Tag Archives: courage

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.

Where the Hammer Will Fall the Hardest

The courage to make the decision to act in the first place is the thing that is lacking the most.

The courage to raise our hands, take responsibility, and to engage with accountability (rather than assigning blame or taking credit) is the work that your children will eventually be paid for.

But not handsomely.

It’s also the work that you’re not getting paid for now, but that your boss, team leader, supervisor, or coach really wants you to lean into.

The people who understand these two principles, that are now coming online as fundamentals of development, engagement, and interaction between people, will “win” the future.

In case you’re thinking “Well what if I don’t want to be responsible beyond my own desire to be? What’s the future look like for me and my children?”

The top three areas of growth, innovation, and development (which will translate to wealth making and value creation in the future) will be in the following areas if the current trajectory of education, work, organizations, and society, doesn’t change significantly:

Making something so “new,” no one has ever thought of it.

Working for the person who made the “new” thing.

Selling the “new” thing.

But since “new” things only come along once in a great while (i.e. the car, the I-phone, the Internet, etc.) the chances of being able to survive as a visionary as the first one are slim.

Which means that in the next two areas, working for someone who’s innovating, or selling the innovation, education, work, organizations, and society need more individual people to behave courageously, engage where it’s uncomfortable, and do the things that are hard now in the present-day, which will resemble a game of patty cake later.

Courage (the lack of it, the abundance of it, or just enough of it) is where the hammer of the unknown in the future will fall the hardest.

Are your children ready?

Are you?

Strategy is a Skill

It is important to note that strategy in managing people in conflicts is still considered by many to be a talent, rather than an attainable skill.

In a conflict, thinking about how to manage it effectively requires exercising all the same planning and engagement that engaging in the conflict in and of itself does.

However, the pushback against this type of thinking most often comes in the form of the complaints that “strategy is too hard” or that “people are unpredictable.”

Individual people may be unpredictable, but general human behavior is predictable, and outcomes from such behavior are even more predictable depending upon which conflict management behavior it is that a party chooses.

Good, effective strategy, that produces satisfactory outcomes requires intentionality.

To plan strategically, understanding three points intuitively begins the process:

  1. Know what you can manage in a conflict around stress, anger, fear, and failure. Without knowing yourself, knowing the other party becomes that harder.
  2. Have the courage to care and be curious. The number one reason negotiations around conflicts fail, is due to genuine lack of curiosity by one party, about the other party’s motives, opinions, and desires for resolution—or management—of a conflict scenario.
  3. Realize that the conflict process is messy and, unlike a chess game, if you plan one step ahead of the other party (rather than two—or seven) your conflict goals toward management and resolution have a greater chance of success.

There is strategy involved in attaining the skills of humility, self-awareness, responsibility, and even empathy.

Almost as much strategy as is involved in letting things “just go,” not paying attention, focusing on issues in the conflict that don’t matter, and not understanding the nature of the conflict (and the other party) that you’re in the arena with.

Strategy to manage and resolve conflicts is a skill that can be learned. Almost in the same way—and at the same level—that extending and not resolving conflict is a skill that is learned.

[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.

[Opinion] Mental Infrastructure

There is a lot of mental infrastructure from the Industrial Revolution still laying around.

And most of that infrastructure can be seen on display in organizations:

Employees who are at the bottom of an organizational chart, believing that they are the foundation on which the organization rests, yet feeling as though they are treated as basement dwellers.

Managers and supervisors who are squeezed in the middle, believing that they are the glue that keeps the top of the organization from flying away, and keeps the bottom of the organization in line. Yet the reality is that they are asked to care about something that they did not initially build, and asked to give positive lip service to ideas that they know will have a low chance of success.

Upper management and executives who are at the top of the organizational chart, believing that they deserve the status that they have. And that preserving that status is the only thing that matters. Yet feeling as though they are in a constant battle with forces (i.e. governmental regulations, organizational ennui, etc.) that the people in the organizational chart below them could never possibly understand.

Work matters in the 21st century, because of two reasons:

The first reason is that as the jobs that used be done by humans migrate more and more toward the computer, the mobile phone, and to whatever hardware innovation comes next (probably the cloud, virtual reality, and A.I.) the only question worth answering is: Can a computer do your job?

When the “yes” answers to that question outstrip the “no” answers, the Industrial Revolution based infrastructure of our assumptions, ideas, and even opinions, about work will change. If they don’t, if we bitterly cling to past notions, continually hag-ridden by reimagining a past to which we cannot return, we will fail to take advantage of the positive parts of our remaining mental maps for a future we cannot fully predict.

The second reason is that as individuals and companies become human centered rather than technology centered, the only things that matter are the Long Tail, emotional intelligence, leadership ability, courage, and resilience. Organizations of the past century said that those traits weren’t that important in light of where your job was placed on an organizational chart. But that is no longer true.

The work that matters will be that which values these traits above all else. And there are some fields (the human services most of all) that are poised to take advantage of this shift in what is valuable in the future, from what was valued in the past.

The infrastructure that needs to be torn down the most is in the minds of employees, managers, executives and others.

The true tragedy is that the demolition work is plentiful, but the workers are few.

[Strategy] Crossing the Chasm for the Peacebuilder

For the innovative peacebuilder, the truly important switch must happen in how thinking about products and services cross the chasm.

crossing-the-chasm-for-the-peacebuilder

Most of the time, processes (such as mediation, negotiation, or dispute resolution) are confused with products.

A process is, in essence, a service.

Sure, there are sometimes opportunities to grow a process past a service and into a product, but this is rare.

The idea that content focused around “how-to” can be a product, is supported by the digital reality we live in now. With digital platforms, developing digital components for processes we already think of as services, should become second nature.

But for many it hasn’t.

At least not yet.

There are four ways to cross the chasm in thinking, from a strong consideration and focus on services, to a strong consideration and focus on products.

  • Deep listening requires surveying clients (formally and informally), compiling that data, and executing on the results of that listening. By the way, deep listening is beyond active listening, and is something that peacebuilders are increasingly seeing as a tactic for clients at the table.
  • Deep understanding is the corollary to deep listening. Deep understanding requires accepting that crossing the chasm is the only way to scale. Plus, it requires accepting that one-offs, workshops, seminars, and more of the traditional ways of engaging with audiences, clients, and scaling a “lifestyle” business, have changed irrevocably.
  • Deep advice requires accessing the wisdom contained in the organizations peacebuilders may already be working in. It also requires listening to, and reading, advice that comes from non-traditional places. Accessing, and considering deep advice is strategic and tactical. Deep advice not only comes from outside the box, but also it comes from looking in another box entirely.
  • Deep courage is the last way to cross the chasm. Execution is about courage, and many of the reasons that serve to “stall out” the crossings peacebuilders attempt, is less about not doing the other three things listed above, but is more about the lack of courage to pull the trigger and execute on a truly scary idea.

Philosophy first, tactics second, and courage always to change how peacebuilding happens in our digital world.

[Strategy] The Era of the Chameleons is not Ending Fast Enough

Human interactions, impacted and shaped by the economic, political, and social effects of the Industrial Revolution, used to highly value—and continue to reward—the skills of the chameleon.

You know the chameleon at work.

This is the person at a meeting who, when a person says “This is clearly black in color,” they nod their head approvingly.

This is the same person who, twenty minutes later at the same meeting, when another person offers their color opinion and says, “This is clearly white in color,” they also nod their head approvingly.

Then, a person walks up to them after the meeting that was supposed to be about colors (but was about acquiescence) and says to them, “One person said the color was black. Another person said the color was white. I think that they were both wrong and the color is grey. What do you think?”

And the person, the chameleon agrees that the color is grey.

You know the chameleon at work.

This behavior, this inability to stand up, stick out, take a stand, or state an opinion, for fear of being fired, flattened down, or left out, was a critical management benefit of our past Industrial Age. It was a function of a work culture based in top-down, command and control directions and the presence of a lone voice of authority to whom to appeal. This behavior was rewarded with promotion, bonuses, and extra trips. This behavior was so regular and so pervasive that it was lampooned by comedians; it lay at the core of televised situational comedies; and it was studied by psychologists.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the chameleons that currently in the workplace, the color is neither black, nor, white. It isn’t even grey anymore.

The dominant color of change, conflict, and innovation is plaid.

And when a chameleon must adjust to the presence of plaid—particularly the chameleon at work—it tends to not survive the experience.

The era of the chameleon is ending, but not nearly fast enough.

[Advice] The Edges

Consuming content and ideas passively, instead of creating content actively.

Reacting to an idea immediately, instead of responding with critical thinking.

