Posts

Friction is Your Friend: Why Sharing Values isn’t always Valuable

by

I hear about it all the time… Collaborate with people who share your values. Really? You know why they say this? Because it is pleasant and easy. When you are around people who share your values you can agree all the time, because you are using the same basis for your judgements. There isn’t much friction. Maybe people who like writing about collaboration find it easier to achieve flow states when they are not experiencing friction. Maybe.

FrictionFireFriction Friend

But friction can be your friend. And not just when you are applying the brakes. You want to make a spark or start a fire? Friction. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to be creative. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to start a business. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to spark dialogue with your community.

Let’s take business for example. I have seen startups where two partners may as well have shared one head they were of such like mind. And neither of those minds had much business sense. Both were visionary. They valued the exploration of ideas. They seemed to struggle to come up with a way to generate revenue to keep going and reach some lift. Neither had much talent or interest in operations. On the other hand, you can take a very profit-centric person and team them with someone who values customer and community and away they go. That is not to say they don’t experience conflict or even strong conflict. They do. But they learn how to balance it. They don’t confuse sharing values with being valuable.

Share

Sharing is great. Share something with your collaborators. Values is just one axis. You might share a goal: keeping your neighborhood clean. But you might have different values driving the goal. One neighbor, Samuel might value the number otherwise known as property value which they believe is impacted by how clean the neighborhood is. Another, Joan, believes that “broken windows” talk from Tipping Point and feels that a cleaner neighborhood breeds less crime. Joan values being safe. And a third, Sandeep, simply values tidyness. Fine. They all want it clean. Share the goal. From different values.

A friend of mine, Steve Crandall, worked at Bell Labs. In one of his delicious storytelling sessions Steve mentioned working with someone – for years – who had a polar opposite political perspective. And yet, in the creative innovation space, the two of created well together. They didn’t need to share values to be innovative together and enjoy the pleasure of that work together. They shared a practice of innovating.

Value Time

There are certainly times when you should connect on your values. It can help reinforce your identity and give you support that you need. But if you want innovation or you want to connect a neighborhood or you want to create dialogue across political boundaries, work with the friction of different values and connect on some other dimension.

As I learned from Valdis Krebs, “connect on sameness and profit from your differences.” Please be intentional about which dimensions of difference and which dimensions of sameness.

Towards Coherence: Interview with Jon Lebkowsky

by

In this series of Wednesday conversations, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Jon Lebkowsky has been an Internet professional for two decades, during which he’s provided community leadership and developed significant expertise in online community development, social media consulting, project and production management, and future studies. He is an author and blogger, as well as cultural strategist and social commentator.  There’s more about Jon at Wikipedia.

Todd Hoskins:  In what context does thrivability evolve, individually or collectively?  Is it all about the distribution of knowledge?

Jon Lebkowsky: Thrivability is a concept requiring social and political coherence, and we’re in a polarized society right now. We don’t have the kind of clear shared vision for the future that we’d have to have in order to thrive as a society. We need a context that gives us that sort of shared vision, and that requires strong leadership. I think it’s very cool to imagine a world where we’re all configuring our own environments and building our own realities to some extent, but we can also be too polarized or fragmented to build the commons, and I think we need a strong commons or commonality as a foundation for a thrivable future.

Todd: What does strong leadership look like?

Jon: A strong leader can catalyze a coherence of perspective in others who follow her lead or respond to her influence, and this can potentially result in synchronization around a common vision.  While there will still be variations in thinking – everyone has a unique perspective – when we’re led to a shared understanding, there will be less conflict about fundamental realities.

Todd: The polarization is evident across the globe right now, but we also see collaboration happening when there is a commonly held vision.  How do we address the social challenge?  What can we learn from the revolutions, as well as the systemic stalemates?

