Ep. 19: UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center Alexa Koenig on Using Social Media to Fight For Human Rights
In this episode, Darren Reinke chats with Alexa Koenig, Executive Director of UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center (HRC) and Co-Founder of the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab. Alexa discusses the spark that led her to fight for human rights, how the HRC uses social media to prosecute war criminals, and some of the tools leaders can use to build alignment when working with groups that may share different values or priorities.
The Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law promotes human rights and international justice worldwide and trains the next generation of human rights researchers and advocates. They are an independent research and training center that applies innovative technologies and scientific methods to investigate war crimes and other serious violations of human rights. Based on their findings, they recommend specific policy measures to protect vulnerable populations and hold perpetrators accountable.
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SHOW NOTES
An Overview of UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and Human Rights Center Investigations Lab [0:58]
How Alexa Became Involved in Human Rights [3:34]
How the Investigations Group Partners With Third Parties to Tackle Key Human Rights Issues [6:15]
How Alexa’s Team Uses Social Media as Evidence to Prove Human Rights Abuses [9:36]
The Range and Magnitude of the Human Rights Issues Alexa Faces Day to Day [13:10]
What the Human Rights Center Does to Prosecute War Criminals and Transform Legislation [15:45]
How Alexa Ensures Alignment Among the Different Teams She Works With [18:16]
What Sparked Alexa’s Book Titled “Graphic” [21:50]
What Today’s Leaders Need to Do to Support Current Causes [25:40]
The Importance of Taking Enough Vacation Time [36:00]
Why Organizations Need to Adopt Individual, Cultural, and Structural Shifts to Recharge Employees [36:55]
SHOW LINKS
Human Rights Center Website: https://humanrights.berkeley.edu
Human Rights Center on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hrcberkeley
Human Rights Center on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hrcberkeley/
Human Rights Center on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/human-rights-center-uc-berkeley/
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Darren Reinke: Welcome to The Savage Leader Podcast, where I interview leaders from all walks of life so that you can walk away with tips to apply to your life and your career. But this isn't your traditional leadership podcast because I believe that leadership tips come from successful entrepreneurs and business executives, of course. Still, they also come from unexpected places, like Navy SEALs, successful professional athletes, sports coaches, musicians, entertainers, and more. So let's dive right into today's episode; my hope is you walk away with something tangible that you can apply immediately to your life in your career. Today's guest on the savage leader podcast is Alexa Koenig. Alexa is the executive director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law, and is the co-founder of Human Rights Center investigations lab. Alexa, thanks for being here today. Thank you so much for having me. Such a weighty set of issues that you work on. Just to start off, can you just talk to the folks about what you're doing with the Human Rights Center, and then also with the investigations' lab?
An Overview of UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and Human Rights Center Investigations Lab [0:58]
Alexa Koenig: Sure. So, the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley has been around since 1994. On the Berkeley campus, when we were set up, we were designed to be a hub for people who are interested in issues of human rights concern international criminal law, war crimes, but you may come at those issues from very different directions. So, we work quite frequently with the journalism school, School of Public Health. We're based in the law school, but increasingly working with computer scientists, and others who really have something to contribute to how we improve and strengthen human rights in the 21st century. In 2016, we launched something called our Human Rights Center investigations lab, one of the issues we've been tackling for quite some time was how to make prosecutions of war criminals and human rights abusers stand up in courts of law. And one of the challenges that we are seeing in this space was some of the judges were quite critical of the prosecution team saying that they were over relying on the stories of survivors, and basically witness testimony, and wanting to see more corroborating information of what had happened in different sites of atrocity. One of the things that we began doing back in 2011 2012 was thinking about how new and emerging technologies were really changing how information flows around the globe, and how we could capture new insights from satellite imagery, drone footage, and increasingly information captured to smartphones and posted to social media that might really support what survivors were saying had happened in their communities, and ideally, strengthen this kind of overarching quest for justice. Our investigations' lab was an attempt to bring together some of the brightest and most dedicated students from across the Berkeley campus, whether graduate students or undergrads, and really take advantage of the fact that these are digital natives who care deeply about social justice, see if we could help train them to scour social media for information related to different abuses, and then verify that content so that our end users, our partners in the field really knew how reliable that online information was. And so today, we're partnering with three sets of different individuals, one are investigative reporters and other journalists. We're working very closely with human rights advocacy organizations, Amnesty International was our first partner. We've gone on to work with Human Rights Watch and other groups that are localized to different communities. And then the third group are legal practitioners. So, this could be anything from UN Commission's of inquiry, different fact finding missions around the globe, and of course, human rights, nonprofit lawyers who are really trying to get justice for some of the world's worst abuses.
How Alexa Became Involved in Human Rights [3:34]
Darren Reinke: So Alexa, tell me about what got you into the topic of human rights and just how you've been become more and more involved in that over time.
Alexa Koenig: Back when I was doing law school from 2000, to 2003, of course, 911 happened right at the, I guess, beginning of my second year of law school, it was a really interesting time to be learning about constitutional law and social justice. I think it was a watershed moment for many of us here in the United States, to think about our relationship to other countries around the world. But also, as we increasingly saw discrimination rising up against Muslim populations in the US and the ways that fear can really distort our relationship to legal principles. I think I really began to look at the social justice implications of national security processes. 2000 2003 was also a peak time here in the count in the Bay Area in California, of thinking through how digital technologies were transforming societies. So I kind of started on two tracks in law school, one looking at intellectual property in cyber law, which I ended up focusing on, but also international human rights. I never thought those paths would end up intersecting. But as we got a little bit further into the 2000s, and social media was really taking off. I think we were all collectively around the world beginning to see how social media can become a site for advocacy and for organizing in a way that I think many of us had not intended. And really this new area of technology and human rights was being born.
Darren Reinke: So interesting, I think so much of the media these days is social media and some of the deficiencies or some of the things that leads to, but I think it's brilliant that you've been able to harness that in a way for forces of good.
Alexa Koenig: Thank you. I mean, I think it's been a process of really learning from different pioneers in the space who got there first, there was a group of reporters based out of Ireland to formed an organization called Storyful, for example, who back around to 2010 really started experimenting with how you could source information from social media sites effectively and efficiently, and ultimately figure out really quickly what was happening in different parts of the globe where you didn't have boots on the ground, verify that content and get it out to major media to basically communicate those stories in a really timely way. I think we've done a lot at the Human Rights Center to try and learn from them about how you can really mind the breadth of information that we now have in digital spaces. I mean, just the volume of having 6000 tweets created every second, there's more communication going out than ever before, I think about what people around the world are experiencing. And the trick is often to find that signal in the noise and help get the right information in the hands of people who are in a position to do something about it, when we are dealing with human rights abuses and other wrongs around the world.
How the Investigations Group Partners With Third Parties to Tackle Key Human Rights Issues [6:15]
Darren Reinke: Can you double-click on that a little bit? I know from our past conversation, I've learned about some of the really important work that you're doing in the investigations' lab. Can you talk about how your group is, is working with these other third parties around the world, but to tackle some of these really important issues?
Alexa Koenig: Sure. So one of the things that we've been doing in the investigations' lab is partnering up increasingly with major media. So one of our most recent stories was a partnership with the Associated Press, they came to us and said that they had heard about the Myanmar military snatching bodies, killing people and then taking the bodies on the ground in Myanmar most likely of civilians, and wanted to know what we could find on social media about this particular phenomenon. So, we had a team that scraped Twitter and found over 2000 tweets and started combing through it for evidence of what came to be called body snatching. And what our team and their team increasingly found was that there did seem to be a phenomenon where civilians were being killed, their bodies were disappeared. When they were returned, often they were being returned with a story from the military that didn't match with the loved ones who remained could see. So, for example, in one instance, the family members were told that their deceased family member had died by falling off a motorbike. But it was very clear that that person had been attacked in the neck, there was a big gaping wound. So, these mismatch stories are something that we were observing, and that ultimately, we were able to partner with the Associated Press to get out more broadly, ideally, so that something is done in response. We've also been working quite a bit with legal fact finders, so helping them to understand how information posted to social media might be used to help strengthen the evidentiary foundations of their cases, in any legal prosecution. Ideally, the gold standard is you bring together the physical evidence of a crime. So, it might be the chemical weapons from the chemical weapons attack, you would bring that together with the documentary evidence, the traditional forms mean things like written orders, or contracts. And then the third part being the testimonial evidence, the stories that survivors say about what has happened to them or their loved ones, and kind of see if that all points in the same direction around the who, what, when, where, why, between an atrocity, increasingly, what we're finding is that so much of that traditional information that you would find in hard copy form is now posted in places on the internet. So social media is really just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how people are communicating. There's so much information when you begin to dig in, like databases that are posted online, or people or business and corporate websites, etc. That really become rich depositories for pulling together the network of people that might be implicated in a particular atrocity. And so I think increasingly, what we're trying to do is train our team at Berkeley, which is about 70 people, we speak about 30 different languages so that we can mind social media from very different perspectives who come from about two dozen different disciplines. And we create teams that are multidisciplinary teams to support the incredible work being done by these reporters and these lawyers to help complement their traditional forms of fact finding and give them the person power that they might need, combing through social media can be incredibly time-consuming. So having large teams that can go through a lot of material quickly and efficiently is really important. Finally, I think one thing we're really trying to do is help train others to do this work so that these more traditional teams really do have people within their own organizations who are sensitive to both the strength and weaknesses of social media as a repository of information.
How Alexa’s Team Uses Social Media as Evidence to Prove Human Rights Abuses [9:36]
Darren Reinke: Yes, interesting. As I can imagine, people just thinking social media is the record of true. So, how do you actually go about using that in an actual case? Obviously, this will probably tap into your legal mind, of course, but I'm just curious because to me, I think it's, well, that's interesting that that would be something that would actually slam the book in terms of a case, but how do you go about proving that?
Alexa Koenig: Yeah, great question. So, I think there's a lot of skepticism and healthy skepticism, to be honest. About information sourced from the internet and having that come as evidences in the case. And the reason for that is of course, as we all know, the online environment is an information environment that's replete with problematic content, whether its deep fakes, or it's just miss attribute information. So, I think the big challenge here is really to have strict verification protocols and processes so that the investigator knows how reliable that information is, and can share that information with a judge or a jury. So, they know how to evaluate whether this actually helps to find information related to a case because this is somewhat of a Wild West in terms of bringing this kind of information, particularly in to international criminal cases, we are realizing there's a lot of guidance and information sharing that needs to happen across the entire field of practice, in December of this past year, so 2020, we released publicly in partnership with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, something called the Berkeley protocol on digital open-source investigations. It's essentially a document that we worked on in partnership with them over three years, interviewing more than 150 people hosting a series of workshops to work on really sticky, unknown areas of law, to help figure out what kind of guidance would be helpful to legal practitioners and to reporters so that they had protocols that they could put in place for really being careful about how they mined information from online places, but also what the verification processes are that they could use to bring this into their daily practice. One thing we've seen across the field is just some really creative and collaborative work being done, where you take videos and photographs and text source from the internet, and piece it together to tell the whole story of a particular atrocity or human rights violation. And there have been several Pulitzers, one and Emmys, one for the kinds of work that's increasingly being pulled together. The concern we had, as legal practitioners, was seeing these really powerful pieces being constructed and going, Oh, no, what's going to happen if this goes in front of a judge, and the judge ultimately does possibly one of two things, looks at this really compelling collection of information and goes this is so damning, that ultimately, they kind of overvalue the information that's been put together by technologists, but that they don't know how to look under the hood of what's actually being done to really probe the reliability of the underlying content. The second is that they would say, I don't know how to probe the quality of this information. And therefore I need to kind of disregard it in ultimately making determinations of facts related to a case. And in that case, you've got potentially hundreds of hours and possibly even hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of time. And people who potentially risked their lives to capture that footage, having that all essentially be undervalued for what it can actually contribute to accountability and justice.
Darren Reinke: You've mentioned some examples and horrifying examples around what's happening in Myanmar. But can you talk about just the scope of the issues that you're focusing on, but also just the magnitude of it, I think we, we tend to see headlines. And I think we just people get busy in their day-to-day lives. And then they go about other things. But talk to me about the range of issues that you're focusing on, but also just the magnitude of what's going on out there.
