[Opinion] 3 Things We Need Now

As many events become revealed that were once hidden; as information becomes freer and freer, and as people have more access to more entertainment, distraction, and dopamine hits via the communication objects in our pockets, audiences need three things now:

Wisdom: There is a dearth of wisdom. You can’t get wisdom from a Google search. You can’t stream wisdom to your mobile device. The only way that wisdom comes (folksy or otherwise) is through relationships with people. When there is a wealth of access to information (Google, anyone?) but there is a dearth of true insight, humanity has really only managed to wrest a sliver from the great artifice of this thing that we call “reality.”

Connection: There is a dearth of connection. Sure, we can connect with an old friend, email an organization and get personalized service, or even instant message a fellow professional in another vertical space far away from ours and harass and/or troll them. But such acts are shorthand for real connection; and, they rely too much on the tool (Facebook, IM, email, etc.) rather than focusing on the act of connecting. Connection with a person, face-to-face, unambiguously, is the only way that conflicts between human beings, and within human groups, will be solved.

Trust: There is a dearth of trust. Sure there is wisdom. And yes, there is connection. But, as has often been said in this space, there isn’t a lack of information, but there is a lack of trust. Not only is there a lack of meaningful connection, there is also a lack of trust. Organizations and individuals rely on this lack of trust to establish their authority long enough in your mind to get you to make a purchase. But trust established for less time than it takes to make a neocortical electrical leap from impulse to emotion to judgment, to justification, to purchase, isn’t really trust at all. That’s just effective marketing.

Showing up every day and being willing to learn, rather than to teach.

Giving people the benefit of the doubt.

Creating an environment of humility.

Do these three things and you’ll be well on your way to building trust, wisdom, and connection for yourself and for others.

[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.

[Advice] Nostalgia and Disposable Income

When a town economy runs on the fuel of nostalgia for an imagined past, and relies on a pool of people with disposable income who are willing to spend money to remember the past, the town is in trouble when either the nostalgia or income run out.

This is not anything new in the culture of towns away from bustling city centers globally, but the phenomenon will become more acutely noticed in the coming years, as nostalgia is abandoned in favor of the new and the shiny (you can’t compete with that) and as disposable income becomes less evenly distributed and less disposable.

And if you don’t think that it can happen in the 21st century, well, there are gold and silver “rush” mining towns throughout the American West that do a brisk business in seasonal tourism as ghost towns.

And it only took them 100 years to get there.

[Opinion] When Do You Pay The Piper?

The person who pays the piper calls the tune. Except when payment doesn’t come, then the piper takes revenge.

The legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is about a politician reneging on a promise to pay a vendor who rendered a service. In essence, the politician broke a verbal contract and then forgot about it. The vendor returns to the town sometime later and takes his payment (in the form of luring the town’s children away).

The legend is so deep and enduring, it has become almost a myth, its lessons enshrined in our language and even our proverbs.

When we call the tune of responses and behaviors in our conflicts, the questions for us are the same ones there have always been:

When do we pay the piper?

and

How much will the payment cost?

We only ask (or think) about these two critical questions when the cost of doing nothing to resolve the conflict in a way that benefits both parties, seems to be the only way for us to risk nothing and gain everything. Then, when the answers to these two critical questions don’t work in our favor, our behavior in a conflict situation begins to resemble that of the politician in the town of Hamelin long ago: We attempt to avoid paying the piper.

Going back on promises, risk avoidance, ignoring the impact of emotional residue, finding reasons to not put in the work to get to a resolution, and withholding reconciliation (or even forgiveness) are all ways we attempt to avoid paying the piper of conflict.

And eventually, if we keep it up long enough, the things of emotional value—relationships, trust, respect, accountability—begin to leave our own internal emotional towns.

Be sure the tune you’re calling in your conflict is a price that you are willing to pay to the piper.

[Strategy] The Deep End

The deep end of the swimming pool is the best place to be in order to change through conflict.

The deep end is where no one wants to go. It’s at the edge of the conflict universe, far away from the shallow center and a place for pioneers, adventurers and a place where safety is not a primary concern.

The deep end as an idiom describes all the ways that people used to respond emotionally to being put in situations that didn’t conform to the status quo, and that required a level of rebellion and non-conformity to confront and overcome. The idiom comes directly out of the last century, a time when personally, professionally, academically, and in every other way that mattered, challenging the safe, right, and easy path wasn’t as profitable as it is now.

We use the phrase “off the deep end” to mean that we have been involved in a situation, or trapped in a behavior, that we have no previous experience in handling, and that we feel so uncomfortable in, that it feels like death.

Of course, out on the edge of the universe, out in the deep end of the pool, we might drown. Or we might just decide to suck it up and persevere, gaining grit and resilience in the end.

Bringing up the importance of swimming in the deep end is somewhat problematic these days, in a public culture that’s built around filing down the rough edges and hammering down the nails that insist on not being hammered down. This is an interesting phenomenon, because there have never been more opportunities to be weird, to stand out, to go to the end of the emotional universe, and to jump willingly into the deep end of the pool of emotional experience.

