Learning is Change

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...
Image via Wikipedia

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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Question 116 of 365: How much power is in the absurd?

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Tagging has always been an art form I am a little embarrassed to appreciate. Even before I understood the graffiti in downtown Cleveland, I think I understood that people were making their mark on something in the hopes of immortality or at least bragging rights. Even in suburbia, tagging was valuable. By developing a tag, you were able to declare just who you were and what you were all about. Most of the coolest kids I knew had developed tough tags that they were proud to scrawl onto the backs of the chairs in Social Studies during the 2nd viewing of Tora! Tora! Tora!. They had beautiful curved letters, and sometimes, even blood pooling at the bottom or interesting characters within the design. And everything within the tag meant something. Every letter represented a part of the person drawing it. It was a thing of suburban beauty.

My tag, however, was absurd. I am no graffiti artist, and I could not come up with anything rugged or overly intimidating. What I came up with was GPSAF, written with angles, kind of like this:

And what menacing ideas did GPSAF stand for?

Giorgio Perogies, Scrooberdeeds, and Freakinbobins.

That’s right. A food item that I have never tasted and two made up words that have no reason for existing. This absurd abbreviation was simply the work of my imagination and my interest in using non-sense to make the world seem just a little bit more sane. In those days, I did not have a well-defined passion. I did not have direction or even something concrete to rebel against. What I had, instead, was placeholders for those things. I had Scrooberdeeds and Freakinbobins. I had the alternatives for swear words, the search for significance, or simply the need to belong to something that I didn’t quite understand yet.

It was the absurd that allowed me to fake my way into understanding the need for identity. It let me be original without having to stand for something. It also allowed me to try things on to see if they fit.

I continue to try absurd things on when I’m not exactly sure what else to do.

Last night, I was taking an aptitude test for a summer program I am applying for. In this test, I was given 4 minutes to come up with as many uses for a tin can as possible. Along with using it to cut fruit and making an old-school walkie talkie, I may have written an entirely absurd suggestion of making love to it. Now, clearly I do not want to make love to a tin can, nor do I really understand how that might be done. What I do know is that by placing that type of a response into such a test, I am able to try out the boundaries of the question itself. By figuring out just how good of a sense of humor the graders have, I can see if I would like to be a part of the program or not. By suggesting the impossible, everything else seems like an incredibly good idea. Or, at least I tell myself that.

For me, the power of the absurd is about letting me have a choice to either dive in completely and invest myself fully or back out without losing too much face. It is about short-circuiting or sabotaging the process so that I can be in control. I’m not sure why it matters that much, but I think that having the control over whether or not you are going to take something seriously is invigorating.

This is why I don’t type out “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” whenever I sit down to a new blog post. Instead, I type out things absurd strings of ideas that will inevitably spark something new. It is why I didn’t learn the names to chords on a guitar. I simply made oddly grotesque finger shapes on the fret board that made music I was proud of. It is why I always start with questions when I am talking to a group of people. I am looking for the absurd answer, the one that I cannot possibly anticipate or pre-formulate a reaction to.
I sometimes get those answers too and that is when I know that my mind is working right. It is when I can actually replace those absurd suggestions and ideas with things that really matter. It is when we can move beyond the silliness and see what the real values of a tag can be. Because at this point, we don’t have to abbreviate nothingness. We all have the character that will stand up and claim its rightful place, so long as we have put something temporary in first. If, instead, we have put in ideas and beliefs that we only kind-of agreed with then it will always be a process of walking back what we have said about who we are.
If we claim absurdity, we will always be given a second chance. If we give a false claim, we will always be considered charlatans.
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Question 115 of 365: When should we build things just to knock them down?

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Domino Rally
Image by unloveablesteve via Flickr

Domino Rally required a lot of patience. Setting up the huge amount of dominos in a row without knocking them over required a steady hand and an iron will to get to the very end of your plan instead of settling for knocking it down half-way through. I played it almost constantly whenever a friend had a set. I liked to watch them topple, sure, but I also liked seeing just how far apart I could put them to stretch out the configuration or how high I could get them to climb over books. I’m not sure that my friends always shared the same enthusiasm. They could go for doing it once or twice, but the time it took to build so far outweighed the toppling time that it hardly seemed worth it to them.

