Arriving at the Question April 10, 2026 By Class55 Share: Class 55 By: Logan Robertson Huecker, Jared Davit, and Cesar Mendoza There is nothing quite like the night before an early morning flight. The excitement that keeps you from sleeping. The fatigue that makes you need it. The hourly glance at your phone to confirm the alarm is still set, and the eventual surrender to the day and the bag already packed by the door. By 4:30 Thursday morning, Class 55 had gathered at Sacramento International, arriving from the whirlwind of our individual lives and the particular demands of California agriculture in April. We came from different valleys, different pressures, different conversations half-finished. And then, in the soft noise of a terminal before dawn, something shifted. Soft voices. Coffee. The easy rhythm of people who are learning to show up for one another. Our momentum and our direction once again coming into alignment. The flight east offered the unique perspective of altitude. The geometric grid of the Central Valley gave way to the Sierra Nevada with this year’s scant snowpack. We glided over Lake Tahoe, the Great Basin, and the Rockies, and all along the way the constellations of pivot irrigators, each circle a statement of faith in human ingenuity and perseverance. From 35,000 feet, the land reads differently. The systems underneath became visible – the hydrology, the infrastructure, the long human effort to live on and from the land. We were, without yet naming it, zooming out. Chicago announced itself on approach: downtown a cluster of spiky towers, small against the vast turquoise expanse of Lake Michigan to the east and the city radiating out in all other directions. For fourteen members of our class, the skyline was familiar. For ten, it was a first impression, and a momentous one. We gathered our luggage, boarded the bus, and made our way to the Hyatt House in the West Loop, thanks to captains Emma Sertich, Kevin Voorhees, and Jeremy Wagner, who shepherded us through airports and baggage claims with steady competence. By mid-afternoon, we had settled into Gathering Room 2 for the session that officially opens every CALF seminar: the Posture Check. The Posture: Zoom Out Each seminar, Dr. Dane White introduces a leadership posture, a metaphor to be explored and practiced as we move through our leadership journey. We have stretched into discomfort, held the tension of velvet-covered brick, toggled between drivers and passengers, cultivated curiosity, and learned to set the temperature rather than simply read it. Thursday’s posture arrived with the quiet authority of something we already knew we needed. Zoom Out. Dr. White opened with a simple portrait of how most people solve problems: identify what seems wrong, find the quickest fix, apply it, move on. It is efficient. It is satisfying. And then the problem comes back. The session asked us to follow the chain further, from symptom to trigger to cause to the system beneath. In pairs, we practiced asking “and what caused that?” at least five times, each iteration pulling us one layer deeper, past the obvious, past the comfortable, into the territory where real change becomes possible. The diagnosis that came from that exercise was as applicable to our industries as to any individual problem we brought into the room: most fixes only address the first circle. The system, left untouched, produces the same problem again. “This seminar,” Dr. White said, “is about understanding systems.” It is hard to overstate how much that single sentence framed everything that followed. The Signal We Miss Why don’t we naturally zoom out? The session offered an honest answer: our brains are wired against it. Uncertainty registers as threat. Working memory shrinks under pressure, anxiety climbs, and the urgency to just do something takes over. The result, reliably, is fast action and shallow diagnosis. We are drawn, too, to satisfying answers, which are rarely the same as accurate ones. The first answer is almost always the visible surface of a deeper system. Naming a person, a policy, or a personality as the source of a problem resolves our anxiety without touching the conditions that produced it. Dr. White gently dismantled our casual use of Occam’s Razor here: the principle doesn’t say the simplest answer is correct. It says that among explanations that fit the evidence equally well, prefer the simpler. Stopping at the simple answer is incomplete analysis disguised as intellectual virtue. For those of us working in commodity agriculture, water policy, or regulatory advocacy, the pattern is painfully familiar. We face problems that have been “solved” repeatedly without resolution: labor shortages addressed by policy without addressing housing, water conflicts managed by allocation without addressing usage culture, market instability met with short-term relief programs that leave the underlying structure unchanged. In each case, the symptom got treated. The system didn’t. Thinking Like a Researcher Zooming Out is thinking like a researcher, someone who genuinely wants to get it right, who observes before concluding, who gets curious about connections, who separates urgency from importance. This is where the seminar’s assigned reading began to come alive for us. John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems, completed in 1927 but disarmingly current, is an argument for exactly this kind of inquiry. Dewey believed that the great failure of democratic life was not a lack of solutions but a failure to understand the problem. In his final chapter on methods, he insists that social intelligence begins with investigation: the patient, rigorous effort to understand a situation before presuming to act on it. The posture Dr. White introduced Thursday afternoon and the method Dewey prescribed nearly a century ago are, in their essentials, the same: diagnosis before prescription, every time. What does Zooming Out actually look like in practice? The session offered four moves: observe before concluding; get curious about connections; separate urgency from importance; and earn the right to act by understanding first. And when we find ourselves thinking we just need to hold people accountable, or I already know what’s going on here, those thoughts are not conclusions. They are signals. Invitations to ask one more question: what would I find if I assumed I was wrong about that? The hardest version of all this, Dr. White reminded us, is the mirror. What role have I played in creating this situation? Thinking academically about yourself, with the same rigor and openness you’d bring to any complex system, is the highest form of leadership. Curiosity Before Conclusions We arrived in Chicago as twenty-four people still carrying the residue of wherever we’d come from. By early evening, something had begun to shift. The problems of our industries had not suddenly changed, and none of us had discovered a miraculous solution we’d been missing; however, we’d been reminded, again, of the right place to start. You can’t durably fix something you don’t understand. That sentence will follow us through this seminar… into the policy conversations ahead in Washington, into the hard discussions we’ll have as a class, and eventually back into the organizations and communities where each of us leads. Next week, we carry this posture to Washington, a city many of us have visited before, but for all of us, it will be new territory in the ways that matter most. The question isn’t whether we face complex systems. We do. The question is whether we’re willing to understand them before we act. From 35,000 feet, the land makes sense differently than it does when your feet are on the ground. The rivers and the roads, the ditches and homesteads, the ancient lake beds and spreading cities all resolve into a legible whole. Leadership at its best works the same way, willing, when it matters, to rise high enough to see what’s actually there. Class 55 extends our thanks to the Foundation staff and program team for their continued support and care. We are grateful to Dr. Dane White for the gift of this posture and for the way he consistently challenges us to lead with more curiosity than certainty, to Judy Sparacino for her logistical magic and intrepid spirit, and to Dr. Casey DeAtley for her steady presence and wise council. And to our captains for the day – Emma Sertich, Kevin Voorhees, and Jeremy Wagner – thank you for making the journey itself feel like part of the work. With gratitude, Logan, Cesar, Jared and Class 55