Learning is Change

Question 125 of 365: Who moved my privacy?

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Portrait of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
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Virginia Woolf wasn’t kidding. Having a room of one’s own matters. That is why teachers who keep their materials on carts are the ones who we pity. It is the reason why we still have stigma around cubicles. It is the reason that we put our names on doors.

In a couple of weeks, I will lose my own room. For the past 9 months, I have been able to meet with people on my own terms. I have been able to put my children’s artwork on the walls. I have been able to avoid ridicule from everyone who ventures into our office for my manual typewriter sitting on my desk.

We are all moving to a historic school building, one of the first ones built in my district. And this is rocking our department to our very core. We spent at least an hour today meeting to just discuss the anxiety around the move (not the move itself, but dispelling the anxiety around it). There is a serious reorganization underfoot and it makes everyone nervous. The feeling in the air was that our family was splitting up. It was a divorce proceeding, or at least the aftermath of one.

“On this day, you can pack your stuff. The next day, you will no longer be able to visit your old home. The day after that, you will be surrounded by strangers.”

This isn’t what worries me, though. I could care less about the loss of being around a few key people. I usually talked with them through online collaborative means, anyway. The thing I am worried about is losing my own space, and losing my sanity along with it. There are very few places that I can really be alone in thought. My room was one of the last vestiges of a bygone era.

For years I lived in the basement. I did this on purpose. As soon as my parents would let me, I moved all of my solid-wood furniture down to the basement and set up camp. I put up christmas lights on the ceiling. I plastered the walls with posters from the local art movie house. I let the technology on my desk spill over onto my dresser and on my bed and on the bookshelf and on the floor. This was the space that other people only visited when I asked them.

I don’t want to return to those days, but I do wish that I could figure out how to preserve some of that privacy. For as open as I am about my work and my collaborative instincts, I feel the need to have a space to spin around in my chair if I need to and not be questioned about it. I am not in any way looking forward to going back to sharing the music I choose to listen to with others. The privacy that I crave is the kind that relaxes shoulders and puts feet on tables. The kind of privacy I desire lets me put up sticky notes and record videos of them.

I want to be able to go for a few hours at a time without having to put up a facade of work sarcasm. The small talk gets ridiculous after a point. And, that point is about after the first 15 minutes of the day for me.

So, I internalize this privacy and I put all of the christmas lights into my head. I use headphones and I step out to make phone calls. I drop out of the space that is supposed to be so colegial. I find reasons to be away from co-habitation. And that is exactly what it is. It is an environment in which we are all a part, but no one has the space to create something new. Everything just seems to take on the sanitized undertones of being civil to one another all of the time.

And this is the grand irony. In all of my calls for collaboration, I still want it to be a choice. I want to be able to go in and out of collaborative spaces at will. I want to be able to begin from a place of personality rather than homogeneity. And for me, this isn’t negotiable.

My privacy isn’t up for debate. Whether or not my official space is found within cubicle or an office, I will always seek out a room of my own. I will plan on finding the spaces that will let me set up shop and let my stuff spill out onto the floor. I will intentially create works that require collaborative spaces that others CHOSE to come into rather than are set as a default.

While I do not bemoan change in my life, I believe in marking its passing. Others can be nervous about shifts to job description or responsibilities, but the only thing I will be looking for are places to ask real questions and get beyond the political fight awaiting all unchosen spaces.

If I had a glass in my hand I would raise it to this:

To finding the next room of my own, wherever that may be.

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Desktop Virtualization for the iPad!

I think one of the things that most intrigued me about the ipad was that It might actually be able to replace a computer running windows or OSX by utilizing virtualization. While there is something to be said for Citrix and their line of remote management products, I wanted to do this for free. And not only that, I wanted to be able to do this virtualization for a number ipads all logged in to the desktop operating system from a single laptop or desktop machine.