It was, however, worth it to me. The time that I spent setting those dominos right and keeping them that way over carpet, hardwood and tile was what made the whole experience what it was. I was creating destroyable art and it held my imagination like little else. Unbeknownst to me, there is an entire subculture of people who weren’t constrained to the pre-made sets of a Domino Rally toy. They were creating art, telling stories and paying perfect homages to pop culture. They have been creating domino falls and constructing elaborate runs of kinetic energy long before I understood what the domino effect even was. And even though I was never as proficient or patient as the folks creating these masterpieces, I understood that there was something majestic about not worrying about destroying your own creation before anyone else has the chance to.

I could put sand sculpture and sidewalk painting into a similar category, but those pursuits let others demolish the beauty of the original work. It is the temporary nature of all of this that I find fascinating. Whether you do the destructive act or not, there is something incredibly satisfying about knowing that you are giving your work a specific time limit for greatness. This timed perfection is something that could be more widely applied if we accept that all great works of creation are held in a particular time and space and that any attempt at recreating or extending those two things will fall terribly off the mark.

I put it to you that institutions should be like a great domino fall. They should take strategy, inspiration, and an incredible amount of diligence to create. Everyone that participates in the build learns something new and they develop the relationships of that only attempting something hard with others can foster. The people that build it know where the weak points are, the problem areas that could cause everything to devolve. They see the whole thing in their mind’s eye, recognizing the beauty and potential of what is to come. They are the ones who set off the chain reaction too. Everyone cheers as a well orchestrated ballet of movement commences. There is a held moment of existence for everyone who witnesses a great build and fall. We are all better for having witnessed it.

And then, the builders pack up their equipment and proceed to their next adventure. They take everything that they have learned and make the next creation even more ambitious and awe-inspiring. They do not try and pick up the pieces of the last build and try and set it off again. There is nothing new for them there. They would simply be doing the same exercise and hoping for the same result. That doesn’t make sense, not for the world of dominos or the world of business, education, or other creative work.

We are all builders and learners. We are all starters of chain reactions. We know, too, just how hard it is to pry ourselves away from having done something flawlessly and trying to do it again somewhere else. But we must. We must not allow our successes trip us up and make us unable to move forward.

The biggest part of this question is really trying to figure out just what it is that I am building, and what I am learning from it, and how I am going to let it go once I accomplish at least some of the things I have set out to do. Just how easy will it be for me to walk away from the systems I have set up? How quickly will I be able to set up a new series of ideas elsewhere? And who will come with me when I do?

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Question 114 of 365: What will we pay to have simulated?

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Pictograms of Olympic sports - Baseball. This ...
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I’m pretty sure it was Hardball 3 that got me through the great Baseball strike of the 94-95 season. Rather it was one particular feature that enabled me to look past the work stoppage and sit in front of the family computer with my brothers and friends next to me, sipping on overly strong lemonade. This feature was the “simulated game.” While you could simulate 9 innings of baseball for outcomes in the game, it was the fact that you could actually watch the entire simulated game that made it something of interest to me. I was flabbergasted that I could watch a baseball game play itself and have Al Michaels announce the whole thing. This seemed to me to be the holy grail of  computing at the time. It was a specific cure for an ailment I was experiencing, and it worked so well in my head that I considered asking my friends to pay me for the privilege of watching those simulated games. I’m glad I decided against it at some point.

At that point, computers seemed to be nearly infallible. I had no doubt that every run scored and every sprite running around the bases was preordained. I believed that given the right set of data, my person computer could churn out the remainder of that season’s results. The amount of trust and confidence that I held for the glowing screen in my father’s study seems laughable now. When I consider what a phone can do that the original Pentium processor could not, the idea that a video game could forecast the outcomes of human beings is a fairy tale. And yet, I was willing to believe in it and that is what mattered.

It is what matters in all of our modern simulations as well. Google Maps simulates the traffic that you will encounter in order to predict the best route to take. Pandora simulates what kind of music it thinks you will like in order to produce the best mood for your working or relaxed state. Most search engines even simulate what it thinks you want to ask even before you start typing more than a few words. I would make the case that these simulations are just as big of fairy tales as trusting a baseball came to figure out the outcome to the complexities of our National Pastime. And yet, these simulations have found their way into our understanding of the world. They have somehow passed themselves off as reality.