Seeking assurance of safety and stability, instead of anchoring in ambiguity.

Collaborating without courage, instead of connecting in all the ways that make us uncomfortable.

Desiring information without wisdom, instead of demanding an exchange of clarity with conscience.

Passive-aggressive manipulation without candor, instead of active engagement with conflict.

These are the edges that people in all organizations, from government run organizations to private entities, need to make an active decision about whether or not they are pursuing.

Our societies, our culture, and our future depends on figuring out the edges.

[Advice] The Fundamentals

When analyzing a problem to move forward towards a solution, there is a lot of emphasis placed on the fundamentals of the problem.

We 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.

Of course, this wisdom is received from a past when the fundamentals weren’t fundamental, they were merely subjective reality, based upon the circumstances of that time and place.

Or, this received wisdom isn’t really wisdom at all, but merely regurgitated conventional wisdom, which has two marks against it before it even is spoken into existence—yet again.

In the now, when confronted by a problem that seems to resembles one we faced in the past, we hearken back to that received wisdom, and being trapped by hindsight bias, we demand that fundamentals be reinstituted.

But this is just a clever version of the idea of returning to a past when everybody got along, there was no strife, and the fundamentals were sound.

Here’s the thing:

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.

Creating a solution to a problem based in the fundamentals can be a foundation to work from. But they can also be the concrete that traps a person, a community, a society, or culture, in a species of cloudy nostalgia for a past that never really was. And once trapped by such nostalgia, those same people, communities, societies, and cultures, are inevitably surprised when an outlier comes along who fundamentally doesn’t care about the concrete of the fundamentals.

Advocating for fundamentals based in received wisdom can be biased, not only because they reflect the prejudices of our personal attributions to past events, our personal desire to minimize dissonance in the present, and our personal need for stability and security in the future, but also because our personal hindsight is always perfect. But in reality, getting to resolution and discovering what fundamental actually worked to solve which problem in the past, was always complicated, messy, mistake-prone, and not assured of success.

Making a rhetorical appeal to return to fundamentals is inherently flawed when the current circumstances don’t even remotely resemble previous circumstances.

And having the courage to throw the past fundamentals out and establish new ones, will always increase conflict, rather than decrease it.

[Strategy] “My Boss Doesn’t Care.”

“My boss doesn’t care about fixing disagreements between employees around here.”

“My boss is the cause of all the problems around here.”

“My boss has never shown an interest in doing any of the things that you’re talking about.”

“My boss is never going to come to any of these workshops.”

“This is all great information, and it would be better if my boss were here to hear it.”

“My boss will never let me do any of the things that you are talking about here.”

Yes.

Your boss has never shown an interest in resolving disagreements.

Your boss has never shown an interest in attending a training, or development opportunity.

Your boss is a person in authority and sets the tone in the workplace of “my way or the highway.”

Your boss is not a progressive thinker or doer in the workplace.

Your boss is the one where all the problems at work start.

And if your boss would just change, everything would be better at work.

Right?

Well….

You could try to strategically disrupt your boss, but many of you are more concerned about your mortgage, your kids’ education, your status at work, the importance of the work that you think you are doing, or whatever the other reasons are you come up with, to not engage in strategic disruption.

You could try to disrupt your boss, but you are afraid that you will be fired, reprimanded, or even not promoted. Or even worse, if the disruption works, you are afraid that the responsibility and accountability for what will happen next will fall on you. And you already have enough tasks to accomplish at work.

You could try to disrupt your boss, but you are worried and anxious that the other employees looking at you, won’t back you up as you speak and act with candor, clarity, and courage. So, you’ll be out there by yourself, facing an angry boss, shifted office politics, and new disagreements that you didn’t think could possibly happen.

Right?

The empathy that exists around acknowledging the presence of all of these reasons for not acting, and for making the statements that you make that are listed above, does not reduce the impact of three facts:

Only you can take responsibility and accountability. Yes, it might not work out when you confront the other adult, known as your boss, about their lack of interest in changing the conflict culture of the workplace you’re in, but it just might.

Only you can implement ideas and strategies to reduce the impact of conflicts in your workplace, in spite of the politics of your co-workers, not because of the politics of your co-workers.

Only you can start the process of addressing, honoring, and respecting adults as adults. Rather than dealing with them in the way that the boss does who you complain about—as if they are children.

“My boss doesn’t care” is the beginning of, not complaint, but possibility.