There are few strategies for managing getting into the deep end:

Realize that you won’t die—the pool of conflict is deep on purpose, so confronting your boss, your co-worker, you parents, or someone else who you think has power over you about their conflict behavior and choices, won’t result in death. Just you being uncomfortable for a while.

Realize that the deep end is where real changes happen—getting excited about the new Iphone or Samsung phone is not a change. Going to the deep end with another person on their behavioral choices that have impacted you negatively is a change. And change always happens at the edges of confrontation and away from the safe, chunky middle.

Realize that, of course you can’t handle it, that’s why you’re doing it—just responding to a conflict (i.e. with accommodation, avoidance, confrontation, collaboration, or compromise) in the ways that you’ve always been comfortable responding is what you’ve always been able to handle. Moving away from that safety emotionally and behaviorally will feel scary, uncomfortable, and will yield results that you couldn’t have imagined. Because you had no basis from which to imagine them in the first place.

If you’re not doing something every day, to change how you address conflict behaviors in your life, you are placing yourself in the shallows of life. And when a real storm comes, and it always does, the deep end of life will come and visit you, instead of the other way around.

[Strategy] Managing the Conflict You’re In

There are ways of managing conflict that involve using the weight of the other party’s assumptions, expectations, and emotional residue in order to create different conflict outcomes.

There are three things to understand in considering how to use the “throw” weight of another party in conflict:

Which quadrant are you in, and which quadrant are they in? Parties in opposite quadrants (i.e. accommodator/controller or collaborator/avoider) rarely interact productively in conflict scenarios, particularly when stress levels are high, mistrust is rampant and miscommunication is the coin of the realm. Knowing your own preferred conflict management style is critical to understanding what kind of assumptions, expectations, and emotional residue from past conflicts you are going to have to manage in yourself before beginning to manage the other party’s.Managing the Conflict Youre In

What is in their quadrant? Accommodators think of managing conflict as a process where being unassertive and cooperative is the way to manage others, and themselves. Competitors think of managing conflict through behaviors that tend to be viewed by others as assertive, but not cooperative.

A person who chooses competition is always going to be frustrated with an accommodator and eventually, a party who baseline is accommodation will either get stressed in the conflict because of do too much of the emotional work; or, they might decide to stop engaging in pointless self-sacrifice.

Avoiders (and many parties in conflicts in business and in life self-identify their behaviors as conflict avoiding) manage the process by being both unassertive and uncooperative with others. In the opposite quadrant are conflict collaborators, who view the process of conflict as one that increases the pie of value and options. Opposite from avoiders, collaborators are both assertive and cooperative.

A party that has collaboration as their baseline is going to be constantly frustrated by the lack of cooperation between themselves and a conflict avoider. And the avoider is going to go out of their way to avoid collaborating—or engaging with any of the other conflict management styles, until there arises an opportunity to work the conflict in their favor.

Then there are the “ditches,” areas between the conflict management baseline styles where interesting things happen. This is where the jiu-jitsu begins in earnest, because these are the spaces where parties can recognize elements of other behavioral styles and use these elements strategically.

This use will be to either maintain the status quo (the ditch between an accommodator and a collaborator or between an avoider and a competitor) or to challenge the way that the conflict process is happening (the ditch between the accommodator and the avoider or the ditch between the collaborator and the competitor) and try another way.

How deep into compromising do you want to go? For a party with a baseline conflict management style defined by competition, compromise will feel like defeat. For a party with a baseline conflict management style defined by avoiding, compromise will be scary and tempting. For a party with a baseline style defined by accommodation, compromise will seem like gaining the Holy Grail, but at the expense of losing something else. For a party with a baseline conflict management style defined by collaborating, compromise will also seem like gaining the Holy Grail, and not losing anything at all in the process.

Going deep into compromise is a strategy, not a tactic. And preparing the parties to “go deep” into an area they don’t understand (and view through their differing frames and lenses in differing ways) is a risky strategy at best. But getting them to cross the ditch toward each other—a ditch filled with assumptions, expectations, and emotional residue from past attempts and failures to cross the ditch—is the second hardest work of managing conflict.

[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.

[Strategy] The Wisdom of Solomon Matters

There was once two women, who both claimed ownership of one child.

In an attempt to determine to whom, the baby actually belonged, (or who was the biological mother) the king decided to physically threaten the child in the presence of the two women through proposing to bisect the child.

The women who was the child’s mother protested. The other women kept silent and the baby was returned to its biological mother.

This story is ancient and hails from a time before lie detectors, biometric scans, and even neurolinguistics; which is why, it cuts to the heart of two human truths:

  • The women who claimed ownership of the children were both driven by ineluctable inner needs.
  • Threatening to bisect the baby focused the women’s attention on those things that matter.

Both of these truths are self-evident in a negotiation scenario. But here’s the thing: Sometime, it’s okay to let the baby be bisected.

Sometimes, parties need to experience the shock and trauma of loss, but not on their terms, in order to return to the table and negotiate for a better outcome.

