Finding Your Tribe

Social tools allow us to connect with other people now more than ever before through three important ways:

Education.

Entertainment.

Edification.

Finding the people who believe in your message, who desire to be educated, or who want to be entertained, is easier now more than ever.

Of course, it’s easier now more than ever, for the noise of a thousand million voices to drown out—not the finding of others who want to communicate with you—but to drown out the ability to connect in a meaningful way with others who need the connection.

Organizations have always sought to use communication connection tools to push agendas, send messages, and to ensure conformity.

But it’s easier now more than ever, for those organizations—governments, churches, political organizations, bureaucracies—to be circumscribed by the individual in search of connection rather than spectacle.

The hardest things during this 4^th revolution in human communication are not going to be finding your tribe, or cutting through the noise, or battling against the forces of conformity.

The hardest things are going to be as follows:

Starting.

Continuing.

Ending.

And every system that we have set up from our last revolution (the Industrial one) that remains in this one, was designed to squelch, manipulate, or channel in “socially appropriate ways” starting, continuing, and ending.

So, get to finding your tribe.

Go start.

There Are No Lectures

Will this be on the test?

This is the question that we struggle with every new semester. It reveals what and where the focus of students has been trained into them over the last 12 years of primary schooling.

Will this impact my grade?

This is the question that reveals the struggle between attaining real learning, real connection with material, and real engagement, and the need for accreditation, for getting the “right” job and for fitting in all the ways that society demands of us.

Will this be in the lecture?

This is the question that reveals a deep desire for certainty and the continuing pushback against the Socratic, the uncertain, and the unpleasant friction of the unknown.

There are no lectures that can cover the ingrained need that these three questions reveal.

There are no carefully crafted syllabi.

There are no YouTube videos and there is not enough clever gaming of student’s pre-wired psychology.

And the professor that spends a semester (or several) preparing more for successfully neutralizing these questions than for engagement and connection with material that could be life-changing, is the professor who has invested in playing a game whose hand was dealt way back in kindergarten.

The Tower of Babel

At the root of all conflict is miscommunication.

The language that we speak, the “babble,” (or “babel,” if you will) is the thing that separates us. The language is not just verbal, of course, but the verbal prompts (or the lack of verbal prompts) create the initial opportunity for miscommunication.

Miscommunication impacts us all, and as more voices enter the public sphere, including voices that were never heard before, the level of noise (or static) increases. And genuine communication becomes almost impossible.

When the medium is also the message, miscommunication becomes the coin of the realm, ensuring access to less understanding and more conflict.

When distraction becomes the thing that drives entertainment (which is easy), rather than education (which is hard) it ensures that in the conflict between education and entertainment, miscommunication and obfuscation become the glass we communicate through.

Badly.

When the individual becomes the purveyor of what is “truth” and what is “lies” (or what is “fake”) the opportunities for those who have clarity about the difference between the two, to manipulate both communication methods becomes almost too tempting to avoid.

When the emotional power of stories matters more as a driver in communicating than reason, facts, and logic, miscommunication becomes easy because emotions are transient, explosive, and unpredictable.

The solutions (or resolutions) to all conflicts come down to attaining clarity in communication, but even if you personally pursue clarity in your communication, there’s no guarantee that your clarity won’t be interpreted as “babble” (or “babel” if you will) by the party you are seeking to communicate with.

Thus, ensuring that the root of the conflict won’t get pulled out from the ground of the fight anytime soon.

[Advice] The Best Advice of 2016

It’s hard to know what the best advice is. After all, it’s been a long 2016, and its shaping up to be an even longer 2017.

Here is a list of some ideas to keep you going in the year to come. Or too look back on and wonder what I was thinking:

Relational resonance—The reason that litigation is such a poor method for resolving disputes is because of most—if not all—disagreements, fights, and “differences of opinion,” are about relationships, built on reciprocation and maintained through common resonance.

What do you do after you thin slice another party in conflict? — Thin slicing is at the core of the old saying “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.” Yet, here’s the challenge: If you can’t even handle being challenged on your thin-slicing tendencies daily, then expecting that a candidate running for office, a celebrity, or some other person to do what you cannot, is a childish expectation.

No more looking…just leap…— Having the courage to make a change, take an action, do something generous, collaborative, or outrageous, and to do despite the dominant culture of your organization is the essence of leap day. This courage has nothing to do with looking (you’ve already spent an inordinate amount of time looking already) and has everything to do with stepping out and saying: I made this.

Doing what you’ve always done— Intentionality is the watchword in conflict. But, you do have an alternative. You can always keep intentionally doing what you’ve always done and hope that changes will result.

