Three Places to Thrash

When faced with a project there are three places to thrash:

Early—before the project begins.

Middle—as the project is proceeding.

Late—as the project ends.

When you (or your team) thrashes early, brainstorming becomes a way to develop new ideas. Speed and immediacy become the primary goals of early thrashing: Speed to actionable ideas and immediacy to the implementation of action, moving toward accomplishing end-of-project goals.

When you (or your team) thrashes in the middle of a project, brainstorming becomes a place to hide. Hiding emotionally, “getting to know your team,” or struggling to decide about the efficacy or practicality of an idea, become the unstated, primary goals. Speed becomes less important than looking good to peers, and groupthink really kicks in at this point, bogging down the implementation process.

When you (or your team) thrashes at the end of a project, brainstorming becomes a place of panic, anxiety, and on some teams (or with you) a place of abject fear. The combination of pressure to ship something out the door encourages a mindset and attitude focused around speed (but for negative reasons) and impatience with people and processes. The implementation process recedes in the face of the attitude of “just get it done.”

Thrashing—that is brainstorming a direction, deciding on an approach, planning a process, managing opinions and conflicts, and implementing a plan for action—should be done early, rather than late if you’re really interested (or your team is really interested) in shipping a product, idea, or service out the door and direct to the market.

Stay In Your Lane

When we tell someone to “stay in their lane.”

When we say to a group of people, “your people have never done that before.”

When we tell an individual that, “people like you don’t do things like that.”

When we say, “we don’t want that idea here.”

When we assert, “that will never work.”

When we give the old comeback of, “we’ve always done it this way.”

When we say, “who are you to come over here and tell us differently.”

We take the organizational and individual, posture, of disbelief, distrust, and even disapproval. When we take that posture, we create a place of expectation that leads to people doing exactly what it is that we want them to do:

Preserve the status quo.

Stay in their lane.

Don’t rock the boat.

Be safe and compliant.

Go along to get along.

Avoid (or surrender) in the face of conflict that might lead to change.

Expectations and assumptions are the fuel of success. They are also the fuel of failure. What we give language too, what we encourage more of through our social cueing, we get more of. What we give lip service too, what we don’t talk about; what we let live in silence, we get less of.

Until the organization, individual, or society, gives up, returns to stasis and stops making waves.

Leave your lane.

If I Have A Dollar More Than You…

If I have a dollar more in my pocket than you do in your pocket at this moment, by all modern monetary conceptions of wealth, I’m richer than you.

If I have a dollar less in my pocket than you do in your pocket at his moment, by all modern monetary conceptions of wealth, I’m poorer than you.

If I add a dollar more of value to the economy through the writing of this blog post, and you gain more than a dollars’ worth of value from reading this post, then who is richer and who is poorer?

Value is hard to quantify (it always has been) but if the market doesn’t figure out a way for more people to add more value in ways that dovetail with their innate talents and skills (that may never have been valued before) then we’re all in a lot of trouble.

Seeking Validation

When someone asks you for validation about their approach to managing a conflict, what they are really asking for is reassurance that they are doing the right thing.

But since validation can only come from gatekeepers, and since gatekeepers have significantly less power in the world now than they ever have before, seeking validation is really an empty pursuit.

And since there is never enough reassurance that the right path has been taken, asking for validation—but really seeking reassurance—is a recipe for hiding from making the decisions that will move a conflict forward toward management and maybe resolution.

Instead of offering validation (or reassurance) offer opportunities and challenges to those who are hiding to have the courage to come out into the light, to make a decision, and to ship a solution that will be good enough for the conflict they are in.

HIT Piece 4.25.2017

The closer we get to the truth of an issue, which typically lies at the center of a universe of distortions, fabrications, and sometimes outright lies, the more difficult our conversations with all the other parties involved, become.

The way to resolve this tension is not through avoiding difficult conversations and difficult parties.

The solution is to recognize the tension and dance with the fear that we have of outcomes that hew close to the truth of an issue.

Avoidance is fine as a temporary tactic, but as a long-term strategy to get to the truth of a conflict; well, no one ever avoided their way to an uncomfortable—but necessary—truth.

Exchanging the Truth for a Lie

The second most compelling question after “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is “What is truth?”

When we fail to do the hard work of renewing our behavior and changing our mindsets, we exchange the pursuit of the truth for the lie of preserving the status quo.

