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.
Friction 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.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2013-04-24 04:24:052013-04-26 11:51:59Friction is Your Friend: Why Sharing Values isn’t always Valuable
you work with others that you don’t have total control over to come up with new ideas or actions
you want to tap into the wisdom of a group and go beyond what any could do alone
the same old problems are present and you know you need to approach them differently to get better answers
My goal for the workshop is two-fold:
give people ways to redirect conversations to be more co-creative
offer several different approaches to achieving co-created solution design
Why Co-Created Solution Design?
Since January 2011, a small group of facilitators working on social entrepreneurship and international development have come together to find ways to impact the system of social innovation globally. We call ourselves ci2iglobal, which is short for Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. With a collective 100 years experience in the area, we pooled our experiences together to figure out where we can be most useful. We believe a crucial part of the difference we can make is spreading the work of co-created solution design.
Collaboration might be the hot word of today, but we believe co-creation gets closer to our intent to help solutions arise from group creation. Too often gatherings come together and the path or outcome has been pre-determined. And it limits the engagement of all stakeholders, which is vital to successful social innovation. Co-created solution design provides a method – a process – to create solutions, but it does not presume answers. It opens questions to be answered by the group.
While much of what we do is about getting something done together, what actually gets done depends heavily on the relationships between the participants and their commitment to action.
I remember very vividly learning first hand the difference between advice and self-generated solutions. On the second day of my coach training, we were asked to provide advice to our partners on how to achieve one of their goals. We talked at them for 30 minutes. Then we were asked to listen as they thought through another challenge. The difference startled me. I am a quick thinker and prided myself on my ability to offer useful advice. However, the solutions my partner came up with had deep understanding of all the forces at play. Most importantly, my partner hesitated in implementing my solution, whereas the partner eagerly looked forward to testing the self-generated solution. The difference in engagement and commitment was tangible for me. I have tried to listen more and advise less ever since.
Co-created solution design is just like that, except it is working with groups and even groups of groups on larger systemic issues.
Strategies
I will be highlighting three different strategies for doing co-created solution design:
Engaging Exploration – Use when there is not much of a time limit and a need to see and act within a large landscape of possibilities.
Flash – Use when there is very little time and a strong base of existing knowledge and awareness.
Creative – Use when you need a very well fit and very novel solution.
So, how do we do it?
Come to the Co-Created Solution Design workshop to find out! After the workshop, I will share some of the materials from the workshop here for those of you who can’t make it.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2012-10-28 20:46:422012-10-28 20:46:42Co-Created Solution Design Workshop at Chicago Bioneers
We have all attended events in which we had to yawn. The pace is slow and laborious. We are stuck in a chair listening the whole time, and the mind wanders to what is on the buffet table that we can nibble on.
Imagine if we assigned a rating for degree of engagement when we gather people together for group work. Let’s say we collapse, for simplicity, the difference between engagement of speaking, learning, or connecting, and just say engagement.
If I have forty people in the room and only one is speaking, the engagement of the speaker, I hope, is maximal. Some percentage of the room, depending on what is said and their interest, is in various states of engagement. We might be able to calculate, if we knew those degrees, the sum of the level of engagement in the whole to what is being said (minus degree of engagement on other devices or to other topics in mind).
Let’s say the activity is introductions, and each person is speaking for 1-2 minutes about themselves, so the group knows itself. It will take 60 to 80 minutes to go around the room. It will also, usually cost, the facilitator energy to police the 1-2 minute limit unless they use a device like a pre-written 3×5 card to keep people brief. (I have used these cards to keep within intro time limits and then made harvest documentation by having them post to a wall using an association method, which can be quite helpful in knowing ourselves as a whole.)
Now, let’s say, instead, I ask those forty people, as part of their introductions to each other, to organize in space around the room as if it was a map of the world. I give them a compass point and four locations to work from. In 3 minutes the group has some sense of where everyone is from and who is near them. They all used their bodies, and had to talk with 2 or 3 others to be sure they were in the right relation to proximal people. What is the algebra of engagement of this activity? Assume there was no need to move chairs or change the room to do the exercise. In 30 minutes of these sorts of exercises (align yourself on a spectrum of interest in… or belief about…, for example). For documentation, you can have someone take photos of the arrangements.
