Right Questions Right Answers

The issue is not the questions we ask.

The issue is knowing the right questions to ask, at the right time, and about the right things.

If you don’t know what the right questions are to ask because you don’t understand what’s happening in a conflict situation, then just blindly questioning isn’t a sign of curiosity.

It’s a sign of foolishness.

If you don’t know what the right time to ask a question is, because you don’t understand timing, don’t care about it, or are in a hurry to score a rhetorical point, then just shouting out a question isn’t a sign of resistance or “speaking truth to power.”

It’s a sign of poor intuition.

If you don’t know what the right things are to question, because you lack the knowledge, the time, the resources, or the emotional energy to do the research to find out about the background of the topic area you are questioning, then the act of questioning isn’t a form of discovery.

It’s a sign of lack of preparation.

Three ideas here can help for knowing the right questions to ask, at the right time, and about the right things:

Be curious but not naïve—or blind.
Chase intuition, then facts, then knowledge and wrap that around persuasion.
Don’t ever ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

And one extra: If asked a question, answer it honestly, truthfully, kindly, but firmly and with conviction.

Network Leap 3

Most people don’t see it.

Confusing the primacy of what we can see, touch, taste, and feel, closes our human perceptions to the potential financial and monetary value of what we cannot measure and codify with our five senses.

This is evident in the primacy of the use of relationship networks in every aspect of our lives.

We cannot touch connection, though we can experience a story with other people.

We cannot see engagement, though we can engage in active listening and experience the positive effects of someone listening to us intently, and the negative effects of someone ignoring us.

We cannot see the value in a relationship, but we can feel with our hands and our emotions the ways in which people grow in relationship transactionally with us.

We cannot see the cruft, bad feelings, negative emotions, and life experiences where the relationship didn’t “work out” as transactionally as we would like, which often creates in us a sense of caution at getting back into relationships and connections.

We have all observed the causal outcomes of the impact of things we can’t see (relationships) and have experienced the power in maintaining and growing connections (networks) to people who may—or may not—be able to “help” us advance in the world.

We all know someone who has gotten a cake job, attained a plum position, or moved up the ladder of an organization, not through technical skills, but through the value of human connection.

Most people don’t see it.

We cannot directly observe the functions of the Internet.

We cannot directly observe how information spreads through bits and bytes and is translated into images, text, and videos.

We cannot directly observe how those videos, texts, and images impact the mind and change the perceptions of the receiver of those messages, but we all accept the reality of these changes happening.

We cannot see how searching for information on the Internet, using a tool such as Google, unites us as disparate people in a communal desire to connect, engage, and to grow our interests, our curiosities, our agreements, and our arguments.

Most people don’t see it.

But Google does.

Think about it: Google as a search engine tool proves—in a form monetized at enormous scale—that the networks of connections matter more for making money, making more connections, making products, making ideas, and making services than anything else tried in human history up to this point.

But there’s an upper limit to that knowledge.

Trapped by the confines of the box in your pocket (i.e. your mobile phone) or the box in your house (i.e. your TV or desktop computer) or the box in your briefcase (i.e. your tablet), there’s a hardware limit to a software solution.

There might not be a software solution to the problems that people have, but in the 21^st century, Google (now Alphabet) is going to do its level best to break out of the boxes it is currently trapped in, and prove that networks between people in the physical world, can be scaled and monetized just as easily as they were through a search function.

Google sees it.

Do you?

[Strategy] Why So Few Self-Aware Organizations?

Organizations, founders, managers, and employees who are self-aware do better than those who aren’t.

This should come as no surprise, but in an economic, social, and even political climate where “knowing thyself” is as mysterious as “knowing thy customers,” it becomes incumbent upon an organization–and the people employed by it–to be self-aware.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

What does our organization do here in the world?
- Why are we doing it?
- Is what we’re doing useful, not to the market or to our customers, but also to the overall economy?
Does our company care?
Are we just here to satisfy our shareholders?
If our employees don’t care (or do care) why do they care and how do we grow what they care about?
What do other people (i.e. the market (fans, customers, clients, shareholders)) think that we do?
- If there’s a chasm between those two perceptions, how do we cross it, if we want to, or how do we live with it, if we don’t?
Are we recruiting, interviewing, and hiring people that are self-aware about why they want to be here?
- And if we aren’t, how do we get them to leave in a way that honors them and makes space for the kind of people we want to be here?

Answering all (or any) of these questions honestly and clearly, requires the courage to speak up, be in the room, stay engaged, and be open to self-critique.