The Range and Magnitude of the Human Rights Issues Alexa Faces Day to Day [13:10]
Alexa Koenig: So, the types of things that we might address really ranges quite significantly, when we had the elections here in the United States back in November. One of the things that some of our media partners had heard was that there was anticipated violence that might break out in different parts of the country, given this strongly contested election and how deeply people felt about the outcome of the presidential decision making process. So one of the things that we did was we set up what are called live monitoring teams, which are teams of anywhere from five to 10 people who were tasked with monitoring what was happening on social media related to a particular part of the globe. So you might have someone looking at San Francisco or someone else's looking at, you know, Seattle, someone else's going to Washington, DC, and really trying to have a sense in real time. What are people sharing on social media for about what's happening on the ground in their communities. And this we were grabbing, we're listening to police scanners, all sources of digital information, and putting that into a massive spreadsheet that we would share with our media partners so that they were aware of where different episodes of violence might be occurring, where particular incidents might be taking place that might be worth looking at more closely, or if they had a reporter on the ground in that city, they might be able to send that to them to go inquire about that more carefully, and ultimately kind of pull that information together. It's ended up that over the past year, we've worked on everything from violence related to the US elections to the blinding of protesters by police in different communities. So very much a US based focus given political realities here in the United States over the past year, but then also looking at attacks on health care and health workers. One minute A study we did with insecurity insight documented over 1100 acts of violence perpetrated against healthcare workers and health care facilities, more than 400, of which were directly tied to the COVID 19 pandemic. And so one of the big insights there is that as people's fear began to climb related to the pandemic, they were increasingly taking out their fears and frustrations, particularly when they couldn't access loved ones who are hospitalized, etc, on the personnel who are trying to save their lives or dealing with this crisis, unlike anything most of us have ever been part of. And so part of that is trying to pull out the policy and the lessons learned from all of that of how we ensure that our healthcare workers who really have been heroes over the past year are safeguarded and freed up to do the work that they do so well.
What the Human Rights Center Does to Prosecute War Criminals and Transform Legislation [15:45]
Darren Reinke: And that brings up an important point is how are you taking all of these insights, obviously, to prosecute or criminals but also to impact legislation here domestically? But even globally? How do you go about taking some of those, those findings, some of those reports, and actually enacting real change,
Alexa Koenig: I think a big value add, hopefully, of our organization, and others who are doing similar work, or how multidisciplinary they are. So, I think when you're dealing with a global crisis, or you're dealing with a really horrific atrocity, it's important to put people at the center of that experience, and to realize that the challenges that they're facing cannot be addressed just through law or just through public health. But you really need to take a holistic approach to ensuring that people's experiences are as positive as they can be. And so, one thing I think that we have found can work well, at least at our center, is to be able to work with media. So, when you need to put public pressure or bring public awareness to a particular phenomenon, figuring out who has a platform to reach the people who need to be hearing what's happening, those partnerships can be extraordinarily powerful and important. And we're actually looking to increase our relationship with the investigative reporting program at UC Berkeley to see if we can be even more strategic and thoughtful about how we're able to bring these trainings and insights to journalists who don't already have them, and partner with them to get these stories out. The second part is because we do have a legal investigations team as well, we often think very critically about Alright, is the way to have positive human rights impact, to get more information out into the world, or is it to take the information that's already out there and see if it can be transformed into evidence that will meet the standards of a court of law to ultimately hold perpetrators to account. And so, I think that is the area where really a lot of these methods are still quite new, and standards and protocols and practices are still being developed. And what we're trying to do is take our insights from media practice, from our work with human rights organizations, bring that into legal practice, but help make sure that due process protections are in place and other safeguards, so that when someone is prosecuted, and social media becomes a piece, or one of the many tools that's used to get that prosecution, we have tremendous faith in that legal process.
Darren Reinke: Yeah, one of the things that it makes me think, is just the disparate groups, types of constituencies that you work with just whether it's the media, whether it's NGOs, whether it's governments, and just the range of issues from these, you know, geo issues to things that are happening locally in our backyard. So, how do you go about engaging with the different groups to gain alignment and to create change? Obviously, something I think about always from a leadership perspective, how have you gone about that because there's so many such a range of groups are involved in all the things that you're working on.