The art of facilitation is the crafting of optimal processes for engagement and achievement of collective goals. There are no perfect solutions, and every group has needs to be addressed that shape the processes that can work. Facilitation is the art of creating process that moderates the flows of individual engagement and catalyzes the flow of necessary information leading to action.
Abra cadabra – work with the algebra of group energy to achieve outcomes to make magical experiences of flow and contribution.
When designing group process ask:
who will be in active engagement during this process?
who will be in passive forms of engagement during this process?
is there another way to achieve this outcome that would change the active and passive engagement ratio?
if each person’s time and attention has a numeric value, and I do the algebra, have I optimized the value in the group? Is there excess capacity that I could/should engage?
My grandfather was the foreman for bridge-building crews. And for the last year or so, I have been focused on building conceptual bridges from the old economy into the new. Maybe that is a grandpa gene.
As I have been exploring this work of bridging from the old to the new, one of the things I am becoming certain of is the need to give people who resist change enough ground of the familiar to stand on. What of the old way do they get to keep? When they know what is safe for them, it is easier to allow for specific changes and a degree of uncertainty. The uncertainty is contained.
MindTime really got e thinking about this. It is a mapping process for distinguishing between people who think about the future, people who focus on the present, and those who live in the past. As I have always been so future-focused, it didn’t occur to me that other people would be holding onto the present or the past. Once I walked through what those perspectives experience, I realized how really valuable they are. People who help with continuity of the present give us all a sense of one thing leading to the next, that there is predictability about our work, and they keep the systems running. They stabilize the chaos of the future-focused, which can be living in multiple even contradictory futures. Those who are past focused are like memory keepers. They put our past glory into deep memory. They are often creatures of habits. Their attention is not on how to make what they do better, instead they attend to how fantastic (or terrible) it has been and then play it out.
If we want to build bridges from old ways of being and doing, we need to be sensitive to these different mindsets.
In the past, I have adopted chaotic change. If I changed my relationship, I would also change my appearance, my home, my job, or any other elements of my life that I could, all at once. My mother told me, after my divorce, that I should imagine each of these areas like a leg of a stool I am sitting on. When I change too many of them at once, the stool loses balance easily. This has become a powerful metaphor for me. What is it that I am going to hold stable, while I make these adjustments?
Bridge building is like that. It is about helping people acknowledge that what has been done isn’t working anymore, inviting them to the possibility that there might be something that would work better, and then being clear about what they get to keep that is familiar and stabilizing to them.
If we are helping past-focused people transition, we can call into their minds where the individual or group has made transitions before. If you can use an epic adventure narrative, then it helps even more. If we are helping present focused people transition, it is useful to remind them of parts of their day that will remain the same. By making the change appear smaller than the continuity of the past, it becomes less threatening. Then, once it isn’t as much of a threat, we can focus on the value of the benefits to be gained, and living into what the daily activity of that possibility might be like.
I am incredibly excited to announce our affiliation with ci2iglobal, the Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. We have been hard at work behind the scenes for over a year, working together to share our wisdom, create useful tools, and facilitate powerful events and laboratories. Our event, We_b, in January at the HUB Brussels brought together some of the inspiring innovators we know in the social sector to test out our individual offerings as a collective.
Why am I incredibly excited about this collective and our events?
Because this is the most phenomenal team I have ever been honored to work with. We are 6 women with a cumulative experience of over 100 years in facilitating social change in global contexts! How often are you in a room with that much experience? More than that, we live and work on three continents now, but we have lived and worked on 6 continents. It doesn’t get better than that until you go to Antarctica!
We have experience scaling up social initiatives around the globe, fostering international collaborations, bringing micro-finance to developing countries, measuring impact for Ashoka fellows, and working with the European Council.
I think it is also important that most of us are old enough to have had long careers in international development while being young enough to be early and eager mavens in social technologies. We get social technology. We get cross cultural dialogue. We get impact assessment. Not just ideologically, but practically and experientially.
The power and capacity that puts in the room when we hold an event is enormous, but that isn’t all. There is more! All of us have done enough of the personal development and group process work to show up in these spaces with egos in check, curiosity in front, and driven by purpose focused on the group outcome.
Somehow the magic combination of this led all of us to explore system sciences and thus we come at our social change work with a core value being the health and evolution of ecosystems – be they human or environmental.
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Nobody warned me what this journey would be like. No one took me aside and said – your beliefs, your very morality will change on this adventure. So before I embark on the next endeavor within this adventure, let me share a bit about what I discovered. Cause I sure wish someone had warned me. Not sure that would have stopped me, but warnings are nice.
1. Forgiveness
No one warned me that I would learn deep lessons in forgiveness. Of myself. Of others. But sure enough, it came. I thought it was enough in my twenties to have learned compassion for those who I perceived wronged me because they too were caught in their own struggles and patterns, often spanning generations. But no, that wasn’t enough. It had to go further. I had to learn to forgive myself for the paths not taken, the options chosen that led to pain or failure, the consequences of what I had – at one time – thought was right action, but turned out to have negative consequences I didn’t want. I had to learn to forgive myself for hurting those I loved when I made difficult choices. And perhaps deepest of all, I had to learn to forgive myself for being hurt by others.
If this idea is new to you, please sit with it. Take agency for all the experience you have. Every emotion you have, you can be responsible for. Whatever – and I mean WHATEVER anyone has done to you, you can choose how to respond and whether to be hurt. If Nelson Mandela can walk out of prison and love South Africa and the people there, then you can get off your emotional victim high horse and recognize that you have a choice in whether to be hurt or not. Do you take the high road? And when you don’t, please forgive yourself. You are doing the best you can with what you have, right now. At least that is what I keep telling myself.
One of my favorite plays is Death and the Maiden where a woman who endured torture and rape as a political prison has a surprise visitor – the torturer – in her home and at her mercy… what should she do? It can be easy to claim moral high ground until you find yourself in such a position. And the only sane way out, I think, is to forgive even yourself.
2. Progress is nonlinear.
Oh, the plans I have made! They are small next to the gifts I have been given by allowing myself to embrace what shows up in my life. Boldly. Embracing it boldly. Looking back, the most crucial decision points were not on any plan. When Jair mentioned thrivability to me in February 2007, I wasn’t looking for it. There was no plan. I felt in the deepest parts of my being a soft flicker that said – follow this. And over time it grew louder. When I think of the most crucial people in my life, there was no plan for them or how they would fit. When I look back at the Thrivability Sketch – it started as a light nudge from two advisors. I started it with small intentions. As the first steps worked, it got bigger. By the end it had doubled in size and was much more than I had imagined it would be.
When I look back on any given day, I am ashamed at how little of the task list is completed. Even when I look at a week of working, the actions are not adding up to what I want to have happen. And yet… at the end of a month, quarter, or year, I am always astounded at what has happened. Beyond what I could have dreamed. I can’t figure out how that happens. It must be nonlinear. So now I just go with that. I set intentions and then just work with what the universe and my network bring to me.
3. There is Life after the Cleanse.
When you first go through the cleanse – the detachment from worldly positions to seek a life of meaning, it is like a giant high. Euphoric bliss, I found my version of god, and it is purging possessions! I love thee. But no one told me there was life after the purge was over. I lost 50 pounds… no really, it was more like 2 tons. I dumped a 4000 square foot house, a husband, 70% of my belongings, city life, and just about anything else that represented my old life. That was 2002-2006. I got my coach training, and immediately went about double leveling up my integrity and alignment. Talk, walk. Talk, walk. Talk, walk. I was on a super sustainability high. I was even blogging for an organic lifestyle brand. And I still felt like a green fraud for a long time, like I wasn’t “sacrificing” enough unless I was living in the woods with a knife completely off grid. Well, no thank you.
But there is life after the cleanse. At some point you stop getting rid of worldly possessions and maintain some sort of balance of inflow and outflow of goods. At some point you settle on a fair-trade organic diet some percentage of the time, but not every bite. At some point, there is no high left. It just becomes the humdrum life of the everyday. You can’t squeeze more meaning from it. Would I feel just a little bit better if I went to the farmer’s market? Only if I feel like it. It doesn’t define me. I am not THAT.
