The “Who” Doesn’t Matter

I read with great interest an article on Google’s “Quest to Build the Perfect Team.” I anticipated an over-the-top celebration of the capacity of big data to crack the toughest codes. I expected what a friend used to call a “lord of the obvious” conclusion: great effort and expense marshaled to prove what everyone knew already. And I expected rampant, breathless use of the word “disruption,” to no great effect.

Happily, I was wrong on the last two counts. And their outcomes are really exciting.

First: yes, Google did deploy big data (their workers are among the most quantified and measured in the world). The article described “Project Aristotle,” a 2012 internal effort “to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared.”

I was excited by how resistant their granular analysis of the interaction patterns of Google teams was to an easy hypothesis. Personal affinities between group members didn’t chart, and neither did intellectual capacity (this being Google, it was pretty tough to control for that anyway). “The ‘Who,’” the researchers said, “didn’t matter.”

The only lead that began to materialize was that effective groups had “norms” – unwritten rules, tenets of “them culture” – about how they would interact with each other, and that those norms provided another variable among how groups worked together.

Their eventual findings seemed slight, at first, but far from obvious. As I consider them, they think they are galvanic for our understanding of how best to collaborate with others.

Here they are. Good teams share two traits:

1. The effective teams all had “quality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” Which is psych-speak for “everyone gets to talk about the same amount.” If only one or two people did most if the talking, the group’s “collective intelligence” declined.
2. The good teams “all had high ‘average social sensitivity’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. They tested highly on instruments designed to intuit how another was feeling, measured by showing them photos of people’s eyes and asking them to describe that person’s state of mind.

The article describes these findings as paradoxical:

The technology industry is not just one of the fastest growing parts of our economy; it is also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture. And at the core of Silicon Valley are certain self-mythologies and dictums: Everything is different now, data reigns supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are clear-eyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new…The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

I think they are pulling their punch: these outcomes are far more transformational than that. They assert how many ways there are for disconnects to happen between people, and how urgent it is for productive groups to make conscious, deliberate choices to cross out of their preferred ways of interacting in order to connect with others.

It’s exciting to think about how the insights of the Quadrants and Motivators put meat on the bones of the findings. Consider:

If only a few people are talking in a group, it could be because the manager is accustomed to only listening to one kind of speech. Maybe she only hears “What” and “How” language as relevant, and interrupts “Who and “Why” statements without realizing it. Maybe she values interpersonal and purpose-driven communication, but sees it as “nice to have,” not “have to have,” and therefore unconsciously discounts it.

Google’s data shows that productive groups share the AMOUNT of talk…but as reported, it doesn’t show what KIND of talk is happening. If members of less-successful groups became aware of cross-quadrant disconnects, they’d have a powerful new way to explain and remediate their “conversional turn taking” issues. And already successful groups would have ways to be sure that their communication that was already equitable in TIME was also equitable in KIND, among Who, What, How, and Why topics.

 If social sensitivity is such a core competency of highly effective groups, then the urgent question becomes how to remediate team members who don’t have it. Again, Quadrant and Motivator insights enable a level of self- and other-awareness that most people have never experienced. Becoming aware of one’s possible blind spots and mixed messages, and those of others, has the secondary effect of tuning you into others’ reactions to your communication, and theirs to yours. The ways that communication is being decoded, internalized, and responded to can become an explicit process, around a shared set of terms and commitments, rather than a vague “horse whisperer” – type aptitude that some have and others, sadly, don’t.

In short: yes, these findings affirm the skills that “great managers” have cultivated for years. But the huge question left on the table is HOW do we strengthen EVERYONE’S capacity in both areas? The article notes that “the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place;” an issue not just at Google, but with engineers and Green /Blue types generally, who experience a deep and mutual disconnect with Red / Yellow types reliable enough to set your watch by.

Both sides of this divide need to find discrete, actionable, measurable, accountable ways to talk about these competencies seriously and work individually and together on how best to strengthen them. If Google’s got that part going on as well, I am not reading about it in this article. I hope they are…or maybe I should give them a call.

I mentioned I was wrong on the “disruption” count. Happily so: as quoted above, this work supplants what is becoming the traditional tech-startup wisdom that getting the best idea to market first is all about being brilliant, overdriven, and self-promoting. It gives a focused and actionable path forward to hitch the power of collaboration – not lip-service, factotum stuff, but REAL working together – to the power of data in service to the big idea. It’s thrilling to see.

Can’t wait to learn what Google does with these hard-won insights. In the mean time – what will you do with them?

Dreadfully cheesy stock image of a “team,” apparently “working well together,” because it’s very hard to depict these insights in an image. In sort-of Google colors, anyway. Borrowed with thanks from the readytomanage blog.

books and laps

I get to watch my son a lot with his toddler, and am blown away by how kids really learn to read.

When a toddler brings her parent a book, she is not really interested in the book: she is interested in being close to someone who she knows loves her, safe and held. That feeling of safety and closeness enables her to read the book. The baby sits in the lap so she can see the book, so she can see and be open to what the book has for her. But she’s got to be in the lap for the reading to happen. No lap, no book.

Later, we learn to be read to in other ways. Still later, we learn to read out loud to ourselves, hearing only our own voice in the guiding, parent role. Then, finally, we don’t even need the voice: we have become independent actors in the world, reading and learning, released on our own recognizance.

But before any of that can happen, we need to be held, in a moment of learning that doesn’t really differentiate between the feeling of being safe and the thing we are reading together. The whole thing happens at once. It is all the same thing. There is no part of it without the other part. Learning, initially, is almost a byproduct of relationship. Before a book is anything else, it is a pretense for being held.

This observation might seem too simple to merit further consideration: babies sit on laps, and reading’s a thing you do. But it came to mind even more clearly when I read this terrific Slate piece on the contested future of NPR. And from mashing the two ideas together, I ended up thinking about – well, about millennials. (I know – again.) Please, read on – it’s really interesting, I promise.

First of all, it turns out NPR is a mess. Not least because they are in a battle with their distributors / franchisees: the local stations, some very powerful, who sit on their board and frequently stymie efforts to provide the public access to NPR offerings without going through them. There’s a bloody war raging over the core premises of NPR’s business – a war being waged “spiritedly, in multiple forums, [over] whether the antiquated economic arrangements that govern NPR’s relationships with its member stations are holding it back from innovation.” (Drama! Intrigue! Power struggle among the tote bags!)

But that’s not even the interesting part. The struggle that underpins the financial and organizational discord is really a fight over what constitutes news at all: whether NPR’s offerings are becoming stodgy and undesirable.

A little history: when NPR began, it was considered an upstart voice…

…hatched by “misfits, castoffs, and dreamers” out of a desire to experiment with audio, and was widely viewed as the province of left-wingers and hippies. The first broadcast, emblematically, was a chaotic, 25-minute portrait in three acts of the massive anti-war rally that shook Washington, D.C., on May 3, 1971…the unusual piece rang out with a vibration from a realm where youthful earnestness commingled with merry-prankster lunacy, land-grant university idealism, New England pragmatism, and a native instinct for storytelling.

So NPR made their bones on the insertion of chaos, polyphony, and above all first-person voice in their reporting. They were the New Journalism brought to drive-time FM: bumpy where the evening news was smooth, and not afraid of wandering from 5W reporting in the name of creating an immersive, complex experience for their listeners.

Cut to forty-five years later, though, and we find NPR being eaten by the offspring of the market it arguably created for textured, “you are there” reporting. There are MORE textured, MORE “you are there” offerings to be had now. And to make matters worse, the podcast revolution has made it even harder to differentiate the value of NPR’s offering.  Just like iTunes destroyed the album (and the existing music industry) with the 99 cent song download, podcasts have atomized the listening landscape. Podcasts offer the capacity for the audience to pick and choose what constitutes “news” for them, and therefore have created the attendant expectation that the experience of listening feel custom, personalized: not like “news.”

And like so many challenges, this one is generational.

The conventional wisdom among podcasters like Blumberg is that, in 2016, listeners want audio programming that makes them feel as though they’re getting to know a person or a topic intimately, whether through the familiar banter of beloved panelists or through lovingly produced works of storytelling. Whereas [baby boomers] turned to NPR because they wanted someone trustworthy to tell them the news, younger generations seem to find satisfaction in the velvety bedroom voice of 99% Invisible host Roman Mars as he murmurs about furniture and the self-consciousness of Serial’s Sarah Koenig, who makes the method of her reporting part of her story.

NPR News reporters usually can’t get that personal, in part because, as Gimlet’s Adam Davidson puts it, they are in the impossible position of having to simultaneously “appeal to 80-year-olds in Alabama and 20-year-olds in Brooklyn.”