And while those three examples do not currently require money, each one is being paid for by the user’s attention. Advertising rules the game of simulation at the moment, mostly because people haven’t figured out how to more effectively monazite the power of suggestion. And yet, that is all that simulations are: Suggestions. They are the thing that could be, given the right circumstances.

The simulations that are forthcoming, though, are the ones that we really need to look for. The suggestions that we will start forking over our wallets for are ones that involve the need to know our future. The prediction of response is coming. The foresight of decision-making is creeping ever closer full acceptance.

I believe that within a decade we will be able to turn on an auto-response system for our e-mail that will answer most of our basic interactions with information from our other messages and documents existing in the cloud. No longer will the vacation responder have to be a burden to us. It may be that when we leave the office and gmail automatically replies with the most pertinent information, we are doing a better job of sharing information. I have this sinking suspicion that when all of our words, ideas and connections can be crawled that the automated process of response will become the norm for anything except for the most personal or idiosyncratic messages.

Many people won’t like this, but they will be the ones who won’t get as much work done. The luddites of this environment are those who do not engage in the social graph to its full “potential.” They will be the ones that refuse to simply fill in the blank of a form response created by Google. They will type out messages in longhand and fall further and further behind. The simulation will become the reality, the prediction will become truth because we will pass it off as such. And I will not put up any barriers, either. I think that far too much of my communication is me performing a search (in my e-mail, on twitter, on the web) for someone else and then reporting out on what I have found. There will be something lost, but most people will not mourn the passing of obligatory messages.

As for the decisions that will be made with simulation, I believe that War Games will finally be coming to a phone near you. Just like in that iconic movie, we will be able to play out our interactions with others (individuals or companies) and forsee the varied outcomes so that we can choose the right way to proceed. Our every move will be judged as data. It is already starting with services like Gowalla and FourSquare. Based upon our patterns of movement, our simulations will show us where we should go next and what will happen if we do follow its insight. And we will listen because we want to believe in the rosy fairy tale that it will provide us with. And if the simulations prove to be true, so much the better. We will have figured out a way to tell the future by having it predetermined for us. We will be able to limit risk simply by allowing all of the deals to be done before we even step foot in the door.

It is right here that I think about Deep Blue and its offspring. Deep Blue at its best could go about 20 moves deep into a chess scenario. It could literally compare 20 moves down any given path to any other 20 move path and then make the right decision based upon that data. We will have that same ability, but it will be much more scary. While we will still be in control of the path, we will choose to believe the one that is displayed for us because we want the outcome that is promised. We will be strategic in our movements, but that strategy will not be our own. And that is when we will pay for simulations. When we no longer really have to think about what the next step is, we will fork over our cash for the privilege.

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Question 113 of 365: Why do we need collaborative email signatures?

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Gmail's Black Dot, Do you see it too?
Image by Gubatron via Flickr

I feel more complete when other people come into my space than when I go into theirs. I feel as though they are reaching out to me, especially if I haven’t given an invitation that must be accepted or rejected. Mass participation in something I helped to create is like no other sensation I know. It is as if I am being chosen from all of the activities that exist and when I see other people take part and engage in the act of co-authoring something, I feel energized and warm. It is those moments of potential when I notice I am not the only one with a particularly interesting idea that seem to lead to everything else. It is as if my mind bounces sets up everyone that is engaged within my head as a pinball machine and bounces the ideas back and forth. And then when the words start to come, the transformation from idea to reality is so complete and beautiful that I pursue it like my son pursues a new tiny raisin box. I can’t be the only one who sees collaboration like this.

So, I had an idea.

What if I demonstrated my value for collaboration within every communication that I sent out? What if I showed people that I believe in crowdsourcing and co-creation within every one of my utterances? What if I left an olive branch out there for others to grab ahold of no matter whether my tone was repentant, forceful or self-abasing in my voice?

As I thought about all of the ways in which I decry a lack of communication and collaboration, I had never really given others an option of exercising their collaborative muscles without first giving them concrete parameters for doing so. Collaboration always had to be for a specific purpose, rather than just for the joy of being a part of creating something together. I knew that I had to show co-creation in the contexts that others envision, rather than just opening up the possibility of letting collaboration happen.