How Alexa Ensures Alignment Among the Different Teams She Works With [18:16]
Alexa Koenig: I think it's really keeping our ears open, and our mouth shut as most as much as possible, but also letting groups know that we're available to provide training or to give additional capacity if they need those resources. Even five years ago, I really felt like there was a lot more siloing in kind of investigations, generally, you had people who are working on intelligence practices, who didn't share much information, media, you didn't see the kinds of collaborations that I think we're increasingly seeing today, not only across media teams, but also within who kind of constitutes that team. Now you're increasingly seeing computer scientists, people with geospatial imagery expertise, who can read satellite images, got people who are really good at coming online spaces, and then people who are really good at the boots on the ground interviewing that often drives a lot of the leads that I think are so important. But you know, I think for our team, we've done everything from trained congressional staffers in the United States to helping to train Interpol to training different UN bodies, to also just working really with grassroots frontline organizations who are doing the really hard frontline work day-to-day in different parts of the world. So, we've worked with Syrian expats, we've worked with weaker expats at this point. A lot of this is really to help people to improve the health of the information ecosystem by helping people better understand its strengths and weaknesses. A big piece of this work is also, of course, putting in place kind of ethical protocols and practices. So, I think it's often people don't realize until they start really doing this work how much information. We're all leaking in online spaces all the time. And it can be really horrific when you start investigating yourself to just see how much can be found out about you in five to 10 minutes by beginning to use your Twitter handle or some other handle that you have commonly used in online places. And so, I think bringing greater awareness to the digital security implications of this work and what people are increasingly doing, who may be investigating you is really important, the physical security pieces, if you do this investigation, if you publish information, who might you be endangering with your publication? And then third, how do we think about the psychosocial aspects of this? So one of the challenges for teams like ours is you're looking at the worst things that human beings can do to each other. And you're looking at it at a scale that most humans were not designed to actually process really upsetting information at. And so a lot of people mistakenly think when they hear about doing remote investigations, oh, well, the good news is your team is safe. They're not boots on the ground in a place like Syria, or Myanmar. And while that is, of course, true, and the physical security implications for at least our team, maybe less doing the digital investigations may still be physically endangering people on the ground in that country. It also means that we've got to have really good protocols in place to give ourselves a little distance from the material and be able to process it and do this work for the long haul without becoming, experiencing secondary trauma ourselves or becoming burnt out.
Darren Reinke: Yeah, such an important point in I was having a conversation with someone recently, they have an organization that actually filters a lot of the social media content, just they have a lot of, you know, mental health breaks and a lot of protocols and procedures, they have to protect them because of just the volume and the intensity. So, actually leads us to the next thing I want to ask you about is your new books. And your new book is focused a lot around that. Can you talk a little bit about your book, but also just reflecting back on what you just said in terms of how can people better either insulate themselves or equip themselves to better handle with some of these just really horrifying images that they're coming across?
What Sparked Alexa’s Book Titled “Graphic” [21:50]
Alexa Koenig: Yeah, thank you. So, the book that I'm working on right now with Andrea Lampros, at the Human Rights centers, a book called graphic, and it's one that we really began working on pretty intensely after the George Floyd, the videos of George Floyd's killing, came up on social media and realizing that a lot of what we were learning about how to handle some of this really upsetting imagery, and how to work with it for greater meaning and impact might be things that are worth sharing with a broader audience, given the broad exposure of many of these horrific incidences today. And so really, what the book is focused on is kind of the three steps that we've really worked on as a community of practice. We have a colleague, Sam Dubberly, who I think has been really instrumental in helping us think critically about these things. But the first thing, awareness, I think, knowing what everyone's baseline is, how often are you sleeping and eating to see you're even aware when you begin to see shifts in your own practice in your relationship to spending time online. A second is there are a lot of tricks that come out from intelligence groups and investigations groups that can help to minimize some of the overwhelming impacts of online information. So, I don't know if you remember the massacre that happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, a couple of years ago, a young man came, and he ended up killing more than 50 people and targeting Muslim populations in Christchurch, New Zealand, he live-streamed the massacres in real time, of course, and unfortunately, quite a broad swath of the population ended up seeing those live streams and I think the challenging thing there is that while it's really important to know what's happening in the world, it's also not necessarily critical that we all be bombarded with this really graphic imagery, when we're not prepared for it. So, we've discovered little things and so of others in this area of practice of if you minimize the sound, so much of the emotion in something we see online is carried in the woman pleading for her life for the baby screaming for its mother. That's not necessarily stuff we need to have at full volume turned up all the way. Same thing with the ways we watch this stuff. So if you know you're going to see a particularly upsetting video, to have it as miniaturised as possible so that you are not bombarding yourself that you're not looking at these things late at night, that you are sensitive to where and how and under what conditions you're engaging with the material, and ultimately giving yourself as much control over that situation as possible. Psychologists have shown that when you feel out, that anxiety comes from having a lack of control. And depression really stems from having a lack of hope about the future. So, a lot of what we advise and what we work on with our teams is figuring out how do we bring better control to the person engaging with online material? And how do we give them a better sense of impact and meaning, and what's possible with that material that they're engaging with? The final thing I'll just say is we found there's really protective aspects to having a sense of community. So thinking to how we create a sense of community and online places or during a pandemic like this, when you are actually physically isolated from each other, you will do little things like just turning on video chat and having ourselves work in parallel as if we're all working in the same room, just to try and recreate as much of that sense of community as possible, not allow that it's how do we insulate ourselves? How do we adapt? How do we overcome some of these things that we see. But then also, I love the way you spun it around so beautifully in terms of how can we actually nurture and foster that greater sense of community? What a really powerful and important message. Thank you. Appreciate it. So one thing just, I think is also interesting is that, you know, there's groups like yours, there's groups around the world who are focusing on these really important issues. I also think about what responsibilities we have as leaders, as organizations, as members of our community to get involved and support some of these things.