Science cannot tell us what truth is. Only what the facts of the matter are.

Art cannot tell us what truth is. Only create representations of the shadows of truth.

Philosophy cannot tell us what truth is. Only make claims about the pursuit of the truth.

Marketing cannot tell us what truth is. Only package the search for it and communicate the process of getting there.

Religion cannot tell us what truth is. Only provide us with a set of rules, regulations and structures to pursue the truth, if we choose.

Governments cannot tell us what truth is. Only render consequences when violations of truth become so onerous that they cannot be ignored and call such consequences justice.

People cannot tell us what truth is. Only tell the stories of their pursuits—and successes and failures.

So: What is truth?

If renewing your mind to get to the answer to this cornerstone question of existence were easy, then everyone would do it.

And conflicts—mismatches in frames, perspectives, and behaviors—would disappear just as quickly.

Do the hard work first of pursuing the answer, and the Truth will find you.

Dollar Value of Mediation Skills in the Connection Economy

It’s hard to place a dollar value on human-to-human interactions in the current (and growing) connection economy, because connection is about engaging in acts of caring.

And whoever put a dollar value on acts of caring?

But here are a few challenge questions if that’s your attitude:

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of raising crops in an agricultural economy?

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of building a widget in an industrial economy?

Whoever put a dollar value on the act of providing a customer service in the service economy?

Humanity figured out the dollar value inherent in all the economic transitions from hunting and foraging, to agriculture, to industry, to service and created functioning economic systems—from trading and bartering to late stage capitalism. And humanity will figure out the current global transition we are in right now.

The space between the old system and the new system is a space of conflict, anger, incivility, uncertainty, spectacle, entertainment, along with a healthy dose of depression, worry, and anxiety.

This is a space where the skills of mediation (particularly around distraction, diversion, and deflection) can be helpful (and monetized) at scale.

But whoever put a dollar value on the acts of caring?

Change One Percent at a Time if You…

…don’t have the courage to confront the ongoing, unresolved cultural conflicts and frictions in your organization.

…if the resistance to change at scale from the organization and even individuals is too hard to address.

…if your fellow employees who should be your allies, cannot be motivated because of internal, intrinsic factors that you can neither understand nor appreciate.

…if you are struggling with explaining to yourself how you continue to “fit” in the culture you’ve become used .

…if you attend in-person trainings, read books, try new methods and techniques, and still nothing changes.

…if you think that you have been patient long enough for change.

…if you have given up on changes happening and are now comfortable and familiar with the lip service that the overall organizational culture pays to change.

Then, you might be ready to take the courageous, risky step of changing the culture that you are in one percent at a time.

Change, driven internally by friction and conflict, always happens slowly at first (sometimes taking years) but then arrives all at once, to everyone’s surprise in your culture.

When You Won’t Need Validation

Recognizing that you once held a belief and that now this belief is changing, is the essence of learning.

And by the time you attain that essence, you won’t need the extrinsic validation from an “A” letter grade, a raise, a promotion, or any other validation that you believe extrinsically motivated you to learn in the first place.

To go a step further, you won’t care if the validation for the learning comes or not, from an external source.

And you won’t need reassurance about the actions you take to implement and execute on your newly acquired self-knowledge.

Need for Reassurances

Reassurances are the fuel on which feelings of safety run.

The overwhelming need for more reassurances often stops us from doing the courageous work that matters.

The resistance (the Lizard Brain) is driven by the need for safety, which is why reassurances are so useful as a tool to drive people forward to accomplishing work.

Or why they are so useful for dulling people toward doing work that matters; in essence, lulling them into a false sense of safety.

If a person is seeking for more reassurances that the path they are walking is the right one, or that the method of management of a conflict that they’ve chosen will “work,” or if they don’t really want to know the details….

Well, there will never be enough reassurance.

Which means you will never get all the safety you need.

Which means you’ll react with a posture of fear when a new idea, concept, or approach is brought to you.

Which means that all the tools and tips in the world won’t really work for you.

Which means that we’ll never get the emotional labor from you that we really need to make the changes that are necessary in the world.

Stop looking for more reassurances.

Start getting comfortable with the fact that there will never be enough.

Move forward courageously with whatever decisions you’ve made, without self-doubt, or fear.