[Strategy] Truth and Fairy Tales

The uncomfortable truth is that an understanding and appreciation of the impact of human emotions is required to address the conflicts of the present day.

The comfortable fairy tale is that everywhere human beings are freed from the impact of their emotions by more economic choices, more scientific knowledge, and more opportunities to engage rationally with an ordered world.

The uncomfortable truth is that people very often refuse to change their behavior and walk the hard emotional path from awareness to competency unless a radical catastrophic (either positive or negative) personal or social event occurs to them.

The comfortable fairy tale is that humanity (both individually and collectively) is trending inevitably toward an integrated, united, globalized mindset, less captive to the paradigms, conflicts, and drivers of humanity’s conflict-ridden past.

The uncomfortable truth is that some people don’t want resolution (or closure) to the conflicts they are experiencing, and seek instead to inflict the consequences, process, and results of their personal conflicts on others.

The comfortable fairy tale is that resolution would be easier to get to if only irrational actors ceased acting irrationally through the auspices of more knowledge, more data, but less received, conceived, or perceived wisdom.

The uncomfortable truth is, the more that we think about the very nature of the human beings with whom we are in constant contact (and with whom we are in constant conflict) the better we get at managing, not the conflicts of others, but the reactions in ourselves.

The three areas in which we grow are often overlooked, but as conflicts, and the confusion about why they occur, increases, these areas will become more critical to engage in with mastery:

Intentionality—no more accidents. Yes, it seems exhausting to always be consciously aware of what we say, what we do, what we think, and what we feel. But it’s equally exhausting to experience the results of a lack of intentionality.

Self-awareness—physician heal thyself. Yes, it might be a more entertaining and distracting approach to be filled with the noise of others (and the constant pitch of the world). But healing yourself requires coming to terms with the signal coming from inside yourself.

Hearing—rather than listening to speak. Yes, it requires patience to listen to others with whom we disagree, and with whom we agree. But when we miss a critical conflict message because we didn’t hear it, we will have to be far more patient with the consequences as they roll out in our lives.

As the framing of more and more comfortable fairy tales run up against the wisdom of uncomfortable truths, it becomes imperative for those who have eyes to see, and ears to hear, to become more strategic around these three areas.

[Advice] Conspiracy Theories

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 those of hummingbirds.

The long read, the long form content, the long movie; the challenging idea, the scientific journal, the complicated path to learning a new language; these are all in competition against TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), the 30 second cat video on YouTube, the 6 second looping Vine video, or the easily shareable click-bait article.

Audiences have been convinced by both marketers, and journalists (just marketers in another way) that their thinking and content consumption choices are sophisticated. That they are able to sift through biases consciously (without relying on assumptions and inferences from facts not in evidence), come to rational conclusions, and then act on those conclusions to co-create an orderly world.

Oh, but were that so.

When audiences can pick their own personalized access to “knowledge” and can choose their own “facts” then news that comes from sophisticated marketers (some former journalists) and content creators, becomes the coin of access to the conspiratorial realm. And social cueing, confirmation bias, and attribution activates individuals in the audience to create their own, publicly viewable, and socially shareable conspiracy theories.

Not about aliens landing at Roswell.

Not about the Illuminati running the world.

Not about a rising one-world government.

Not about a coming cashless society.

But conspiracies about stolen votes, illegal voting (and voters), racialism, economic injustice, Big Pharmaceutical companies poisoning vaccines, Big Agricultural companies poisoning seeds, Big Banks ceasing to be allowed to failed, Big Governments seeking to curb natural rights, Big Faith seeking to curb libertine tendencies, and on, and on, and on.

This type of conspiracy theory mongering is particularly subtle and insidious, because it plays on the mistrust and biases audiences already have built in to their world-view and thinking, but it does the play at scale, and one-to-one. This creates a feeling of community (we’re in the know) while also creating a feeling of persecution (we’re on the outside of everyone else).

And people should have expected it. As more knowledge, has become more accessible to the common individual (if you have a smartphone in your pocket with Internet access, you have a supercomputer) we have been encouraged to embrace the conspiracies we like, share them with our friend circle, and then sit back and wait passively for reality to match our frames and worldviews. And when that doesn’t happen, we go back, double-down, and start the conflict cycle.

Mass media (led by the collapsing and panicking journalism field) is complicit in this as well, seeking to drive audience attention to ideas and concepts that are spurious, but that also generate clicks. This is because mass media content production can’t figure out (at scale) how to get audiences to pay for something they can get anywhere for free, but it’s also driven by the ego-based desire to be seen, be acknowledged as an expert, and to grow the network and personal brand of the content creator at the expense of the market, and the audience, gaining new knowledge, or being challenged in any meaningful way.

Fake news—and the environment that allows conspiracy theories to metastasize—is not going to go away. The echo chambers of social platforms are too powerful, with too many voices, too many passive audience members, and too many exclusively self-interested actors.

What is going to have to change is, as always, the hardest piece: Individuals are going to have to decide what they will absorb, what ideas they will believe, and they critically reject other ideas, based on objective evidence and proof.

But if individuals (and audiences) could do that effectively, the placebo effect long-ago would have ceased to be effective.

[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.

[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.

[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…

[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] Mental Infrastructure

There is a lot of mental infrastructure from the Industrial Revolution still laying around.