And in case you’re wondering if this all actually works, well here’s a little something to watch…

[Opinion] We Get More of What We Reward

When the emotional labor of addressing a dispute with a customer, a client, a co-worker, or a boss, is the work we don’t want to do, we revert to doing the work that makes us the most comfortable.

This is usually the task that we were hired to do in the first place.

A graphic designer, instead of confronting her client with what she knows about design, graphics, colors, and what is appealing to the human eye in practice, rather than in theory, will instead revert to the statement “Well, it’s what the client asked for.” And then do the bare minimum on the project.

A human services professional, instead of respectfully establishing boundaries with a client who has engaged in bad/poor behavior in the past, will allow that client to continue to run roughshod over him. He will revert to the statement “Well, I hope that the client changes this time.” And then he will do the maximum to ensure that the client follows the same rules and policies that didn’t change the client’s behavior before.

A factory worker, instead of confronting co-workers about shoddy work, or not showing up on time, will allow that co-worker to continue the behavior unabated. The worker will shrug her shoulders sagely and think “The boss should do something. After all, it’s not my problem.” And then the worker will start to come in a little bit later, and a little bit later, and a little bit later, until her arrival time matches that of her tardy co-worker.

A manager, instead of engaging in radical self-awareness work and self-confrontation about how they can improve as a leader and manager, will engage in radical “doubling-down” on driving the team forward to accomplish a seemingly unattainable goal. The manager will firmly think “That’s why they’re here. To work and get a paycheck. I have enough responsibilities without babysitting them as well.” And then the manager will make excuses as various members of the team quit, transfer to other parts of the organization, or gradually become “C” players, committed radically to performing just at the average.

The ironclad law of life is that we get more of what we subsidize and we get less of what we tax. When we subsidize laziness, disrespect, cynicism, disappointment, ignorance, appeals to “the rules,” or “the policies” we get more of the same types of behavioral responses in the organizations we seek to lead. When we tax emotional labor, self-awareness, leadership, insight, and open conversation, we get less of the behavioral responses that will raise up our organizations.

And yet, human intuition is to avoid, prevaricate, be selfish, be lazy and ultimately, to do the bare minimum at scale. This is the work—hidden behind the cover of our job/task descriptions—that we think we are hired to do, from founders and managers to employees and interns.

But, what if we’ve intuited the wrong thing?

What if the work that we should be subsidizing is the work that negates the effects of what we think is “natural” and “just the way that it is”?

What if we not only thought differently, but acted differently?

Network Leap

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 in order to leverage innovation, change, and advancement.

Of course, during the height of the Industrial Revolution last century, no one understood how to measure the revenue generated by any kind of network (personal or professional), but everyone knew somebody who had gotten hired via a referral, or who had made a purchase from strong word-of-mouth.

The Internet shows the power of such networks virtually (have you bought an online course lately?) even as it erodes the networks between people in the “real” world.

This is a particularly troubling realization for organizations built at scale, i.e. “real world” companies, from old line manufacturers (Ford) to healthcare companies (name your national hospital conglomerate of choice here).

The fact that a network matters more than physical size, monetary resources, access, etc., on the Internet is the main reason why corporate mergers (i.e. AT&T + Every Other Media Company You Can Name on the Planet) won’t do much to increase the overall market share of individual eyeballs and mass audience attention. The mass approach doesn’t work (because of the network impact of the Long Tail) and such mergers are the flailing attempts of declining industries to remain relevant in the face of the only thing that scales from individual to individual.

The web of the network.

Some sectors are provincially beginning to understand the impact of the presence of the network in the physical world, with the growing talk around the Internet-of-Things. But this is just the beginning.

The fact that the presence of the network matters more than the size of the network, is why Google will eventually get out of the search business altogether (probably around the middle of this century or so) and be the first Internet based company to burst from your computer or mobile phone application, out into the physical world.

Search matters less and less when the network matters more and more to accomplishing revenue, connection and growth goals at scale. Sure, Facebook may “win” the networking wars against search in their own little walled garden, but Google is planning on escaping to larger territories in the physical world where the presence of a network generates more revenues, because of the inability and myopia of Industrial Revolution based organizations to appreciate the impact of a network at scale.

These larger territories where networks aren’t as valued (yet) include the physical connectivity infrastructure of a city (Google Fiber), the physical place where individuals spend time commuting to work (Google Car) and the place where individuals spend the time connecting with others physically AND virtually (Google A.I. projects).

The fact that the network matters more than the technology facilitating the development of the network, is why virtual reality companies (Oculus Rift) and augmented reality games (Pokemon Go!) will be on the edges of individuals’ and companies’ radars for some time to come. The real “killer” app for both virtual reality and augmented reality technology will be the one that brings connectivity and an already established network into the new technology. And then pivots to connect that network to a larger, physical world.