Jon: When people revolt it’s because their needs aren’t being met . . . you actually have to push a society pretty far before you’ll get the kind of explosion we’re seeing in Egypt. They sense that the regime in power is working against their interests. We have that in the U.S. to a pretty great extent right now, but we’re still committed to our civic processes for mediating power. I think we’d have to feel a real sense those had collapsed before we would erupt, but we do have what you might refer to as systemic stalemates. In both cases there’s a sense that the seat of power is not in touch with the base, and I would say the base is unclear and confused. We need strong leadership, but that’s not enough. I’ve been considering how you would work a transformation from the bottom up. I’ve always been interested in the grassroots. Grassroots movements can be somewhat more effective now because connections can form and messages can be shared with very low barriers to communication. However the distributed communications architecture tends toward fragmentation of groups and messages. It’s harder to build strong coherent movements in this context. I think it requires a lot of groundwork from the bottom up. I think a network of physical meetings that bring people into a real understanding of context and opportunity could be very powerful.

Todd:  The growth in participation . . . you’ve worked within the medical, government, publishing, and tech sectors – possibilities are changing, business models are changing, behavior is changing?   What has to shift for these transformations to truly take shape?

Jon: The thing about being in the moment and being creative about it is that you can see so many possibilities and levels of action.  The ideal shift would be in consciousness, and would be evolutionary, but you don’t make or drive or force evolution, and we can’t necessarily control what possibilities manifest even if we have some sense of what they are.   I think there are some people who are experiencing a change in the way we perceive and live in the world, learning to be more cooperative and collaborative. The Internet facilitates a democratization of knowledge, and sharing has become a predominant metaphor within online social networks. So perhaps we’re learning to work together better, and we have access to more knowledge and more meta-knowledge – knowledge that facilitates knowledge. So what has to shift is shifting.

Todd:  You started Plutopia with the mission of creating events rather than publishing white papers.  What is it about events that gets you excited?  What possibilities do you see in facilitating an experience rather than writing a book or releasing a record?

Jon:  We’ve seen an evolution of media from conversations around campfires to conversations mediating by writing, then publishing, then mass broadcast media. Most of us grew up in a world informed by the latter, the broadcast mode, where our experience of culture was largely mediated by various forms of publishing and broadcasting. This is somewhat alienating – experience through media is limiting. We all want a visceral human connection and an experience that engages all our senses. That’s what we produce at Plutopia Productions.  We have the concept of the sense event – “a produced entertainment or educational affair that engages participants in an amplified multi-sensory experience and results in enhanced associated memory formation.” These are accelerated culture-building, convergent experiences that can be extended through media. I think it’s a more raw and engaging form of culture-through-experience. By engaging us fully, it can be transformative.

Todd: What can we do, at an organizational and personal level, to allow for consciousness to evolve?

Jon: I was reading a lecture by P.D. Ouspensky, who was inspired by the work of George Gurdjieff. Ouspensky discusses how we have the potential to advance our consciousness but most won’t, because they don’t want it. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky consider the normal state most of us are in most of the time as a kind of sleep. Which is to say that, by default, most of us are born into various degrees of consciousness that are beneath our true capability; we’re like automatons. In Buddhism we talk about karma and conditioning, which is also about living without real presence and consciousness, in a state that is not mindful and awake at a level that is possible for human beings. Many accept this state, thinking that we are what we are, and lacking aspiration to explore further and deeper. There’s no effective argument with this. You ask what we can do to allow consciousness to evolve – I don’t have a pat answer. I think the evolution you ask about is very difficult, and the best we can do is be present and be exemplary. I know teachers who are effective by getting people to take small – very small – steps. Small and subtle things can change our energy and our consciousness, and perhaps there’s a gradual change.

Todd: How can we encourage the growth of the commons?  Find coherence?  Amplify the shift?

Jon: The growth of the commons emerges from an attitude of sharing. It’s hopeful that the metaphor of sharing is so common in social media, and I’m also hopeful as I meet so many people who don’t seem to be at all greedy or attached. In sharing we also find coherence – as we share ideas and perspectives, we become aligned. And by sharing we amplify the shift, attitude can be infectious.

Todd: Closing thoughts?