Well, without realizing that I would solve this question so quickly after procuring my own iPad, there is a relatively simple way to do software virtualization for about 9 ipads/iPod touches/iphones, all for free. Here it is, step by step:

1. Turn on fast-user switching. This will allow the iPad to connect to an account other than the one that is being used by the computer itself. To do this, go into System Preferences, click on Accounts, Click on Login Options, then check the box to enable fast-user switching:

System Preferences
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Accounts
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Skitch
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2. Create as many accounts as you would like to use for virtualization. Click the plus sign within the accounts window to do this:

Skitch
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3. Download Vine VNC Server from http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxvnc/
4. Open up the program you just downloaded and go into the preferences. From within the preferences, set up your first display on your current OSX account (the one you normally use). This will set up your VNC server for that port to only look at that account. You will see why that matters in a bit. You will also need to choose a password to allow access to your screen:

Apple
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Vine Server Preferences
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5. Log in to one of your other accounts via the fast-user-switching. And Open up Vine Server program in that account. Then go into preferences and set up the second display. (repeat this step for as many virtualizations as you would like):

SystemUIServer
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Picture 2-1
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6. Download VNC Lite on your iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mocha-vnc-lite/id284984448?mt=8) and open it up. It should look like this:

photo
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7. Click Menu and then Edit Connections. Add two connections (to start, but you can add as many virtualized connections as you want). Both should have the same VNC address (your computer name on the network), but one should have 5901 and one should have 5902 in the port area. This will tell the VNC client which user to log into. You will also need to put in the passwords that you set for the vine servers:

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8: Connect to one of the two connections that you just set up. If you have done everything correctly, you should be able to connect to your computer from the two accounts. Enjoy:

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photo-2
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Now aside from this being really cool, I can think of a good number of reasons why this matters. I would like to start seeing people use mobile devices as desktop and laptop replacements both for the economic value as well as the ability to put more power in the hands of students, collaborators, and creators. I would also like to see just how efficient we can get at using the technology we have in the room before we start adding a whole bunch of requirements for 1:1 laptops in any situation. I’m interested to see where this goes. Let me know if you come up with anything great.

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Question 124 of 365: Are there clowns hanging up on our walls?

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The original Clinic building opened its doors ...
Image via Wikipedia

The Cleveland Clinic was my childhood hospital. I visited my pediatrician there with my two brothers more times than I care to remember. I didn’t recognize it as the world-premier institution that it is, though. I just knew it as the place with the clown posters on the wall.

Within this enormous waiting area with a few children’s toys and books, there were these rather intimidating clown posters that had french words written on them. The clowns weren’t sad or particularly happy. They were just there, staring down at you as you waited to get your next shot.

The clowns were such a part of my childhood that I lamented their loss when the Cleveland Clinic decided to venture out into satellite buildings closer to our house. As I was old enough to drive and needed blood work instead of height and weight checks, I still wanted to wait in that room. There was something about having clowns look down at you that made everything seem absurd, and by that measure, made everything relatively okay.

The question I really want to ask is if I have ever replaced the beautiful smeared lipstick of the clown with anything else that is worth noting. I want to know if there has been anything that I have hung up around me that has given me the same level of consistency and understanding for things, even in all of their chaos and unbelievability. And more than that, can we all hang our own clowns up in the waiting rooms that we frequent so that nothing seems as real as it is and we can float away from the pain that forthcoming into a place of fantasy and interest?

The waiting rooms in our lives are not in hospitals for the most part. They are in our cars, in our homes, and wherever else we can’t have the instant gratification we crave. They are even in our email as we wait for responses. They are in our physical objects that don’t update as fast as our digital ones.

And as we wait for lights to change or someone to hit the reply all button, there really is very little in the way of clown ambiance. But, I think that there could be more of it, if we tried hard enough. We could make the background of waiting just slightly more comforting if we worked to create reminders of the hilarity of it all.

Here is what I am proposing:

1. E-mails should have an escape hatch. Within every reply there should be a link that you could click to get away from the experience entirely. There should be a link in signatures to an inspiring photograph of an absurd situation. There should be a labyrinthian puzzle to traverse before you can get back to your e-mail. It should be hard and worthwhile, but it should be more difficult to do your e-mail without being reminded of how ridiculous it is that we are tied to a machine for multiple hours of the day.

2. Traffic lights should be hackable. Instead of just having a green orb to tell us to go, we should have the ability to upload our own (filtered, perhaps) image to the green light so that when it changes we are looking at what it could possibly be. The only people who might be able to see this change are the ones that just missed the light the time before, and thus the folks with the most time on their hands. By ensuring that others can tap into what the traffic light is all about, it is ensuring that the absurdity of humanity is represented in one of the craziest practices we do every day (letting a color tell us when to go and stop).

