Smartening up

From Seth

When you seek the mass market, there are two paths available:

You can dumb down your message and your expectations, and meet your audience where they stand. You can coarsen your lyrics, offer simpler solutions, ask for less effort, demand less work, promise bigger results...

Or you can smarten it up, and lead despite your goal of mass, not chase it.

The very fact that "dumb down" is an expression and "smarten up" isn't should give any optimist pause.

Culture is a gravitational force, and it resists your efforts to make things work better.

So what? Persist.

Musings

When Worried, Stop Worrying.......Think

"Worry gives a small thing a big shadow."—Swedish Proverb.

Issues will come up....the ups and downs will happen, after all life's dynamic.

But worry? 

That's of our own making. We're hard wired to worry. But look at it, rather than help resolve, worry typically comes accompanied......... accompanied by anxiety, fear, stress, tension, headaches, irritability ........and such others which can only drag us down further, and take away from our ability to think.

Once in a space of worry, our thinking gets clouded, and we just get good at adding 'What If's' and we add so many to a likely already 'uncontrollable situation' , and that's what creates that big shadow.

Worry is more likely to interfere with the problem solving than help.

Sure, worry has a space. Can we use it to look at the issue, face it head on, strip it threadbare and know what....you'll clearly see how much you can do and how much is in the non controllable zone. In how much you can do, find what you can in the present, and that's it, that's about all you can do. And know that that is the best you can do.  And your best is always good enough.

Try it...stop worrying and think...it will give you so much surplus energy to do so many nicer things in life, to even just be nicer.

You'll see more positivity enter life, for yourself and by default, those around too.  

The loveliest of bouquets

The little things that bring on the smile.

Just now, I'm sitting engrossed with my book, and the door bell rings. I go open, only to find no one there....... but as I was closing the door I spot this cute little bunch of flowers sitting on the doormat.

I had no idea who, but it didn't take much to guess it was my little 'kiki aunty kids' ...... just that there were now so many groups, I was wondering who I could thank for the beautiful gesture.

Then I figured that tit-for-tat doesn't necessarily have to be negative; I wrote out a little thank you note and left it on the mat with a five star for paper weight. And sure enough, I soon have these three kids ring the doorbell, all saying a five star munching thanks. 

The thanks seemed to continue as I said a huggy thanks again, and it was then that they touched a core....to my question of, what made them do something so beautiful, they said 'because you are so kind aunty'. The pure and undiluted guilelessness of children....the smile now brought in a tear :)

It's Not Always About Agreeing

Excerpts from an HBR article with an unusual, and well articulated perspective, by Liane Davey

If Your Team Agrees on Everything, Working Together Is Pointless

                                                            

Collaboration is crumpling under the weight of our expectations. What should be a messy back-and-forth process far too often falls victim to our desire to keep things harmonious and efficient. Collaboration’s promise of greater innovation and better risk mitigation can go unfulfilled because of cultural norms that say everyone should be in agreement, be supportive, and smile all the time. 

You’ve probably been taught to see collaboration and conflict as opposites.  As a team, you’re “all in the same boat.” To be a good team player, you must “row in the same direction.” These idealized versions of teamwork and collaboration are making many teams impotent.

There’s no point in collaboration without tension, disagreement, or conflict. What we need is collaboration where tension, disagreement, and conflict improve the value of the ideas, expose the risks inherent in the plan, and lead to enhanced trust among the participants.

It’s time to change your mindset about conflict. Let go of the idea that all conflict is destructive, and embrace the idea that productive conflict creates value. Building on one another’s ideas only gets you incremental thinking. If you avoid disagreeing, you leave faulty assumptions unexposed. As Walter Lippmann said, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” 

Unfortunately, our distaste for conflict is so entrenched that encouraging even modest disagreement takes significant effort. I find that three specific techniques help people embrace productive conflict.

First, discuss the different roles in the team and highlight what each role brings to the conversation. Highlight how the roles are there to drive different agendas. 

As you work through each role in the team and their different motives, you’ll see the light bulbs going on as people realize, “You mean I’m supposed to fight with that person!” Yes! “And when he’s disagreeing with me, it’s not because he’s a jerk or trying to annoy me?” Right! If the team has the right composition, each member will be fighting for something unique. They are doing their jobs (and being good team players) by advocating in different directions, not by acquiescing. By taking the time to normalize the tensions that collaborators already feel, you liberate them to disagree, push, pull, and fight hard for the best answer.

Second, use a personality or style assessment tool to highlight differences in what people are paying attention to. In addition to differences stemming from their roles, team members will have different perspectives on an issue based on their personalities.

A third approach to normalizing and encouraging productive conflict is to set ground rules around dissension. Ask your team to define the behaviors that contribute to productive conflict (i.e., conflict that improves decision making while contributing to increased trust) and those that detract from it. 

One case that would benefit from clearer expectations is the use of the devil’s advocate role. The true role of the devil’s advocate (originally, the person appointed by the Pope to counter evidence of sainthood in the Roman Catholic beatification process) is to question the veracity of evidence and to propose alternate explanations for what has happened.  A true devil’s advocate does a great service.

Giving people permission to challenge, disagree, and argue isn’t enough. After all, giving someone permission to do something they don’t want to do is no guarantee that they’ll do it. If you want to create productive conflict on your team and use it to generate better ideas, you need to move beyond permission to making productive conflict an obligation.

Claim Your Space.......

This was a little experience at the fuel station.

I'd done with getting fuel filled, and then moved onto the air pressure checking space. There was already a little queue, and I pulled in behind.

In a couple of minutes I see this guy on an Enfield go past me, and stop ahead in the queue.

I'm at first just wondering how he could do that, then I'm trying to catch his eye and of course, he is looking everywhere except at me. I can feel my annoyance grow.