Jon: When I meet someone who seems to be more awake, I’m hopeful. One wakeful person suggests the possibility of objective consciousness for all of us.

Todd: Thanks, Jon!

Thrivable Leadership : Interview with Kevin A. Clark

by

Each Wednesday, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Kevin A. Clark is an award-winning brand strategist, experience designer, author, and transformational catalyst.  He is President and Founder of Content Evolution LLC formed in 2002 to provide leadership in brand behavior and experience strategy.  In early 2009 Kevin retired from IBM with 30 years of service.  He is Program Director emeritus, Brand and Values Experience, IBM Corporate Marketing and Communications – responsible for discovering and creating new ways for people to experience IBM.  As a business metaphysicist, Kevin also is a member of the North American Thrivable Network.

Todd Hoskins:  In your experience how are the impacts, methods, or requirements of leadership changing?

Kevin A. Clark:   Yes, there’s definitely a shift.  John Perry Barlow says the role of the manager is changing from telling people what to do, to helping them make sense of things (so they can act on their own).  Leaders need to move from directing to enabling.  Governance at the board level needs to move to enablement too, and environmental scanning.  This is part of the resilience and adaptive function leaders need to embrace.

Business schools are creating technically capable professionals, yet they are not delivering two things you get promoted for:  leadership and judgment.  Leadership gets some air time mostly by case study, yet more focused on outcomes than the journey.  Judgment hardly at all.  We need to find better ways to provide learning environments to hone good judgment – both inside the enterprise (the federation in my case) and the classroom.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard Business School said two decades ago the new deal with employers and employees is:  We can’t guarantee your employment, but we can guarantee your employ-ability.  I like that deal.  It means you take full advantage of being the best you can be as a lifelong learner and professional, and it places the burden on the organization to find ways to hold on to you.

Todd:  There is a collapse of disciplines/silos that we see happening, which also seems to point towards the more thrivable whole.  Business leaders are no longer just reading business books.  You are influenced by Don Beck, Ken Wilber, Dave Snowden, Carl Jung, Dan Ariely, among others.  What is happening here?

Kevin:  Business leaders are beginning to act as authentic selves in all contexts as opposed to acting situationally.  Situational management techniques lead to multiple personality disorder; and organizational schizophrenia.  If you treat all the people in your life with respect and don’t become another person when you go to work, you start to understand how to play non-zero – or more ways to play in an increasingly win-win world.

I believe we’re also inheriting a new generation of people who are broadly networked and think in bursts (texting-minds), combined with short attention spans and a width of broad knowledge.  I see imprinting and collective consciousness moving toward bite-size interaction with implications for short-burst projects and direction.

I work with companies in other parts of the world that have 100 year plans and accompanying scenarios – we have a shorter time horizon in our Western left-brain linear processor world.  We need to embrace the non-time-dependent, holistic side of our thinking to be fully ready for economic forces emerging that have a much longer term and more comprehensive outlook.  There is also a perceptual and cognitive readiness emerging that makes it possible to both collaborate and compete simultaneously.  It is the “I” and the “we” held in dynamic tension – not canceling out each other, but amplifying the strengths of both.

Todd:  Is business planning changing?

Kevin:  Business planning is changing from simply doing “well,” to doing well and doing “good” for a number of stakeholders.  We encourage an understanding of the full spectrum of resource acquisition and resource allocation, making provision for alternative futures and preparing for them.  We look at monitoring emergence, and understanding both the permissions to operate freely and unconstrained along with the behaviors that will trigger regulation and customer defection.  These are all needed by the contemporary business planner.  Spreadsheets will no longer be the primary planning tool.

Visual models accompanied with explanatory narrative and a financial business case will be needed to deliver competitive resilience in the future.  The planning cycle will also have to move from annual or quarterly cycles to continuous modes with selected deep dives.  This will provide new insights and help eliminate the unjustified assumptions which can deplete the energy of companies through unnecessary activities and operations.

Todd:  Content Evolution is a global “non-holding” company.  I know you’ve called it a “federation.”  How do the companies relate to one another?