In the hopes of spontaneous collaboration, I have set up an open Google Doc that is now a permanent part of my e-mail signature. With every reply, I will be telling people that I would rather be contacted through collaboration than through a phone number. I am telling people the ways in which I connect must be within a co-created space rather than on “my turf” or theirs. While this may be nothing more than an experiment, I am now inviting everyone to come together rather than simply take a look at my identity. And, I encourage others to do the same.

What if we all used collaborative signatures? What if we found ways to promote the values that we say that we have signed on for? What if we didn’t point people to our websites and our blogs, but rather we pointed them to take part in branding our conversations with everything that they bring to the table? What if we learned from one another without the boundaries of a single e-mail thread? What if we created the spaces for solving common problems and what if we actually solved them?

I get why specific spaces work so well. I get why Facebook and LinkedIn are so wildly popular. You know what you are supposed to do there. You are supposed to share information about yourself and establish a presence that others can come and interact with. What I am proposing is a departure from this because I am advocating for a space with undefined identity. In fact, the way I created the link to share the Google Doc, pretty much assumes everyone is anonymous unless they login from the Doc itself. I am also proposing a space that can change ownership and focus depending on who is there and how it is being used. Because people can exist in real-time within the document’s chat area, conversations can happen and then disappear. Because people can leave semi-permanent notes and ideas for one another, it is like having one massive whiteboard that other people can add to at will.

Given that so many of us are working from anywhere there is an internet connection, we need an office whiteboard that can be doodled on and graffitied. We all need a space that doesn’t have the parameters of meeting notes and agenda items or informal sharing that drifts by in a stream of tweets. We need almost permanence. We need open-endedness. We need collaborators.

And we should show this need every chance we get.

So, here is what I am starting with. Create your own space:

This is my public collaborative document for anyone who I correspond with to take part in. It is an experiment in whether or not giving people the option of collaborating and creating together will cause them to do so, despite the very different types of people that I talk to on a regular basis.

What kinds of things can you do here?

  • Leave me notes. Leave other people notes. Drop in interesting pictures.
  • Ask a question or answer one.
  • Throw out an idea or build something new.

Obviously, this isn’t the place where you will write the great American novel, but you can take whatever is in this document and use it however you like. I am licensing everything here as Creative Commons Attribution-Only. Go bananas.

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Question 112 of 365: How do we show up now?

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How many times can you press this button befor...
Image by Simon Lieschke via Flickr

I didn’t miss a class in college. Not the early morning british literature class with the English woman who hated students that “shouldn’t be english majors according to their lack of ability to write.” Not the earlier still poetry course with the stroke victim teacher who required tuning into her particular brand of accent to understand anything clearly. The story of Beowulf never sounded so discordant, I can tell you. If 90 percent of success (or life) is just showing up, I was well on my way.

And yet, that wasn’t when showing up really mattered. I could have skipped a few of those courses. I could have not read the material beforehand too. The only consequences were grades and a little bit of self-esteem. I am finding that showing up means so much more now. Not showing up for meetings or not getting included in a conversation can mean that entire ideas get taken off of the table. It can mean that many things that I hold dear will not have a satisfactory outcome. Even as showing up has become more important to me, though, I think the whole notion has rightfully been turned on its head.

I show up without showing up now. I show up via e-mail. I show up via Google Doc. I show up in blog posts and phone calls and web presence. My words are brought forward as if I were there without having to worry about making time. And that is pretty weird. It is an odd sensation to be held responsible for decisions without actually voting up or down. Ideas are held on trial in absentia because of someone’s interpretations of my priorities. While this has always happened, now they have more to go on. Now they have a serious body of evidence to support their claims about where I which side of an issue I would support.

My favorite new way to show up, though, is in a collaborative document. When someone has put out something for review, I get to write in what I believe and then check back to see whether my changes were accepted or not. I get to attend the revision party without actually having to prove myself worthy of taking up space in the room. If I can type my way into a policy or change a single viewpoint from with the written word, I have shown up much more so than if I would have just spoken my mind.

