[Advice] Prepare for the Baby

Before a new baby comes into the world, usually a family diligently prepares for its arrival.

The family prepares the environment that the baby will thrive in, from the set-up of the room to the clothes the new baby will come home in.

The family prepares their emotional life as well, changing their hearts and minds in preparation for a new life, a new voice, and a new perspective.

The family prepares their financial life, hopefully putting money aside, creating a savings plan, and otherwise prepping for the addition of a new person who will have needs and wants that must be met.

The family prepares their spiritual life as well, shifting their mindsets, their worship and even thinking about new traditions and how to integrate the new baby into their lives.

When a new baby comes into the world, a family prepares at all levels for the arrival of the baby.

In the Western world, there’s a reason that Thanksgiving precedes Christmas and Christmas precedes the New Year.

The transition from holiday to holiday is not about materialism, commercialism, or even marketing.

The transitions are about gratefulness (preparing the heart), arrival (the baby is born), and possibility (the future is bright).

In conflict, let us not forget the importance of growth into these transitions. Let us prepare our hearts, and our relationships, as diligently as we prepare for the arrival of a new baby into our homes, our communities, and our neighborhoods.

[Advice] Listening to Hear

Most of the time, in conflicts, we engage in listening to the other party long enough to create a counter-argument that supports the narrative we already have in our heads.

This is not active listening, it’s passive consumption of content while idly waiting for a turn to speak.

This passivity in listening is particularly acute when, in the middle of a statement (or idea) being expressed that we have already dismissed as irrelevant, uninteresting, or not fitting our narrative structure, we pull out the computer in our pockets and start surfing for distractions.

Or our eyes cease to focus on the person making the statement and we begin to look around the room.

Or we begin to fidget and move around, impatiently awaiting the end of whatever is being said.

Children tend to behave like this, and one of the functions of parenting is to curb such ADD-like behavior and channel the energy devoted to not listening to active listening.

And to hearing.

When adults behave like this (as increasingly we are seeing) it leads to the top three cause of conflict: miscommunication, poor communication, and fumbled communication.

There are some ways out of this, and the researcher in listening, Jim MacNamara, offers seven canons of listening (go and check out his talk with the London School of Economics and Political Science. It’s fascinating):

Recognition
Acknowledgement
Attention
Interpreting
Understanding
Consideration
Responding

To get to appropriate responding in a way that acknowledges what was said by another party, listening (which is an active, and transactional act) must become part of the listeners’ conversational DNA.

And in a communication world that rewards impatience, inattention, passive (or little) recognition, endless noise, a lack of consideration, poor interpretation, and inattentive responding, what are we as individuals to do to increase our listening, and decrease our speaking?

[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] Fierce Confrontations

Confrontation is the beginning of conflicts, but confrontation can only come about if we have the courage to have a conversation in the first place.

Conversation is not confrontation, though conversation may make parties in conflict uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable conversations must happen in fierce ways for those conversations to have value, meaning, and to move parties from where they are comfortable to where they are uncomfortable.

Part of this means moving away from banalities, and talking about the things that aren’t worth talking about, and moving toward talking about the truths we don’t talk about.

Susan Scott, in her book Fierce Conversations, calls these truths “ground truths.” From the military, this defines the truth that intelligence and tactics can’t get you to.

It means discussing philosophy, not religion.

It means discussing strategies, not tactics.

It means moving past listicles, and the regular “hey, how are you doing?” of the day and directly addressing the things that are making us uncomfortable, unproductive, and uncourageous.

When we act to move toward discussing ground truths, we must take the step with courage. We don’t move in that direction because its infinitely more comfortable to just avoid the whole thing, complain about a situation to others, or to continue to escalate the uncomfortableness of the situation through ambiguous and misleading nonverbal communication.

When we have the courage to move toward ground truths, we must eliminate three things from our thinking that hold us back:

Our need to be liked. This doesn’t mean that we act impolitely, impolitically, or speak out of turn. What it does mean is that we must acknowledge that the emotional reactions of the other person may lead them to not like us. And we must be ok with that.

Our need to be right. When we open the door to discussing ground truths, we also open the door to being told that we a wrong; that we have misinterpreted the situation or the responses of the people; that our framing might not match the reality as other people see it.

Our need to be heard. The person who opens a ground truth conversation should probably speak last. There is an epidemic of noise in our work, family, and school cultures. This noise serves as a constant distraction, designed to keep us responding and reacting to the wrong things. We tend to respond to the impact of all this noise by ratcheting up our own voices. In a ground truth conversation, our voices should be silent, and out need to be heard put on hold.

