GYoung (WMF)

See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Gyoung for the official blurb.

Gayle Karen Young, Chief Talent and Culture Officer

Gayle Karen Young

Chief Talent and Culture Officer, Wikimedia Foundation

"It’s not the easy and convenient life I seek, but life lived to the edge of all my possibility.” - Maryanne Radmacher

About me

(This page is undergoing construction, much like I am.)

Professionally, I'm an organizational psychologist. This means I work with organizations, teams, and individuals to support effective processes, execute to strategy, develop leaders, and engage employees.

Two key professional pieces that bear relevance in my personal life is that I am board chair of an innovative global women's human rights organization called Spark. My work in the human rights of women and girls is near and dear to my heart and Spark also has a commitment to developing leaders and allies. We leverage a networked approach because the complexity of global issues needs networked solutions. I also facilitate for the Women in Management program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which is another way that my commitment to supporting women in leadership roles emerges.

Personally, I am keenly interested in this world we live in, and it shows up in a large span of interests that include but are not limited to:

• International Travel: My most recent trip was in September 2011 to China and Cambodia. I've had incredible experiences - descending into the earth and darkness to see pre-historic cave paintings in the south of France, knelt to listen to Spanish mass in the midst of the Mosque of Cordoba, climbed up the central shaft of the Great Pyramid of Giza and marveled at the pillars of Karnak, kayaked down the Dordogne River Valley between ancient fortresses, listened to church bells from the towers of Carcassonne, and rock climbed along the beautiful Li River in China. I've traveled to the Baltic on a solitary sojourn to Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Russia by myself. I love the great cities of the world - New York, Hong Kong, Paris, London, Rome, as much as I love the little villages. I love visiting with local NGOs when I travel. During my trip to Vietnam, I spent time visiting with former trafficking victims, distributing scholarship money to girls for vocational school, and sitting in a sex ed class at the Adidas Factory outside Saigon.
• Neuroscience and Psychology: How does your brain work?! I want to know! This also includes an ongoing interest in systems of understanding personality (for adding language, not pigeonholing people) like the Enneagram, MBTI, etc.
• Futurist Causes: Humanity has always learned where it's had frontiers to reach for. The space program (I went to Space Camp) is a great example of this. I support where science and tech push our frontiers, so even if I don't personally care about whether we achieve the singularity, I deeply and fiercely support the singularity community, the anti-aging community, the seasteading community, etc.
• Reading: I love words, I love the way words strung together make different meanings, I love the way that words allow access to whole other worlds and places and states of being. I suppose this may also be a place to confess that I occasionally write fanfic.
• Science Fiction/Fantasy: I started reading at a very young age, long before I would talk to people, and disappearing into other worlds but also learning to stretch my imagination on that was fabulous.
• Poetry: For saying the things that go straight to the heart in the ways that prose can't
• Music: I play the piano at a mediocre level and the flamenco guitar appallingly poorly, but when I've heard flamenco guitarists in Sevilla, Spain, I know from my poor playing a small glimpse of the true skill of maestros. I've also experienced the bliss of singing the Hallelujah chorus of Handel's Messiah with a full orchestra, and I still love singing medieval sacred choral music or Broadway musical theatre songs around the house.
• Dancing: I was once a competitive ballroom dancer, in the rhumba, samba, and tango. It's been awhile though. I still teach, upon request, a really fun workshop to help people dance who really don't think they can! I have, at various points, been an avid lindy hop swing dancer, salsa dancer, double-veils belly dancer, and just generally am happy to be out on a dance floor.
• Role-playing Games: I still sometimes refer to slipping on the sidewalk as a fail to make a roll. I think much of what I learned about human interaction I picked up in live-action role-playing games (LARPs). I still miss being a part of a regular game - it's such a fascinating exercise of co-creating and imagination. I do not allow myself to play online games - I would never get anything done. For a while, I used to admin and code on MUDs/MUSHes.
• Perpetual Learning: I'm a workshop junkie. I'm not happy unless I've spent a few weeks a year learning.
• Spirituality: By however you define it, human meaning making structures and the ways we choose to interact with what we don't know. I'm currently in a two-year ordination program as a Sufi Cherag, and have also taken and deeply hold my vows as a Zen Buddhist. As a Zen teacher I had once said, "I'm not a spiritual teacher because I'm particularly better at being good, but because I love the sacred." I chose the study of Sufism because it includes with it an thorough study of all the world's major wisdom traditions, which goes back to the point of "learning junkie".
• Design: Exquisite fonts, letterheads, chairs, and coats make me deeply happy.
• Archery: This is my latest hobby! It's very exciting to me, actually. If there's a zombie apocalypse, I will be able to shoot one with some degree of reliability if it stands very still between 10 and 20 feet away. I like classic recurve bows, and having a quiver on my hip and a bow in my hands is one of the few times I feel like a badass. It's not Legolas, but it's something. Plus, watching your arrow sail into the bushes is great real-time feedback for your attention slipping or getting momentarily ungrounded and unfocused.