And that is the real change in showing up. It is no longer a simple process of being party to the talks, you must propose a new plan every chance that you get. You must put into writing what it is that you believe is most right. And you must support it, too. Otherwise, your signature on the sign-in sheet isn’t worth anything. Showing up now means getting things done. If you aren’t making the decisions and setting out action items (half of which should have already been accomplished during the meeting), then you aren’t doing it right. While showing up is 90% of life, that 90% is now so much richer than has ever been previously required.

That 90% is a beautiful cascade of responsibilities and agenda points. And yet it is more than that. Because you can choose your own way to show up, you are no longer bound to be what it is that other people are asking of you. Because you can design the space in which you participate, it means that you can be as prepared or lazy as you like. Showing up is an art form now. It is one part initiative and one part persuasion. Equal parts preparation and creativity.

Attending an event in your pajamas is now just as okay as it was to come to an 8 O’ clock class in them. Being in the room matters, but only if you have attacked what is going to transpire in that room. Only if you understand all of the ways that you can be in the room.

I can be on the walls in a twitter stream or well crafted pitch. I can be in the hands of the movers and shakers, the laptops buzzing with the series of links I have sent out which carefully traverse my point. I can even show up in the heads of those attending by way of creating an experience with a piece of technology or a story that somehow grabs hold and will not let go of the long-term memory centers.

Unless you understand all of those ways to show up, you might well not even come.

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Question 111 of 365: How hard is it to be born?

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The structure of part of a DNA double helix
Image via Wikipedia

It is all a matter of perspective.

My typical perspective is that it is hard to give birth to something. My wife  knows more than I do about this. She is intimately aware of the discomfort, the sleeplessness, the depression, and the sickness that occurs in the process of creating a human being. I know about the worry, the late night runs, and the intense planning for every possibility with my future child. Even still, I have never considered it from my child’s viewpoint. I never thought about what it must be like to go through all of those things and experience those particular stresses from the inside. Moreover, I have never considered the process of birthing anything else, like a company or a school, from the perspective of that entity. At least, not until today.

Today I heard this idea: “The hardest thing to do is be born.” It was merely in passing. It was in between discussions, between powerpoint slides. But, it stuck with me.

The hardest thing to do is be born.

I immediately thought about my kids and I thought about what I am attempting to do with this book. Is it their intention to be born? Have they conspired with the universe to struggle into being? Do I even have a choice in the matter?

The hardest thing to do is be born.

I am always so wrapped up in getting things done that the insurmountable process of creation always seems so much in my control, as if it would never occur without my help. But my creation is the one being born. It has a vested interest in being born well, and it struggles and pushes forward to complete the process, no matter if I help or not. It grows, however incrementally, and I can’t stop it. The only thing I can do is to feed it the right things and exercise it and take it in for checkups.

My Isabelle was first. We saw her fingernails and her lips and her lack of hair through the lens of a newfangled 4d ultrasound, and we knew that she was growing and moving and working so hard to create herself. We saw her hands move and reach out to grasp at the dense tissue around her. We knew that these things were happening, but seeing them is something else entirely. There is nothing like watching the created in the process of creation. There is nothing like watching growth occur, even if in tiny increments.

But what are the fingernails of a startup? What is the lack of hair in a new school? What are the premature hands reaching out toward in a project? If it is so hard to be born, shouldn’t we be going in for ultrasounds and seeing progress the same way that we would our own children. While I recognize that they are different and they should be different, I don’t think that birthing something of worth really should be left to chance. And I no longer believe that it is entirely in our control either. No matter what, the DNA of a creation is going to guide the process along and our influence is not always going to be positive.

Just to ensure that I am doing it right, I would like to see a pregnancy chart for an organization. I would like to see what the trimesters are going to offer me and what obstacles I would likely have to overcome. I would like to know what the morning sickness is like for some of the projects that I am a part of creating. I would like to know how changes to the biological makeup will influence the outcome. I want to see the Punnett square possibilities for eye and hair color. And yet, I still want to be surprised too. Just like with my own children, I would like to see what unforeseen beauty is created when the right mix of founders get busy.

The hardest thing to do is be born.