Over five years after the purge, and I have completely adjusted to my new life. I am thinking about finally getting rid of some of the books that I hang on to. I don’t need to be THAT either. And maybe that is part of the secret to purging. Hold up an item – ask, am I this thing? If you say no, I am not this thing, then you don’t need it. Just keep what you use at least once a year and that which you ARE. Everything else is just crowding your experience of life.
When I am not defined by what I have or have given up, I have a whole new world to create in terms of what I want to be.
4. Justice – There isn’t any.
As a kid, I had a very solid notion of justice. And as I grew older, it was important to me to be part of doing justice. And somewhere along the journey, I woke up to how much that was about me and not about anyone else. The world is not a just place. It isn’t fair. My playing sheriff isn’t going to make it fair. In fact, there are usually so many forces at work, that what is really fair has a very complicated and nearly never ending cascade of actions needed to keep balancing out the fairness.
What I needed most of all was to be okay with myself. Not anyone else. Not anyone’s actions. Just me and mine. This started as a light hint – a sense that I was the only person I had to live with for the rest of my life. Just me. No one else. But it built into an awareness that I should do what I needed to create the life that I wanted. And I didn’t want a life of chasing down other people for what they did or did not do. Creating my own life was much better than trying to bring about justice from others. It may seem really selfish, and perhaps it is. But instead of spending my night worrying about how someone had wronged me, I could sleep peacefully dreaming about what I wanted to do next. My mind-time was free of the anger of being wronged. I simply started to let go.
So when I got divorced, we didn’t fight over money. I didn’t worry about it being a “fair” or “just” division. Instead I focused on what would allow the kids to know they were loved and what was going to foster a healthy relationship with my ex. What did I want to go to bed at night thinking about? The toaster oven? No. I still have random moments where I think, “what was I doing giving him so much of what we built together?” but those moments pass quickly. I can buy the stuff, if I need to. I can’t buy peace of mind or relationships.
Maybe justice is what we can give ourselves if we want to love our own life. This isn’t just “turn the other cheek” – it is turn the other cheek and forget-about-it rolled up together. I am trying to give myself the gift of that mind-time freedom to go about my life starting right now with what I have right here.
Next
I wish someone would tell me what is coming down the pipeline next. What deeply held belief or assumption is going to get deposed next? And how is that going to feel? And what will it then get for me? If you know, please share.
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We must be careful about asking old modernism questions of the new era. The answers do not compute. This includes things like “why isn’t there a static finite answer to questions about what makes us thrive?” or “why aren’t women successful in traditional male fields **using masculine terms of success**?”
Why can’t we answer with a finite static answer the question of how to thrive? Because the answer changes over time. The system is adaptive. And the answers have to evolve as the systems evolve. What we have learned from Kuhn’s Scientific Revolutions is that even when we think we have figured things out, we haven’t. We continue to evolve how we believe the universe works. So if we **know** that the answers will evolve – in fact, when that is the most stable thing we can know, then we can embrace that evolution and stop the hubris fantasy of having come up with some finite and static answer that will be true for all time. Instead, we can embrace the answer that seems best right now and continue to seek ever more refined answers. It is the questions we can get attached to, rather than the answers we get now.
This is especially true of questions like, “what does thriving look like?” or “what does it take to thrive?” We have learned that our best efforts to address problems for society in the last 100 years may have improved things on the factors we were trying to improve (think child mortality, disease rates, poverty) but there are unintended side effects. Each effort to make the system better can result in new problems that we find just as pressing as the ones we were solving (overpopulation, for example). Thus, there is no solid or static recipe at the intervention and tactic level. Instead, we need to keep pressing on in our quest to answer how humanity can thrive without killing off the ecosystems on which it depends.
Similarly, in my research on creativity and innovation, I keep seeing the outcome of civil rights and affirmative action in terms of women and other minorities performing on masculine terms of success. It looks like a form of covering to me. For example, women are seen as achieving equal levels of creativity by achieving equal levels of awards, press mentions, etc. However, this is judging women on masculine terms, obscuring what it is even is to succeed in more feminine terms. Feminine terms of success might be better found in growth of community, number of enduring relationships, quality of relationships, network support, peer appreciation and cooperation, etc. Look for where there is cooperation rather than (or in addition to) competition.
