The Work/Play Dialectic

According to some religious mythologies, work was punishment to human beings for unforgiving sins from their intrinsically flawed nature. Over the ages, this twisted and unfortunate perspective became a self-fulfilling prophesy. What's interesting are the positive deviants who continue to dismiss the work/play distinction as fallacious and unnecessary. The treat the two as a single flow experience of delighted engagement. They refuse to treat them as separate and intrinsically distinct. They derive energy from both and both are fertile mothers of creativity and conscious living.

It's possible that all the consternation over work-life balance is not reconcilable until we synergize work and play into a single rich reality and way of being, doing and belonging.

How Important Are Meeting Agendas?

It's been my experience that meeting agendas that feature topics are never as productive as agendas formulated as questions. It's also been my experience that pre-set agendas do not necessarily keep meetings focused, inclusive or productive. Some of the most wasteful meetings I've seen have had detailed agendas with timeframes. 

How productive a meeting becomes has everything to do with the quality of questions used to organize the interactions, thinking and engagement. Actually, I would argue that meetings where people build the agenda as they go in meetings can be far more productive than unilaterally imposed agendas.

Small Experiments

In the old conversations, we positioned big as the most valid approach to change. This was a bias for large scale change, supposedly well-planned. For several reasons, there is more efficiency and sustainability in change when we go about it through multiple iterations of small experiments. These lower risk and accelerate learning and paybacks.

With the mantra that small is smart, experiments on small scales become richer platforms for creativity than large change ever provides. They use fewer resources and the costs of permissions and oversight. Every organization and community is wise to keep multiple small experiments going at any point in time. Those that have used the approach has found that it is sheer illusion that rigorously planned and capitalized large changes have fewer failures than multiple improvisations.

The Art & Power of Storytelling

Teaching the art and power of storytelling this weekend at the Harvard Kennedy School with next gen sustainability scientists and innovators. People resonated with the reality that, when it comes to creating new levels of connections and influence, narrative has far richer power than numbers.

They were equally challenged by the work involved in developing story portfolios and compelling stories. These are competencies they never got even in the best graduate and doctoral programs in the Ivy League schools. They are competencies few people receive in any education process.

They are vital to positioning science and practice in making a difference in community building, policy making and ultimately engagement.

Can Social Skills Be Learned?

We have sufficient evidence that people of any age can develop the social skills lkke empathy and communication. I've seen it occur with many but not all people who have had opportunities for development. Perhaps the most significant approach is giving people time to reflect on their intentions, actions and their real time consequences. Reflection and feedback become powerful tools for this kind of development, even more effective than didactic instruction.

We need to build these into how we structure time in organizations and learning contexts.

Leadership: The Transition From Hero To Host

Organizational innovator Meg Wheatley talks about the critical journey of leader from hero to host.  Hero plays the role of depowerment, doing the thinking and deciding for people instead of building their capacity for engaged empowerment. The opposite is leader as host, convening conversations that engage and matter. This is leader as facilitator whose success is measured by how well people think and decide for themselves in benefit of the whole.

Polyforms

Polyform describes a community project whose outcomes incorporate a diverse mashup of local assets.  A community garden can incorporate seeds from local university agriculture programs, straw from local farmers, wood reclaimed from local structures and recycling programs for chicken coops and compost bins and local work training program participants hired for construction projects.

These projects don't involve complicated plans, just intentionality to the synergy of forms. We see the magic of acting local intersecting multi-sourcing.

Imagination Capital

We gain gained increased clarity that growing vital communities takes the synergy of financial and social capital. It also takes imagination capital. