[Strategy] On Truth and Reconciliation

There’s truth.

There’s reconciliation.

Rarely do you get both of them together.

This isn’t to say that parties seeking reconciliation are engaging in deceitful behavior or lying to gain an outcome that benefits them in a conflict process. But we are all selfish and no more so than when we can see the light at the end of the tunnel of conflict.

This isn’t also to say that parties seeking truth are engaging in behavior that will prolong conflicts and make them worse. But we are all myopic when our needs aren’t met around core values—like getting to the truth of a matter.

Just because you get the truth from the other party in conflict about their motives, their moods, their inner drives, or the outcomes they want, doesn’t mean that you’re going to get reconciliation.

And just like resolution, reconciliation may just be as hard to arrive at.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 4 – Halelly Azulay

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 4 – Halelly Azulay, Leadership Coach, Facilitator, Consultant, Speaker and Upgrader of Sustainable Leader Development

podcast-earbud_u-season-four-episode-4-halelly-azulay

[powerpress]

So, I talk and write about this stuff all the time.

Growing talent in the workplace cannot happen with considering work in a different way.

Talent is something that everyone believes that they have, but very few people can target and develop in a meaningful and demonstrative way.

Trust, follow-through, belief, and a standard of work and an understanding of labor, is changing in the world of work.

But this should be nothing new for you, because you’re listening to this podcast on your way home from work, on your way to work, or while you’re sitting in your cubicle, trying to avoid doing work.

Our guest today Hallely Azulay knows about all of this and is going beyond just exploring the changing world of work, she is actively trying to mold it into something better for everybody.

So what’s the solution?

Well, I argue for more training, as you would assume. I also argue for more transparency and authenticity around emotional labor. But I know that could be something that you may not be comfortable with.

But what about your manager?

The chasm between our comfort zones at work and the growth that we need to do at work to remain relevant is staggering. We need guidance, shepherding, diligence, and respect to cross that chasm successfully.

Without this, we won’t cross the chasm and truly develop our talents, skills and abilities in ways that allow us to become true stewards of the workplace.

Such guidance can come from the outside of your organization from folks like myself and Hallely. But more often than not, it’s going to have to come from the manager or supervisor who you actively do work to avoid during the day.

To paraphrase from Juvenal: Who trains the watchmen to watch in the first place?

Listen to Halelly and take the time to connect with her via the links below:

The Talent Grow Podcast: http://www.talentgrow.com/podcast

Talent Grow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TalentGrowLLC

Talent Grow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/talentgrow

Talent Grow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HalellyAzulay

The Talent Grow website: http://www.talentgrow.com/

[Strategy] Average in the Future

There have always been people in societies, cultures, and among populations all over the world and throughout history who have committed an average level of effort to the work of building their lives.

They lived. They died. And they didn’t make a ripple or a dent in the universe.

It’s only in the last 100 years or so that the protection for being average was codified at a mass level through the direct efforts of the Industrial Revolution and the aftereffects of that same revolution.

Another way of saying this is “C’s get degrees.”

Yes, they do.

But, over the next 100 years, they may have to get a different set of skills in order to maintain that “C” status, both in life, and in their careers.

It’s always been demanding to be average; to stay in your lane; to follow directions without critically thinking; to not be the nail that sticks up; to protect the status quo by not engaging in conflicts that matter.

And it’s just going to get even harder.

[Opinion] Trend Lines

There are monumental shifts happening everywhere, from politics to religion.

There are very few people really able to understand and analyze two things that happen at the same time:

The trend lines in culture, society, economics, and religion are moving in a certain direction.
The trend lines in technology, jobs, and employment are moving in a certain direction.

Trend lines tend to overlap, but the overwhelmingly human tendency in reaction to the feeling of overlapping, is to hunker down and protect, rather than to be open and collaborate, when the obvious end point of the direction of the trend lines becomes…well…obvious.

Emotionality confines us in our reactions and responses, and our human tendency is to react in the short term to maintain the status quo and to not worry about the future. The hard work is getting humans to shift from short-term thinking to practicing long-term empathy.

However, trend lines are not inevitable.

Neither are the goals that trend lines seem to lead to.

But they can become inevitable through our own macro inaction.