The other crucial place I see this misguided judgment of the new by terms of the old is in leadership within generations. Older generations keep bemoaning the lack of leadership from the younger generations, when in fact it is that they can’t perceive what leadership even looks like for the younger generations.They continue to look for it as command-and-control models. And forget, the younger generations saw JFK and Martin Luther King get shot. Younger generations believe in starfish leadership by catalysts rather than spider models of top down leaders. (See starfish and spider.)
*Note I see this in my own work, as my older gen nonprofit partner in philanthropy keeps wanting me to study under a nonprofit leader and points me to old model sustainability people. It was a pleasure this week to point her to my honorable mention on the EnrichList where I am placed next to some of her own heroes. It is as if my work on thrivability since 2007 seems nearly invisible to her, because it doesn’t exist in her world the way other organizations do… the network and visibility of the work doesn’t register as significant on her measures (dollars in the org, donors, placement at old model conferences, etc.). Instead, the measures of network reach, meme spread and adoption, dispersion across multiple sectors and networks, and such measures matter most to me. Success with the term thrivability has always meant, to me, “how many people are turned on by it and shift their way of seeing and being in the world because of it” and not how much money moves through the organization or wether the old guard adopts it. It is about awakening and activating people, then trusting them to do what will lead to more of our collective thriving.
These mismatched conversations have us talking past each other, the new world inexpressible to the old. And the old world, nonsensical to the new.
Recently a friend commented on how crucial holding space is. It needs unpacking. What do we mean when we talk about holding space – both interpersonally and in groups?
A room holds space. A circle of chairs holds space. My arms around you hold space for you.
The foundation of a house holds space for the house to be built. It touches the ground. It makes the house stronger and more resilient. But you don’t go looking at the foundation unless you are buying the house or it seems to have trouble.
Holding space seems invisible. It is hard to see, but you can sense it is there. When it isn’t there or isn’t strong, the lack of it is very noticeable.
As a facilitator, holding space for a group of people to do something together involves:
creating physical space that is conducive to the task.
What do people need to do with their bodies?
What relationship do their bodies need to have to each other?
Is there light, fresh air, refreshments to keep bodies fueled?
creating emotional space that enables action on the task at hand.
How do people feel welcomed and invited to engage?
Is the emotional desire to get what matters done greater than the emotional desire to rest, resist, or sabotage?
Are there clear boundaries for good behavior? Who enforces boundaries and how?
Does each participant feel respected and appreciated – valued for their time, skill, and experience?
creating intellectual space that sparks wisdom and creativity.
How do people know they can safely contribute wild ideas?
How is the critical (refining) phase made distinct from the generating phase?
How do people know they can move beyond impressing each other to doing something together?
What helps contributors feel like they are a part of something larger than themselves?
In one on one dynamics, holding space for an individual to do something transformative, vulnerable, or bold mostly involves:
creating physical and intellectual space
Same questions as a group for both, plus
Does the individual feel safe – physically, from distractions, eavesdropping, etc?
creating emotional space
Can they have their experience of their emotions without having to defend, justify, or argue them? (even if that is painful to the listener)
Can they explore a thought or feeling without being interrupted or distracted?
Do they feel a respected? Experience engaged neutral listening?
Holding space for someone is not about responding to the emotions or words and gestures. It is about observing the emotions with the individual. Being beside them in the experience they are having, not as a respondent (even if it is about you), but as a companion in the experience.
And this can make holding space for someone really really hard for us. We have to move out of ourselves and into a space of an objective compassionate observer.
When you make a chair or a house, there is a tangible visibility to the work. You can see it happening, measure it, check against specs, and watch it function over time.
When you are holding space, there is a very intangible and invisible quality to the work. Conspicuousness in holding space shows a lack of grace. You can’t see the “magic” of it. You can’t touch it. When space is well help, people feel at ease, as if they can be themselves. At the highest level, it can be about stepping deeply into another person to experience with them what they notice and feel, which requires an incredible amount of vulnerability on their part.
