Learning from Experts

I read a lot of nonfiction books. Well, if you’re going to be a stickler about it, I listen to a lot of nonfiction books, because my best brain time is when I’m doing something else and audiobooks make the three loads of dishes I do every day a lot more tolerable. One thing I’ve learned from my hours and hours of nonfiction listening is that the experts really do have insights that the rest of us haven’t thought of.

I don’t think that we should always do exactly what any given expert is saying, and frankly, the state of science reporting in this country is appalling, but one reason I like listening to nonfiction is that every field brings with it its own lens for looking at the world. People who have spent their whole lives looking deeply into one thing are changed by it. I’m a people person, so I like hearing their views just to see how they’re so different than I think.

For example, I listened to an amazing book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness, which was about how our brains trick us into thinking the world is terrible and getting worse every day when, in reality, many of our efforts in medicine and economic development are steadily working. The writer was a research physician who had worked primarily in the developing world, and then later in his life, had devoted his time to making complex information more digestible to leaders and laypeople. Throughout the book, he talks about how, as a doctor working in places with limited resources, choices are just…different. You begin to think in terms of how many lives are saved with low-level intervention instead of how to save every last life.

Why am I talking about this in the context of advocacy? Well, I think that a lot of us are great at identifying problems but not so great at figuring out useful solutions. For example, our neighborhood doesn’t have consistent sidewalks. It’s a problem. If you want to stay on a sidewalk, you have to cross the street several times over the course of a block .Kids walking to school are unsafe, people walking their dogs are unsafe, and it makes it less likely that any of us will get out there and exercise.

So far, I have identified a problem. And since I’m not an expert, I have an easy solution. Get the city council to build more sidewalks. So maybe I decide to go to some city council meetings, I put my name on the list, make a public comment, hey, I even get a few friends to help me. And still nothing happens.

Because I’m not looking at this through the lens of those who are experts at this. I need to go out there and find out what the true steps are. How many people do I reasonably need to get together for this? Should I reach out to a city councilmember individually to get their input and support? What have other towns done in this situation?

As it turns out, my city council has a sidewalk plan that is publicly available. Now I’m starting to see through their lenses. The project lists off all of the roads in our city that have inadequate sidewalks, assigns points to them based on proximity to schools, connection to public transit, current safety status, and…wait for it…public demand for replacement. My sidewalks haven’t had much public outcry, but given the criteria, it looks like that’s the only lever I have to pull. The public works people have thankfully already done most of the work in assessing safety and cost.

Now that I’m seeing how the experts approach it, I can see what I need to do next to maybe get this problem solved and make my community a nicer place to live. This may seem like such a simple example, but first of all, anyone who has tried to get their town to do a public works project knows it’s complicated, and second of all, solving small problems often helps to solve the bigger ones, in my experience. How can you start to learn about a problem you’ve noticed? Can you find information from experts on how to approach it?