Kevin:  Content Evolution functions as a global ecosystem of member companies – we work together to organize intention around marketplace behavior.  Much of this is done by exposing members to each others’ capabilities, participating in joint business development activities, and global teleconferences.

We have a business development commons that brings together the sales and development executives from the member companies and provides a safe environment for them to collaborate and quietly do horse-trading.  We also have an annual conference for our 40 companies worldwide – last year at Interbrand headquarters in Manhattan – and this coming year in the spring at Jack Morton Worldwide in Boston.

Todd:  How does this model represent a shift from the old “if you can’t beat them, join them” model of compete or acquire?

Kevin:  We collaborate.  I’m reinvesting the 30 years I spent in the corporate world and taking my professional relationships and federating them into something integral that hasn’t existed before.  It’s also better being a global mentor than being a traditional manager – just like it’s better to be a grandparent than being a parent!

Content Evolution as a member federation has no debt, since no one acquired anyone.  We have more capabilities than the largest of the marketing holding companies, spanning customer and market research, product and service ergonomics, business and thrivability strategy, brand strategy and management, and customer and constituency experience design and strategy.

Todd:  What have you learned in pioneering this federation?  What mistakes have you made?

Kevin:  I have made no mistakes (says the ego).  “Ha!” says the rest of my consciousness.  I like to move in several different directions at once.  Some of my experiments failed, such as working on a collaborative book (too much effort for too little collective reward).  We refocused our group energy around driving revenue rather than driving early visibility.  The recognition we’re here is growing – commensurate to our practical contributions to solving client problems and adding breakthrough value.

Our strategic selling method: listening, just like I’ve needed to direct less and listen more to the members.  Today we’re working together better than ever and thriving as a group.

Todd:  Anything else, Kevin, that can help us thrive in the New Year?

Kevin: Be intentional!

Todd:  Thanks, Kevin.

Network Thinking: Interview with Valdis Krebs

by

Each Wednesday, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Valdis Krebs is the Founder, and Chief Scientist, at orgnet.com. Valdis is a management consultant, researcher, trainer, author, and the developer of InFlow software for social and organizational network analysis.  Valdis is also part of the North American Thrivable Network.

Todd Hoskins:  What is social network analysis?

Valdis Krebs:  Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities.  The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes.  SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships and forms a basis for improving the relationships and connections in the social group.

Todd:  How does understanding the network relationships contribute to thrivability?

Valdis:  Some network patterns support a thrivable outcome and others constrain it.  A network map shows you an “as is” picture of where you are at.  You know your goal is thrivability and the network map says “OK, you are here now.”  The community leaders, coaches, or weavers then have to figure out how to get “from here to thrivability.”

Creating or building the network for thrivability is not following a blueprint and building a house.  It is more like getting in shape for a marathon, or for rock climbing – you get the system ready for maximal performance in the space you are in.  You get ready, but there are no guarantees of success.  You can be in great shape and still run a bad race today.  But, you probably beat all of those who are in bad shape and ran a bad race today!

Todd:  What structures or prescriptive approaches have you seen that promote a thriving network?

Valdis: The structures that maximize emergence, learning, agility and adaptability.  Those structures that prepare you for the unknown — after all we can NOT predict the future, but we can partially influence it and be ready for it.

One big item is each person’s network awareness — do you know what is happening around you?  Who is involved and how they feel about and contribute to what is going on around you and them?   Do you know who needs help?  Who has the answers?  Who needs to be connected or introduced?  We can only keep so many relationships in our heads and in our software — how do you best utilize that limited number for yourself and others?

Network awareness depends not just on your connections, but also your connection’s connections.  How do you create a close, comfortable network and still have it wide and reaching, so that you can be aware of non-local events and knowledge?

Todd:  You have written that we need to build creative combinations of similarity and difference in order to foster interdependence?   How does a network not become homogeneous?

Valdis:  Yes, birds of a feather flock together!  And if we do not pay attention, and just let things go naturally, we will build highly homophilous networks.  It is easy to build a network of similarity.  It is more difficult, but much more useful (for ourselves and others),  to build a network that utilizes both similarity and difference and thrives on the interplay.