“All evidence suggests that with on-demand audio, people don’t want the three-to-four-minute radio stories,” Davidson told me. “They don’t want the anecdotal lede, followed by an expert saying something. They want something longer. More engaged. Something that isn’t designed for 30 million people in mind, but 1 million people who are more like them. They want something looser, more fun.”

So demand for the experience of news had morphed. It is no longer enough to be accurate, comprehensive, and timely in reporting: you now must also enable the listener to “get to know a person or topic intimately” while feeling like a customized, boutique, niche offering.

The facts have to be embedded in an experience of connection.

You can’t just read the book – you have to provide the lap too.

Between the lines of this awesome piece, I hear a common refrain about “kids today”: they ways that millennials want it all spoon-fed to them, even the news. Everything for them has to be just so.

Back in OUR day, the grown-ups say, we showed up to work and did what we were told. We didn’t pay attention to our quality of life when making career decisions. We didn’t expect supervision and real-time feedback all the time to tell us if we were meeting expectations (though it must be said we didn’t come of age in an education system that reduced all educational to a high-stakes test score that told us whether or not we had learned anything).

And we sure didn’t expect the job to adapt to us: our schedules, our wardrobe, our needs for validation and affirmation and social connection. When these kids, with their hoodies and merit-based pay schemes and mutual funds, come into our world, it feels so weird. A blasphemy, leading with what they need to work well, or concurrently seeking their personal satisfaction while also working for the company’s bottom line.

It is threatening, to be sure – all the ways the young folks are different from us. But my son’s toddler shows me that maybe we are the ones who got it wrong.

• Maybe our insistence on separating ourselves from the emotional consequences and implications of our work has set us up to be divided people, unfulfilled, at odds with the world.
• Maybe if we had attended to our own needs when we were their age, we wouldn’t be a generation overwhelmed with regret, overwork, addiction – all the consequences of pretending things are OK when they are not.
• Maybe they are on to something.

To be sure, there is a fine line between wanting your news reporting to feel personal, immersive, and customized, and not being able to attend to something that doesn’t explicitly try to draw you in. As we mature, we need to learn to focus on things that resist our focus. After all, much of the most important stuff in the world is boring; many of life’s most power truths hide in plain sight, in the small print, and we have to learn to be able to read, understand, and use it – even if it seems off-putting at first. Sometimes especially then.

But maybe we learn to do that kind of work best when we begin the process of learning how to in a relationship of safety, accommodation, and personalization. Maybe the kids today aren’t selfish and soft. Maybe they just insist on learning the way that people learn best, and always have: on their own terms, with a keen eye to their own safety and support before they venture into something new, or pick up a new book.

So four insights from this musing:

1. Why are we so hung up on what is wrong with the younger generation? What lack in us do their peculiarities call out? I think one might be that their insistence on having the world their way, on-demand and customized, scares us because it reminds us of the ways we didn’t, and don’t.
2. If we can overcome our first resistance to their approach (e.g., that they are selfish, soft, self-absorbed), then we might be able to actually learn something from them.
3. This is HARD! This intergenerational strife. It would be much easier if everyone were like us, in this and every other domain.
4. But we can’t afford to ignore them. We must listen to them, and learn from them. Because you can only step in the same river twice, and that river only flows one way.

I plan to join the next generation downstream. I am working as hard as I can to confront what is new and uncomfortable – to let myself feel what’s weird and keep going anyway. I suggest you do the same.

Maybe acknowledging your own discomfort is the first step to addressing it. And maybe, once you feel safe and comfortable – well, maybe then you’ll be ready to learn something new too.

Image borrowed from lincnyc, with thanks.

nibs and videotapes

I am fond of machines of all types, especially typewriters and writing instruments. In our age of invisible, lightning-fast silicon word processing, I still like to be able to see the process by which words get made. So I was fascinated to visit Birmingham UK a few months back, where I spent time in the Pen Museum. I got an earful there about technology and obsolescence. In particular, I got to thinking how difficult it is to shape the way the world is going, and to be on the right side of progress.

I learned two stories in Birmingham: one up, one down. Here I’ll tell you both, and then explain why these stories got my attention so.

For the last half of the nineteenth century, Birmingham was the global center of steel pen manufacture – more particularly, the nib, the metal part at the end that was dipped in the inkwell. Prior to the creation of the steel nib, only a trimmed quill could be used to write. But the point of a quill did not last long, and it required a skilled craftsman to sharpen it, and of course you had to be dipping it in ink all the time.

A perfect storm of opportunity emerged in Birmingham in the 1820s, when John Mitchell figured out how to import iron from the surrounding country and craft it reliably into steel nibs. An abundance of cheap labor was to be had, who were paid a pittance and expected to produce as many as 18,000 pens per day. And so for a few decades, three out of four things written around the world were written with a pen made made in Birmingham. At the industry’s peak, more than 100 companies had set up shop in their manufacture.

In hindsight, innovation always seems like destiny. But I was struck by how many possibilities the innovators in this industry had to perceive where most others had seen obstacles. Consider:

• The manufacturing materials weren’t to be had in Birmingham, but rather in the surrounding “Black Country,” which also had canals adequate for bringing raw materials in.
• But those canals weren’t exploited as trade routes – until ways to make iron with coke, instead of charcoal, were discovered, which blew the roof off the potential for iron production and presaged the Industrial Revolution.
• The people of Birmingham were already skilled in the making of small objects, like button and buckles, prior to the invention of the steel nib.
• But it took someone with imagination to see how those skills could be combined with the unprecedented speed afforded by the hand press, and therefore transferred to the large-scale production of something new that was also tiny and had to be made to exacting specifications.

In other words: seen from the usual point of view, Birmingham in 1910 was a small economy that eeked out a subsistence living doing boutique handwork, relatively apart from the rich coal and iron seams nearby. But from a more imaginative perspective, it was an untapped mix of resources, transportation, and skilled labor: all it needed was an invention that drew on each in equal measure for an industry to be born.

That’s the growth story. Steel pens were a boom industry that put an inexpensive and well-made object into the hands of most anyone who cared for one. It was an object that created its own need: people who hadn’t thought to have a pen before suddenly craved one, and in turn sought to do things with it. Which in turn fired a boom in literacy and written expression, a whole new way of interacting with the world. Birmingham invented its market, taught the world to want what it made, and dominated.

Until the fountain pen was invented in 1850. Fountain pens didn’t require you to dip and interrupt your writing – they were clearly superior, better at doing the task that steel pens had taught people they could do at all. The fountain pen was an innovation that drew together its own ingenious creations (iridium tips, hard rubber stoppers, and free-flowing ink – I told you I loved this stuff). It took a while for these inventions to penetrate the already-established steel pen market, and for a while it looks like the two industries co-existed as steel nib makers adapted their processes to accommodate fountain pen bodies.

But American invention and scale in fountain pen manufacture eventually outstripped English production, in the 1880s as far as I can tell. And then, of course, the whole industry was dealt its death blow when Laszlo Biro patented the ultimate killer app, the ballpoint pen, in 1938, which paved the way for American dominance of the pen market with cheap ballpoints by the 1950s.

That’s the bust story: the innovation that comes out of nowhere and overtakes the space that you invented. The disruption that you retool to incorporate and work alongside for a while, telling yourself that symbiosis is health – until yet another innovation puts you both under and consigns you both to the dustbin of history.

I left the museum with my head reeling about what lessons I could learn from the whole story. I could see the rise and fall, the boom and bust – the whole arc. And while I could empathize with the difficulty those caught the middle of it must have experienced, I told myself that, if I were in their shoes, I certainly could have read the water better, adapted more nimbly, figured out moves that would have sustained my business even as the world changed around me.

But the thing is, I probably could not have. Who of us, sitting on top of a market that we invented, could accurately see where the threat was coming from? Call it the Blockbuster challenge.

That’s the company that had a shot to buy Netflix in 2000 for a song, and passed; who didn’t think RedBox was a threat until it was too late for their entry into that space to make a dent. And the company who, like all the rest of the entertainment industry, was flatfooted by the surge in online streaming – the killer app that’s in the process of ending any entertainment platform that can’t evolve beyond its sacred, cardinal understandings of what the business they are in is really about at all.

One thing I can know for sure, though: no innovation is weathered by sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending that nothing is happening. Of course, there’s still the “Good to Great” lesson of figuring out what you are best at in the world, what you are most passionate about, and what can drive your economic engine, then “hedgehogging” up and just focusing that. But being a “hedgehog” can also be your undoing if, in the process of staying focused, you fail to see the world changing around you. It won’t matter if you are best in the world at something if no one in the world wants anyone to be good at that thing anymore.