Confrontation precedes conflict. But only by a little. And when we need to be liked, to be right, or to be heard, we miss the opportunities inherent in confrontation, replacing them instead with negative escalation, continued conflict, and unmanaged outcomes.

HIT Piece 11.29.2016

Sometimes a presentation doesn’t “work.”

Sometimes there’s no connection with the audience.

Sometimes the presenter talks more to themselves than they listen to the crowd.

Sometimes questions aren’t asked (or answered) by the audience or the presenter.

Sometimes there is no active listening on the part of the audience.

Sometimes there is no active listening on the part of the presenter.

Sometimes the content is not what the audience expected.

Sometimes the content is not what the presenter expected.

Sometimes personalities clash.

Sometimes the content is exactly what the audience needs to hear, but not in the way that they need to hear it.

Sometimes the presentation is just a failure, and there’s nothing that the audience (or the presenter) can do at all to “fix” it.

Sometimes trying again, with a different audience, is enough.

[Advice] Conflict Manipulation

The manipulation is simple, but the consequences are complex.

We lament “Why can’t we all just, get along?” and then we proceed to irritate, obfuscate, or deceive the other party.

Then we look at them with Alfred E. Nueman’s famous facial expression and metaphorically shrug our shoulders.

The problem is not “getting along” (whatever that may mean, in whatever context you may place it for your conflict) the problem is that resolution is a chimera, and managing the other party in conflict is emotionally exhausting.

So, we dance the conflict two-step and hope that the other party will dance with us. But the consequences of the dance of avoidance (particularly if avoidance is a baseline rather than a temporary strategy) is that we avoid addressing the things that matter to us. And the months, years, or even decades roll by, and we harden into emotional positions from which we cannot extricate ourselves.

There’s too much cruft around the outsides.

The story that we tell ourselves then falls back to the original lament, the original starting position, and when it’s time to get to resolution (or management) we stymie the other party yet again.

“Why can’t we all just, get along?”

Well…there are reasons…

[Advice] How to Have Gratitude

Remember how easy it was to say “thank you” when you were a child and you had nothing to lose?

Yeah…neither do we…

And the thing is, as we become fully autonomous adults, with our own minds, motivations, and needs, it becomes less easy than it ever was in childhood.

We can talk all we want about the history of the Pilgrims, the fractious nature of their relationship with Native Tribes, or even if they should’ve left Europe in the first place, but underlying all of the dogmatic anger and resentment against the Pilgrims in our contemporary culture (and in some cases, against this day), is one simple fact:

It’s really, really hard to humble ourselves to say the words “thank you.”

It’s also really, really hard as adults to be thankful when we believe inherently that our own power gets us what we have, rather than working collaboratively in a community with others, creating “good enough” governments, and resolving arguments without resorting to violence.

It’s really, really hard to have a heart of gratefulness when we feel that our ideas, our emotions, and even our identities have been changed, stolen, appropriated, or even wiped out all together.

It’s really, really hard to say “thank you” when we feel that the system and structure is the one to whom we are giving thanks (it’s not) rather than the Immovable Force behind the system and structure (which we may—or may not—believe in).

It’s really, really hard to understand that saying “thank you” is not about how we feel today, tomorrow, or even how we felt in the past. Instead, having a heart of gratitude is about doing what’s right no matter what our ephemeral and fleeting feelings may be.

All of this is hard. And it should come as no surprise that it’s always been hard.

Both at the beginning of celebrating this thing called Thanksgiving Day, and all the way through today, two hundred and twenty-seven years later.

But if we get through this day, then the long spiral of renewal toward next year becomes one that happens without the baggage of resentment, conflict, and strife.

[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…

HIT Piece 11.22.2016

The power of stories is undeniable, particularly around the Thanksgiving holiday.

Stories about the Pilgrims.

Stories about the country today.

Stories about the country yesterday.

Stories about the neighborhood.

Stories about the family.

Thanksgiving is a curious holiday, because at its root, it is about thanking God (who the Pilgrims believed in, by the way) and about sharing the overflow (which the Pilgrims did with each other and the Native tribes that surrounded them).

Gratitude and sharing are at the core of the stories we tell each other on Thanksgiving.

But it is hard to be full of gratitude (or even to share for that matter) when there is conflict, strife, oppression (psychological or otherwise) or when there are outside signals that create meaningless internal noise.

The distractions from getting to the root of your story, are a story in and of themselves. But those distractions, many of which are focused on conflict, strife, and oppression, are not the core story of the holiday.

Thankfulness is a story.

Gratitude is an attitude. And a story.

Sharing is a story.

The power of the stories we tell—and the power of the stories we don’t tell—lies at the core of giving thanks, being grateful, and sharing with others.

[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?