[Opinion] Realizing Your Potential is Not Even Half the Battle

Let’s talk about potential.

The idea that another person can do something that you can’t do, and do it better than you, typically engenders a couple of different responses in people:

The first reaction is one of coveting, not only the talent that the other person has, but also the ability that they have to leverage them. This reaction leads to jealousy, envy, and eventually taking actions that prevent the talented from fully realizing their potential.

The second reaction is one of surprise and joy, not only at realizing the talent that the other person has, but also engaging actively in helping that person find opportunities to connect with others who can help them fully realize their potential. These are actions that are designed to delight the person with potential and are done somewhat selfishly by the other party.

Then, there is a third response which doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but that rears its head far more often than we might think: This is the reaction of the person with the potential.

This person may not see the potential in themselves.

They may not care about pursuing that potential in the way that another party would like (we see this with parents and children sometimes).

The person may have other things going on in their lives (i.e. they may not have an “empty lot” on which to build their potential).

Or, they may simply be someone who enjoys the stimulus that comes from being recognized as having potential, without having to actually take any action to grow that potential in the long-term.

Every person views potential in different ways, and through different frames and lenses, based on stories they tell themselves (and stories that they repeat over and over again from childhood), but the truth is, potential—which is a combination of innate talents, learned skills, and the accumulation of the impact of life choices—is still a personal thing for each individual.

And even as the Internet—and before the Internet, the computer—has disrupted all of the old, “tried and true” Industrial Revolution ways of realizing potential and turning that potential into viable products and services for other people, people have stayed the same in how they react and respond to the potential in themselves, and others.

Curious…

[Advice] Stare Uncomfortable in the Face

The part of the conflict process that is addressed the least (and the most) is the uncomfortable part.

Not the scary part, where you’re actually doing the hard work of resolving an issue with people that you may (or may not) like.

Not the uncomfortable part that comes after you’ve decided to do the work and now you have a choice of whether or not to continue forward when the going forward becomes difficult.

Not the difficult part that comes when you decide to take a step back and examine the entire conflict process and determine where your emotions are coming from.

The most uncomfortable part comes at the beginning of the conflict process, when the resistance is at the highest, and the need for assurance is the most critical, and when you are looking into the eyes of the other party and think:

“This isn’t going to work out.”

That’s the most uncomfortable part.

And we talk almost not at all about it because to do so would be to acknowledge that we might not be emotionally, spiritually, and even physically, strong enough to manage the ups and downs of a process we’d rather avoid.

But the uncomfortable part comes before avoiding. It comes before surrendering. It comes before delaying. It comes before confronting. And it comes before engaging.

The people who can stare the uncomfortable part of the conflict process in the face—and not blink—will be the people who will create teams, that will form organizations, that will win the future, by doing emotional work first, and every other labor second.

It all starts with being able to stare being uncomfortable in the face.

[Strategy] 1…2…3…What Are You Hiring For?

Entrepreneurs (some of them) remember what business owners of all types have forgotten, at scale:

You get the conflict culture you hire for.

Think about it.

If you hire people that are looking for the organization to guide them to another level in their careers, past self-doubts, bumps in the road, dips in projects, and changes in the economy, you will create a resilient employee culture.

If you hire people that are looking for reassurances, permission, the answer to “Is this going to be in the test?,” and people who want to be paid extra to give extra, don’t be surprised when your conflict culture is based in avoidance, delaying, surrender, and a lack of responsibility and hiding.

If you hire people that are empathetic, focused on others and their experiences (customers, clients, etc.), who can make courageous decisions and take action in the face of a lack of standard operating procedures, but still justify those decisions in the context of advancing organizational goals, values, and growing the brand promise, then you have created an organizational culture that people (customers, clients, etc.) will cry out for.

The trouble is that with 20^th century mass production came mass hiring. With mass hiring the organizational idea grew that your organization wasn’t doing well, unless it hired everybody in a given pool based on factors that had little to do with your organizational culture, e.g. they lived close, they had the “right” credentials, they answered the questions in the interview in the “right” way.

Well, the era of being able to accomplish goals and do work at scale that matters with just anybody off the street, has passed; and, what has replaced it is ever smaller groups of people, doing more and more work that matters, using emotional intelligence, caring, resilience, and empathy to manage the inevitable conflicts that come with change.