It should be hard. It should be worthwhile, too. An idea is conceived. It is housed in a hostile environment many times, but the people that care about it should be able to protect it. So long as it is cared for, the DNA will replicate and complete its mission. A fruitful idea requires frequent assessment and progress monitoring, and for this it needs people who know what they are talking about. Just as I couldn’t tell a boy from a girl in our original ultrasound, I can’t tell whether or not my ideas are progressing effectively.

I need expertise to see if the hard work that my idea is doing is going to lead to any long-term health effects. In short, I need idea doctors and nurses. I need them to see the whole and the parts and to analyze what is progressing appropriately and what is not. I need them to produce an ultrasound picture for me too. One that I can show off to all of my friends and family. I need them to reassure me that everything is going to be just fine too.

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Question 110 of 365: Can we change from the outside?

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Smith-Corona Classic 12
Image by mpclemens via Flickr

Advice is a funny thing. It is often sought, often misheard, often rejected, often obnoxious, and often invaluable. This is all at the same time, mind you. Whenever I am asked to give advice, I know that there is very little chance that the changes I am advocating for will be followed as I have voiced them. I find myself looking in on effects of my advice from the outside. Much of the time, I don’t have to deal with the ramifications of my advice. I usually just get to jump from that conversation into another one where I won’t be around to see the effects of everything that I have contributed. And yet, the subtle pressure that I have provided, does seem to resonate and have an effect.

If I were going to describe the effect it would be like this:

I bought a Galaxie Twelve Smith-Corona manual typewriter. It is one of the best purchases I have ever made. It has a ribbon that never ends and that can be almost infinitely wound and never get old. Every time that I rest my fingers on the keys, I know that I am about ready to make serious damage. I really pound on those keys, and you have to. To get the type to show up correctly, you have to mash down hard as if each finger was a fist with enough fury to push the letters into being. The sound of each striking key is metallic and harsh. It is loud as it cascades off of my office walls.

I get people coming into my office all the time asking me what I am doing with a typewriter. They are flabbergasted that someone “like me” would actually use such an antique. Then they see the margins set and the paper pulled in correctly, and inevitably they want to know what I am writing about. I never get this question when I am typing on my computer. While I could conceivably be doing a great number of things with my computer keys, I never get asked what I am writing about. Somehow, the computer in a public space is private and the typewriter is not.

I am affecting not only the paper itself, but everyone who may sees it and hears the sound of its creation. Essentially, I have demystified the process of writing by inviting other people to come and observe and take part. I am taking away the unholy veil that seemingly is in front of our every act at work. As my fingers are continually cushioned by the oversized keys and as the page moves upward showing that I am actually accomplishing something, I know that the effect I am creating for myself and others is one of reinvention. By making edits and contributions in such a way, I am telling myself that it is okay not to engage in the same sorts of technologies and circumstances that are created for me. It is appropriate to question my level of comfort with any given task. It is also okay to completely reject the conventions and make sometime more concrete than abstract, more real that virtual.

I think that all of my advice boils down to pretty much the same thing, anyway. It is all about demystifying the work that you are doing and making it more real. When I advocate for using Google Docs rather than trading around word documents it is to make sure that people can see what one another are thinking and work together towards a common goal. It is about establishing the same expectations for everyone within a given project rather than hiding the fact that some people do more work than others. When I advocate for using a backchannel at a meeting or conference it is to demystify the way in which we process information. It is to ask everyone to participate in something that they could easily let happen to them. And, when I advocate for creating online spaces to ask big questions, I am attempting to capture learning. I want it to be visual and memorable.

I do not have some silly brand of advice to change the way that organizations work or to improve the working environment for all stakeholders. If we did nothing else besides demystify our work for others, we would be well on our way to creating better environments and organizations. If we were able to describe our purposes and our processes to the outside world (or even to our coworkers), there would be much more ability to relate and work together. Yet, somehow many of us function on the hypothesis that if we shared our secrets, everyone would be able to do our job. We want to perpetuate the myth that knowledge is still the only kind of power worth having.

Connections are the power that we should be pursuing. They are the value that we should be providing to those we work with. The wonder of a network is not in the content that is currently there, it is in the content that is coming because of the connections that have been established. The spaces that we inhabit whether online or physically should only be judged by how many connects are visible and how much work can be transmitted via those connections.