We are surrounded everywhere by the remains of “average”— We are surrounded by the remains of “ok” in a time when “ok” is no longer good enough. And when the disconnect between “ok” and reality reaches a breaking point, we get demagogues, marketers, con men, flim-flam men, and others selling us a bill of goods, rather than the hard truth: “Ok” was never good enough and doing “just a little better” than last year isn’t going to get the same outcome financially, morally, ethically, or materially anymore.

There is a difference between broadcasting, sharing, and interacting, both in the physical world and in the digital world— Broadcasting, sharing and interacting are happening at all levels in our society; and, our digital tools have provided us with the ease of communicating faster and faster. But this also means that our responses to conflicts in our lives become more shallow and immediate, even as the reactions cut us emotionally at a deeper and deeper level.

What are your core values? — Values are not positions (which are often about personal (and sometimes public) identity or maintaining “face”) nor are they about interests (which are often flexible, negotiable, situational, and impersonal). And too often in our public language, at work, at school, in social media, and other places, we use the language of principles to talk about positions—or even worse, to justify mere interests.

There are no shortcuts to accomplishing anything. Boy, do I wish that there were…— The quality, or trait, of getting up and doing what needs to be done, particularly when you don’t want to do it, is sometimes called “will” or “grit” or “courage.”

But these are fancy labels for something a lot deeper that we can’t really describe. And anybody who wants to make a dent in the universe, no matter how big or small, must possess this trait in great quantities if they are to make the dent they want to make.

The impresario’s dilemma is balancing between quantity and quality— When there is so much ephemeral stuff (such as content, ideas, and art), considerations around quality become the watchword for monitoring and disengaging with ideas that we find to be reprehensible. But keep in mind that, once you increase the quantity, quality only suffers when caring about the outcome takes a second place to getting the outcome to happen.

The leap (hey, I wrote about leaping again this year!) from the inside to the outside is going on right now— The deep revelation of the revolution called the Internet, is that it continues to demonstrate that networks are the most valuable resource that an individual, a corporation, or a government possesses to leverage innovation, change, and advancement.

The fundamentals changed this election year. This is rarely a metaphorically bloodless act. And it was not bloodless this year…— People place a lot of importance in understanding, revisiting, and honoring the fundamentals of a problem, because they come, not from conceived wisdom, or even perceived wisdom, but from received wisdom.

Demanding a return to the fundamentals can be a callback to received wisdom, but only if the current problem resembles a past one in any kind of way. And problems involving people, rather than processes, are constantly in flux.

Conspiracy theories abounded at the end of the year. So, here’s a tip about how to deal with all of that…— The standing rule is that people tend to most easily believe in conspiracy theories that they create, and tend to reject the conspiratorial thinking of others.

The trouble with our concerns about fake news is that they come from a place where critical thinking has been reduced in favor of playing to (and supporting) audience attention spans that rival hummingbirds.

In 2017, let’s all commit to growing the size of our ears to hear, our eyes to read, and our brain to absorb, rather than just our voices to speak.

[Strategy] Truth and Fairy Tales

The uncomfortable truth is that an understanding and appreciation of the impact of human emotions is required to address the conflicts of the present day.

The comfortable fairy tale is that everywhere human beings are freed from the impact of their emotions by more economic choices, more scientific knowledge, and more opportunities to engage rationally with an ordered world.

The uncomfortable truth is that people very often refuse to change their behavior and walk the hard emotional path from awareness to competency unless a radical catastrophic (either positive or negative) personal or social event occurs to them.

The comfortable fairy tale is that humanity (both individually and collectively) is trending inevitably toward an integrated, united, globalized mindset, less captive to the paradigms, conflicts, and drivers of humanity’s conflict-ridden past.

The uncomfortable truth is that some people don’t want resolution (or closure) to the conflicts they are experiencing, and seek instead to inflict the consequences, process, and results of their personal conflicts on others.

The comfortable fairy tale is that resolution would be easier to get to if only irrational actors ceased acting irrationally through the auspices of more knowledge, more data, but less received, conceived, or perceived wisdom.

The uncomfortable truth is, the more that we think about the very nature of the human beings with whom we are in constant contact (and with whom we are in constant conflict) the better we get at managing, not the conflicts of others, but the reactions in ourselves.

The three areas in which we grow are often overlooked, but as conflicts, and the confusion about why they occur, increases, these areas will become more critical to engage in with mastery:

Intentionality—no more accidents. Yes, it seems exhausting to always be consciously aware of what we say, what we do, what we think, and what we feel. But it’s equally exhausting to experience the results of a lack of intentionality.