If you want your organizational conflict culture to look—and people in it to have the courage to act—in a transformational manner, and be successful in an ambiguous business future, then hire for it.

Today.

But don’t complain that you can’t get where all the other organizations are getting, with customer and client awareness, attention, trust, and revenues, when you don’t hire for those outcomes.

And don’t complain when your “best” people leave the conflict culture that you hired for, for a more robust culture across the street.

A Treatise on the Evil in the Human Heart

Some of the things that I am about to express today may offend you.

Some of the things that I am about to express may not apply to you.

But either way, they are statements, ideas, and conclusions, that have not been discussed enough lately in the discourse that has been permeating our long, national narrative for at least the last twenty-five years, but they are present most recently in our national non-discourse, since the death of a man in St. Louis last year.

Or maybe it was the death of a young boy in Florida.

The deaths are only the latest example of human beings engaged in the ultimate conflict—violence—with each other, as a way to resolve issues.

These deaths are troubling, but not for the obvious reasons that drive social media communications, meme generations, outraged postings, declaratory blog posts, media declarations, and the fake outrage of television pundits, entertainment celebrities, and social justice advocates.

These deaths are troubling because, instead of drawing the American (and global) population closer together, they (and their immediate, reactionary aftermath) seem to only drive people further apart, into separate camps, meme-ing and glowering at each other with outrageous social media declarations about “unfriending” people who disagree.

Their deaths are troubling because the underlying issue beneath of all of these deaths is never truly talked about, examined, or dissected.

Maybe because that issue appears to “obvious,” to “easy” to deal with, or perhaps, the issue appears to be so unsophisticated to our contemporary minds, that it overwhelms us with the depth of its simplicity.

But, much like Occam’s Razor, the simplest answer is often the most accurate one.

But not the easiest one to solve.

***

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Discussion about the depth, breadth, and nature of the problem of human evil—and changing the hearts and minds of the people who have a propensity to do evil rather than to do good—gets less and less sweeping media coverage of any kind these days.

Collectively, we have decided in the United States (with much of the rest of the world not far behind)—that people (both individually and at scale) will just be perfect (or can at least be coerced into being good) if enough laws are passed, if enough people are socially sanctioned and made uncomfortable about holding and expressing uncomfortable opinions, and if the public responds quickly enough to get outsiders to straighten up.

We believe the Rousseauian myth (though he was not the first to express it) that man is driven to commit evil because of inequalities in society (a society, of course built by imperfect men) that manifest through the disparate gossamer of poverty, racism, sexism, or whatever phobia there is of the moment.

Culturally, we accept that the root of human evil is not based in a soul fallen through the curse of Original Sin (I mean…who wants to talk about sin?), but instead we believe that evil lies somewhere buried in deep in all of the social structures humans have invented, built and maintained over time.

We genuinely believe that if we just change the structures, either gradually or immediately, that justice will be meted out, that death will come only to the guilty, and that peace and freedom without consequence will reign.

And that would be a fine, worthy set of beliefs to pursue, if they weren’t proven catastrophically wrong, time, and time again.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Aaron Burr shooting Alexander Hamilton in a meaningless duel over politics, honor, and expedience.

The Hutus and the Tutsis engaged in genocidal mass slaughter with machetes in Rwanda in the 1990’s.

All over the world today, children wake up and are abused, beaten, and even worse, on their way to adulthoods, where they will continue the patterns of senseless abuse with their children.

A few days ago, a man shot police officers doing their job.

A few days before that, a man was shot in a traffic stop.

A few weeks before that, a man shot 50 people in a nightclub who weren’t bothering anybody.

A few months before that, a child was shot in a neighborhood scuffle.

And for years upon years, the crime rate in major cities in America has been ticking ever so slowly downward, even as the heinousness of the crimes that created public ripples through immediate reporting shock us even more with their depravity.

A few days ago, a college student got drunk and raped another college student.

A few years ago, cocaine, and then crack addiction were tearing up cities with murders, thefts, and all other manner of depravity.

And now heroin is doing the same thing, in “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” rural areas populated by the poor, the abused, and the neglected.