What Today’s Leaders Need to Do to Support Current Causes [25:40]
Darren Reinke: So what are some things that that leaders need to be thinking about to support all of these range of causes, whether they're here locally in the US, or whether they're issues that are happening around the world, I mean, things like human trafficking, talk about children and getting married early, I guess children getting married in general is obviously a problem. So, talk about some of those issues in terms of in what should leaders be thinking about? How can they be getting involved? I mean, I really applaud I know Ashton Kutcher has really stepped out on social media and focused human trafficking, but beyond celebrities, people who have a following whether it's on social media, or just they have a platform, they have a budget, they have a way to enact change. So, what should organizations community members be thinking about of how they can actually get involved and make an impact?
Alexa Koenig: Thank you for that question. It's, it's such a great question. One thing that I think is always really interesting is, you know, at the organizational level, I would really think about what is the cultural change you'd like to see happen, and that is really tied to your own mission and mandate. So if you are, I think, unfortunately, in the world today, there's so many things that are going wrong, but that we actually do have some power to influence whether it's climate justice related issues, racial justice related issues, to find that issue that really resonates with your team, and practical ways to actually engage for us. I think that, you know, we obviously work on a range of issues, one of our most recent reports was really focused on child marriage. And what I think was particularly innovative about our health and human rights team's approach to that was the dedication to not just going out there and studying a population and coming back with recommendations for policymakers. But they actually worked in very creative ways directly with the girls and young women who were experiencing child-marriage themselves, and really had them lead the conversation about what they think drives child marriage, and how that can best be addressed. I think for any organization, really listening to what people on the front lines have an issue, you're trying to tackle what they're saying they want and what they need. And are you the right organization to help make a difference in that space can go a really long way. Where I see organizations sometimes trip themselves up is when they're trying to lead without listening. And unfortunately, I think that's where you begin to see this gap between what can really have impact on the ground, where the people who are on the front lines really do own the problem. And sometimes what they suggest is not going to be what you want to hear. In those cases, it may be that the best thing you can do is we're not the organization to fix that and to engage on that issue in that way. But we know someone who might be and to maybe make those connections for greater impact because I think for every organization, we have networks and relationships and insights that can be extremely invaluable for people who are really addressing things top, you know, on the front. The other big thing that I think I really learned from the investigations' lab is this idea that Leadership isn't always vertical. And I know that's something that already a lot of people are thinking about and grappling with. But what I've really loved about our team is that so much of what we do was designed and driven by the students, there's no one person on any of these investigations teams that can be the authority or the expert in the space, just because it depends on such a broad range of skills, whether it's the language skills, scraping skill, like the more text-based skills, whether it's the sociological skills, etc. So because of that, we're all dependent on each other, it almost reminds me of Ensemble Theater teams, where everyone comes into trying to create a whole new world for an audience, and everyone brings what they can, and really has to improvise off each other to create a world that you're all making in real time. And I think that where we have been strongest as a team is recognized that sometimes the people who would structurally be seen as at the bottom of a hierarchy, actually sometimes are the right people to be driving the train and really pushing us in a certain direction. I think our work on ethics and on resiliency is stronger because oftentimes it's been the students themselves who said, Wait, we're missing something fundamental. And hopefully, we've created a culture that can really then listen to that and bring that and adapt that into our day-to-day practice.
