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?

What Does Your Perspective Look Like When You Change Your Mind

What does your perspective look like when you change your mind?

Mindsets are based in the accumulation of identity, meaning, life experiences, and assumptions that each of us make about how the world, and the systems in it, should work.

Mindsets are also backed up by the accumulated cruft of judgments, frames, attributions, and other cognitive “ticks” that people exhibit in their thinking and behavioral choices.

Many of the aspects of mindsets are considered by individuals to be fixed: they are what they are and there’s little point in attempting to change them.

Some of the aspects of mindsets are considered by some individuals to be changeable: they can be grown, can shift, can be made to serve a person rather than the other way around.

Changing your mind can come in many forms: through seeking new knowledge, through taking on new challenges, through deciding what not to do, or even through seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with another.

The journey from here to there is important. But not nearly as important as it is for you to tell us what it looks like from that new perspective.

HIT Piece 3.7.2017

Here’s the thing:

The only person at work who can change the culture of where you work, is you.

The only person who can manage adults as if they are adults, are other adults acting like adults.

The only person who can ensure that products, ideas, and innovations ship on time, is you.

Here’s the other thing:

If you believe that your boss has more responsibility, power, and accountability than you do (or if you believe that you should get more credit, and not take any blame if things go wrong) then you will doggedly pursue advancing in a toxic work environment.

If you believe that managing adults as if they are adults (instead of tolerating, condoning or ignoring childish behavior) is the purview of someone in human resources, and not you, then you will be constantly frustrated by conflicts in the workplace.

If you believe that your responsibility is not to “ship” but instead is to show up and turn a widget in a machine that you don’t really want to contribute to understanding, then you are preparing yourself inevitably for much larger problems in the future.

Here’s the conclusion:

The only person who can prepare for a future they can’t see, and prepare to do work that matters, and engage with hard, taxing emotional labor that pays off many tomorrows from now, but not today, is you.

It’s always been you.

This should be a thought that frees you, but for so many, the thought imprisons them further.

What’s that thought doing to you?

The Hard Thing About The Hard Questions

The hard questions aren’t ones that you just need to think about harder, to get to a binary answer.

Binary answers.

“What the other party wants to hear” answers.

“Feel good” answers.

Wrong answers.

Right answers.

The compelling issue is not that the questions are hard, or that they are scary.

The issue is that the answers frighten you because of their implications around responsibility, accountability, safety, and security.

But the only way out of a conflict is to go further in.

Thinking harder about a binary answer isn’t the way to get to more resolution.

Neither is thinking about how to structure the answer to get the other party on your side.

Sometimes, answering the hard question really requires you to pick an answer, stand up, and courageously defend it.

What We Can Have

There can be truth and justice and civility in a civil society.

For if we sacrifice any of the three—in service of achieving any one of the others—the pillars of civil society fall apart.

And then, we become the very monsters of oppression we are fighting to destroy.

On Holiday

Taking a holiday from conflict—either from managing them or resolving them—is something too many of us are engaged in too regularly.

A holiday is supposed to be a break and a time of renewal, yes, but it is also to be a time of mindfulness, refocusing, reframing, and rededicating ourselves, our behavior, our thoughts, and our feelings toward the future.

As has been recently said, holidays are a time on, not a time off.

Holidays are also a time for genuine celebration.

Celebrations come with different traditions, but practicing traditions (such as taking a day off) without understanding or appreciating the deeper meaning behind them, is hollow religion of the worst kind.

With that being stated work (or at least our modern conception of work) is considered a practice that a holiday is a break from.

But some of the best work is performed when a person is engaged with mindfulness, refocusing, reframing, and rededication to the outcomes, people, and relationships that matter.

Taking a holiday from conflict management, or from pursuing resolution, is a practice worthy of being abolished.

Go to work.

The original founders behind holidays—particularly those focused around renewal, unification, and reconciliation—would want you to go to work.

Loyalty is not a Byproduct of Trust

Loyalty is not a byproduct of trust.

We fundamentally miss this fact in human interactions.

Trust occurs because a relationship builds over time into a state whereby transactional withdrawals can be made from the invisible account of engagement.

Loyalty occurs when people choose to engage with each other out of habit in an unthinking, uncritical way. This fact makes loyalty a particularly pernicious state because when the fundamentals underlying the engagement change—but the thinking about the fundamentals remains habitual and uncritical—the parties are forced into a place where they must shift their focus.