3. The physical objects around us should make fun of us on a regular basis. Or, maybe we should just get in on the joke. After all, books know more than we do about their particular subjects or stories. Chairs do a better job than us at supporting a person’s weight. The plastics that we use everyday will likely outlive us. Perhaps all of this should be made known to us more consistently. Subtle hints could be dropped in the form of notes or casual taunts. Our objects could be the clowns of consistency that stare at us every day if we let them.

While I’m not sure that the Cleveland Clinic was trying to promote this idea or not, here is what I learned from sitting in that room for endless hours in my youth:

The whole world is a circus. The sooner you recognize that and start laughing about it, the better the world will become.

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Question 123 of 365: How much are we inspired by comfort?

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Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Image via Wikipedia

So, I’m blogging from an iPad. I’m that guy. I’m sitting here with my bluetooth wireless keyboard resting on my lap, looking over at the gorgeous screen being propped up with the new super-durable case I got today. All of this is so new that I really have no frame of reference, but if this particular moment is any indication, I think it is the most comfortable I have ever been while writing.

I don’t have the heavy laptop weighing me down. I don’t have to worry about the battery giving out. I don’t even have to care whether or not I’m misspelling things because the autocorrect on this thing is ridiculous.

Not only does this make me an incredible nerd, it also makes me so pampered that I feel guilty about it. While my tech lust for this item and the productivity that I knew it would represent is nothing compared to the feeling that I know I am incredibly lucky to be able to spend money on such a device that is so inessential.

And it makes me wonder whether or not I will be as inspired to create worthwhile stories while I sit so comfortably. It makes me wonder if “having” really will make me passionate to want more for myself and for others.

I was always really put off by the last line of Gene Wilder‘s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the movie, he Willie Wonka says, “Do you know what happened to the boy who got everything he always wanted… He lived happily ever after.” (Or, at least that is how I remember it.) Even as Charlie, Grandpa Joe and Willie Wonka himself are lifted high above the city in the Wonkavator, I think that this appeals to our need to “win” at the end of the day. It doesn’t reflect just how important the daily struggle is. And, it certainly doesn’t allow for any thinking time to consider just how much the act of “wanting” can lead to the act of creation.

If Wonka is about creating new and amazing concoctions, he should be promoting that for his young apprentice. He should be telling Charlie to continue to dream because now that he has reached his goal of caring for his family, he can have new goals and new wishes to start progressing toward.

This is not to say, that I feel as though I have everything that I have always wanted by sitting here on my couch and typing away at a quarter-inch thick keyboard. It isn’t to say that by simply being able to touch my browser I no longer want anything else to change. There is a lot that is still missing from the experience (I just tried to figure out how to attach a screenshot to an e-mail and couldn’t). I just know that I am comfortable now, that I don’t have to worry about anything else coming in and distracting me (mostly because the iPad doesn’t do multi-tasking yet).

I live in a comfortable world. I eat food every day. I shower with clean water. I have a filter in my refrigerator that makes pure ice cubes. My children have toys to play with and their own rooms. I sleep on a mattress and not the floor. I am privileged, and I know it.

What good can come of this? Isn’t having an iPad and these ridiculous accessories just another way to show off a technological elitism? Isn’t it a way to focus all of the attention on materialism and comfort instead of the real problems that other people are having? It is all just an academic exercise.

I’m sure after a few days, it will be like I always had these tools. I will start to think about a fictitious equity for them. My access will become a perceived access for all. It will happen because it always happens.

Web 2.0 isn’t ubiquitous. It is just prevalent.

Smart phones aren’t changing the world. They are just changing their users.

Social networks are making us more comfortable with sharing information than we have ever been before, and so we do it without even thinking. The value of an anecdote, a picture, or a home movie has gone down so drastically that there really isn’t anything that we say or share now that can’t be said or shared from the comfort of “everywhere.”

While I am not going to be giving up my iPad after 2 days with it, I feel like I might try to make this comfort different. Perhaps, this is the kind of comfort that I will be able to share. My wife is going to Kansas City this weekend to visit her sick mother.

Perhaps, she could use some comfort.

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Question 122 of 365: Who yells out during a live recording?

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Ben Folds went to high school with one of the ...
Image by commondream via Flickr

One of my favorite bands of all time is Ben Folds Five. There was always a certain nerdiness that went along with listening to them that I never really could explain away. The one song that resonated with me longer than any other during early high school was “underground.”