Darren Reinke: Yeah, there's so much richness to what you said. I mean, I could pause and go deep on any one of those 5 6 7 things, but just listening to what they want, and taking that focusing on the people that you're trying to, to impact. I think that seeing if it fits, and I think that's so important because I imagine people want to get involved and champion change, but they need to see if that doesn't really align with their mission. If it does, it can be really powerful. I think sometimes. I mean, its wonderful companies are committing budget to focus on issues, but what else can they do to help, you know, find other ways to help whether it's their network, whether it's their relationships, whether it's their expertise beyond just the capital, they can apply, obviously, you know, human capital is really important to in terms of getting volunteers. But I also love the way you said, I think it's so important is you talk about strengths, you didn't use the word strengths, but people in their different skills and their experiences, and it's not always the person on top, who should lead a certain initiative or a certain project, it should be based on their expertise. So, I think that's so important, something I champion, also with leadership teams is, it's not always the quote unquote, person who has the right title on their business card. But it's really based on expertise and strengths. I think so many, you pointed so many things about how organizations can get involved, but also what a fabulous way to create a highly collaborative and innovative team,
Alexa Koenig: I think we've been really grateful for the insights that have come out of it that have helped keep us actually at the front of this field of practice because we're not doing things one way. And then sticking with that model. I think anytime you bring tech, particularly digital tech into any area of practice, things change so quickly, that the people who are hired to manage the teams, if they're not listening to the people on the ground, in particular, the newest people coming in, I think there's something to be said for giving the new people the history and the context, but then allowing for that new creativity and innovation. To give one example of what you were talking about the title on the business card, we had a number of students who graduated from our investigations' lab; there's only a small handful of people who are really coming out of academic institutions who have these skills. And I remember at one point, a large major inter governmental bureaucracy was looking to hire some online open-source investigators like our team. And actually, we're very close that just made an offer and ended up having to resend it to the person that they were bringing on board because she didn't have a graduate degree. And they were so bureaucratic and formulaic that it didn't fit the parameters of what they designed for this job. But really, that was demonstrating a big mismatch between what you need to do this job well, and kind of more traditional understandings of what it makes to be a great leader in this space, I'm hoping that we're gonna see a lot of creativity and room for growth. The other thing is knowing where your impact is, when we first set up the investigations' lab. And we're partnering with all these amazing organizations, reporters, lawyers, advocacy groups, we thought our impact would be on helping to source information that were coming directly from servers and getting that out more broadly to the world. And while that was a source of impact, what I grossly underestimated was the impact that would come from working directly with students themselves and a next generation that were coming through these two dozen different disciplines. Because instead of hitting, say, computer science students over the head with ethics classes, they were having to live the ethical quandaries that come from sourcing information about people in very vulnerable contexts, who you share that with, under what conditions, what kinds of technology, you're going to get to pry into the most sensitive parts of their lives. And so, you know, it became a living lab that benefited, I think, not just social justice issues broadly. But ultimately, every person whether it's me as one of the leaders on the team, or one of the students, and it's radically, I think shifted our perspective on how you do human rights work in the 21st century
Darren Reinke: You've has such an important point is you've actually amplified your impact, not only do you have the impact you have externally on the populations you're trying to change into to have impact, but also anyone who comes through your organization, you've changed them fundamental in terms of how they go out in the world, and how they work within your organization, but even beyond in the work that they do. So it's neat to see that just the impact that you have, and also experience on show learning. It's not just learning in a classroom, it's actually learned in your lab. It's a learning lab of sorts, which is pretty cool.
Alexa Koenig: Yeah, I think all the work we've done on ethics has been because we were dealing with ethical questions every day and realizing that there were no clear-cut answers. And so, we really did have to create some kind of protocol for ourselves on how are we going to address and do this decision-making around how we operate, we don't want to just be frozen, we need to do something. But we need to do something in a smart way that isn't going to ultimately create more risks and dangers than we're ultimately trying to address. I think as human rights practitioners, we realized we really had to walk the walk of if we are trying to make the world better from a human rights perspective. We shouldn't just be doing the human rights work for the people on the ground. We need to live those values and the ways that we operate and ideally strengthen not only the collective experience in the lab, but the experience of every individual. I think what's been good about that is that as you know the 500 people or so who've now come through the investigations lab and have gone out into the world, they've now gone into major tech company He's major media, major legal firms, United Nations, etc. And they're bringing a lot of that ethos around collaboration and creativity and resiliency with them, they're sometimes butting up in these more traditional cultures against some of the limitations, I think. So, we're really writing, and we just got recently got a grant to figure out how we take the diversity and equity inclusion, what's working in our lab, and help to take some of the insights around what we've been learning from our students and share that out with communities more broadly.