So, here is what I think makes the most sense:

  • Create online spaces for collaboration where people can see just who contributed and what their connection to that shared knowledge is.
  • Create physical spaces for connection where people share stories about their work.
  • Create both physical and online spaces for disruptive behavior (like typing on a typewriter) so that our expectations can shift beyond what it is that we need for the given moment and think about just how we can grow.

And that is how I propose to demystify my work and change from the outside what is going on in ideas and places that I will never fully see realized.

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Question 109 of 365: What is your field?

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A man that I trust and respect once told me that we always go from specific to general in our heads, but we want to go from the general to the specific in our lives. He was speaking about the process of creating something new, but I think it applies to nearly everything I do. In my head, I tell stories, make specific connections and relate to the minutiae of a situation. In my working life, I seem to want to generalize about everything and then iron out the details later. I speak in absolutes and generalities but the only things that have ever really meant anything to me are the details. I do not remember a general good feeling about my achievements, rather my mind focuses on specific moments within those achievements that seem to represent those good feelings.

My wedding itself I can speak about in platitudes of good fortune, but I remember the way my little brother in law jumped from flower pedal to flower pedal down the isle with our rings bouncing around on the pillow the whole way. I can convey the fact that I love my children, but if I really want them to know what I mean, I have to retell the story of my daughter sitting with my wife and relating just how she believes that cells work according to their pictures in my wife’s textbook. I have to relate to someone else on the specific level, the one that brings about a passionate reaction. It is in the specifics of how many times I got up with my son on a nightly basis to put him back to bed that I am able to connect to other people. It is in the recounting of the time I  put away dishes in our first home while my sick (pregnant) wife kept me company on a palette of sofa cushions on the kitchen floor.

The specifics matter.

And that is why it is getting harder and harder for me to tell people that I have a particular field of interest. It is why I have a harder time prescribing to the general ideals of a particular organization or job. It is why my passions don’t run toward keywords that you can punch into Google. And yet, all of our outward facing experiences, the kind that are required for introductions and business meetings are based upon this ability to generalize and synthesize. It is based upon whether or not we can pitch experiences as sound bytes rather than for the character-driven developments that they are. So, what should I do in situations that require the impossible: the general standing in for the specific?

What I hope to tell people in the future is that my field of expertise is and always will be in stories. It is in the drilling down to find a single image to capture the imagination. It is in finding a single argument that an entire program or course can be based upon. It is in crafting an experience for an individual so that they can know what it is like to speak with urgency and conviction, to create conversations that continue as long as they are valuable. It is doing one thing well and then telling that story until the next thing that needs to be done reveals itself.

And that is how I think that we can get beyond ego. It is how we can move into a place where everyone is capable of confident discourse and respectable work. It is the way that we will all become sticky and relevant. If we were all storytellers (and admitted to being so when asked), we would never have to justify our passions and our accomplishments. We would never have to prove our overreaching generalized purposes. We could be who we are with one another and create businesses and schools that edify the specific.

So, here is what I propose:

  • Rather than beliefs on the walls of corporations, let’s put up stories or situations that demonstrate those beliefs. Let’s tell each other just how we accomplish what is that we seem to value. Let’s figure out what our one word codes really are based upon, going from specific to general.
  • Rather than letting students choose a major, let’s have them write the stories of what they would like to achieve. Let’s have them revise this story over time and see how it shifts and transforms. This way we won’t have anyone who needs to change their major just to fit their current passions; they will be able to represent their entire selves within every edition of their story.
  • Rather than doing 5 year plans that include virtuous goals, let’s outline the stories of how people will interact with us and our products throughout those 5 years. Let’s not set goals that are measurable, let’s write stories that are relatable. If we can take those stories from fiction to non-fiction, we have achieved our goals.

If we go from the specific to the general, we won’t have to worry about who is doing the small stuff and who is going to see to the details. We will all see to the details and nothing will get left behind. And the end of the day it is about this: I want my kids to tell me a story about their day. I want my boss to tell me a story about how he thinks I could improve. I want my wife to tell me a story about her dying mother. This matters. that is why I am going into the field of storytelling, not in the abstract English teacher sense, but in the concrete and human sense that we are all born storytellers. It is only the abstractions of life that take us away from this.

So, tell me a story.

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