This is a very personal book for both me and my father and co-author, David Chanoff. Its origins are in a seminal experience I had as a young refugee worker in Africa. Early in the year 2000, a colleague and I were sent into the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a rescue mission to evacuate survivors of countrywide massacres. I did not anticipate that the experience would shape and change me as it did. But the unexpected life-and-death dilemma that confronted us there in a country torn apart by war has forced on me years of reflection. During that mission we faced a decision about whom to take with us, if we could, and whom to leave behind, if we had to. I've pondered ever since: Did we do the right thing? What if we had lost more people? Could I have lived with myself if everyone had perished?
My colleague and I argued our options out during a long, sleepless night, the two of us on different sides about what to do. I had never before been tested by anything remotely resembling this. It was, for both of us, what one writer on moral decision making calls "a crucible," the kind of experience that has the potential to transform a person from who he or she was into somebody with a far clearer sense of self and the rock-bottom values that matter most.
I was unprepared to make a decision of this kind. I had only been working in Africa for six months then. I had never worked in a country at war. I had never had to hire armed guards to protect massacre survivors in a place where many of their family members and friends had been hunted down and killed. I had never had to deal with violent, duplicitous government officials out to either use our rescue operation for their own purposes or shut it down and do their worst to the people we were trying to protect.
During the mission I took precautions to make sure the Congolese officials did not know our precise evacuation plans. Government spies had likely bugged my room and were monitoring emails and phone calls. In spite of this I felt the need to communicate with my parents, to let them know I was all right and to give them some idea about what was happening. Just as I had never done this sort of thing, I knew that this was a new experience for them as parents, worrying about a child of theirs working in a place of great danger.
With a Finnish mom and an American dad, I grew up bilingual. Even if my emails were monitored, I thought it unlikely that the spies could decipher Finnish. So in brief moments at the computer I fired off emails to my parents in my mom's native language, telling them I was okay and a little about what was going on.
After the rescue operation my dad, David, and I started up a conversation that has gone on for years about what happened back then: how that life-and-death dilemma changed the person I was, and how hard-choice dilemmas have impacted others we knew. For myself, that experience shaped the way I looked at people who had suffered violence and persecution in their home countries that forced them into lives as refugees. Eventually I founded a non-governmental organization (NGO), RefugePoint, whose mission is to protect the lives of those who are overlooked or forgotten by the world's humanitarian networks.
Over the last ten years as I've built this organization, I've continually returned to that decision point in the Congo. It has become a guidepost for my leadership because it forced me to think about my own values and the best way to express those through my actions.
As RefugePoint grew, the talks with my dad increasingly focused on to how to build and lead an organization. Eventually those talks extended to discussions with our Berrett-Koehler editor about my particular experience and how that related to leadership more broadly. My interest in understanding what this decision meant for me grew into an exploration of what critical decision points have meant for others, and about the nature of leadership, and into this book.
And who better to co-write it with than my dad? He was intimately engaged from those first emails he received from the Congo, and he has been a colleague as well in the evolution of RefugePoint. Not least, in his own career he has collaborated on books with leaders in the military, business, health, politics, and other fields, many of whom have experienced their own critical decision points.
The book is in two parts. In Part I, I tell the story of the Congo rescue operation in my own voice and in some detail. We regard this as a kind of "story of stories," the platform for our thoughts about how people make moral decisions and how those experiences can shape who we are and how we interact with our own organizations and communities. In Part II, my dad and I go on to tell the stories of people from many walks of life who have themselves faced decision points that have been pivotal for them. These stories speak to our common need to know who we are. They tell us how this essential knowledge of our own values can transform the impact we make on those around us, how it can, and often does, lead to a calling that we may well have had no idea we harbored within ourselves.
From Crisis to Calling is about moral leadership, the kind that doesn't leave anyone behind. It's about how to identify this kind of leadership within yourself by using crucible moments, or decision points, to hone in on and bring out the humanitarian values such as empathy and compassion that are intrinsic in all of us. It's about how to take advantage of the hardest decisions in our lives in order to tune in to our moral core and use it as a lodestar for leadership.
Sasha Chanoff