And most of that infrastructure can be seen on display in organizations:

Employees who are at the bottom of an organizational chart, believing that they are the foundation on which the organization rests, yet feeling as though they are treated as basement dwellers.

Managers and supervisors who are squeezed in the middle, believing that they are the glue that keeps the top of the organization from flying away, and keeps the bottom of the organization in line. Yet the reality is that they are asked to care about something that they did not initially build, and asked to give positive lip service to ideas that they know will have a low chance of success.

Upper management and executives who are at the top of the organizational chart, believing that they deserve the status that they have. And that preserving that status is the only thing that matters. Yet feeling as though they are in a constant battle with forces (i.e. governmental regulations, organizational ennui, etc.) that the people in the organizational chart below them could never possibly understand.

Work matters in the 21st century, because of two reasons:

The first reason is that as the jobs that used be done by humans migrate more and more toward the computer, the mobile phone, and to whatever hardware innovation comes next (probably the cloud, virtual reality, and A.I.) the only question worth answering is: Can a computer do your job?

When the “yes” answers to that question outstrip the “no” answers, the Industrial Revolution based infrastructure of our assumptions, ideas, and even opinions, about work will change. If they don’t, if we bitterly cling to past notions, continually hag-ridden by reimagining a past to which we cannot return, we will fail to take advantage of the positive parts of our remaining mental maps for a future we cannot fully predict.

The second reason is that as individuals and companies become human centered rather than technology centered, the only things that matter are the Long Tail, emotional intelligence, leadership ability, courage, and resilience. Organizations of the past century said that those traits weren’t that important in light of where your job was placed on an organizational chart. But that is no longer true.

The work that matters will be that which values these traits above all else. And there are some fields (the human services most of all) that are poised to take advantage of this shift in what is valuable in the future, from what was valued in the past.

The infrastructure that needs to be torn down the most is in the minds of employees, managers, executives and others.

The true tragedy is that the demolition work is plentiful, but the workers are few.

[Advice] When The Bubble Bursts…

Denouncing decisions made in the past without empathy is a sure way to be surprised when a bubble bursts.

Bubbles are created when we think we have predictive powers about future events, that we don’t. And then, we proceed to tell stories and build narratives that back up the “reality” of those bubbles in our heads.

This would be fine if it were an isolated incident.

Unfortunately, everybody’s doing it.

See, since no person knows the future (and a majority of people tend to denounce the past without learning from it), the chances of the narrative bubble we’re living in being the only bubble (and by extension the right bubble) are pretty slim.

To none.

There are other ways to be surprised when our bubble bursts, either collectively, or individually:

  • Lacking curiosity to explore alternatives—or even hear of them—from people with other narratives, who we find abhorrent, or wrong.
  • Assuming only one outcome to a conflict, a decision, or even a problem is the “right” one.
  • Manipulating available (and unavailable) information to “get consensus” from a fickle and wavering crowd.
  • Presuming that since we’ve already heard an alternative solution one time, that the next time we hear it, it will be the same as before. And thus dismissing important information we’d rather not consider.

The really humbling (or humiliating) point to consider is that bubbles invariably burst.

The presence of a bubble, whether an information bubble, or a narrative bubble, almost always ensures that there will be a resounding “pop” when the bubble bursts.

The only compelling question coming out of that burst bubble is: Are we going to learn from the bubble bursting, or are we going to continue to commit the logical and emotional fallacies that got us to “bubble-based thinking” in the first place?

[Opinion] Live with the Outcome of the Vote

Tomorrow in the United States, is election day.

There is, during local, state, and national elections, the usual appeals to get people to engage in phone calling for candidates, rallies, polling, and all the other “get out the vote” parts of an election campaign.

The appeals come from the idea that it is easy to convince people not to vote; thus, by getting in their face with constant appeals to participate in all aspects of the voting process (from planting a yard sign to actually voting) the candidates hope to ensure that people are persuaded to vote.

This is all well and good. But towards the end of an elections cycle, such appeals can rise to the level of farce.

What’s far more important is how candidates, and their supporters, live with the outcome of an election.

Candidates and supporters don’t need to be told how to get out the vote.

Candidates and supporters need to be told how to live with outcomes they might not like.

Or that they might have voted against.

This ability to deal with outcomes that are not voted for, without engaging in disruptive revolution, is a fixture of the United States electoral process, because of how the electoral process is designed via the Constitution: A candidate and their ideas may be popular, but if there isn’t enough support from populations in states with a high number of electoral votes, then the candidate loses.

Being a popular loser is something that past candidates have some experience with at the national level in the United States, and because of this two-tiered system, the electoral process has always been relatively free from the chicanery and corruption that sometimes rules in plurality, or parliamentary based systems.

The thing that drives the difficulty in living with the outcome is partially the media. We get the media system that we have built, and in the United States, it is a system based on short attention spans, emotional hijacking, and spreading of rumor as fact.

But we allowed that system to be built.

The other thing that increasingly drives anger, and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes, is the fact that as the United States has become more fractured in its media consumption of facts, there has been the corresponding rise of tribal like behavior. This type of behavior, instigated by a click happy media structure, creates a perfect storm of disaffection and unrest, that goes beyond the outcomes of election days.

And it will go beyond Tuesday as well.