My work

I'm the Chief Talent and Culture Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. As part of the hiring process, WMF frequently asks people to work on a project or task as part of the hiring process, and here is mine: User:GayleKaren/WMF_Recruiting_Strategy_Project (Note: It's located off my personal/volunteer Wikipedia account because I worked on it before I came onboard to WMF). I completed it in December 2011, and naturally my thinking has evolved since actually becoming part of the organization and we've updated our internal recruiting strategy considerably, but I thought I'd keep this around.

Professional Development Focus Areas:

• Developmental Psychology - I study adult development and the relationship between development and leadership capacity. I'm particularly interested in supporting the development of people in transition spaces in their lives, where there's a lot of ambiguity and traditional societal structures don't offer guides through the sticky spaces. I'm experienced with the two measures that actually assess adult development. One is called the Subject-Object Interview developed by Dr. Robert Kegan, which is a way of interviewing to understand someone's meaning making structure. The other is called the Sentence Completion Test, pioneered by Jane Loevinger and then further revised and refined by Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter.
• Organizational Behavior - This field encompasses organizational structure and strategy, group dynamics, team development, etc.
• Integral Theory

Disclaimer: Although I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, please note that contributions under this account do not necessarily represent the actions or views of the Foundation unless expressly stated otherwise. For example, edits to articles or uploads of other media are done in my individual, personal capacity unless otherwise stated.

Contact

* E-mail: gyoungwikimedia.org

Thoughts about WMF

As I start to coalesce my thoughts about my role at WMF, I'd like to make them as visible as possible by putting them here. I wrote up this quick summary of some observations after my first month. User:Gyoung/WMFJan2012Thoughts

Some Quotes I Love:

• “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Viktor Frankl

• "How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradictions were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great passing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light." - Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

• "It does seem that we suffer from a collective cognitive dissonance. We know the children are starving; the ice caps really are melting. We know our designer sweats are connected to designer sweatshops; our automobiles to the turbid atmosphere; the food on our table to the dwindling water table and the chemicalized soil…We also know there’s already enough to feed, clothe, house, heal, and educate everyone, without exception. It’s less a shortage of resources than a short-changing of imagination: compassion being an ability to imagine – to see – the connection between everyone and everything, everywhere.” - from "Field Notes on a Compassionate Life" by Mark Ian Barasch

• "This is the reality we live: aspiring to be our best, longing for and sometimes finding meaning and connection within ourselves and that which is larger than ourselves, we are undone by messy bathrooms, traffic jams, and burnt toast. I am not interested in a spirituality that cannot encompass my humanness….Beneath the small daily trials are harder paradoxes, things that the mind cannot reconcile but the heart must hold if we are to live fully: profound tiredness and radical hope; shattered beliefs and relentless faith; the seemingly contradictory longings for personal freedom and a deep commitment to others, for solitude and intimacy, for the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living.” - Oriah Mountain Dreamer

• "If not to hunger for the meaning of it all, then tell me what a soul is for? Why have the wings unless you’re meant to fly? And tell me please, why have a mind if not to question why?" - Yentl

• "Not all who wander are lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien

• "The rule of no realm is mine...But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, ... if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in the days to come. For I am also a steward. Did you not know?" - J.R.R. Tolkien

This user is a psychologist.