And this is magnificent gift, when space is well held people can bring forth their best self.
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My thoughts are too lengthy for a simple tweet. The most important of which I never see spoken of. There are several movements or methods for women today. The old guard is the one most of us are familiar with. It is rooted in social justice – where do women not have access and let’s count them and fight to change the numbers by bringing visibility and accountability on the issue. This is a movement about access and choice – women ought to have access to just about anything men have access to – and then have a choice about whether to participate – as women. What this usually looks like is women parading around as men, taking on male traits to succeed on masculine terms in a male-dominated space. Back when this movement had its peak women even wore shoulder pads to physically appear more masculine. It was an important effort, and today many of us, of the female kind, stand on the shoulders of giants who pushed for this form of equality. This acting-as-if we are men is part of the insideous practice called “covering” which many minorities are forced to practice in order to operate with those in power. (Thanks to Kate Ettinger for pointing me to the book on Covering.) Some might argue that all of us perform covering to some degree.
But there is another form of feminism in the generation of women that followed. I think I fit in this group. For us, we were raised with the idea that we could choose any career. Few of us were told (and if we were told, we didn’t take seriously) that we couldn’t do the career of our choice because of the simple biological fact that we were women. We assumed access. Many of us are ambidextrous. Well, make that androgynous. We know how to demonstrate traditionally masculine traits quite well, but we also could use our more feminine traits. Most importantly, few of us wanted to be the “first woman” to do something. We wanted to be successful on our own terms and as individuals with specific skills and abilities. We didn’t want preferential treatment for being a woman.
One woman I spoke with that fits this space is a journalist. She said she didn’t want to be a “female journalist” she wanted to be a “journalist” who happened to be female. We don’t want to use the “woman” card to gain special access. Tokenism. While tokenism gains some ground for the cause of social justice, it hardly feels rewarding to win on grounds that shouldn’t be considered to begin with. Tokenism means it is still about whether you are a man or a woman, and we will toss in some people by choosing them based on their sex (or race, etc). It isn’t about the ability of women to compete – regardless of their sex, and succeed because sex is not a filter. In fact, it highlights sex as a filter.
Women in this group don’t want to attend “women’s groups” or have events or panels for, by, or about women’s issues. We go so far as to nearly deny the biological reality that we are women. Make it a non-issue. Ignore it. Shhhhhh.
I have a sense that there is a younger generation that is moving beyond this urge to silence the sex issue. These women are embracing their experience as women and realizing that being a woman brings strength and ability that is crucial in today’s world. I have a few books on my shelf that point to this new embracing of the value of women. The first one I read, many years ago, was entitled, “How to Succeed in Business without a Penis: Secrets and Strategies for the Working Woman.” Another is “Web of Inclusion.” I would love to know your favorites books and articles in this space.
There are many things I admire about this emerging movement for women – mostly millennials – as they begin to solve some of the complications of past movements for women. I also see some ways there are unintended consequences. The value judgment is mine, and I own it. Sexual and romantic relationships for young women seem to have been adversely impacted. Women’s image of body and self hardly seems to have improved. That all seems like a lengthy topic in itself. But let’s get back to women in business for now, where progress has clearly been made.
As the article in Inc. mentions, women by the numbers are successful in achieving equality (or surpassing it) in education. And, where women are present, there can be “higher ROI” and better “capital efficiency” and so on:
“An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation showed that women are actually more capital-efficient than men. Babson’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those run by men, and that organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35% higher return on equity and 34% higher total return to shareholders.”
The women who make it past the sexist barriers and glass ceilings can be even better at business than men. As these stats become known, having a woman involved in your business becomes a business strategy instead of a moral imperative. Will the new tokenism be less moral and more pragmatic? I hope so.
For now the women’s movement feels more complicated given that a large segment of women don’t want to have their bodies sexed and their identity tied up in the sex of that body.
What can we do? Let’s move toward more integration. At SXSW last year I was on the only panel that was all women that was not at all about being a woman. Let’s acknowledge that women have an expertise and an identity beyond that of their sexed body. Include women not as tokens (perceived as a deficit attached to a moral obligation) and instead include women because they are capable, perceptive, agile, hardworking, insightful, or whatever traits are needed in these uncertain times. See us for our strengths and not the “lack” of a penis.