So I will venture my lesson learned from Birmingham: seek out the thing that makes you uncomfortable because of how disruptive it is to your equilibrium, and make friends with it, on its own terms. Right now, today.

For example: you may feel that our collective fascination – especially younger folks – with social media is a massive time suck, where people avoid real world commitments and consequences in order to laugh at each other’s palaver and distract themselves from anything that really matters.

I identified this aversion in myself, not long ago (see next blog post). But the fact was that the very abhorrence I feel for something new should be heard as a personalized invitation to me to go figure out what it is, on its own terms, right away. If I choose not to – if I choose instead to climb back up into my office atop the tower of industry I created – the chances are good that I won’t see the threat coming. I’ll be too busy counting my money to hear for whom the bell tolls.

I don’t know if Birmingham could have retooled to make ballpoint pens, or typewriters, or scientific calculators, had they seen the threat coming earlier. I don’t know if Blockbuster could have turned their ship faster had they not been so quick to dismiss DVDs-by-mail, or eventually, streaming. I do know that both those industry leaders really didn’t want to think the world could change under their feet. But it did, and yours will to.

The real question is: will you see it coming in time? The choice here – as it is most everywhere –  is yours.

Image from this great site on tourism in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, with thanks.

Put Down the Trash Can Lid

I think TED talks are pretty much over, but the last one I saw that got my attention really nailed me. It was Brene Brown’s first talk on vulnerability – the one where she explains that, as a scientist, she had to write the book that her data led her to, not the one she wanted. This admission really raises someone’s credibility in my eyes: that they are willing to abandon their pet project and be convinced by their research that things are other than they wanted them to be? Sign me up for THAT class! (The 20 million hits her talk has received so far help too.)

To sum up: Brown’s a social science researcher, and she started out wanting to know about how connection works. But whenever she asked people about connection, she found herself talking about connection’s shadow side, which she didn’t think was part of her question at all:

When you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they’ll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.

And she came to understand that people’s main experience of connection is fear of not having it. And that fear is caused by deep shame, which she defines as the fear that if they were really known, fully and honestly, by those around them, no one would want to connect with them.

Which means that being connected to other people absolutely requires a willingness to be vulnerable – a willingness to share who we really are, and therefore be really seen.

I understand that by this point I may have lost readers, who probably clicked away the second they saw the word “shame,” and were definitely gone by “vulnerability.” Many who I have made my bed with professionally understand “vulnerability” to be a synonym for “weakness”. As a culture we despise it, and despise those who admit to having it; most business cultures revolve around seeking out other’s vulnerabilities in order to exploit them. Even having the word on your computer monitor could be a liability (someone might see it there!).

But I have to follow my data to their conclusion too – and the thing is that none of the wildly successful CEOs and companies I have worked with came to me because everything was going great and they just wanted things to get a little better. To a woman and man, everybody who has worked with me has come to me in crisis, either full-blown or incipient: crisis that had resulted from continuing to barrel along pretending that they were, in fact, invulnerable, and that the way they had been functioning was working just great. Hugely successful people, leading thousands every day, but inside wracked with fear and pain. And shame – shame they couldn’t name, and were actually forbidden to by the status quo, but that nonetheless had almost completely incapacitated them.

No one comes in to do important personal work on a high note; when things are going great, why change anything? But pain is a powerful motivator to change – maybe the only one. And it leads you to find wisdom in ideas you formerly thought foolish.

So Brown has my attention: when she talks about pain that no one wants to admit is there as the path to change that works, she is singing my song. Check out her further conclusions – the unexpected and unwanted ones that six years of data drove her to:

1. The only difference between people who have a strong sense of belonging and those who don’t is that the people who have a strong sense of belonging believe they are worthy of having it.

That’s it. They believe they’re worthy.

2. Those people who believe it share a sense of courage – which Brown calls “whole-heartedness,” diving into the latin root cor, “heart”.

These folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can’t practice compassion with other people if we can’t treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and — this was the hard part — as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.

3. And finally, these people – the whole-hearted ones – fully embraced their vulnerability.

They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn’t talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating — as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, “I love you” first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They’re willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.

From these three insights many other important ones flow – about addiction, and parenting, and leadership (and I am thrilled to see how fully she has built out those implications). But rather than explore those here, I want to stop and think for a minute about the role of vulnerability in my own work.

Decades ago, as a chaplain, I worked with soldiers using a book by Jonathan Chamberlain called Eliminating your Self-Defeating Behaviors. It’s long out of print, and has since been supplanted by other cognitive-behavioral protocols that are more efficient, I am sure. But it provided a powerful image that has stuck with me ever since.

Chamberlain tells the story of a child walking home after school who is attacked by bullies pelting him with snowballs. He grabs a convenient trash can lid to protect himself, and survives the encounter relatively unhurt but deeply traumatized by the suddenness and the violence of the attack.

And from then on, whenever he walks home from school, he carries a trash can lid. He knows it’s silly; he knows that, logically, the chances of another group of bullies attacking him with snowballs is extremely remote. But he can’t deny that he feels better carrying it, for some reason – even as the months and years pass, and it becomes heavy, and hot in the summer sun, and prevents him from picking up anything else, or bringing home books or an instrument to practice, or even holding a girl’s hand. Really, walking around without it feels impossible, whatever the cost.

The point is probably clear: decisions we make to armor ourselves against attack are extremely logical in the moment when we need the armor, but it is easy to become trapped into believing the the armor is the key to anything ever going well again. The armor becomes the new normal, and we move through life guarded against vulnerability, no matter the cost.

How do we put down the trash can lid and become vulnerable again, and therefore open to all of life’s experiences? Brown indicates a few ways that have been borne out in my own work:

• We acknowledge that it is going to be hard to be vulnerable – and accept the value of the discomfort as the price of the ticket to lasting change.
• We become aware of how experiences in the past taught us we needed to be armored – and undo the power of their irrational messages.
• We start doing things differently, in measurable, accountable ways – with the support of trusted friends and counselors.
• We don’t ever become comfortable with being vulnerable – we just get better at it, which gets easier as we start to collect evidence of how our changes are impacting our lives and the lives of those we lead, work with, and love.

My tools provide ways for committed people to stop the pain and start getting serious about understanding what is driving them, and what’s getting in the way of their best efforts to be authentic and connected with those around them. They help people put down old defenses and supplant them with new habits. And they help people move into the discomfort with hope that is borne of visible, measurable results.

One final insight: a wise friend pointed out that maybe armor isn’t just something to be put down, but rather something to be outgrown. That as our sense of our true self grows stronger, it bursts through the armor, which eventually is revealed to be constricting rather than protective (here I think of the Grinch’s heart at Christmas time, that “grew three sizes that day”). That’s a terrific way for my clients to consider the way that the changes in their lives are helping them grow; that as they become more themselves, they can set aside things that used to help them, but are now in the way. There’s no shame in growing – only some pain, and endless possibility.

Come to my site and download my free e-book if you’d like to take the first steps in putting down your own trash can lid and embracing the power of vulnerability in your life and work. And thanks, Dr. Brown, for your insights!

Image of a fine trash can lid from Amazon, with thanks.

status quo

What we live every day seems so real. But it’s not.

I am not trying to get “red pill / blue pill” on you: of course our world is real.

But the way we manage to experience it as normal – however weird it actually is – never stops astounding me. We can make anything feel like business-as-usual after a few days of living with it. This cognitive plasticity seems to be one of we humans’ greatest powers, enabling us to be resilient even in inhospitable conditions. I wonder if it is also one of our great weaknesses.

Here’s another thing: the way we make the weirdest things seem normal has to do with the stories we tell ourselves about them. That’s one of the reasons that when we change jobs, or cities, or partners, eventually we end up feeling in large part the same way we did before. We changed a lot – but we didn’t change the story. And what the story says, goes.

Example: when I was just starting out in my first posting as a chaplain the Air Force, I was stationed at a base where I was convinced that all my colleagues were out to get me, because they didn’t think my religion was legitimate. I brought that story in from my previous experience as a missionary: a sense of being antagonized all the time.

And there was certainly some theological truth to it; lots of energy had been spent bashing Bibles to convince one or the other faith that it was not in tune. But the experience had completely overtaken me. I experienced the entire world as a persecution. Where my office was placed, the responsibilities I was assigned, every glance in a staff meeting, got assigned meaning according to this story.