Darren Reinke: Yeah, you said, so many more interesting things. Me, I love what you said about it's you're focusing on the values external, but you really have to live those, you have to walk the walk. And it all starts with the leader, and then the leadership team and then cascading out from everything that's so important because, and having alignment, like, we can't just have these values that we have externally in the marketplace, we want to change the lives of our consumers, but we're actually not changing the lives of our employees. I think it's a great example of how you're actually changing the world. But you're also changing the couple of 100 folks that have come through the lab.
The Importance of Taking Enough Vacation Time [36:00]
Alexa Koenig: I think one of my greatest guilts recently is honestly not taking more vacation time. Because I think it's very easy when you're working on issues of social justice, and you're passionate about your work to always work harder and work more. And I think there's a natural inclination in any organization to foster an environment where people are deeply dedicated to their jobs. What we're now really struggling with and trying to figure out is how do you be deeply dedicated to your job and realize part of doing your job responsibly is to actually take breaks and take vacations? And how do we make those paid so that ultimately, we realize we are then investing in the people who are taking those paid vacations to do work that is just as important as some of the investigations work that they are doing, which is to figure out how they could do this for the long haul to be sustainable in this position, and to really live the values that we are hopefully operating under.
Darren Reinke: And that's an unintended consequence. Or maybe it could be predicted. But so, how do you actually do that? Practically speaking, I think, so many people are they struggle, if they're really passionate about their work, whatever it may be, whether it's working in tech, or working in an industry or an area like human rights is, how do you get people to actually take their foot off the gas and a few others taking care of themselves taking time off, so they can actually come back and bring the best to their job? Any tips and tricks you have for ripple?
Alexa Koenig: I think for organizations, in particular, for leaders, it's to think through what can be done at the individual level. So, how do I empower each member of my team to know when I need a break and to know and to feel comfortable asking for it to know what practices they can put into their daily lives to make sure that they are as healthy mentally, physically as they can be? The second is cultural. So, how do I as a leader help to foster and underscore and continually feed a set of norms that makes it so that people feel comfortable saying, This investigation is getting to me, I thought I wanted to work on Syria because I'm Syrian, but I'm actually finding that it's too politically sensitive. And so, I'd like to switch teams, do we create the room culturally, for people to be able to have that kind of self awareness and ultimately benefit our investigations? Because the right people are working on the right pieces of whatever puzzle we're trying to solve. The third is structural. So, what kinds of internal structures can we create that is going to give people the support and the resources that they need, and part of it is a mind shift? I think for myself, you know, when I first started doing this work, I didn't see pay, I saw paid time off more as an expense for the organization than actually an investment in the future quality of our work. And the individuals who've been so carefully selected to do this work and bring so much passionate intelligence and creativity to it. If I'm churning through them, then I am not living the Human Rights practice I'm supposedly supporting. But the, I'm also really, from a very utilitarian sense, squandering the extraordinary power that we have as a community to really support each other and to do the highest quality work possible. So, I do think that individual cultural and structural approach can be really helpful in trying to reset when something starts to get off path to kind of bring things back in alignment with what you're hoping to accomplish.
Why Organizations Need to Adopt Individual, Cultural, and Structural Shifts to Recharge Employees [36:55]
Darren Reinke: So Alexa, where can people go to find out more about all that you're up to at the Human Rights Center in the investigations' lab, but also to learn more about your books.
Alexa Koenig: We have a website, human rights.berkeley.edu. We would love to see people, and you could reach out to us through that website. Also follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the usual places, and we would love to engage. Thank you.
Darren Reinke: Great. Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time today.
Alexa Koenig: Thanks, Same.
Darren Reinke: Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Savage Leader Podcast. My hope is you walk away with tactics that you can apply to become a better leader in your life and in your career. If you're looking for additional insight in tactics, be sure to check out my book titled The Savage Leader 13 Principles to Become a Better Leader From The Inside Out. Also, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and I would truly appreciate it if you would leave a review and also rate the podcast. Thanks and see you in the next episode.