Donald Robertson
Born October 27, 1952, in Union City, TN. At age 12, Don experienced his first flight in an airplane on a vacation with his friend’s family to Florida. The boys rented a kayak and paddled out to sea, their first time and with no adult supervision. Past the breakers, a Nautilus class nuclear submarine surfaced off the coast and the two boys tried to row out to it, but it turned out to sea. They never got close, but they had believed they had a chance.
That first airplane ride in 1964 inspired both boys to want to learn to fly. After high school, his friend became a private pilot and Don became a flight instructor at age 19. In 1971 Don joined the Air National Guard and in 1977 became an air traffic controller with the FAA.
In 1981, Don was one of 17,500 controllers that went on strike against the FAA. All were fired. His decision caused him to become unemployed and often unwanted because of resentment toward the strike. Don found work at Sears, retail lumber companies, and as a police dispatcher. In December 1984, he returned to the federal government at the Defense Mapping Agency Aerospace Center.
While working for the government Don obtained an undergraduate degree in Legal Studies and a graduate degree in Management and Leadership. He learned about leadership, systems thinking, and the role curiosity, imagination, and innovation play in transforming lives, through research of work by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Russell L. Ackoff, Lakota authors—Joseph M. Marshall, III, Albert White Hat Sr., and Vine Deloria, Jr., Sir Ken Robinson, Sir David Attenborough, Paul Shepard, and the comedic essays of George Carlin. Carlin’s essays turned out to be warnings of how America has headed in the wrong direction.
Don retired from the government in 2016 and has enjoyed time with family, touring the country, woodworking, and continuing his research.
Entering his eighth decade, he sees a lot wrong: the environment, politics, religion, the education system, corporate prominence, apathy, low self-esteem, high incidence of narcissism, sick nationalism, and arrogance. But if you’re thinking about something that you’ve never done before, he believes it’s like paddling out into the ocean to chase a nuclear submarine, the only real failure is not trying.
655: Donald Robertson, part 2: Seeking a Wolf
Donald committed to seeking out seeing a wolf. He shares about his experience on this commitment. He shares his deep connection and commitment to nature and how the project affected it.
Donald thinks and acts in systems. We know we are a part of nature, but not all of us behave as if we understand what that means. Donald shares what it means to him, given his background in systems based especially in one of my great role models, W. Edwards Deming.
634: Donald Robertson, part 1: Thinking in Systems (a third listener episode)
Don regularly reads my blog. We’ve emailed for years so after inviting to record episodes with other listeners, I invited him.
We both find a systems perspective the most effective way to understand and act on our environmental problems. I enjoyed talking to him about systems. Many people see them as technical, to the extent they get the view at all, but you don’t have to work with them that long to see they are how to understand the environment and how we can act on it effectively.
The alternative is to keep proposing solutions that sound nice but exacerbate our problems, things like trying to reduce carbon emissions alone, carbon offsets, recycling, chasing efficiency, and plans that accelerate the system and its polluting results. What works is changing our values, goals, images, beliefs, and things leaders work on. Changing the system, not being more efficient.
If you get and like systems, you’ll find our conversation refreshing. If you don’t get systems, you’ll appreciate learning from our conversation.