And then I'm asking myself, 'if you're annoyed, why you just sitting here, why you not doing anything about it... why this quiet submission'. All that walk the talk stuff went through my head, so I get off and very politely I tell him. And this guy has the gall to say, 'no, I'm two wheeler, so I can do it'. I try to reason with him, but to no avail. 

And then he's like, let's ask the air pressure attendant. By then I was mad..so I'm like..'we're two mature adults, why can't we decide' ( what expectations... I was obviously the less mature one there )

Anyways, the issue got resolved by the management quietly stepping in, just seeing this altercation happen, and they set things right.

So one lesson is 'claim your space', just do it politely. Then the next thing which happened, was even more interesting.

We made peace.

All it took was a smile.... no smugness and no I-told-you-so looks....just an honest and open smile......and he picked that up. He gave me a sheepish smile...nevertheless an honest smile.

So the larger take away........ even with difficult situations, keep the ego out and it's possible to end well. 

Shakespeare’s Characters Show Us How Personal Growth Should Happen

An interesting write up from the Harvard Business Review, by Declan Fitzsimons

Norman Mailer once wrote that there is a cruel but just law of life that says we must change or pay an increasing cost for remaining the same.

As a leadership scholar teaching in a business school, I encounter leaders daily for whom this “law” is a very real and disquieting one. They know what will happen if they don’t make the changes to their businesses, but they are not so sure what they should do to support those changes. Is it about learning how to run more effective team meetings? Or how to be better listeners? Or adopting a different leadership style to bring about a shift in organizational culture?

While there is no formulaic answer to these questions, there are some fundamentals without which no amount of skills development is ever going to work. One source of insight into what these fundamentals might look like is the work of an author whose work has never been out of print for over 400 years: William Shakespeare.

In the opening chapter of his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom, who has taught Shakespeare at Yale for 30 years, suggests that before Shakespeare, characters in plays would unfold but not necessarily develop.

If a character merely unfolds, we intuit correctly that we already know all there is to know about them when they first appear onstage. Their authors have robbed them of the one quality that would make them interesting: the capacity for self-enquiry that might reveal something unexpected not only to us but also to themselves. They teach us little because they cannot surprise us, essentially because they cannot surprise themselves. This is the real-world equivalent of the manager who comes out of a feedback session and thinks, “Nothing new – the same feedback as I have heard before,” and then says to themselves, “I guess I am what I am!” or “I have my way of doing things, and some people like it and some people don’t.”

Shakespeare does not let us off the hook so easily. He shows us that we are not simply who we say we are, but instead are made up of many conflicting and unknown parts. As Bloom puts it, Shakespeare’s characters develop because they have the ability to overhear themselves talk, either to themselves or to others, and are thus able to reconceive themselves. By endowing his characters with complex inner worlds, Shakespeare treats us, 400 years before Freud, to virtuoso displays of what to the modern ear sounds very much like self-discovery. There is not one Hamlet but many. After learning of his father’s murder, he discovers in soliloquies of stunning intensity that he cannot bear to remain as he is. So tortured is he by his inner conflicts that he considers, in perhaps the most famous soliloquy in all literature, the pros and cons of suicide (“to be or not to be”).

We are mesmerized — not simply through the beauty of the language, but because we realize that he is hearing these things for the first time. And no matter how many times we see the play, we never tire of it, because it is at such moments that Hamlet, while in real danger of unraveling, is at the same time exquisitely vulnerable and thus truly human.

Shakespeare shows us through Hamlet and other characters not only the sine qua non of human development — that in order to change ourselves we must first discover ourselves — but also what that development sounds like, looks like, and feels like. He shows us that it is the moment when Hamlet is so close to falling apart that he is able to fall together. 

For us, far away from the dramatic intensity of fictional characters, the point is not that we can change only if we contemplate killing ourselves or turn our backs on our friends; change is rather about moving toward, rather than away from, the anxieties that powerful external challenges provoke in our internal worlds. Hamlet was able to face his own inertia and cowardice; Hal was able to confront and thus transcend his dissolute lifestyle and embrace a new identity fit for a king. But both were possible only after the characters became willing to discover what lay within.

Shakespeare teaches us moderns that in the face of an uncertain world, self-awareness — that much-vaunted leadership quality — is only worthy of the name when it is revelatory. And it can only be revelatory when we are willing to concede that we know ourselves only partially.

Development, then, is less about changing ourselves by learning new skills than about discovering ourselves by giving something up — including some of our most cherished notions of the person we think we are — in order to discover the person we could become.

You Are My Mojo.....

It was in the middle of an intense conversation with a friend.....  intense, in the sense of one of those tough situations.....enormous stress, rigid timeline, low energy, high tension, the makes....no easy space. After I while I heard her say "I'm going to hang up, I need to pull myself together........ I am going to go find my mojo".

I had no idea what 'go find my mojo' meant, but it didn't seem like right space to ask.

I was a little reluctant to let her go in that space, and went 'hmmm...okay.... but.... are you sure........just talk na, we can talk about other stuff..... or whatever'.....and we did.

After a little while I hear, "I think you are my mojo.... Do you know what that means?"

I was caught out...had to admit no. Had never heard the word.

I Googled, I googled even as I was on the phone...searched with 'find my mojo' (as I thought it was a phrase) and lo and behold, Google gave me ten different ways to find my mojo. 

And I was like 'Oh god.... I don't want to find.....I need the what.........what is mojo'.

And then I used the little trick I'd learnt in Google, you can search with 'def: mojo', and that will give you definition. 

And it showed ; | a magic charm, talisman, or spell |

How totally charming right....to be able to be that for a friend.....have a friend who can be that for you.....a mojo....sure brought a smile into a tough situation. And also a special moment ....a moment to cherish.