In the Air Force, you get moved around a lot. I had five postings in the next ten years, and each one of them felt strangely the same. The settings would change dramatically – swampy and hot here, snow drifts and tire chains there, two oceans, two mountain ranges – but I always ended up feeling the same. It’s like I stopped seeing all the differences, so they really weren’t there. All I really saw was the story.

And what’s most funny is that the story was often the most improbable explanation for what I was experiencing. Occam’s Razor usually got discarded in favor of the story. Maybe I got the crummy details because I was new and lower status…but I understood without question that it was because of the story. Maybe the crummy office was the only one available as the base was staffing up its ministry team…but the story told me otherwise.

Reality seldom entered into it. The story ruled all realities – like Tolkien’s one ring, it bound them together. And like a hobbit or a golem, I guarded it jealously, not even realizing the power of its thrall.

I’m out of that story now, mostly. I still occasionally wrap myself in it, usually when I am feeling put-upon or tired. It’s comfortable, even though it’s painful. (Another unbelievably weird thing about us: we’ll prefer familiar pain to unfamiliar uncomfort.) But mostly now, I can and do hear other stories.

I was convinced to by the preponderance of evidence – after a long while, the world taught me otherwise. The world will eventually teach you what is true, I believe. I also believe that the world’s way of teaching takes a long time, and is very painful. It’s a lot faster, and easier, to come to grips with reality on your own terms, than its.

*                 *                   *

The phrase “status quo,” as we use it now, means the usual way of being: the normal state of affairs.

But I learn that it is a shortening of the phrase “status quo ante bellum” – “the state existing before the war” – a bit of boilerplate used in treaties to describe the legal restoration of leadership to what was there before, as we say in the South, the late unpleasantness.

“Status quo” equals “the state in which,” literally. The Latin doesn’t say what “state.” But in English we complete the ellipsis, easily. Oh yeah: the state in which things were before. Let’s go back to the way things used to be, whenever possible, as quickly as possible, and forget all this ever happened. Phew.

The question for anybody who wants to change is clear: how do we reset our desire for “the state in which…things were” to “the state in which…things are other than they were?”

I think the key to this shift lies in noticing when we are erasing our new opportunities by overwriting them with old stories. And choosing instead to actually note “the state in which” things are right now – and, therefore, could be, if we make different choices.

We do this through a hundred little decisions, every day.

• We choose to see a supervisor’s decision to take us off a responsibility we had always been responsible for as malicious…because it matches our story that supervisors are controlling and conniving people who are out to get us.
• We choose to see our suffering bank account at the end of the month as confirmation that we are “not good at money”…because it matches our story from when we had our first paper route and spent all our money on candy.
• We choose to see our difficulty staying in relationships as an indelible part of our roguish, lone-wolf personality…because it matches our story that if anyone really knew us, they would never want to spend their lives with us.

Each of these scenarios describes something that is happening in the world, and the meaning it assumes only because we assign it that meaning.

Here are the empirical realities:

• We don’t know why she reassigned us.
• Money will go where we put it.
• Everyone is flawed, and everyone is still lovable and needs connection.

When we try to open our eyes wide enough to see reality on its own terms, it can be disorienting to realize how powerfully our stories have determined the world we see, the world we react to, the world we choose to make within ourselves and with those around us.

You know what? I take it back. Maybe it really is red pill / blue pill. There’s a choice to be made, and it’s yours to make, in every moment. So says the movie:

MORPHEUS: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

NEO: How?

MORPHEUS: Hold out your hands.

In Neo’s right hand, Morpheus drops a red pill.

MORPHEUS: This is your last chance. After this, there is no going back.

In his left, a blue pill.

MORPHEUS: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe.

The pills in his open hands are reflected in the glasses.

MORPHEUS: You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Neo feels the smooth skin of the capsules, with the moisture growing in his palms.

MORPHEUS: Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.

Neo opens his mouth and swallows the red pill. The Cheshire smile returns.

MORPHEUS: Follow me.

No one can be told what reality is. You have to see it for yourself. You can take the blue pill you always have, and awake in your bed, believing what you want to believe. Or the red pill and see the wonders that have been in plain sight all along.

It’s only the truth. Nothing more.

There’s a lot of discomfort, initially, in this change of being. The light hurts our eyes when it comes on. The water is cold, when you first hit it. But once you’re in the light, once you’re off the pier, you have choices about what to do next.

And the most incredible part is that, in this way of seeing the world, the status quo is never “status quo.” The world will bring you an impossible variety of experiences, every day, and you are limited in your experience of the world only by stories you tell yourself. If you have let go of old stories that no longer connect you to reality, then you have opened yourself, quite literally, to new worlds, daily.

I won’t say “follow me,” like Morpheus; I don’t know the path, really, to lead anyone.

What I do know is a set of tools and daily practices that help people be in the world as it really is, and I know that they always work, if you commit to them. Look further into the site to learn more about them.

See how deep the rabbit hole goes.

It’s better out here.

“Red and blue pill” by W.carter – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_and_blue_pill.jpg#/media/File:Red_and_blue_pill.jpg

pi-pi-pi

I’ve recently learned the Yiddish phrase “Kein ayin hara,” which means “no evil eye,” and is used more or less the way I might say “knock on wood.” Frequently followed by spitting three times (“pi! pi! pi!”), it’s apparently a phrase with deep historical resonance. It is rooted in the idea that evil is everywhere, and is attracted to those who celebrate their good fortune.

From antiquity onwards, the belief in the “evil eye” as a dangerous entity became accepted. It is not too difficult to understand how the term evolved to mean the direct causation of harm via a look of spite. Envy was the spur to this evil, so one way to escape it was not to appear enviable. Good fortune or abundance should not be displayed or boasted about. Modesty and humility provoke scant attention and therefore no danger. Deny the baby is beautiful or the possession is prized. And if misfortune did strike, once upon a time it was probably easier to blame someone’s “ayin hara” than seek out the true causes over which you had no control.

Therein lies an interesting doublethink about what to do with our successes, as well as our failures. Being content with our lot must mean to some extent deprecating it and hiding it, so as not to draw attention to it by inciting envy. And doublespeak, as well: a baby in this culture is praised for her ugliness, and dearest possessions are treated, at least, publicly, as worthless. Everyone understands what everyone is doing, but from the outside in it is a puzzling thing to see. It appears perhaps ungrateful, our ungracious, not to treasure what is of great worth. When in fact,not celebrating it is the greatest care that can be taken with it.

I guess this idea caught my eye because it pointed to all the ways we are indirect in our dealings with others and with ourselves, and the reasons why we might be. Perhaps one reason we are indirect is because we do not really know who we are or why we are doing what we are doing. It is easier to feign agreement with those around us, or with who we perceive to be the most powerful person in the room, when we are not clear about what we think, or whether or not we have the right to say it and be heard and respected.

Many of us have learned this to be the only way to really survive in the business world: we are not “yes people,” exactly, but we are very adept at taking the temperature of the room, identifying the powerful presences that need to be managed, and responding in a way that advances our own cause. We choose our words, or tone – even our accent! – to match who we think we are supposed to be, or who a successful person would be.

This isn’t always dissimulation or self-reservation; sometimes we just don’t understand how differently others might experience the world than we do. One of the great insights of my career has been to realize how many time people feel they have not been heard and acknowledged, when in fact they have either been “talking past” those around them or misunderstood the response received as disrespect.

For example, some of us only feel heard when our supervisor comes and sits down in our office to talk about what we’ve just submitted, or at least a long email responding to each of our points. For others of us, that kind of interpersonal engagement seems like a touchy-feely time waster, or the kind of thing that only happens when your work is really off-base. True competence, we feel, is rewarded with autonomy, with being left alone.

Being in communication – or even harder, collaboration – with someone who doesn’t share your understanding can be like standing outside a circle of sweet old ladies praising a beautiful child by commenting on how ordinary she is, while the mother insists that she is more ordinary still. What is going on? Until we get it, we do not get it.

There’s a deeper insight than miscommunication here, though: why we might choose not to speak the truth.

We are afraid of what might happen if we do.

In the “Kein Ayin Hora” tradition, the fear that informs the misdirection is fear of an unknown, malevolent force that might notice our success and thwart it. This dynamic is in play with many of us, even without the supernatural elements. When things are going well, we find ourselves haunted by all the memories of how things could go wrong – and allow those memories of the past to shape our present. We maintain old defenses long after the threats that provoked us to build them are gone. We believe stories that were told about us by people, and in situations, that we will never be connected to again.

Robert Pirsig calls these tendencies “hang-ups,” part of his marvelous “gumption trap” formulation. Social psychologists have isolated it as a self-assessment issue, in which we underestimate our own capacity in while overestimating others’ – a tragic factor in self-sabotage that’s especially prominent among under-rerepresented populations in careers, such as women in STEM fields. There’s even echoes of it in the “Lean In” phenomenon, when Sheryl Sandberg chides women for “leaving before they leave.”