Media interactions, brand interactions, organizational interactions, and even some individual interactions rely on the posture that loyalty = trust or that trust = loyalty, but the fact is, most interactions are based on neither trust, nor loyalty, but instead are based in authority, ambivalence, storytelling, habit, and other factors.

When the bonds of loyalty are broken, without a commensurate rethinking of the bonds in the first place, situations and conflicts arise that lack the drivers of ethical clarity and moral fiber. And then, anarchy reigns, trust erodes, and loyalty becomes a relic of a naïve past.

Work on trust first.

Worry about loyalty not at all.

The Model Doesn’t Work Without Content

The model doesn’t work without a base of content.

And since quality is subjective (it always has been) and quantity is overwhelming (it has been ever since Google pushed the argument of search to its logical conclusion), the only considerations in online learning that matter are the ones based on the efficacy of the content you’re offering.

But, when building a model for online learning, too many educational institutions are trapped in the Industrial Revolution conception of content, consisting of lectures, tests as performance measurements, grades as a “stick,” accreditation as the “carrot” and conformity as the ultimate goal.

The Industrial Revolution education model works well with accreditation (“Will this get me my degree?”) and supports the creation of graduates with minds that aren’t focused on the skills that matter for the future (“soft” skills) and instead are focused on reinforcing doing things that no longer have much value to organizations:

Like hiding from responsibility and accountability.

Like placing blame when a project or initiative fails.

Like competing in a race to the bottom on price.

Like sacrificing personal ethics for a public paycheck.

Like working for organizations and in industries where professional decline is considered the “norm.”

If the model for your educational organization’s online learning experience doesn’t feature robust, peer-to-peer learning opportunities (projects), “speed to market” dashes (short time frames), high quality student participation (we don’t take everybody because we are neither “massive,” nor all that “open”), and technology as an assistive tool rather than a crutch (email as a messaging service rather than a time waster) then your model of online education and learning will resemble every other model of online learning currently available.

And then you’ll attract exactly the kind of students that you have attending your brick and mortar institution.

But maybe that’s the audience and consumer your educational organization wants to attract, recruit, retain, and ultimately graduate.

But if it is, please be clear on that focus in your organizational head when building the content model for your online learning experience.

HIT Piece 2.7.2017

On any curve of distribution, at the beginning of the curve and at the end of the curve are outliers.

At the beginning, these outliers are known as “pioneers.”

At the end, these outliers are known as “laggards.”

And in the middle of the curve (where the bulge is) this space is a cluster known as “the masses,” or the “average” or the “median.”

This truth of distribution stands for anything that can be mathematically measured, from the number of tall people in a room all the way to the number of CDs that people own who you may stop on the street.

This truth of distribution applies to my words (and the words of any other blog writer) as well.

On one end (at the beginning of the distribution curve) I’ve written blog posts with 50 to 100 words.

On the other end (at the end of the distribution curve), I’ve written blog posts with 1000 to 2500 words.

And in the middle, on average, I’ve written posts with 300 to 500 words.

Some math before I make my larger point: In the last four years, I’ve published 848 blog posts. If on average I’ve written 500 words per post, which comes to 424,000 words I’ve published in total since starting in 2013. And it might even be a little higher than that, due to posts not published.

424,000 words.

In all that time, I haven’t collected as many email subscribers as I would like.

I also haven’t collected as many engaged readers as I would like.

And this is the trouble with the Internet in general and blog writing in particular.

It begs the questions:

Why write on a blog you own, everyday if no one (or very few) are reading and engaging with you on your own platform and instead are continuing to read and respond on other platforms (i.e. Facebook or Medium)?
Why continue to build on land that you own when you’re the only one in the house?

I’ve been thinking about these two corollary questions a lot lately, because people often get excited when I talk about the blog, but then, when I point out that it requires you to be engaged with me, in order for it to work at the emotional and psychological level, I get…

…well, I get the responses that you would think I would get.

I’ve been thinking about these questions as I’ve been watching shared, walled, social media gardens devolve into spaces of short-form thinking, and long-form hubris.

I’ve been thinking about these questions as I build a platform that may not be for everyone–but that just might be for YOU.

424,000 words.

Responses, engagement, critical thinking, emotional intelligence: These are the things that matter, and whether writing, teaching, video making, or podcast recording, I hope that you will stay in the meaty part of the distributions curve of listening, engaging and responding.