For event organizers, put women on panels – not because you want to have a good ratio of men to women but – because you want to have a valuable perspective on a new approach to success. We enter the Relationship Economy, as Jerry Michalski calls it, and women, in general, navigate the world of relationship with profound perception and intuitive grace, achieving very useful business results. If you want to be successful in todays uncertain world, put women on your team, your board, or your panel.
ps. as for you women – the few – that demonstrate the seemingly female traits of backstabbing, destruction and gossip – who want to masquerade as men by denigrating other women, your selfishness undermines the work we all do as humans to evolve. It makes you appear short-sighted and shallow, and alienates you from authentic connection, trust, and alliance. We are angry with you, collectively. We will forgive you, but please go get some therapy! If you don’t know what I mean, take a look at this garbage: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannahbreslin/2011/07/25/why-women-shouldnt-go-to-tech-conferences/
Note: I speak here only about women…some issue may overlap with race and other “minority” positions. However, I can’t speak to those and trust to those whose experience of those movements is more informed or more personal. I do have a rant I can write later on how we each have some form of privilege or power, and the social justice practice of focusing on where we lack power is a self-destructive way of navigating the world we share. If each of us stand in a multi-faceted identity and acknowledge our power and lack thereof, we develop sympathy and alliance with others.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Jean Russellhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngJean Russell2012-01-19 06:19:552012-01-19 06:19:55Women: Up Down and Around
Prediction for 2012: A year of unimaginable extremes. The fiction of wall street broken by the occupy movement will see a broader decrease in trust in the economy and corporations. Jobs will be lost. Free agents will struggle as the economy to support them hasn’t gained ground yet. Depression will be the word of the year in many circles. Politics in the US will seem chaotic and highly unpredictable.
At the same time, trust in neighbors will go up along with bartering. As the middle class dies a begrudging death, the sleeping giant of America awakens. Survival will be about connecting to people around you. Quality of life will start to improve in dark contrast to economic stability. You will rate elements of the year either a 1 or a 9.
There will be at least 3 and likely 7 major catastrophes, some weather related and 2 or more economic black swans. Fear will not be about terrorism, it will be about the chaos and structure change by the amassing disenfranchised. (When 65% feels disenfranchised, there will be change, and it won’t be pretty)
Major factor in making it, from a business perspective, will be how trustworthy are you. Some iteration of “micro” will be seen everywhere. Set directions but not destinations. Push decision-making to the edge or you won’t be nimble enough to adjust to extreme economic climate.
The divide in the US will grow larger. On many axis. Short term thinking will result in short term gains that never add up to long term endurance. Think and be like a marathon runner. Drink lots of water. Meditate. Act small with a long view.
If you let go of all your assumptions and the story you had about your life, your business, and your world, and instead focus on your confidence in responding in this moment to what is before you, directing yourself and your business toward a direction you believe in; then you will end the year grateful. If you resist…well, the infrastructure collapses with or without you in it. Make quality of life your mantra. Seek the path you can be in with grace.
I was asked on Facebook what mechanisms I was using to think of this. This is my quick answer:
1. studying currency design, trust and radical economists (money is a collective agreement to pretend there is value in a number. The number 1435 has no value as anything more than a number, but if I say you have that much money, we can do something with it. Context matters. Don’t trust the context? Value goes up in smoke – start bartering and find other ways to exchange value.)
2. conversations with economic historian and reading about transitions in smaller scales (http://srnels.people.wm.edu/and on blockage – http://thrivable.wagn.org/wagn/Book+blockage)
3. watching what is working – what is and has been making communities more resilient
4. playing with models in my head – what if there is more of that… or less of this… what would happen then?
5. Swarm behavior and complexity science – looking at meta stable states, phase changes, slime molds as metaphor of individual/collective.
https://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.png00Thriverhttps://thrivable.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/TS-Right-Horizontal-Full-Color-1920x1080-Logo-Padding-300x228.pngThriver2011-12-12 15:12:552011-12-12 15:12:55Prediction for 2012
Friction Friend