It is a song about not fitting in as well as about finding a niche somewhere within which to be happy. While I no longer feel the need to seek out the underground of life in order to be accepted, there is a part of the song that continues to intrigue me. At the beginning of the song, Ben Folds does some spoken word magic to tell the audience about how he was never cool in school. In the studio version of the song, everything goes swimmingly and the song begins on cue. However, in the live version on Naked Baby Photos, there is an incredibly inarticulate heckler that screams out reactions to Ben’s statements. Things like, “who the ______ are you” are given their own time and space on the record. They are paid as much respect as the song itself, in fact they have mostly changed the song for me in that I can’t even play the studio version without his harsh words making their way into my mind. It makes me even more uncomfortable each of the times I have seen them live when they play this song. Other folks have tried to mimic this character hundreds of times, and I can’t imagine just how annoying it has all become for Ben.

And that is why I wonder who the person is that is willing to ruin a song and an experience for millions of people. I wonder just who is able to put themselves out there on the side of forgettable discourse. I wonder who is even thinking about placing themselves in fronton the world just to tell everyone that their worth can be summed up in leaving a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

And ye tit is this very phenomenon that is stilting our ability to go on the record for much of anything. It is the fact that we know that almost everything is being taped for posterity that makes us not want to yell out at all. We don’t want to be put into the meeting minutes as having a contrary opinion. We don’t want to be recorded in a webinar as going against what is being officially proposed. Conference calls are even worse because the action items almost never resemble exactly how harsh or interesting the actual recording would have been.

We don’t shout out loud anymore knowing that we could be influencing the mixing of information for years to come. We find satisfaction in an approximation of what we said or worse still, in self-censorship. The gag reflex kicks in way too early for everything that we do now that being a part of a lasting record doesn’t really seem like an option.

Our options have been whittled down to staying silent or becoming q chorus of similar voices. We become the audience for a cult of personality, instead of leading our own performances that may conflict with the stated purpose of the event.

Now I am not sanctioning heckling or yelling out profanity at those who are willing to be up in front of others, what I am simply suggesting is that it should be possible for us to scream out valid critiques of what is going on. Not only possible, but necessary. And, I am not talking about Twitter. You can yell out profanity in that microblogging service easier than broadcasting it any other way, but there is very little chance of it being mixed down into the final version of those events as you have stated it.

Rather, I am talking about yelling out in person. I think that it is all about push back. It is all about going on the record as asking questions and providing solutions. It is about being loud about your reservations for the topic at hand.

Because at the end of the day, you don’t want anyone to be able to think about the events you shared without hearing your reaction to them in their head. That is the real stickiness: to be remembered in the context of important work.

While the heckler in “Underground” has ruined the beginning of the song for me forever, It gave me the opportunity to question just what I believe about the words being said. Because of him, I may have figured out just how unimportant underground ideas really are (at least ones that stay there).

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Question 121 of 365: What is the point of conditional statements?

I know that all success is dependent upon other successes. I just
thought that I could choose which successes to build upon to go
forward.

Ashton and I were accepted to The Founder Institute on Thursday. For
those who are uninitiated, this is a program that leads entrepreneurs
through a few months of mentorship and concrete assignments in order
to raise capital and see the company through to the next phase in its
development.

Today I was notified that because Ashton was not able to commit to the
entire time period (he will be in Argentina for part of the time),
that both of us will not be excluded from the program.

This single conditional statement I find to be ludicrous. It is
applying the same logic as to restaurant seating. Your whole party may
not be seated until your whole party is present.

That is not the way that the world of collaboration and creation
works. If some people aren’t available for a meeting, we record the
notes, archive the audio and generally create a space for everyone to
come together on what was discussed. Being absent is not only an
option, it should be encouraged. When people can work and collaborate
on their own time, they are more likely to give everything that they
have rather than sitting through an interminable event when other
things are on the line (like a trip to Argentina, maybe).

It is perhaps a factor that The Founder Institute was not going to get
another 600 dollars of our money that spurred this decision, but I
would like to think that it is just a lack of foresight on their part.
I would like to think that it was merely a rigid commital to old
business practices that really sealed our fate.

I would like to think that we are moving beyond this, but I think that
the world has a few more conditional statements in it.

Posted via email from The Throughput

Question 120 of 365: Who were we when we first learned to open doors?

