When I lived in downtown Boston, I was surprised by how standoffish everyone in my apartment building was. We would see each other twice a day in the elevator but we’d rarely exchange a word of greeting or acknowledgment. It was so bad, I remember thinking to myself at one point: Maybe this building is in the witness relocation program, and people are afraid they’ll be recognized.
Boston is the grumpiest place God ever created. Normally, I’d say the situation was beyond our individual or collective control. But recently I met a couple of guys who could actually change Boston’s emotional tone.
One of them is Nigel Jacob, the Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. We were talking at the Innovation Incubator at HBS and I asked him if there was something we could do about Boston’s witness relocation program. We talked about Culturematics and other urban mechanics. It was a lively conversation. But there was no obvious fix.
Then I met Richard Laermer, who is on the verge of launching Thank Bank, which is a social network designed to make it easier for people to express gratitude. Let’s say you are visiting a relative in the hospital and an orderly does them a special kindness. Typically, we think: Wow, what a thoughtful guy — but the thought dies on our lips for lack of an accessible and efficient way to capture and express it. That’s where Thank Bank comes in. It represents a new way to register and communicate gratitude.
Nigel, meet Richard. Richard, meet Nigel.
A city is, among other things, thousands of small gestures. Some are acts of kindness — when people say “hi” to strangers or let people into traffic. Some are acts of indifference or hostility — when people cut off others in traffic or ignore one another in elevators.
These acts do not zero out. The tone of one or the other prevails, and it helps define the city’s character. At the moment, Boston counts hostility as fundamental to its character. But it could be otherwise. Boston could start treating kindnesses as essentially Bostonian, and who knows where this might lead: the courtly grace of a place like Savannah, the cheerfulness of a Cincinnati, or the rough, good humor of a New York City? Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Reversing the Charles River would be easier.
Bostonians have been so mean so often for so long, a simple intervention just won’t cut it. The trick is to find a way to make kindness accelerate until it becomes the thing that everyone knows about Boston.
Nigel, meet Richard. Richard, meet Nigel.
Richard’s Thank Bank offers the opportunity to capture the structural effects of the kindnesses that take place in the city such as Boston. His system of acknowledgement and reward can take those kindnesses and fix them in place. I appreciate that this may take roughly as long as the parting of the Red Sea — but it is possible.
As Alex Bentley, Mark Earls, and Michael O’Brien have recently pointed out, we are profoundly social creatures who absorb and imitate the behaviors of others — often without thinking about it much. This is the way fashion works. Before we know it, and without making a conscious decision, we find ourselves wearing fuchsia or buying Capri pants. We are hard pressed to explain ourselves, because this social change worked by an invisible logic and in tiny increments.
And this is where the Thank Bank comes in. It helps kindness to live on long enough to have a structural effect. That is, we convert a few acts of kindness into a pattern of kindness. I understand that this is an implausible transformation. On the other hand, to rework a phrase from Stewart Brand, “[every] present moment used to be the unimaginable future.”
Let me address the elephant in the post. Many of you who pride yourselves on being tough-minded and perhaps even a little Bostonian, will look on this as the worst kind of magical thinking and would very much like to reassure me that “wishing cannot make it so.” Boston will never change. Cities don’t work this way. No Culturematic, however cunning, can sprinkle ferry dust on this city. Snap out of it.
Well, what about the broken windows phenomenon? In the 1970s, New York City was in a veritable death spiral. Urban problems were driving taxpayers out of the city, which lead to the underfunding of social services, which lead to still more serious urban problems. Some part of New York City’s astounding recovery is attributed to the broken windows policy that says if we address small crimes (i.e., graffiti and broken windows) we send a signal that someone is paying attention, that the rule of law remains in force and that the forces of civilization will prevail over criminality. So why not kindness over hostility? If we can preserve and reward small acts of Bostonian kindness, then maybe it’s possible to affect large-scale change and to establish a new standard of civic behavior.
Capturing and fixing tiny cultural gestures can lead to large social changes. But we need to discover the Thank Banks, urban mechanics, Culturematics, and other mechanisms that make this happen. The cost of failure? A life of witness relocation for millions of Bostonians.
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