Self-awareness—physician heal thyself. Yes, it might be a more entertaining and distracting approach to be filled with the noise of others (and the constant pitch of the world). But healing yourself requires coming to terms with the signal coming from inside yourself.

Hearing—rather than listening to speak. Yes, it requires patience to listen to others with whom we disagree, and with whom we agree. But when we miss a critical conflict message because we didn’t hear it, we will have to be far more patient with the consequences as they roll out in our lives.

As the framing of more and more comfortable fairy tales run up against the wisdom of uncomfortable truths, it becomes imperative for those who have eyes to see, and ears to hear, to become more strategic around these three areas.

[Advice] Fights of Fancy

The world inside rules the world outside.

One of the terrible functions of the last half-century has been the rise in the perception of people, both at the individual level and at the group level, as purely economic actors.

When viewed this way, people’s reactions and behaviors (and even group reactions and behaviors) are chalked up to science or economics.

People are perceived as rational actors, realizing that they are in a play called life, full of sound and fury, but ultimately signifying nothing.

Oh, but were this so.

The fact is, conflicts, disputes, disagreements, and more are worked out in the inner life between our two ears, in much more complex ways than economics or scientific analysis can determine. This happens long before they spill out of the container of ourselves and begin their impact on others.

The fights we have are of fancy: Trapped inside our own experiences, we struggle to get out, to escape, and to connect with others.

The very act of escaping from ourselves creates an internal conflict inside ourselves. And as our technology has become more granular, able to connect people at the surface level, across cultures, and even national borders, we have become blinded and less connected to the inner drives of other people.

The tools we have designed can be used to connect, but only if vulnerability, self-awareness, and introspection are built into the tools themselves.

And those traits aren’t built into the tools because they escape the notice of the builder. Primarily because of the inner life of the builder.

A clock with a clock maker.

The world inside rules the world outside.

The reasons why we have abandoned the exploration of the inner self are many, but the reason that we have abandoned even attempting to understand the depths of the inner world that drive conflict is one: We are afraid of what we will find and we are selfish in our interests.

The work of radical self-awareness, intentionality, empathy over sympathy, true vulnerability and intimacy with others cannot come through connecting through our tools.

We must escape the world inside (both ourselves and our digital distractions) and get to the world outside.

[Advice] Conspiracy Theories

The standing rule is that people tend to most easily believe in conspiracy theories that they create; and tend to reject the conspiratorial thinking of others.

The trouble with our concerns about fake news, is that they come from a place where critical thinking has been reduced in favor of playing to (and supporting) audience attention spans that rival those of hummingbirds.

The long read, the long form content, the long movie; the challenging idea, the scientific journal, the complicated path to learning a new language; these are all in competition against TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), the 30 second cat video on YouTube, the 6 second looping Vine video, or the easily shareable click-bait article.

Audiences have been convinced by both marketers, and journalists (just marketers in another way) that their thinking and content consumption choices are sophisticated. That they are able to sift through biases consciously (without relying on assumptions and inferences from facts not in evidence), come to rational conclusions, and then act on those conclusions to co-create an orderly world.

Oh, but were that so.

When audiences can pick their own personalized access to “knowledge” and can choose their own “facts” then news that comes from sophisticated marketers (some former journalists) and content creators, becomes the coin of access to the conspiratorial realm. And social cueing, confirmation bias, and attribution activates individuals in the audience to create their own, publicly viewable, and socially shareable conspiracy theories.

Not about aliens landing at Roswell.

Not about the Illuminati running the world.

Not about a rising one-world government.

Not about a coming cashless society.

But conspiracies about stolen votes, illegal voting (and voters), racialism, economic injustice, Big Pharmaceutical companies poisoning vaccines, Big Agricultural companies poisoning seeds, Big Banks ceasing to be allowed to failed, Big Governments seeking to curb natural rights, Big Faith seeking to curb libertine tendencies, and on, and on, and on.

This type of conspiracy theory mongering is particularly subtle and insidious, because it plays on the mistrust and biases audiences already have built in to their world-view and thinking, but it does the play at scale, and one-to-one. This creates a feeling of community (we’re in the know) while also creating a feeling of persecution (we’re on the outside of everyone else).

And people should have expected it. As more knowledge, has become more accessible to the common individual (if you have a smartphone in your pocket with Internet access, you have a supercomputer) we have been encouraged to embrace the conspiracies we like, share them with our friend circle, and then sit back and wait passively for reality to match our frames and worldviews. And when that doesn’t happen, we go back, double-down, and start the conflict cycle.