In all of these instances, we let our fear of what might happen have a say in what will happen, or at least what we are willing and able to put forth as our contribution to the outcome. Better to hold back and not feel vulnerable and foolish when things don’t work. Better to hide our gifts and minimize our power. Kein ayin hara, pi-pi-pi.

These beliefs do amount to a superstition of sorts, even without the woo-woo parts. As Stevie Wonder taught us, “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer!” The power of the processes I have brought to thousands of people is in their capacity to bring understanding and peace to situations that previously had been filled with confusion and pain.

– Once we know who we are and can predict how we will react in given situations, we can see the places where we “lean back” and are not fully who we can be.
– Once we realize how many of the chimeras we are fighting are long gone (or better, were never there at all), we can make decisions about what to do next based in reality, not fantasy.
– And most urgently: once we identify the fears that keep us systematically away from the truth and consign us to endlessly talking around it, we are given the choice about what to share and what not to.

This insight doesn’t mean we become open books, clear channels through which every passing thought is spoken and amplified. We still have judgments to make. But we are then freed to make judgments that focus on the facts at hand, not the fears that cloud the view. We can have a right relation with our strengths and our successes, and use them as building blocks to our next adventure.

So what will it be? Fear and doubt or clarity and strength? The choice is yours!

Beautiful amulet of the “Hand of G-d” borrowed from this Pinterest page, with thanks.

You 3.0

I feel that online life is characterized by estrangement and longing.

That’s one of many thoughtful things author Rick Moody has said. It’s mostly on my mind because I am trying to think through – even think ahead – of what online life offers to support those who wish to make lasting, holistic changes in their lives.

When I say think ahead, I mean I want to consider what is coming next, after the internet. I am not technologically savvy enough to begin to imagine Web 3.0 – let’s leave that to the folks at Wired (who, when they consider it, usually seem to discuss the future in terms of integration of the market with the growing trove of personalized data that lie in the Big Four’s server farms). What I do know is that the version of personalization that Web 2.0 has offered is becoming increasingly dehumanized, even as it accumulates granularity in the data it uses to define us.

For example, I am noting the change month-to-month, even week-to-week, in my social media experience. That’s how fast it is happening. The shift to flash video in the Facebook feed was surprising – suddenly one day, the pictures began to move, like an animated Disney forest – but even more so has been the recently aggressive prompts to remember my friends’ birthdays, and to send them greetings on their big day. And FB has begun coughing up images and posts that I shared two, even three years ago, in the interest (I think) of building some narrative arc into my online experience, some gentle sense of a story unfolding with peaks and valleys, learnings and enduring mysteries.

All of this has the tacit effect of reminding me, over and over, how much FB knows about me; how much of myself I have confided to them in the interest of them, in turn, confiding it to my friends. The net effect is disquieting, especially when FB tips even farther into the uncanny valley and tells me how glad it is I am using Facebook tonight. Comparisons to Hal telling Dave “I can’t let you do that” are not far off: suddenly the machine is addressing me, reinforcing some behaviors and discouraging others. And all the while, the space itself becomes more cluttered with both the elements of the world that FB’s algorithms tell it I want to see and the elements that let it monetize my eyeballs: the in-feed ads, the growing box in the upper right telling me what news is “trending” in my geographic area and therefore should be attended to, even the little strobe effect that has been built into some images that flashes unexpectedly, forcing my autonomic system to attend more to that image. I comply – I am only an animal, after all, drawn to light and movement – but always at the cost of a little panic, a little unanticipated arousal that makes the whole mise en scene that much more agitated, fragmented, atomized.

What an odd word for this reflection to cough up: “atomized.” It’s the word of another generation, of course: my childhood, the period in which the split atom represented all our greatest hopes and fears for what we might do upon or against our planet. Here I use it to describe the various splittings and increased resolution that the data-saturated environment has made real. My preferences in politics, drink, film, have all been recorded – even, infamously, whether I respond more desireably to happy or sad news. The 1s and 0s of the simple binary that underlies everything digital are, in turn, constituting me as a pointillist portrait, with the points themselves subdividing again and again as they reach toward absolute constitution of me, homo digitalis, Digital Man.

Whew. That was intense. But I only hope I communicate something of the experience of being online these days. To return to Moody’s observation: all these simulacra have the two net effects:

• they render me further estranged from who I really am, and who my friends really are;
• they engender greater longing in all of us to find each other, and ourselves, once again.

First, the estrangement. Online, both my friends and I become avatars, more and less than our actual selves, when distilled to our online presences. The word is first used in 1985, borrowed from the Hindu word for a deity manifesting in the world in physical form (but inverting it, as the designer wished the in-game representation of the player to be the human player’s instantiation of himself in the not-real world of the game). Our avatars are thus less and more than human: only what we tell them we are, but with the gaps filled in and smoothed over by big-data analytics that a user base of more than one billion makes possible at FB.

Avatars are able to communicate in seconds around the globe, share the slightest inkling of a thought with thousands at once and gather their replies a moment later. We give up something slow and dense and muddy in our transmutation from flesh to pixel, but we are happy to make the switch because of how time and space collapse for such a low price of admission. (Remember: if it’s free on the internet, you’re the product.) Our estrangement from our flesh is transcendence, initially, but becomes anomie (what happens when “unruly scenarios result in fragmentation of social identity and rejection of self-regulatory values”). We are unable to get back to the type of connection we took for granted before; we are unmade from our usual capacity to connect, and cannot be remade into regular people for blood or money.

Which feeds us into the longing: the itch we can’t scratch for human connection. It seems all the more doable by the day, because of how high fidelity the reproductions of humanness online are. With pixels this dense – 1080p, even more for us top-shelf Apple-biters – everything looks as good as being there. But what we see there is not really there, and our somatic beings know it, and tell our brains and our hearts that we are connecting even as our senses wish to tell us we are. I understand artifical sweeteners causes a similar effect: even though, metabolically, we are not consuming sugar, our emotional desire to consume (i.e., our appetite) is engaged as if we were, and we consume more than we would if we were consuming actual sugar (i.e., our auto-off that kills our appetite once we are sated is hijacked, so we can’t know when we’re sated). Addressing our longing for sweetness through artificial means only intensifies our longing; addressing our desire for connection through avatar interface only intensifies our desire.

I know how cranky all this might sound. There has always been societal concern when a new technology of representation shows up to render our fictions more realistic, from the cheap pulp novels of the eighteenth century to the lurid true crime mags and comic books of the 1950s, even the video games which supposedly began warping our connection to reality the instant they appeared in our shopping malls (which echo the same concerns about pinball machines fifty years earlier). Each scared the elders by the simulation of reality offered and the way it was feared to affect the users’ engagement with the real thing. I observe that none of the past technologies actually beheld a rendering of the real thing within its grasp (3d printers). There’s a real way to avoid my concern by just chalking it up to the last generation being scared of the kids, with their jalopies and their rock and roll…and their VR helmets.

But there is a difference this time – perhaps for the first time. The past technologies all sophisticated the users’ palette for imaginative substance, true, and perhaps dulled the imagination by offering more and more to be seen, not pictured. But nothing was hyperreal, realer than real (except, frequently, in the SF stories that some of this technologies serialized). Now – here, in the same laptop I compose these lines upon, a browser window away – I have access to Who My Friends Actually Are: what they look like, what their kids look like when thy open their birthday presents, what they think is funny and sad and horrifying.

They are Really There. And, ineluctably, they Are Not.

* * *

So what does my despotic fever dream here have to say about Web 3.0? Or more to the point, its potential role in supporting humans seeking to make lasting, healthy behavioral and relations changes to themselves?

First off, it should be noted that, were our avatars in fact our selves, this line of thinking would end (and I would be out of business). Because as we become more saturated with data, and more constituted by data, we begin to believe the modernist fantasy that we should respond as data: to logic, to preponderance of evidence, to statistical models that can predict what we will do and the margin of error that accounts for the few times we don’t do what we should.

