First 200 Bad Drawings

There are 200 bad drawings inside every comic book artist.

Just as there are an estimated 1,000 bad words/turns of phrase inside of every writer.

And there are a certain number of below quality (or poor quality) teaching or training experiences inside of every teacher and trainer.

There are 1,500 bad jump shots inside every free throw shooter. As there are multiple bad layups inside of every basketball player.

In professional fields from comedy to athletics, the audience accepts that there is a curved path that the performer has to walk, from being inexperienced to being experienced.

What the audience doesn’t know is where the performer is at on the path from being inexperienced to being experienced, which complicates the audience’s judgment of the performance.

And can warp its feedback.

But the thing is, once the performer gets all the inexperience out of their system, and successfully works their way through the curve from inexperienced to experienced, the performer won’t care what the performance “looks like” to the audience.

The performer won’t care about the feedback about their performance from the audience either.

Self-Select Out of the Pool

Here’s an idea:

When you hear an idea that doesn’t appeal to you, doesn’t interest you, or that doesn’t resonate with you, merely say (either internally to yourself or externally to the presenting party) “That’s not for me.”

Then add this other part on.

“And that’s ok.”

Then, either move on physically from the room or emotionally from the interaction.

This works better as a coping mechanism for handling ideas, concepts, and thoughts that we find to be personally repulsive, than engaging in feedback processes where you seek to destroy the other person’s sense of self-worth and seek to shame them into silence.

If it’s not for you, then stop wasting your time (and the other party’s) and self-select out of the pool of interaction.

Do this so that other people, for who the idea is appealing, can self-select into the pool.

This approach works better than staying in the pool of interaction, exercising the vain hope that the messaging underneath the interaction will resonate for you—or be relevant for you—at some point in time in the future, and at the end of the interaction, engaging in the politics of personal destruction via the use of weaponized negative feedback.

Caring Costs

Caring costs.

It costs to be empathetic to your employees’ emotional needs.

It costs to be mindful of the non-verbal messages you’re role modeling.

It costs to be engaged all the time in the active act of actively listening.

It costs to develop connections that gain you nothing in the short-term.

It costs to care when that caring may not be “enough” for the other party when what was really desired by the other party was a transactional act, not a relational one.

Caring costs.

But what else are you going to invest your emotional energy in?

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.

Connection-as-a-Product (CAAP)

If connection is the product of the future, the problem is not going to be connecting; human beings connect naturally–and arbitrarily.

If connection is the product of the future, the problem is not going to be developing the tools and technology to mediate, facilitate, develop and encourage those connections; human innovation is already beginning to drive that development.

If connection is the product of the future, the problem is going to be determining the value of that connection.

The assumptions, decisions, and even the drivers, that encourage the development of markets, regulations, policies, and procedures, at scale are absent in the face of something ephemeral, long-term, relationally based, and seemingly arbitrary from person to person.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking about this differently:

What are we charging our customers and clients for?
What are we paid to do?
What do our clients and customers believe we are paid to do?
What is the value of education about connection to our customers and clients?
What is the value of connection for our customers and clients?
What is the value of the tools around the act of connecting with our clients and customers?
What do our clients think they want from each other?
What is the market value of our network, to our customers and clients?
What is the risk profile of our market, our clients, and our organization?

Answering these questions, along with carefully considering the inherent (and growing) value of storytelling, self-awareness, and conflict management (not resolution—that requires skillsets you might not want to acquire) will open the door to creating a macroculture of connection.

Avoiding these hard questions and hoping that another innovator, entrepreneur, or visionary will come along and create the web of support that the system of connection-as-the-economy requires, is foolhardy and dangerous.

If connection is the product of the future, the problem is going to be answering the questions, in brave ways and then acting on the scary answers.

Obligation is a Funny Thing

Obligation is a funny thing.

And not funny as “ha-ha” but funny as in “Isn’t this a modern irony?”

The NFL owners voted almost unanimously this week, to move the Raiders franchise from Oakland to Las Vegas (a move fraught with its own implications in a professional sport full of people with questionable moral and ethical decision making practices…but bear with me) and their explanations to the fans of why they are moving, is reflective of a larger shift in our culture around the concept of obligation.

The attitude encapsulated in the owners’ comments following the vote reflects two views of obligation:

The first view is that of “we owe you nothing.” The franchise and the team played games, grew a fan base, and gave the entertainment to the fans of the sport that they craved. In exchange, the fans gave the team and franchise money through ticket sales and more.

Purely transactional.

The second view of obligation is that of “the only thing I ever owed you was a ‘good time.’” The players, the ownership (I’m a Denver Broncos fan, I know), and even the overall notorious behavior of the franchise reflected this “good time.” In exchange, the fans (both locally and regionally) gave the team, the owners, and the franchise attention, awareness, and an audience.

This is also purely transactional and reflects a view of obligation based not in attaining revenues of money, but attaining revenues of attention and trust. It’s the view that Frank Sinatra had about his life versus his performances, and that many celebrities of all stripes seem to have abandoned in recent years.

There are two large perspectives to consider here, both of which relate to conflict management and our real lives, as well as one small—but salient—point:

Our lives are never purely transactional in nature. There is always an exchange of emotion for revenues (either trust or money) and that transaction has never been more valuable than now in our overall organizational and public cultures.
Our conflicts are based on other people barreling past our obligations and asking us to give more emotionally, than we may be prepared to give. However, the reality is that our personal boundaries around obligation must expand, or our management (not to mention our resolutions) will be task oriented, thinly veiled attempts to get to a relationship based goal we don’t really value, with the other party.

The small point is this: The organizations and leaders that understand the nature of obligation and the power they wield in a transactional relationship, will attain far greater—and far more meaningful—outcomes from individuals, societies, and cultures, than those that don’t understand.

Or even worse, those that don’t care—or never cared—in the first place.

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.

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.

Sharpening Our Axes

Searching for the right tree to cut down (where to put our focus in a forest of worldly options) may not be as important as taking considerable time to sharpen our axes beforehand.

Unfortunately, too many of us are focused on the complexity of the forest of trees we find ourselves surrounded by (i.e. media noise, internal dialogues, external conflicts, etc.) and are not focused enough on sharpening the axes we’re carrying around.

Some of our axes include:

Our money.

Our time.

Our intentions.

Our relationships with people that matter in our lives.

Our “no’s.”

Our “yeses.”

Our strategy for managing our egos.

Our strategy for managing other people’s egos.

Our emotional energy.

Approaching a tree in the forest and chopping it down is twice as hard with an ax that’s dull.

And not all trees respond well to being cut on by all axes.

[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.