better able to accommodate frequent adaptation and experimentation than an outcome goal, which we either hit or miss.
The remainder of the UnHero framework focuses on the process of how to go about realizing these goals and addressing more intractable leadership challenges. It has four basic steps:
1) See through cloudy problems to the underlying forces feeding them. Orienting our work toward broader, more distant goals necessitates a shift in perspective on where we focus our attention and efforts as well. A Heroic approach encourages zooming in: analyzing, isolating and focusing in on the target problem and what we can likely fix or change. In contrast, UnHeroism recommends zooming out first and developing a more holistic understanding of the relationship between the issues we care about (e.g., interdepartmental hostilities) and the forces in the surrounding environment that may give rise to them (history, incentives, culture, policies, modeling, training, etc.). This is essentially the approach that physicians who practice functional medicine take when they shift away from the standard medicine of “what’” (What disease do you have? What drug do I give?), toward the medicine of “why” (focusing instead on etiology, on causes and mechanisms for the illness).[xii]
2) Home in on local potential to redirect such forces. Once we have gained an initial understanding of the fuller system with which we are working, it becomes critical to identify the specific actors and sources of energy driving change in the local environment. Here, you are basically drilling for resources, and local information is everything. For instance, identifying subgroups within your organization that evidence positive deviance: who have managed to channel tensions from interdepartmental hostilities into creative energies for innovation, should be identified and supported. This is akin to what Doug Holt has described in iconic marketing campaigns of highly successful and enduring products like Mountain Dew, Apple and Absolut vodka, which intentionally tap into and offer solutions for national levels of community anxiety.
3) Work in sync with the forces inherent to these systems. Once the systemic nature of the problem is better understood and the energy for change is located, the next most important job for any leader involved is not to mess things up. Rather than trying to fix complex problems and trigger unintended consequences, UnHeroes learn to work with the flow of the situation giving rise to the problem in order to leverage how it is unfolding and facilitate desired outcomes (e.g. more productivity, less violence, better quality of life, etc.). They learn to work with the resonant forces driving change in the local environment identified in Steps 1 and 2 and harness them for the task at hand (like bolstering, scaling up or replicating examples of positive deviance that have emerged on their own). This thinking goes against traditional change theories and is much less direct, obvious, and heavy-handed, but can be realized by: working at the margins, or working away from the primary presenting problem on more peripheral upstream conditions that can eventually help address the problem, or taking multiple actions while attempting to achieve one goal, which research has found to be more likely to result in more effective and sustainable changes with complex problems.
4) Embrace failure and adaptation — learn from the unintended consequences of well-intentioned acts. This is simply the opposite of Heroic planning, implementation, and “staying the course.” In fact, UnHeroic leadership in the context of chronic, context-heavy problems is synonymous with failure. So the question is not how to avoid failure in these cases but how to learn from it most effectively and efficiently and with the fewest negative consequences. This can be achieved by: gaming systems: testing solutions through initiating multiple pilot projects and embracing failures as a means of learning the underlying rules of a system; making more decisions: assessing a new situation and setting goals and a course of action, but then continually adapting: staying open to feedback and to reconsidering decisions and altering course as needed (even emergent forms of positive deviance may have diminishing returns); and remaining focused but not inflexible: identifying the most critical local issues early on and staying focused on addressing them, without developing a single-minded preoccupation with one solution.
Together, these four steps offer an UnHeroic logic for more effectively listening, learning, supporting, failing, and navigating seemingly impossible cloud problems. Below, I offer a story of one such journey as illustration.
To Be Heroic or UnHeroic? An Illustrative Case Study
The leadership experiences of Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) provide a vivid illustration of both Heroic and UnHeroic leadership in action. Although complex, resource intensive, and demanding, and not without its critics, the approach of the HCZ offers a parable of another way to address seemingly impossible problems such as chronic patterns of urban violence — by working both informed by and in sync with the contemporary dynamics of the situation.
The rate of violent crime in American urban centers rose exponentially between 1965 and 1990, especially in the Harlem community in New York City. It was then that the community activist Geoffrey Canada, an African American and native New Yorker from the South Bronx, began to head up the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in Harlem after attending school at Bowdoin College and Harvard University.[xiii] Canada reports that he returned to New York to help “my kids” survive the violence and poverty epidemic in the streets of his hometown. He was particularly focused on helping young, African-American boys in the community avoid the strong tides of violent premature death and imprisonment that were so prevalent in the community — clearly a cloudy problem.
One of Canada’s first initiatives as Director of Rheedlen was smart. He established a program for young males in the community, which combined martial arts training (Canada had a third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do) with conflict resolution training to provide them with increased discipline, a sense of security, and constructive problem-solving skills. After launching the program and working tirelessly for several years, Canada came to realize that it was a failure. He felt that he had been able to help a few individual boys now and then, but that the vast majority of them got readily pulled back into a life of drugs and gangs and violence (and often early death) in the streets. He felt deeply frustrated and disappointed, but not deterred.