But we don’t. Homo digitalis remains more homo than digital. And while the work that needs to be done can adapt to be communicated, reinforced, or personalized through multiple platforms and modes of engagement, the work itself remains stubbornly analog:

1. It almost always begins with an experience of acute pain, or a shift in chronic pain that has been suffered for a long time that suddenly makes it no longer bearable. That pain may be internally generated, but it is more frequently thrust upon the person by outside circumstances.(The only force other than pain that I have seen start the cycle is the intervention of some higher or greater power, accountable to no one but itself – Paul’s change on the road to Damascus is an example.)
2. It always requires that the pain compel a person to come to a greater understanding of who he is and how he acts, through application of a structure for understanding that both accounts for his complexity and demonstrates how utterly like everyone else he is.
3. It always requires him to replace a discrete number of undesirable behaviors with desirable behaviors in short-cycle, describable ways;
4. It always requires her to practice the changed behaviors unceasingly, with complete personal accountability, which is immeasurably helped by the constant support of at least one other person who helps him stay accountable.

Following from these four principles, it becomes apparent that the very context of Web 2.0 is inimical to the first event taking place, and seriously obstructs the others.

The algorithms that encourage estrangement and longing do so by disrupting organic relations to ourselves and to each other, and replacing them with less nutritive but still appetizing simulacra of those relations which in turn (like artificial sweeteners) create greater desire for their ersatz relations. This dance of estrangement and longing is a shadow play that distracts us from the Really Real: our actual experience of the world, and others’ experience of us as we move through it (i.e.. our sensory engagement with it, which in turn points to its lasting aspects).

The only way social media technology can support lasting, permanent human change is by becoming something utterly other than what it is: by becoming a means to engage reality rather than create surrogates of it; by becoming a tool to amplify and deepen our engagement with reality rather than filter and mediate and edit and Awesomeize it.

What might that look like?

I’ll sound like a spokesperson for a product for the next moment, but I am not.

I am forming these lines using a program called iA Writer. It is a radically simplified text creation environment, which appears more like typing letters on a page in a typewriter than any word processing program that I have ever used. Looking at my screen, all I see are the words I type, and a pale blue line which pulses at the point where the next character I type will appear.

However, it is not a typewriter: beneath the seamless surface is the most powerful word recognition and autocomplete functions I have ever encountered. I fee like I could type with my elbows, and this program would know what I am trying to inscribe and do the work for me. Everything I type is instantly backed up, on the machine and to a remote server, and exporting my writing to other formats or the web to share is easily done with simple menus that appear only when I mouse up to them, and disappear otherwise.

In short: the technology here has been developed to the point where it disappears, and functions only in the service of my own self-expression, reflection, and sharing of who I am with others. I am more myself on the page than I would be without this technology; the alacrity with which I can express myself is enhanced, but the thoughts themselves are not. If there is anything in the autocomplete that gives me some plausible words more than others, thereby shaping my text for me, it is deeply unconscious – I can’t see it.

It perhaps makes me more articulate in my writing than I would otherwise be; someone reading me might think me a shade more well-spoken than I actually am. But what I am enabled to express by being saved form the hunt-and-peck typing I never unlearned is more than enough compensation for that slight enhancement of who I am when I write. I feel the program facilitates me slightly in becoming more of myself; in offering more of myself up for reflection or sharing, or declaration.

What if this genre of technological development were brought to the social media environment? What if there were a way to be in connection with others – with those we already love in meatspace – that enabled and enhanced expression and perception rather than re-presenting it? What would that look like? Here are some possibilities:

• It would minimize estrangement of ourselves from ourselves and each other by making available only exactly who we say we are, how we look, how we sound, and would do so through an interface that offered only ourselves to each other.
• Nothing of us would be captured, no algorithms would be created or improved based upon our responses to them (though how that autocomplete gets so good would have to be figured out, then). Our iterations and interactions would live beyond the moment in which we have them only if and when we choose to inscribe them through writing, or sound, or video, or some other mode of presenting reality as yet undeveloped.
• We would have access to under-the-hood tools that encouraged the set of interactions with self and other that fosters healthy self and other-creation: focused listening and speaking. Truth telling. Empathetic understanding of the consequences of our actions. Accurate depictions of what might be if we were to make different choices next time. Nothing would be entertaining, other than ourselves. Nothing would compete for our eyeballs, other than ourselves.

You can see how these features would map onto the characteristics of real, lasting change:

1. Such an enhancing technology should probably enable us to feel the pain of the consequences of our actions more quickly and deeply than we otherwise would, and therefore bring us more readily to the place we need to be for change to happen.
2. It should probably give us access to a model of understanding human experience that both lets us see what is unique and ineffable about each of us while at the same time allowing us to see the ways in which all humans are the same.
3. It should probably offer specific, articulable behaviors that can be changed in short-cycle, describable ways.
4. It should probably support one-on-one accountability for practicing those behaviors and learning from the experience of trying to live into a different way of being, in direct and supportive ways.

None of these innovations would change the fact that technology is always, to date, only expressed in images, words, and sounds. This technology, at its most perfectly realized would only ever be an augmentation of lived reality, not its surrogate, as surely as the written word is not the same as the spoken word, or the inchoate languaging that churns inside all of our heads, all the time.

But our writing is itself a precious technology that lets us arrest the flight of our thought, inscribe it and reread it and perfect it, in order to read it back to ourselves and share it with others. We can reflect without writing, but we reflect differently with it. So might we connect to ourselves and each others without this technology I am proposing – but perhaps we could discover a new level of possibility through connecting with it.

Maybe there’s a way to build this new way of being in connection through existing channels, but I do not see it. I can see ways to use existing social media platforms to educate people about another way to connect, and to invite them to come and try it – but it cannot be monetized through information gathered about people. Perhaps it cannot be monetized at all, except by an initial buy-in and a monthly fee that grants access to the service (like my writing app – or, for that matter, like joining almost any supportive group). It would need to charge enough to sustain itself; no one can get rich off it, any more than the ministry should be a way to get rich. Words like “open source” and “crowdsource” have new meaning in this context: it would needs be a true commonwealth (“a political community founded for the common good”), accessible to all. Perhaps it can be built upon existing platforms that share these values.

But that’s what it would look like. Can we do it? Can it be done?  I do foresee a time when those who seek a more authentic, reality-affirming engagement with themselves and others through technology forsake the versions of themselves they originally established online for more powerful, more responsive ones, like folks of a certain age abandoning their Hotmail accounts (or, indeed, the kids leaving Facebook in droves for hipper, more anonymous platforms as FB was overrun by their parents).

I believe that homo digitalis is not as fully formed by the social media powers as those powers would wish to believe. I wonder at the moment when all the pictures of my grandson that his parents have so lovingly archived are presented to him, at eighteen, as the backbone of his new Facebook profile – and anticipate a revolt, from him and his peers, that any entity would presume to tell him who he was, and therefore is and shall be.

We are still people, beneath the pulp novels, pinball machines, comic books, video games, social media chatter, and immersive 3D environments. We’ll find a way to continue being so. How will it look? What will it mean for those of us who wish to change and be better? What do you think?

Image a shameless lift from the promotional materials of the 2015 film Ex Machina, which I have not seen but has very arresting art, with thanks.

the liberating power of constraint

I wrote this post in two voices: a public one, that tries to apply the wisdom of a beautiful poem to the work I do, and a private one in italics, in which I let the power of the poem help me understand some pain that I have chosen to carry for many decades. I am pretty happy with how it turned out.

I have been chewing a lot lately on the William Cullen Bryant poem “Thanatopsis”.  Published when he was eighteen, it was widely considered too well-wrought to be written “this side of the Atlantic,” let alone by one so young – was considered a forgery, at first, because the transcendence of its insight didn’t seem to match its provenance.

It’s appropriate that the poem’s reception had to do with the mix-up of youth and age, callowness and wisdom. We so infrequently know where the one ends and the other begins; we so infrequently recognize what is most wise and precious when we first see it, because it often seems counterintuitive to what we want to call most valuable. The world has a way of making the last first, of burying the lede, of saving the lesson for after the test.

I think I first read this poem during my tumultuous first year of undergrad. I had been accepted to an exclusive, private undergraduate college, probably part of a national interest in geographically diversifying the elite colleges of the northeast (this was just before any other diversification became an urgent issue). I came directly to college from a competitive public high school in Northern Virginia, but had moved there from Wyoming just two years before, and I still felt quite the hayseed, with shit on my shoes. I remember most of that year living in an existential terror that I would be found out: that I was NOT a well-bred, blue blood east-coaster, and that anyone who thought themselves my friend would certainly think better of it once they really got to know me. In that context I took Western Civ, where I remember being mortified by mispronouncing Goethe’s name in the first day of class, to the amusement of all. I must have read the Bryant poem there, first; it’s mostly a blur of pain and fear, and I ended up transferring west to a state university that felt a better fit for me.

Here’s what I am noting about “Thanatopsis” now: the lesson at the end of the test. The poem is, literally, “a view of death,” and its greatest lesson is that a thing’s qualities, powers, and potentials change depending on how you view it.