A few decades ago, some cops pulled a man out of a car in LA and beat him, seemingly without provocation—and no one put down the camera to stop them.

A few decades ago, violent riots swept through cities, following an endless spate of assassinations that no government entity could prevent.

In the 1930’s a government put the pressure to its own citizens and ultimately drove many of them into gas chambers, putting the horrifyingly apt title of The Final Solution to a process that had previously had no designation, other than the term pogrom, going back into the Middle Ages.

The examples overwhelm because at the bottom, they are about the depravity and evil of the human heart, which is desperately wicked, desperately ego-driven and selfish, and desperately desirous to do whatever may come to mind unto others without consequence, rather than having anything done unto them.

The typical, rule/sanction based bulwarks of religion, government, and even social sanctioning are gradually losing their ability to sway people away from committing individual acts of evil. Paradoxically, they are gradually swinging toward passively supporting, more and more, collectively larger acts of systemic institutional evil, because, as the Founding Fathers noted in the Declaration of Independence “…all experience has shown, that mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

And as the rule/sanction moorings fall away, one by one, the only thing that is left between people are relationships; the ties that bind, as it were. And even those are tenuous, at best, without something else buttressing them.

Do black lives matter?

Do white lives matter?

Do cop lives matter?

Do civilian lives matter?

Do children’s lives matter?

Do women’s lives matter?

Do men’s lives matter?

Do rich people’s lives matter?

Do poor people’s lives matter?

Does changing the human heart matter?

Does it start with you?

***

And now we are at the crux of the current manifestation of the age-old matter in our digital age.

No hashtag ever changed a thing.

In person change has always been fraught with difficulty, misunderstandings, miscommunications, negative escalations, and conflicts. When people talk with each other face-to-face there is always the opportunity for confusion and conflict, particularly if the conversation in question is questioning deeply held stories around values, worldviews, and frames.

It takes a lot of emotional quickening to escalate from a conversation to a confrontation to a conflict to a fistfight to a war. There are many discrete steps in face-to-face communication that social norming has established, developed, and refined for thousands of years to limit such escalation. But, as is always the case, human beings’ tools for communication get better, friction and misunderstanding increases, even as the speed of communication increases, and conflicts flare up.

From carrier pigeons to riders on horseback to the telephone to mail by airplane to emails and now Twitter, there have always been people who would rather fight to hold onto the status quo in their hearts, than take a risk and explore a different way. As the speed of our tools has increased how fast we get a message and then react to it, (going from days or weeks to micro-seconds) there hasn’t been a commensurate increase in the heart of rational contemplation.

Thus we get to social media communication.

The collective social media population reacts within seconds to an offense that culminates publicly only after brewing deeply in a human heart for years, and then uses the immediacy of social communication tools to psychologically manipulate people on the other end of the message into reacting rather than thinking.

And there’s really only two reactions available: fight or flight.

Not a measured argument.

Not a reasonable discourse.

Not knowledge or growth.

They are looking for either a respondent’s heels or their fangs.

In the case of the Internet, and the communication tools we have built on top of it, we have exchanged immediacy for escalation, and have confused personal passion driven by our reactions for legitimacy of an assertion.

Ease of access to digital tools also allows our solutions to deeply heart-based problems to be focused on the tawdry and the spectacle—which is short term—instead of the deliberative and the reasonable—which is long-term.

No hashtag ever saved a child.

Our desire to comment, burn, and react on the basis of spectacle, indicates that the type of communication we desire is that which will be friction free, painless, non-relationally based communication, when we want it, how we want it, that allows us to do what we want, when we want, how we want.

But this is an inherently selfish and vain position, a reaction from deep in the human heart to strike immediately at those who hurt us. A reaction that culminates in employing the phraseology of escape (“Please “unfriend” me if you disagree with me”) rather than the language of understanding, compassion, and recognition that we are all fallen.

We are all in need of justice with mercy, compassion with understanding, and reconciliation without strings.

No hashtag ever made a traffic stop less dangerous, or more dangerous.

Online communication will always be fraught with difficulty and no amount of changing a name policy, policing speech we don’t like, or building walls and doors into our platforms (or our physical lives), is going to prevent than difficulty.