We don’t want too much of either – similarities or differences –  we want a nice combination.  Enough similarities that we feel comfortable and can communicate with each other, but also enough differences that we can innovate and turn each other on to something new and different.

Todd:  So, it requires intention?

Valdis:  Yes, intention and attention!  Know what you want to do and be aware of what has been done around you.  We are always self-organizing, and so are others around us.  With a group of similar intention we will build a thriving network to support that intention.

Todd:  Speaking of building groups of similar intention, are leadership structures changing?  What is emerging?

Valdis:  Yes, leadership is often emergent in networks, and also different depending on need.  Most people don’t think of networks as having leaders — they think everyone is equal in networks.  That is not true.  Some people always have better connections than others in some situations.  Person A may lead in situation 1, but person B takes over in situations 2 and 3, and then in situation  4,  a third leader emerges.   It is usually not one leader all the way through as it is in most hierarchies.

A thrivable community recognizes expert and situational leadership and allows and encourages it to happen.  Even co-leaders are fine.  Whatever implements the intention.

Todd:  If recognizing the power of networks is a valuable lens through which to look at our communities, groups, and organizations, how can we all become better network thinkers?

Valdis:  First step is to recognize that you are embedded in multiple networks:  work, family, friends, hobby, sports, religion, neighborhood, etc.

Second step is to “Connect on your similarities and benefit from your differences.”  Think of the introductions you can make to benefit those around you, including yourself.

Third, is practice simple network weaving.  You do this around triangles — social triangles.  A knows B and C knows B.  B realizes that A and C could benefit from  knowing each other and makes the introduction.  This is called “closing the triangle” — all three people, A, B, and C now know each other.  Look for opportunities to close triangles around yourself.  Don’t introduce everyone to everyone else — just make those introductions that have a plausible positive outcome for the community.  At the same time you are closing existing triangles, open up new ones by making connections outside of your immediate circle of friends and colleagues.  This will open the network to diversity and possibility as new people with new ideas and knowledge now interact within your community.  Anyone can close and open triangles — they do not need anyone’s permission.  This is grass-roots, bottom-up network building.

Todd:  Thanks, Valdis.  I look forward to seeing you at the next workshop!

Why the optimism?

by

In the face of all the catastrophe thinking and story-telling, why the optimism of thrivability?

This optimism is not blind idealism or the search for some dreamy utopia. A thrivable world will exist (and has existed) in a strange balance and tension where there is more health and generativity than illness and destruction. That does not mean there is not destruction. Old orders must fall, become the compost of new life, and cycle through. Ideas get refined and transcended. A thrivable world is not static. It is not the end of suffering or the birth of a hedonistic paradise. Instead, think of a garden or better yet a meadow.

So, let’s be pragmatic. What is the basis for being optimistic about thriving given stories of catastrophe and crisis. I will merely mention these – you can find more easily by digging deeper on any of it. This is the big picture overview. Also, it is not comprehensive. I offer here only a half dozen examples of why optimism is warranted.

  • communication – never before has communication been so possible – over distances, between languages, across cultures, etc. Information can flow. There is talk of a global brain (although at times that brain may seem primitive and dumbly focused on sex, superficiality, or bad news). It still remains – never before have we had such access to each other. (nods to Deanna Zandt)
  • cognitive surplus – never before have so many had so much liesure time. Not saying we are effective with it, but the possibility of people contributing their time, wisdom, and resources has never been greater. (nods to Clay Shirky)

Yeah, you heard those before….but it is working? What about people who are dying!