For companies that can’t envision the leap to network based thinking (but who have executives and others on their cell phones texting, emailing, messaging, and otherwise building their virtual network constantly) here are a few suggestions:

Build the physical network between schools, industry, and government in your local town, or municipality. There is nothing less sexy or interesting than sitting at a table talking about how things were better economically in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, but that lament must be part of a larger discussion of expanding the web and the network using the same thinking and acting that individuals are doing virtually daily.

Realize that money is no object. Money is a story. Fear of change and resistance to the present reality and the future possibility are the objects. Recently the question came up in a workshop with an organization in transition “How do ‘crack’ the Resistance?” One way is to build trust. The other way is to change the thinking of the organization around what constitutes a “revenue generating” activity, and what does not.

Realize that there isn’t power in hoarding knowledge, access, or a carefully constructed network anymore. There isn’t power in hoarding money anymore (no matter how much cash on the balance sheets the Fortune 500 is hoarding). There isn’t even power in hoarding connections to politicians, power-brokers, or personalities anymore. The power is in sharing, reciprocity and building trust across boundaries, rather than busily building moats.

Or walls.

The full power of the Internet—in its ability to shape how humans build, how humans communicate, and how humans create network value—has yet to be fully explored.

We are at the beginning of a revolution.

[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.

[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.

HIT Piece 10.04.2016

Seeing is believing.

Why is that?

Role modeling is still the most powerful predictor of leadership success or failure.

Role modeling builds a company culture and ensures that the culture grows.

Role modeling is about both presence and absence. It’s about what is there, and what isn’t there.

Role modeling is unstated, unsaid, and often unremarked upon, but its power is acknowledged in the actions people choose.

Role modeling starts in childhood. Children follow their siblings—or don’t—directly due to what they see role modeled before them.

There are some questions to ask to determine if you’re actually role modeling or if you’re just putting on a show for an audience:

Is anyone actually watching?

Do I care what they see?

Can they learn a lesson?

Does my absence speak volumes?

Who will be impacted?

Is this a test?

Could I have done better at that last action?

Do I owe an apology?

Does it (i.e. my words, or deeds) matter to someone else?

Do they care what they are watching?

The difference between putting on a show (which is what the performer, the impresario, and the flim-flam man do) and role modeling (which is what parents, teachers, supervisors, managers, and responsible adults are supposed to do) is that putting on show requires that you answer none of the above questions.

Role modeling requires that you take responsibility and accountability for the answers to each one of the above questions.

HIT Piece 9.27.2016

Conflict is the process of change.

No great change—not one—happens without conflict.

The key is not to fear conflict (which many of us do) but to manage it.

Many people are afraid in times of great change because they aren’t offered a vision for what the change will bring, nor are they offered the courage to look the change in the eye.

The role of statesmen, leaders, and even executives used to be to provide assurances to the masses of people that the conflict would be manageable, that the outcomes (or changes) would be beneficial, and that the future would be positive.

Those roles stand empty now, and thus it is up to us to choose individually: A past state of supposed peace we cannot return to, or a future state that we need courage, clarity, and candor to get to.

There are no more statesmen and leaders “over there” anymore.

Which is good.

Because, they’re right here.

[Opinion] The Bigots Among Us

It is easy to dismiss ideas that we don’t agree with, that we find to be repulsive, or that downright offend us.

It is easy to dismiss ideas that we believe are damaging, could lead to cycles of violence, or that we believe are fearful.

It is easy to dismiss ideas that we think are regressive, oppressive, or not progressive enough for us to engage with based on our worldview.

And increasingly, and even more disturbingly, it is easier for us to dismiss the existence of people in the culture who hold these ideas.

But, as it turns out, the people holding ideas that make us afraid and angry, or that we think are stupid or retrograde, are the ones that work next to us sweeping floors, washing dishes, taking out the trash, and sometimes even counting our change back to us at the grocery store.

This is a real problem, because there’s no way to eliminate all the people who think differently than we do. There’s no real way to completely and categorically scrub every idea that we find offensive from the public square. The only option really, is to socially sanction the people with the ideas enough so that they shut up…and go away.

But…

Those people are still going to have children.

Those people are still going to have houses.

Those people are still going to have to pay the bills.

Those people are still going to want to contribute to society and culture.

Those people are still going to work.

And when a culture links holding a preferred set of ideas to advancing economically, socially, and culturally in that culture; and, when there are some people who just think differently, that culture is not long for freedom, and is approaching a soft form of tyranny.

Which has always hardened in the not-so-distant historical past.