The solution to all of this, as with most things, lies in changing the motivations, the drives, and the worrying tendencies deep in the dark heart of man. But we cannot begin this change under our own power.

My long, troubled, questioning journey through physics, philosophy, politics, and even religion, has convinced me that the solution to the all of these motivations, drives, and worrying tendencies, endlessly repeated from one news cycle to another, lies first in individually establishing a heart-felt, meaningful, personal relationship with Jesus Christ through prayer, reading the Bible, and joining with others in community of all races, genders, orientations, and beliefs.

But many people (some of whom are my friends on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms) are unwilling to believe that the solution to all of this depravity is this simple. Some of you (if you’ve made it this far) will probably be vehemently disagreeing with me. Some of you will be confusing the ineffective, rule/sanction based bulwark of religion, with meaningful relationship with other people in Christ.

I welcome your feedback.

I am friends (and nominal associates) with all manner of races, sexual orientations, political positions, and religious/non-religious people on many social platforms. I do not run from disagreement on this conclusion, and I welcome questioning.

Because I am talking about relationships.

Real ones.

When you have a real relationship with Jesus Christ, not a rule based relationship, you don’t go it a nightclub and shoot people. No matter how egregious their life choices may seem to you in the natural.

When you have a real relationship with Jesus Christ, you pray for those who have wronged you racially, ethnically, and socially, and you let those prayers change your mindsets, behaviors and attitudes before you put on your policing uniform.

When you have a real relationship with Jesus Christ, you let that relationship determine when to disobey (civilly) those in authority, when to obey (in civilly) those in authority, and when to let God sort it out.

When you have a real relationship with Jesus Christ, you are not frightened, worried, or consumed by human injustice perpetrated by human actors; instead you are emboldened to act with courage in the face of all of that, knowing that Jesus walks before you—so who can be against you?

When you have a real relationship with Jesus Christ, you are able to forgive your enemies before they do unto you, without rancor, without judgment, and without fear of what you will lose.

I am convinced, now more than ever, that the greatest impact we will ever have on each other—the greatest ability that we will ever display to others to show them how to “destroy a piece of [their] own hearts” is by walking out the love, compassion, and nonviolent response exemplified in the life, actions, and words of Jesus Christ, to people whose opinions, positions, and even behavior and actions, we find to be scary, repulsive, revolting, and even violating human decency.

Our role is not to deal out death (whether that be rhetorical death via a social media post or literal death via a weapon) in judgement, for who can know all ends of the human heart?

Who can predict how walking out the impact of a relationship that goes above all human knowledge will affect that other person who disagrees—even unto death?

No hashtag ever generated a relationship with Christ in another human being.

***

The solutions are simple, but not easy.

Teach your children to use kind words with each other and role model not looking at the phone.

Go and talk to your neighbor who disagrees with you politically, economically, racially, scientifically, emotionally, and find out why they disagree through actively listening to them, rather than making a judgment.

Take the inner journey toward Jesus Christ, with or without a Bible believing church behind you. This journey—if you take it as seriously as you take protesting, demonstrating, and inspirational posting—will change your heart fundamentally, if you let it. It is no surprise that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a practicing Reverend first, and then a nonviolent demonstrator, and then a public hero.

No matter what your title, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your desires, or your needs, begin with changing the world, by changing yourself—your own dark heart—first.

Avoid dealing out metaphorical (or even literal) death in judgment, and instead lead with compassion.

For justice without mercy is merely dressed up revenge.

And mercy without justice is merely watered down passivity.

We are all called to be active, not passive, players in this life, regardless of our title, our position in life, our past history, or our current situation.

I am not preaching human love. I am not advocating for human understanding. I am not writing for more of the same thing that doesn’t work. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am not telling you what church to go to. I am not telling you what pundit’s video to reTweet, or what meme to post.

I am focused, laser-like, on uplifting you toward examining yourself first and then looking at others. I am focused laser-like on destroying pieces of my own heart that are capable of evil. I am focused laser-like on attaining and facilitating the justice that Jesus Christ would have me attain and facilitate, rather than engaging over and over again with my own anger, disappointment, and disgust.

And the diamond through which I am shining that laser-like focus is my real relationship with Jesus Christ.

The solutions cannot be all wrapped up neatly at the end of a 2700-word + essay, because the problems are buried deep in the human heart.