  • hearts break as we read of children dying, but what is the trajectory? UNICEF says:
  1. “Research and experience show that six million of the almost 11 million children who die each year could be saved by low-tech, evidence-based, cost-effective measures such as vaccines, antibiotics, micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated bed nets and improved family care and breastfeeding practices.”
  2. “While global immunization rates have risen from less than 20 per cent in the 1970s to about 74 per cent in 2002, millions of children must still be reached.”
  3. “In its sixty years of existence, UNICEF has seen a fifty per cent reduction in under-five mortality between 1960 and 2002.”
  • Peace on the rise. I know it seems like the opposite. But let’s look at some charts to see what the numbers tell.
    via systemicpeace.org

    via systemicpeace.org

    We can see from figure 8 that the conflicts that do exist produce more refugees and exist in poorer states and thus require more humanitarian relief. However, note, “The end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, had an equally dramatic effect on the general level of armed conflict in the global system.” A couple key points:

  1. “Separate research indicates that the increasing level of societal war results from the protractedness of societal wars during this period and not from a substantial increase in the numbers of new wars.”
  2. “At the peak in 1992, nearly thirty percent of the countries in the world were experiencing some form of major political violence. This percentage of the world’s independent states (with total population greater than 500,000 in 2008) has dropped by nearly one-half since the peak, registering at slightly more than 15% with major episodes of political violence in 2008.”
  3. “There has been substantial improvement in general resilience in the global system since 1995.”
  4. “Global gains are observed for seven of the eight fragility indicators; only “economic legitimacy” shows no improvement, indicating that there has been no substantive shift away from primary commodities production toward manufactured goods in the world’s more fragile states.”

There are a few counter-trends to be wary of (see end of page)

Okay, so kids are more likely to live (but we can keep improving that) and there is a downward trend in warfare/armed conflict. We can communicate better and have more time to make the world better (or be entertained or both). But what about the environment?

Let’s try wikipedia this time:

In 1999, the United States EPA replaced the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) with the Air Quality Index (AQI) to incorporate new PM2.5 and Ozone standards.

The effects of these laws have been very positive. In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions:[48]

  • carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons
  • nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons
  • sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons
  • particulate emissions fell by 80%
  • lead emissions fell by more than 98%

Please don’t take this to mean that we are done. We are not. AND, when was the last time you heard that we had made progress?

So we have been making some progress, and actually there are some positive trends. Now let’s add in a few juicy additions:

  • Purposeful or meaningful life pursuits are on the rise, in fact there is a convergence. Millenials – in general – prefer purposeful work and play, GenX is interested too, and the Boomers who made money so they could have a meaningful life later – well, that later is arriving. What happens when you have multiple-generations with a growing interest in living on purpose, with intention, and therefore being conscious about doing more good in the world?
  • Social entrepreneurship (probably in part as a result of the previous) is on the rise – a very hot trend with many subsets and variations in making money by or for doing good. Let’s call corporate social responsibility one of those variations.
  • A paradigm shift in leadership and collaboration is underway. Beginning a few decades ago with the birth of servant leadership, and reinforced by books like “Outliers” (which shows the supporting factors that go into supposedly independent genius)… now we have open source, crowdsourcing, and so much more. How we think about working together is changing. And that change makes more successful collaboration possible.
  • Green technology. Some of us find it so incredibly sexy. And sometimes it really is. Sometimes it is wishful thinking or innovation many years from implementation. However, I can count 4 wind farms on my 120 mile journey to see my family. I sense some potential black swan like shifts if some clean green energy or technology comes to market… whether that algae that eats pollution or cars run on the biofuel made by your food waste… I have hope that something out of the bright green movement is going to come to fruition in a way that changes the world dramatically.
  • I’ll close my brief list with metrics… we have been improving our metrics (and our intelligence in how those metrics can be used to tell different stories). The better our metrics – and the better we are at realizing what to measure, the tighter and more useful our feedback loops become. From using social network analysis to map out which congresspeople are being lobbied by what organizations (and who is paying them)… to stats on child mortality, the environment, and energy consumption and creation – we know more about our world than ever before. And that empowers us to do more about it.

These are just a few of the things that make me optimistic in the face of catastrophe stories. What are yours?

On twitter–

@jhagel: More cause for optimism – we are having fewer children and living much longer – great visualization of global trends http://bit.ly/c93ven