Mass media (led by the collapsing and panicking journalism field) is complicit in this as well, seeking to drive audience attention to ideas and concepts that are spurious, but that also generate clicks. This is because mass media content production can’t figure out (at scale) how to get audiences to pay for something they can get anywhere for free, but it’s also driven by the ego-based desire to be seen, be acknowledged as an expert, and to grow the network and personal brand of the content creator at the expense of the market, and the audience, gaining new knowledge, or being challenged in any meaningful way.

Fake news—and the environment that allows conspiracy theories to metastasize—is not going to go away. The echo chambers of social platforms are too powerful, with too many voices, too many passive audience members, and too many exclusively self-interested actors.

What is going to have to change is, as always, the hardest piece: Individuals are going to have to decide what they will absorb, what ideas they will believe, and they critically reject other ideas, based on objective evidence and proof.

But if individuals (and audiences) could do that effectively, the placebo effect long-ago would have ceased to be effective.

[Strategy] Communication Channel

The voice is a communication channel.

So is a pen, a piece of paper, a keyboard, a desktop computer, or even a mobile phone.

So is a television screen, a computer screen, and a mobile phone screen.

The eyes, the hands, the body are communication channels.

So are mobile applications, Internet platforms, and even websites.

The ability to miscommunicate effectively comes about when we confuse the channel, with the message coming through the channel.

Or we confuse the medium with the message itself.

We seek nuance through these channels in a vain attempt to connect completely with another human being. The problem is that these channels are flawed because they are channels that exist of human making, human molding, and even human compromising. The nuance that we seek through using these channels—the clarity, courage and candor we ultimately seek—will not only come through such channels.

Conflict is easy when the medium and the message are confused. Conflict relies on obfuscation, confusion, miscommunication, and disconnection.

Blogging, tweeting, “facebooking,” Snapchatting, or using whatever the platform of choice to communicate with nuance, will result in more conflict not less. This is because nuance is sacrificed when using these platforms to communicate ideas that are easy to understand, but hard to manage, and may not ever result in resolution.

Reading is a communication channel.

So is thinking.

[Advice] Conflict Manipulation

The manipulation is simple, but the consequences are complex.

We lament “Why can’t we all just, get along?” and then we proceed to irritate, obfuscate, or deceive the other party.

Then we look at them with Alfred E. Nueman’s famous facial expression and metaphorically shrug our shoulders.

The problem is not “getting along” (whatever that may mean, in whatever context you may place it for your conflict) the problem is that resolution is a chimera, and managing the other party in conflict is emotionally exhausting.

So, we dance the conflict two-step and hope that the other party will dance with us. But the consequences of the dance of avoidance (particularly if avoidance is a baseline rather than a temporary strategy) is that we avoid addressing the things that matter to us. And the months, years, or even decades roll by, and we harden into emotional positions from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

There’s too much cruft around the outsides.

The story that we tell ourselves then falls back to the original lament, the original starting position, and when it’s time to get to resolution (or management) we stymie the other party yet again.

“Why can’t we all just, get along?”

Well…there are reasons…

[Advice] How to Have Gratitude

Remember how easy it was to say “thank you” when you were a child and you had nothing to lose?

Yeah…neither do we…

And the thing is, as we become fully autonomous adults, with our own minds, motivations, and needs, it becomes less easy than it ever was in childhood.

We can talk all we want about the history of the Pilgrims, the fractious nature of their relationship with Native Tribes, or even if they should’ve left Europe in the first place, but underlying all of the dogmatic anger and resentment against the Pilgrims in our contemporary culture (and in some cases, against this day), is one simple fact:

It’s really, really hard to humble ourselves to say the words “thank you.”

It’s also really, really hard as adults to be thankful when we believe inherently that our own power gets us what we have, rather than working collaboratively in a community with others, creating “good enough” governments, and resolving arguments without resorting to violence.

It’s really, really hard to have a heart of gratefulness when we feel that our ideas, our emotions, and even our identities have been changed, stolen, appropriated, or even wiped out all together.

It’s really, really hard to say “thank you” when we feel that the system and structure is the one to whom we are giving thanks (it’s not) rather than the Immovable Force behind the system and structure (which we may—or may not—believe in).

It’s really, really hard to understand that saying “thank you” is not about how we feel today, tomorrow, or even how we felt in the past. Instead, having a heart of gratitude is about doing what’s right no matter what our ephemeral and fleeting feelings may be.

All of this is hard. And it should come as no surprise that it’s always been hard.

Both at the beginning of celebrating this thing called Thanksgiving Day, and all the way through today, two hundred and twenty-seven years later.

But if we get through this day, then the long spiral of renewal toward next year becomes one that happens without the baggage of resentment, conflict, and strife.