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My son just learned how to open doors. He stretches as far as he possibly can, trusting that his socks won’t slip under the strain. He extends each of his five fingers until they curl around the handle and then he pulls down with all of his might. It is amazing to watch someone that was formerly unable to go from one room to another be able to do so now without fear. I love watching him do this.

I can see the pride in him when he finally pulls the door open and turns around to gauge my reaction. He wants to see if I approve, but what he really wants is to show me just how little he needs me, even for only one moment.

It is even better when he wakes up in the morning. He lowers himself down from his “big boy bed” and then opens his door as wide as possible. As he swings the door in front of himself, he smiles as big as anything I can imagine as I do something that I am proud of. He says, “Hi dad.” And I melt.

And I wonder what it was like to be able to melt someone like that. I wonder what it was like to simply be able to open physical doors and have that be enough. Now, everything is metaphorical and it seems as though all of the doors that I look at will give me no more satisfaction in going through than staying on the other side.

A former student of mine wanted to know how to connect his Zune to the wireless network within his current high school. As much as I wand to be able to help him, I don’t have an answer. I now work in a place that does not believe in open networks or true guest access without prior approval. This door is closed. But who is proud of opening it? Who cares whether or not users can bring in their own devices and get on the network?

Even if I do open this door, are we really going to be better for having gone through? We know what is over there. We can get there on our phones, our connect cards and thousands of other local wifi hotspots. I get why access is important. I get why leveraging all of the computing power in our pockets is what we need to be doing, but I don’t need it right now.

I want to know who we were when we first learned to open that door. When we fist gained access or asked the questions about what was possible when we connected our devices. I am interested in the outstretched fingers trying to find the handle on the web. Who were we then?

Were we the ones who knew what to expect? Did we know that everything was going to be tactile? Did we know that everything was going to be collaborative? Did we know that the web was going to be the place that all of us played and worked and found value?

And who are our parents in all of this? Who are the mentors who are sharing in our joy at having found the other side?

Open doors clearly bring out the questions in me, but it is that smile that I keep on coming back to. When I look at my son doing it, I know that the world should be finding new doors to open and not harp on ones that have already been fully explored.

Question 119 of 365: How can you have everything?

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I stood where Bill Gates is standing right now.

I’m not sure why that matters, but knowing that I was previously in the same space as one of the most influential people in the world is downright unnerving. It is as if the universe has now made the comparison between us. Not a connection, but a comparison. Of all of the people that have existed in that space, he is the one that has done the most good for the world health crisis. He is the one who has funded the most schools. He is the one that has made the most money and changed the world with his computing vision.

Today, in the cafeteria of the Science Leadership Academy, Bill Gates took question from high school students that I have met and have had conversations with. He looked through the same windows that I have and walked through the same doors. Now, watching him do these things on a live video feed is nothing compared to the experience of actually being there with him. But, perhaps it is better this way. I don’t have to be embarrassed at my relative lack of accomplishment. I will never have to stand up to him and justify my own work against his.

And I know he doesn’t care, but I don’t need him to. I don’t look up to him as if he were a god among men and I don’t need his approval to make my own small contributions to society. I do, however, want to listen to him. I want to know his story, both of his successes and failures. I want to see that the cosmic comparison continues to weigh everything and come up with an answer at the end of it all, not in terms of who matters more but rather a comparison of two ideas. Because at the end of the day, there is an idea of Bill Gates and there is an idea of Ben Wilkoff. Our ideas intersect and separate at different points. They both have a narrative, an arch, and many plot devices. I don’t think that just sharing the same space is the only part of our “ideas” that cross paths either.

In telling his own story, he said that it you can have everything. He said that all of the world’s knowledge can be found in libraries and online. He said that the basis of getting what you want out of life was a good education. He said these things because they mesh with his story, with the idea of Bill Gates.

They also match my story. I have everything. Everything that I need for information, for connection, and for creation. I had a wonderful education, and I figured out just what it means to learn (although, mostly outside of a formalized setting). I read books and blogs and tweets. I see the world’s information and I incorporate it into the idea of me.