They’ve been going on since man disobeyed God in the garden of Eden, and then, Cain slew Abel and his blood cried out from the ground for justice.

They’ve been going on since Abraham bargained with God for the preservation of Sodom and Gomorrah.

They’ve been going on since the Romans burned Christians as pyres to light Nero’s palace.

They’ve been going on since the Catholic Church killed Jews and other non-believers, in the Inquisition.

They’ve been going on since one part of our country decided that they would rather engage in an apocalyptic Civil War than give up the trade of humans as chattel.

They’ve been going on since Vladimir Lenin decided that in order to make a “perfect world” he would have to break some eggs.

They’ve been going on since Hutus and Tutsis destroyed Lake Victoria with each other’s dead bodies.

They’ve been going on since a cop shot a man in a car for no other reason than he appeared to be threatened.

We cannot begin changing others under our own power until we change ourselves first.

If we could, we would have done it already.

We need more Jesus, not less.

And not the Jesus we make up to make ourselves feel comfortable about our human evils, and to justify our judgements and decisions, but the Jesus who is what He says He is.

Or else…well…just look at the headlines, the videos, the news reports, and the decay of interaction to see what the inevitable outcome will look like.

[Advice] Conflict-Resolution-as-a-Service 2: KPIs

Understanding where people’s conflict responses are in their quadrants and where they position conflict messages in their brains, are critically important to consider. Particularly as you develop key performance indicators as you start resolving conflicts in your organization, differently than you have been before.

If a person prefers an avoidance stance toward conflicts in my professional life, then a person with a more collaborative stance (in the quadrant opposite) will have some problems with the avoider.

If a person prefers to be in control and compete around conflict (as many in the aggressive world of work sometimes do) then the accommodator in the opposite quadrant might have some problems.

The marketing theory of positioning (as expounded by Trout and Reis) says that there is limited “shelf space” in a person’s mind for messages. It further states that, once a message has been anchored onto a shelf, it’s not going to be dislodged by a new message in the same space. Instead, the jujitsu lies in creating a new message in the quadrant opposite the established message.

In relation to conflict management, a key performance indicator of whether or not your conflict training efforts have “worked” or not is: are people communicating messages to each other in the heat of conflict in a different way that reveals messaging anchored in a different position in their minds.

This is a KPI that is so subtle, so hard to actually see, that many managers, supervisors, owners, and others, who aren’t necessarily dialed into to language, emotional depth, and other conflict driving factors, will miss it. However, outside of people communicating with each other with courage (which comes with coaching, not necessarily training) people communicating differently, using different words, phrases, and even body positions, and getting different outcomes, it’s the only metric that matters.

[Opinion] You Can Bet Your Bottom Dollar

If you’ve got all your money in front of you, and you put it all on black (or red) you might just be betting your last dollar. Your bottom dollar, if you will.

Employers and employees in the last century used to believe that motivation and morale were traits that could be squeezed out through the regulation of labor, one 22-pound shovel at a time.

But in this new century, as the wheels have come off of the Industrial Revolution, it’s hard to take the measure of modern motivation and morale. Motivation, and even morale, have become individualistic and based, not in professional loyalty, but instead in social public display. Many people—employers and employees alike—have come to understand, without saying out loud, that they have to be willing to abandon old notions of employee loyalty, and even work ethic in order to advance in the workplace.

But many people don’t want to push their chips forward. Many people—employees and especially employers—don’t understand what they’re meeting in a future where motivation is exemplified through doing things that don’t show up on a resume and that don’t scale immediately. Many employees, and employers, feel as though they are putting their souls at hazard.

And as more technology replaces human motivation (which is a trait, not a state) and human morale (which is about the soft skills of team development, rather than the hard skills of work ethic and loyalty and—increasingly—intelligence) becomes less interesting to employers as a trait to develop, many more people are going to choose to not be a part of this world.

Which will inevitably lead to conflict, which may come burnished with the patina of the 20^th century language of social justice, equality, and overall restlessness, but underneath will be about motivation, intelligence, access, talent, and even the ability to engage in emotional labor.

Rather than continuing to seek in vain the next 22-pound shovel.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Jeremiah 17:9