At this point Canada regrouped. Having now spent several years living and working in the Harlem community and getting to know current conditions on the ground more intimately, he realized that he had failed to see the big picture. He had not sufficiently understood the immense complexity and power of the drop-out/drug/violence/poverty landscape of the Harlem community in the 1990s, and had thought that by targeting individual youth with enough care, attention and non-violent problem-solving skills, they would thrive. He now realized that his good faith attempts to train them and offer targeted services could not begin to alter the forcefully destructive dynamics that captured their lives in any significant way. So, he radically changed course.
Fed up by now with top-down approaches to addressing chronic patterns of violence and poverty in poor neighborhoods, Canada launched the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ). The HCZ is a revolutionary social experiment that combines educational, social, and medical services for children and families from birth through college, woven into an interlocking web of support for an entire neighborhood. Recognizing the tightly linked and complex nature of how many different urban problems combine to constitute ecologies of desperation and violence, he and others in the Zone began to work systemically within a 1-block, then 24, 60, and ultimately a 97-block radius of the Harlem community to offer a comprehensive set of services to help the most at risk children not only survive but thrive.
The HCZ approach is both simple and complex. It operates on the basic principle that each child will do better if the children, families, and community around him or her are doing better. So they begin by identifying the most at-risk children in the Zone by doing everything in their power to locate the lowest scorers (“delayed” or “very delayed”) on the Bracken public school readiness test. This often entails canvassing housing projects and neighborhoods, going door-to-door, and networking through current client families. Then, once identified, they attempt to provide these children and their families with everything they need — medical care, nutrition, safety, tutoring, committed teachers, you name it — to make it from pre-K through college, in order to thrive. A central part of their mission is supporting families and communities to ensure they are equipped and empowered sufficiently to support their children from birth to college and beyond. The work involves a great deal of perseverance, adaptation, and resourcefulness on the part of the HCZ staff.
Their theory of change is key. It suggests that if the HCZ can locate and support the most vulnerable children — the ones that get most easily trapped by the ferocious pull of the streets and fuel the drop-out/drug/violence/poverty syndromes — and help them to flourish, then they will eventually help transform the entire community, which in turn will help promote the welfare of future children. This not only disrupts the vicious cycle of generational poverty in Harlem, but it also helps to establish a virtuous cycle of success and support. This is a targeted but complex, long-term approach to addressing intractable community problems that is exceptionally promising and is today supported by considerable independent evaluation research.
How is this case UnHeroic?
Enabling the System to Self-Correct. When Canada reoriented his approach in Harlem from the Rheedlen Centers to the HCZ, he shifted the primary aim of the initiative from the specific goal of reducing violent death and imprisonment of youth (the problems) by training them individually in his martial arts and conflict resolution program (Heroic deeds), to the more general, long-term objective of enhancing the safety, prosperity, and well-being of the broader Harlem community over time by helping the most vulnerable children thrive (UnHeroic). In other words, his objectives shifted from more precise, shorter-term problem-focused goals to those of qualitatively altering the dynamics of the broader community from impoverished and violent to constructive and thriving by tapping into what was already working there.
Seeing through the Problem. When Canada shifted strategies to the HCZ, he changed his focus from the narrower issue of urban youth violence, to the broader pallet of the multiply determined patterns and trends evident in the Harlem community. This required committing time and attention to the many different realities present in the community, something most outsiders can’t access or afford to attend to. But Canada and the HCZ staff’s day-to-day interactions with members of the community provided them with a much more grounded and nuanced understanding of the local community than Canada had originally arrived with. This included the needs for enhanced economic support (addressing underfinanced public schools and a dearth of living-wage jobs) as well as cultural and behavioral changes (related to parenting skills, expectations and norms around education, and the presence of positive, accessible role models). Canada’s increased awareness of the complexity of the problems eventually generated a new sense of clarity, which helped him develop a feasible strategy that he could implement and assess. The immediate crisis and misery associated with destructive problems in Harlem were considerable and demanded attention to the here and now. But it was equally important that Canada broaden his temporal perspective to understand how past and present patterns were likely to shape future outcomes.
Honing in on Local Potential. While directing the Rheedlen Centers, Canada went to school on the dynamics of Harlem in 1990 and learned two critical things. One of the most powerful insights he had was that the success of the children and the strength of the community went hand in hand. When young kids in the Harlem community got lost to drugs and violence and prison and premature death, as so many had, the community got lost as well and the generational cycles of poverty were reinforced. However, when young people succeeded — graduated high school or college, or got a decent job — the families and community members associated with the child brightened and rallied. Equipped with a better understanding of this core dynamic, the Zone began to invest in bolstering it.
Second, given the tightly coupled ecology of poverty and violence in the community, it became clear that there were no simple solutions to helping the children. Multiple needs and challenges had to be addressed simultaneously to have an impact, but they could never afford to offer every child everything they needed. However, Harlem is a community of sub-neighborhoods that can differ dramatically from block to block. So they could achieve some economies of scale by focusing attention on one block at a time, and scaling up from there. This local knowledge helped shape the efficacy of the HCZ strategy.