When dealing with human lives (and “baby splitting” happens all the time in preparations for warfare) parties often count the cost and then decide to go ahead with a disastrous action. And out of that disaster comes new opportunities to focus parties on what matters, rather than getting trapped in the weeds of irrelevancies that may have previously dominated the conversation.

Parties in conflict can be lazy, deceptive, self-serving, myopic, and greedy. Clarity of purpose, drive, focus on attaining tangible outcomes that matter, and developing a relationship with the other party often stall in the real world.

And it’s in the real world, outside of the theories of how human beings should and ought to work, that the wisdom of a mediator matters the most.

[Advice] Listening to the Linchpins

There are all of these stories out there.

A woman works in the billing department of a major company. She is passionate about her work, but she is also knowledgeable about tax laws. She sells vitamin supplements as a side hustle, and owns a piece of rental property. Her kids help her with the work on the rental property and she is able to buy them new Nikes.

A women owned her own business for ten years because she went to business school because her father wanted her to. She was always passionate about working with people. After ten years of operating and owning a business, she put that project aside to work in a company with people.

A man works to feed vulnerable populations at scale on a daily basis. He believes in the work so much, that he is running for political office as well.

A man knows more about food safety than you and I will ever know. He has trouble convincing his family though, that they should listen to him in his knowledge and take his advice. They all get sick following an outdoor picnic at a family reunion where the food was out, starting a cascade of conflict via text messages after the fact.

All of these people are linchpins. They create value and connection with the people around them, in order to grow their worlds. They are taking risks to expand their voices and the only thing that is stopping them from going further is themselves.

Listen to the stories around you.

The stories of the linchpins.

Because the chorus of stories is growing louder and louder and expanding out further and further and touching more and more lives in ways that matter.

[Opinion] It’s Up to MBAs to Save the World

Business students—modern day, Internet savvy, native users of the information superhighway we’ve all built for the last twenty or so years—can save the corporate world.

The unfortunate thing is that somewhere along the way to cashing out in a cushy consulting position, or advancing in organizations by whose culture they are troubled, someone forgot to tell them.

This is not unusual. Partially it’s due to the echo chamber of higher education—the faculty who teach from a worldview and frame set on preserving the world they teach in—and partially it’s due to a corporate world still focused (in spite of all the evidence of disruption to the contrary) on achieving cookie-cutter, command-and-control outcomes on a quarterly basis.

There are, of course, a range of types and varieties of business students, from undergraduate business majors, dutifully studying their work at second, third, and fourth tier institutions, all the way to community and junior college students “older-than-average” who return to business programs to either run a small business better, or to provide for their families.

Finally, there are the top tier, classic business school students from elite institutions who are studying to become the next masters of the universe. These are the ones that we traditionally think of as dominating the salaries and cultures of corporations and organizations where MBAs are hired.

Except, at all levels, the work that matters is shifting away from what a human used to do well toward what a computer can do better. Accounting, spreadsheet analysis, financial reporting, supply chain management, and on and on, really matter less and less as topical areas of focus and interest in a world where information is changing hands faster than the left to right swiping motion on a smartphone screen.

The work that does matter, in organizations, to individuals, and the work that is going to reshape the global paradigm of the next fifty years, doesn’t show up on spreadsheet, and can’t be open to analysis. And it never did; but, industrialists of the past century who built the old paradigm want MBAs and anyone in a business program of any kind to continue to believe otherwise.

Philosophically, there must be a change in how we teach bright, young, ambitious, people at all levels (from community college programs to the Ivy League) in order to succeed with outcomes that will be measurable, not in terms of dollars and cents (though that will come) but in terms of people, connection, and the continuing malleability of human nature.

But what would a two-year immersive, MBA experience look like?

Here’s a rough idea of how practically, an MBA program would look, one focused on getting bright, ambitious, Internet native, students to develop and nurture the kind of work that will grow organizations in the 21st century:

  • Year One:
    • Semester One:
      • Ethics
      • Sustainability
      • Conflict/Dispute Resolution Skills
      • Failure, Success, and Resilience
    • Semester Two:
      • People Management
      • Psychology of Supervision
      • Storytelling
      • Listening
  • Capstone Project: Peer Reviewed and Focused on Building a Functioning Business in the Real World
  • Year Two:
    • Semester One:
      • Finance
      • Accounting
      • Supply Chain Management
      • Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis
    • Semester Two:
      • Persuasive Writing
      • Digital/Virtual Leadership
      • Organizational Culture
      • Restorative Justice
  • Capstone Project: Go and Turn Your Peer-Reviewed Project from the 1st Semester into a Business

And after all of this, there must be follow-up. But not in the traditional sense of “Did you get a job?” and “How much does it pay?” which are questions that really only interest the federal student loan originators. Instead, follow-up with these students would be focused on the only metrics that matter: failure, success, long-term growth, and connection:

  • Did you fail in 5 to 7 years after the program?
  • Did you succeed in 5 to 7 years after the program?
  • What “dent” if any, did you make in the universe?

And that’s it.

With such a program, the MBAs we are turning out from all institutions would be prepared to save the world from the current troubles and hypocrisies, that have caused many corporations to collapse under the inability to change for the future that is here.

Now.