That is why we should listen to people. Whether they are Bill Gates or someone in the supermarket. That is why we have to constantly compare notes on what kinds of stories we are telling to one another. We need to be aware that whenever two people have shared the same space and time, there is a comparison that must be shared. When we see differences, we should recognize them. We should celebrate the fact that our stories aren’t the same. We should also look for those places that our ideas match up. When we find those places, we should feel connected to an understanding that we indeed are experiencing the same reality as one another. We should feel incredibly happy that neither of our ideas are entirely flawed because we have shared something special. When the ideas of ourselves resonate with one another, it doesn’t matter if one knows it and the other doesn’t. So long as someone is making note that there was a singularity of vision for a brief moment, that is enough. It is enough to know that Bill Gates and myself, for the moment that the story was being told and heard, are allowed to let our ideas meld.

I was in Target the other day with my two children and an elderly man stopped me after I paid for our groceries. He told me that he had four children and that for a few years he had to leave them alone with his wife while he was in the War. He said that his entire family had a food budget of $15 per week, and they were able to stretch it and make it work. I had just paid for $150 of groceries that may not even last us the week. That is a factor of 10. He said that the number almost made him fall out of his bench seat as he waited for his wife to get out of the bathroom. In that moment, he noticed that our stories were drastically different from one another. He was both making a note of that fact and allowing me to do the same.

At some point in the future, I may understand exactly what he was talking about. For right now, I can just be thankful for the story. At some point, I may be able to hold the same understanding as he did of leaving his children and wife behind to work toward a cause greater than himself, but for right now I can just listen. Perhaps, that is all that any of us can do.

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Question 118 of 365: When can efforts truly dovetail?

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My grandfather didn’t yell. He never really felt the need. His authoritative voice was so awe-inspiring that trying to do anything against his wishes was ill advised. I knew him as the man who built and fixed computers and read every science fiction book in the library (literally, he only read the new arrivals because he had been through the entire backlog of SciFi books). The one time that I heard him raise his voice in reference to me was when I was trying to shove a hair brush into a glove compartment. I tried to push the door closed as hard as possible, slamming it in order to try and get it to shut. My grandpa forcefully told me to stop. With equal force, but a little less volume, he proceeded to show me that there was something in the way of me shutting it. He said that I should never force something to work. I should figure out why I won’t work, fix it, and then try again.

I was humbled by this particularly astute advice, as if it should have been something that I innately knew. Being all of nine at the time, I’m not entirely sure why my embarrassment was so acute. It was always been hard for me to not try and force things to work. In the end, I always thought that it would be easier to force them instead of figuring out the root cause of the discord. On that day, in my mother’s van, I knew what it meant to be wrong and to know it. I knew what it meant to take a step back and reflect on what I was doing and then change my action to produce a better result. I also knew what it meant to see that someone else might want the same things for me and that it may take their advice in order to get those things to happen.

I wonder sometimes, if I have continued to heed his expert advice, especially when it comes to collaboration. Whenever I see that someone else is doing something similar to me or whenever I see a smart person who may have similar interests, I try and make our efforts dovetail. Perhaps this is just me wanting to make sure that we are not duplicating efforts. Maybe it is just my need to co-author ideas. Whatever the reason, I seem to find connections where others do not. Sometimes it works out and beautiful creations come, but other times the collaborations fizzle because they were based only on my perception of a situation. It is in those moments of fading collaborative spirit that I feel as though I should probably force the hair brush one more time to see if I can close the deal without too much readjustment.

Given that this rarely works well for long, inevitably I have to reassess and either change my priorities or ask someone else to change theirs. These efforts are sometimes futile, but I learn a lot from them. I learn how ideas can come together and what each one needs to survive. I learn that different perspectives can inform decisions more than identical ones. Companies and Schools were not created because everyone had the same investments and interests.

And yet, I keep on searching for those individuals and organizations that want the same things as I do. I keep on wishing that I wouldn’t have to force the door closed with any of them. And every once in a while, I stumble and fall headlong directly into one of those situations. A perfect storm of time and space where efforts really do dovetail.

It happened just this week for me:

I found Mindquilt on Twitter. Their tagline is Ask, Tag, Send, Answer. They provide software for companies to share the institutional knowledge through asking and answering questions, game dynamics, and expert-matching. This means that anyone in an organization who asks a question will be matched up with someone else based upon the tags within the question and that they both get points and badges (a la FourSquare) for the entire process of finding a solution. Finding this was scary in terms of what I am trying to do with Open Spokes. But what made everything suddenly okay was that the CEO of the company contacted me about what I was doing a few hours later. He had found me through the same mutual Twitter follower without knowing it.