Working in Sync. Canada clearly shifted his mode of leadership when moving from his initial martial arts based approach to the HCZ concept. At first, he did what we all would do — he built on a distinct set of leadership competencies (martial arts, conflict resolution, and charisma in Canada’s case) that allowed him to play a distinctive leadership role in helping youth learn a “better way.” But, when this approach came up short, Canada shifted gears in a way that put the community in the lead. For example, recognizing the good works being done in many of the public schools in the Zone in helping to address violence and poverty, the HCZ reached out and offered support to each of the schools in whatever form the school itself deemed necessary. Thus, instead of imposing one-size-fits-all solutions into schools, the Zone allowed the school principals to determine what they felt would most help them be more effective in serving their families. This resulted in a variety of innovative new programs that emerged bottom-up from the specific needs of the schools.
Failing and Adapting. The full story of Canada’s involvement with urban school violence in Harlem is, in many ways, a story of trying different strategies and tactics, learning from success and failure, and adapting accordingly — even if that adaptation meant wholesale changes in their approach. For example, who thought that by providing sufficient food, safety, healthcare, and educational support to a targeted group of at-risk preschoolers in Harlem would eventually lead to significant drops in violent crime in the community? This is a clear example of working at the “margins” rather than directly targeting a problem. Clearly, the pathways to efficacy of such strategies are tricky and often unknown, which makes it all the more important to work with them in highly adaptive ways.
Although a brief sketch of a complex contemporary case, the story of the Harlem Children’s Zone illustrates both a smart, logical, well-meaning Heroic fix that failed (Canada’s original programming), which is emblematic of many such solutions to complex problems, as well as the power of UnHeroic adaptation. Canada’s failure ultimately led to him radically changing his orientation to the challenges he faced in Harlem, shifting from a Heroic approach to leadership to a more UnHeroic approach of working with the community in ways that were ultimately more effective and sustainable.
Peter T Coleman is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University who studies intractable conflict and sustainable peace. His latest book is The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization. Follow on Twitter @PeterTColeman1
[i] Economy, P. (2016, March 13). 7 Keys to Becoming a Remarkably Effective Leader. Retrieved September 05, 2017, from https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/7-keys-becoming-effective-manager.html
[ii] Prive, T. (2016, October 17). Top 10 Qualities That Make A Great Leader. Retrieved September 05, 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyaprive/2012/12/19/top-10-qualities-that-make-a-great-leader/#38e39c9d7754
[iii] Mullins, L.J. (2002). Management and Organisational Behaviour, 6th ed., Prentice Hall, London.
[iv] Rowe, W. G. (2007). Cases in Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
[v] Jones, E. E., & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of experimental social psychology, 3(1), 1–24.
[vi] Landau, M. J., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Cohen, F., Pyszczynski, T., Arndt, J., Miller, C. H., Ogilvie, D. M.,& Cook, A. (2004). Deliver us from evil: The effects of mortality salience and reminders of 9/11 on support for President George W. Bush. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 30 (9), 1136–1150.
[vii] Kakkar, H., & Sivanathan, N. (2017, August 11). Why We Prefer Dominant Leaders in Uncertain Times. Retrieved September 05, 2017, from https://hbr.org/2017/08/why-we-prefer-dominant-leaders-in-uncertain-times
[viii] Bennis, W. (1989). Why leaders can’t lead. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
[ix] Gowing, N., & Langdon, C. (2016). Thinking the Unthinkable: a new imperative for leadership in the digital age. Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.
[x] Guehenno, J.M. (2016). Changing Conflict and What it Means for Peacemakers. University Seminar presentation on February 25, 2016 at the “Problem of Peace” University Seminar at Columbia University.
[xi] Me! Tenzing Norgay (And so does the Encyclopedia! See The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. (2016, August 05). Tenzing Norgay. Retrieved September 05, 2017, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tenzing-Norgay)
[xii] The Institute for Functional Medicine. (n.d.). What is Functional Medicine? Retrieved September 05, 2017, from https://www.functionalmedicine.org/what_is_functional_medicine/aboutfm/
[xiii] See early article: Tough, P. (2004 June 20). The Harlem Project. New York Times Magazine.; and later book: Tough, P. (2009). Whatever it takes: Geoffrey Canada’s quest to change Harlem and America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
[xiv] The data tells the unfolding story. Between 2002 and 2011, 97.3 % of 4-year-olds participating in the Harlem Gems pre-school program scored average or above on the Bracken Basic Concept Scale. The first group of 6th grade students going through HCZ’s charter school, Promise Academy, graduated in 2012. Of them, 100% passed the English regents exam, 90% passed the Geometry exam, 96% passed the Algebra 2 and Trig exam, 92% passed the Integrated Algebra exam, and every senior accepted into and planning on attending a post-secondary school. Between 2011- 2012 — Promise Academy I placed in the 99th percentile of city high schools — with the 6th highest score in the city. Not unrelated, crime rates in Harlem have come down markedly to levels not seen since the 1960s, likely due in part to the work of the HCZ. (See New York State Education Department Data Site, accessed at http://data.nysed.gov; and Harlem Children’s Zone Goals and Achievements site, accessed at http://hcz.org/results/).