First, the poem gives us the view we’ve come to expect of death. It opens with heavy emphasis on describing the inescapability of death and the fear it occasions:

When thoughts of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—

…And then it makes sure we understand the savage equanimity with which we will all succumb, and be rendered the dust from whence we came:

Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon.

So far, this seems a pretty straightforward memento mori (“a reminder of the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly good and pursuits”), perhaps befitting Bryant’s Puritan upbringing. To my ear, that’s a poem of despair, ultimately, and the only way to countenance it on its own is through bucking up and bearing the suffering that life deals us. Doesn’t sound like what I want to spend my life doing. But what could our options be?

For Bryant, there are options – and they begin with our point of view. The turn to something more lovely and sustaining comes next:

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,
The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre.

Bryant turns the focus away from individual suffering, and spends the rest of the poem exploring the majesty of assuming one’s part in the universal parade of mortality. The poem becomes one of acceptance, even celebration, of the inescapable finitude of human experience – and since none of us can escape the reality that bounds us, it is far better to embrace the ways that our limits enable our potential while we are here. Which ends the poem on something like a peaceful note:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

The “unfaltering trust” isn’t in God, necessarily – I don’t find God in this poem, not explicitly. Instead, it’s in the rightness of the way things work out, and in the peace that comes from ceasing struggling against the current that’s more powerful than anything else we know.

I have struggled to make sense of my terrible first year at Wesleyan ever since I left it. Why was I so unhappy? Was the problem with the school itself: the snobs, the judgment, the social shibboleths that no one ever taught me? When I was there, I sure felt that was the problem: them, not me. I felt so much pain, and I turned the pain into anger at everything around me. Before I left that year, I sneaked into the house of the fraternity that had refused to accept me because I wasn’t well-bred enough and stole a silver loving cup of their mantel. I still have it; for decades, it has represented my “getting even” with a group of people who caused me a lot of hurt.

But now, I have different perspective: I see it differently. Maybe part of what was getting in the way of my relaxing and accepting the opportunity that had been given me was my own fear, my own conviction that in fact the admissions committee HAD made a mistake; that I DIDN’T belong because I was a hayseed. The social psychologists call this “stereotype threat” – that place where our knowledge of how others MIGHT see us negatively cause us to see those negative attributes in ourselves, whether or not they are actually there, and underperform accordingly. The real truth is probably somewhere in the middle: in the early 1960s, that place WAS a bastion of exclusivity; in the early 1960s, I was supremely sensitive to any hint that I was being excluded.

I do know that my son ended up attending that school twenty-five years later, and visiting him felt like something being made whole. The place has become aggressively inclusive in the interim, seriously dedicated to creating an environment where all are welcome. I had lunch many times in the dining room of the same fraternity that wouldn’t have me a quarter of a century earlier, wondering at how easily my son and all his wildly different friends got along so famously, and how warmly they included me as one friend among many.

Maybe it just wasn’t time for me to be there in 1962, and it was in 1991. Maybe I was spending so much time in struggling against some inevitable force my first time around that I couldn’t see that the outcomes were out of my control: that the simple fact of the social climate of the early 60s was that I wasn’t a fit there, and could be (and was) somewhere else. Or maybe I was writing my own story so powerfully onto the reality of the place that it really didn’t matter what was real: I was going to live the story I brought along with me, no matter what. Either way: maybe the place didn’t change so much as my perspective on it did. Either way, I could have had a different story had I tuned in to the reality outside my story a lot sooner. I am stunned to realize how much pain I might have avoided had I simply changed my point of view earlier.

This is why I am so impressed by this poem, lately. It used to be about the futility of trying to accomplish anything, since the end of all of our efforts is ultimately foretold. Now it is about accepting the actual limits of our world and thriving within them anyway – of finding faith and hope to persist in the very limits that used to keep me from feeling it.

The thing about reality is that it doesn’t change: we do. We have power over the reality we make. We can carry stories that render everyone around us our opponents; that make all differences into battles to be won; that make every challenge to our own story a threat to hammered out of existence using the tools most readily available. Which, sadly, tend to be the habits we learn through our education (as Parker Palmer says, “when we get surprised in an academic context, we reach for the nearest weapon and try to kill the surprise as quickly as we can, because we are scared to death”).

The limits we all have to our intellects, our capacities, and ultimately our time can be raged against, or accepted and worked within. The choice is entirely ours – if we have the will to choose to become the masters of our own perception and commit completely to living life on life’s terms. Acceptance of reality paradoxically opens us to the only way to really change our experience of it, as surely as death ceases to terrify once we accept the way that its limits empower us to live in fuller connection with those with whom we share our finite, beautiful journey.

My son had a poetry professor at that college who refused to teach free verse – only structured forms like sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas. My son told me how he growled on the first day of class, in his Manchester brogue, “I seek to teach you the liberating power of constraint.” Our constraints can liberate us – if and only if we accept them and take a different view of the truth they offer us. When we are fully connected to reality, possibilities appear where before there was only pain.

Image of Parkin’s Memento Mori, borrowed from the Twitter feed of the Ferens Art Gallery, with thanks.

burn this

I remember visiting my son at college many years ago and having brunch at his fraternity with his friends. One guy stood out then, and now: am imposing, balding fellow, with a quick wit and way with words. He remains one of my son’s soulmates, and I hope he won’t mind my sharing his remembered wisdom here.

Over the duration of the meal, he made two observations about our relationship to stuff that have stayed with me. Here they are:

1. “You don’t truly own anything you can’t carry at a dead run.”
2. “Sometimes you have to burn everything you own just to make a point.”

The first was probably shared in the context of the big start-of-semester move in that had just taken place. Because of his strength, he was frequently asked to help haul stuff up the winding stairs of the ancient building (he had actually begun responding to people’s greetings with “how big is it, and how far do I have to move it?”).

But his comment wasn’t just bluster about how traveling light would mean less work. He really believed it. I saw his room, and it was spartan to the extreme: the milk crate he would presumably use, were he called upon to carry everything he owned at a dead run, sat in the corner, and his furnishings could probably have fit inside it. Several hard-cover books, his father’s Army portrait that hung over the closet, and a few clothes, really. He was set to go.

And the second – “Sometimes you have to burn everything you own just to make a point” – was his typically memorable précis of the Tlingit tradition of potlatch. That gift-giving celebration is a bit more complex than he made it out to be, but at the core he pretty much nailed it. It’s an observance in which your status in the culture is cemented by your demonstrated willingness to redistribute – or outright destroy – at least as much as you receive.

I wondered if, on one level, potlatch could be seen as a distant echo of the Biblical injunction against “scribes and Pharisees” and their ilk, who cared much more about how they were seen than who they truly were.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

One of my favorite versions of the message is Old Testament, actually:

The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.

In other words: is potlatch all for show, like lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills just to show off that you could afford to? That wouldn’t be much of a lesson to work from.

But no: the more I read about it, it seems potlatch really WAS about redistribution of one’s worldy goods as a marker of one’s integrity. This was an idea so radical that its abolition was a key goal of assimilationist efforts by white settlers, who saw it as a barrier to individuals and families accumulating wealth (“a worse than useless custom that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to ‘civilized values’ of accumulation“). It was an insurgent idea, this divorcing from attachment to stuff – so insurgent that it needed to be wiped out.

Well, I didn’t sit down to brunch expecting to hear such wisdom, but here I am more than twenty years later reflecting on what these “pithy pearls of power” mean for my work and the people it helps. Here’s some thoughts:

1. What can we really “carry at a dead run”?

Not much, physically. Only those things that cannot be replaced, of course – which calls our attention to how much of our stuff CAN be replaced if needed, or wouldn’t really be missed were it to vanish. We joked during our last move that maybe we should throw away every third box and see how long it took us to miss something. I wonder how many of you reading this feel the same: how much of what you have accumulated and curated in your basements are actually things that now only have power because you have held on to them this long, and whether or not, in some sense, those things are now owning you.

And irreplaceable things are always about people, not about the things themselves. Even when they are things, they are things that are precious because they are connected to people. The photos, the letters. The markers of how we succeeded in the interpersonal parts of our lives, not the stuff-accumulating parts.

Bonnie Ware’s blog post on this point made the rounds on the internet a few years ago. After working as a palliative care nurse for many years, she summarized the regrets many of them expressed as their lives came to a close. The top five include:

• I wish I didn’t work so hard.
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

No one talks about wanting more stuff: they talk about connections to people, not things. (Gretchen Rubin’s wonderful Happiness Project makes similar points.) It seems almost impossible in our hyper-marketed, hyper-stuffed world to really let these insights sink in and let them shape the priorities of our daily lives. But that’s exactly what we need to do if we hope to shape lives that we can truly feel were well-lived when our time is up.