Even this early on in our collaboration, we have started discussing just how our two ventures are working toward similar goals from different points of view. We have been able to start the process of dovetailing our efforts, and all because we were open to that prospect. We haven’t forced anything, and don’t need to. We have both assessed the situation and removed the obstruction for going forward. We got all of the forced work out of our systems, so now we can just talk and plan and create. I like that.

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Question 117 of 365: When should you jump ship?

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Figure 20 from Charles Darwin's The Expression...
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Other people affect us in the strangest ways. Retirement parties are one such example. The rash of these awkward moments in my life have really been getting to me. When people decide to cash in their chips, it really makes me eye the stack I have in front of me. It makes me wonder what they know that I don’t (which, if they are retiring after 30 or 40 years of work, is probably a lot). At these parties there is cake, but it isn’t about the cake. There are gifts, but no one cares about the gifts. There is small talk, but no one remembers what was said. The entire event is centered around the vacuum that will be left in the absence of the person leaving. While we pay attention and say nice things about all of the service that was one in the retiree’s tenure, the real issue on everyone’s mind is all of the things that won’t be done in the future because of this retirement. We all play out in our heads the stories of what will never be completed or worse yet, what projects will never be started.

And the same goes for people leaving to work elsewhere (although, they usually don’t get a grand party). We all know that they will be replaced either by someone new or someone shifting into that position from within. Yet, we cannot put ourselves into that place of knowing what it is that will happen during or after the vacancy. It is entirely the fear of the unknown that creeps in on us and makes us want to run to leave too. It isn’t the peer pressure of other people leaving that makes us question our loyalty. It is the fact that we have no idea who is coming in to replace them and what the organization will look like afterwards.

The best organizations can weather any large-scale changeover. There have been many shifts in priorities and populations in large school districts and Fortune 500 companies, and with each shift comes a new identity. And yet, fitting re-assimilating that identity is hard work, and not all of us have enough energy left for it. So, how can you take control of that oncoming identity shift? You make that change first. If you leave and start work elsewhere, you get to control what you want to be a part of. You get to choose your partners and your co-workers, instead of having them chosen for you as the organization morphs into something that is unrecognizable to you.

And yet, there is a powerful force within us that makes us want to wait it out and see if it will get any better. There is always this loyal streak that seems to engage our fight or flight instinct and it gets us to recognize just how hard the flight might be. We look around us, at the economic realities of the day, and we decide that it is good just to have a job. We make do with what we have. We take on additional responsibilities. Every day, we keep our head down just a little bit lower in the hopes that everything will start to shake out and we won’t have to move too far from where we are to maintain a similar status.

And then more changes come, more uncertainty. More people keep leaving, challenging our resolve. Stay the course or head out in a new direction? All of this head-down standing still doesn’t work so well when the ground underneath us is moving.

So, without putting too fine a point on it, I would like to enumerate the things that I look for in deciding whether or not to jump ship on any given day:

  • I must be able to see myself in my leadership. This doesn’t have to be all leadership, however. It can be a single leader that I can look to and see that his or her values align with mine. I need to feel as though I am not working against the entire system at any given moment, and I need to know that someone will have my back if I take a risk.
  • Reorganization doesn’t take people for granted. In any reorganization effort, I need to be able to see that the people who are working the hardest to create and innovate within the system are not passed over for people who either want to obstinately keep the status quo or folks who would rather forget everything that has been done before. I don’t want anyone else (or myself for that matter) to feel like someone’s pawn or bargaining chip in the Org Chart.
  • Cost savings isn’t getting in the way of progress. You cannot put an entire organization on pause. Cutting can lead to better reflective practice, but it can also lead to better blinders. I opt for continuing what was promised and then delivering more.
  • Sitting down and pounding things out becomes the default option instead of waiting things out. I will only stay on board so long as people are willing to sit down and write out what they want. I will not hesitate to jump if I start seeing people wait on the sidelines for too long, hoping that someone will come and solve their problems for them. Hardship is the time when collaboration matters most. It isn’t that you need to communicate more, you need to listen and be in the same space with other people as much as possible. You need to rewrite the organization and ratify it with everyone who is capable of putting their name to paper, even if we know that it will change again. Not knowing, believing, or creating the next generation of an institution is unconscionable.

Because I know that each of these issues is of value to me, I don’t have to live out one my favorite Clash songs on a daily basis. I am loyal and hard-working, but there I also know what is worth fighting for.

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