This is deeply resonant with me, because my work is ultimately about connections between people: helping folks realize that they truly do not know another’s mind, and that their assumptions about them are ultimately just projections of what they wish the world to be. The Quadrant and Motivator insights, when resolutely practiced, add up to a practical, hands-on behavioral change mechanism that cultivates real capacity for empathy. It allows us to realize, sometimes for the first time, that we are not the only people in the world, and that our view of the world is not the only correct one. When we are capable of acting on that understanding, we become capable of true connection to others – and, finally, have a chance of not dying on a mountain of things, filled with regret.

2. What  do I “need to burn”?

I’m going to understand this question metaphorically: while we are all capable of getting rid of our physical stuff, we can make our own decision about how and why to do that. (But how interesting the power “getting rid of everything” is beginning to collect in our culture! Whether the decluttering phenomenon, or the dramatic “burn all you have” gesture to make a point, we really like to consider getting rid of stuff as a liberating, transformative act.)

Instead, I am thinking about what we can stand to get rid of in our behaviors. Not in our emotions – I am convinced that our emotions will do what they do, and we really don’t get to decide which we’d rather get rid of than feel. But definitely our reactions to our emotions: our predictable, reflexive responses to stimuli that make us uncomfortable. We can “burn down” our defensiveness, our anger, and our denial that “anything is wrong.” We can replace it with deliberate, habitual responses that are not self-defeating and get us closer to our long-term goals – if we are willing to exercise the discipline and accountability we’ll need to draw upon to make deep and lasting change.

3. What is the “point” I want to “make”?

This might be the deepest takeaway of all. What’s my message, my takeaway, my value-added, my elevator statement, that summarizes what I am really all about? We all have one – and it may or may not be the one we think we have. Were we to really hear what our colleagues think of us, how closely would it match who we think we are?

• Are we the bearers of insight and vision we believe ourselves to be?
• Or do our misunderstood Motivators lead us to predictably “bring more heat than light” to our work tasks?
• Or – shudder to think – are we the people who’s input isn’t so much welcomed as managed for damage control?

If we got this far in our professional lives, I am confident we have been fueled by more than venal self-interest. We crave the feeling of doing exactly what we were made to do, well; we want to feel of use, of service; we want to excel, to really make a mark and leave a legacy that honors what we worked for.

I think that getting in touch with how much we are “willing to burn” raises the intensity of our commitment to making the “point” we wish to make. It invites us to be completely honest about our true impact and our true legacy, as it is shaping up – and reaffirms our commitment to changing what needs to be changed so that we can really be the people we want to be.

We never really know what’s going to stick with us; what tossed-away words might come to crystalize wisdom for us later. I am surprised at the power of these words I heard so long ago, and excited about their resonance with the deep truths I’ve learned over my career in helping people change.

Come over to my web site to learn more about my work and how it can help you figure out what you most want to “carry”, and what you need to “burn” in order to make the “point” you hope to. The choice is yours.

Fire image from dreamtico.com, with thanks.

Dragon Panda Bicycle Inscrutable

I really enjoyed listening recently to a rebroadcast of a This American Life episode dedicated to the experience of expats in China. Especially moving was the story of Kaiser Kuo, whose parents were born in China but moved to the US and raised their kids as Americans. Kuo has since returned to China, where he was a member of the first Chinese heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty, and is now Director of International Communications for the Chinese search engine Baidu.

What most got my attention was this conversation from a weekly podcast Kuo does on the expat experience in China. A writer for The Economist is present, and the discussion turns toward a dedicated column that magazine is launching on China – the first since they started a column to the United States in 1942. A very funny discussion followed about what to name the column, that almost made me drive off the road laughing:

We don’t have one yet. We solicited people to nominate their own suggestions for the China blog.

Most of them were pretty appalling.

Really? What have you heard so far, Jeremy?

Well, they were kind of like dragon and silk and—

Well, I said we should please have—bamboo curtain—

—please have dragon, panda, bicycles and inscrutable, or some combination—

“The Inscrutable Pearl of the Oriental Dragon panda”.

Sorry, too late. I’ve already taken that.

So I think The Inscrutable Panda is not a bad choice.

How about “The China Slant”?

You sent me a few of those, offline, Kaiser. And I was going to protect your reputation by not repeating them.

It was funny because it was true: westerners seek to reduce China to a few signifiers that reflect the “orientalist” desire to make China exotic and foreign, but in predictable, controllable ways.

But a minute later, the story observed not just how inadequate that sort of summing up is, but how hard it is to explain any aspect of something so very foreign to someone who hasn’t been there. Like so much TAL, it needs to be quoted at length to really get it:

As foreigners living in China, especially ones who write about it for a living, we’re always trying to figure out how to explain China, not just to our readers and listeners, also to our friends and family and acquaintances. We know that looking at the country from far away, for instance, from the United States, it can be difficult to make out the proportions here.

Parts of it seem very American, the friendliness, the conspicuous consumption, the drive, pride in the sheer size of the country and belief in the country’s exceptionalism and the arrogance that goes with that. Also the ambition, and the anxiety among the ambitious, about getting your kids into the right kindergarten.

But then parts of it are straight out of the Cold War. We don’t really have a good word for what China is now. Totalitarianism isn’t right. But, of course, it’s not politically free in any sense of the word. When I sit down to write, I’m looking at facts that are sometimes in direct contradiction with each other, and are also in motion.

Do I lead with the fact that the income of the average citizen here doubled in 12 years, a process that took 50 years in America? Or the fact that around 150 million Chinese people, the equivalent of half the population of the United States, still live on $1 a day? How does any expat answer the question, “So what’s happening in China these days”?

I’ve had my own experience in China (see elsewhere on this blog), and have worked at length to get my own arms around just how foreign things can get. But as I heard these expats talk about their experience with foreignness, I found myself thinking about how we can best manage the disorientation that comes from being in all kinds of unfamiliar environments. What does it take to keep on course, even when everything around you is disorienting?

The thing is, every new experience gives us “facts that are sometimes in direct contradiction with each other, and are also in motion.” I have spent my professional life working with CEOs of companies large and small, and know that one of the primary challenges of leadership is knowing what you are looking at as you review the sea of data that arrives at your desk every day. A core executive competency is determining what is salient and what is not, and then deciding next steps based on that changing view. Contradictions abound:

• There is a temptation to see every new thing in terms of what is old; to only welcome information that conforms to what is already established.
• But there is also a need to accept the new, even if it troubles precedent. “Disruption” is the business buzzword of the last two years, and inasmuch as it means anything anymore, it means accommodating and responding to the forces that require leaders to reimagine their efforts and their markets in new light.
• But leading with disruption risks always responding: managing in crisis mode, reactively and not proactively. And of course, leaders who do that find themselves tilting at the latest windmills, whether or not they correspond to their core mission, hedgehog concept, etc.

So leadership requires management of the foreign every day. How can you balance what needs to change with what must always stay the same?

I have developed powerful tools to help distinguish what must change from what must not, and I describe them in the essay “The Five Fingers of my Hand,” downloadable here as a free e-book.

I try there to understand how the workforce’s younger generation differs from the rest of the “Old Guard” and me, and decide it has a lot to do with how they orient themselves. Whereas my generation connected with established career checkpoints and values like loyalty and working one’s way up, millennials thrive in the “gig economy” and prefer merit-based recognitions to tenure-based ones. But that doesn’t mean they are un-anchored; rather, the are anchored to each other, not least through the social media inputs that they refer to a hundred times a day to affirm their choices and their places in their networks.

What remains the same is the need to have a very short list of true, deep understandings of Who You Are, independent of the referents you use to orient yourself. My work helps people understand their automatic preferences in how to engage problems, but also gives them a useful understanding of both the Motivators that drive those preferences and the emotions that power those Motivators. Those who complete my process emerge with a sense of who they are that transcends the foreignness they will be confronted with that day – a self-knowledge that always allows them to know which way is up, even when everything looks and sounds and smells different and it’s hard to decide what even deserves your attention.

These understandings are simple, but not simplistic: it’s not just “dragon, panda, bicycles and inscrutable.” The truest understandings are the ones that come to hand quickly and are actually useful as you try to decide what to do next. And hundreds have told me that this work is the most useful they’ve ever done.

If you’d like to get clear about what remains true, even when everything around you is foreign, click here to learn more about the work. And I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Unfortunate image of a Dragon / Panda hybrid borrowed from CIMSEC, with thanks.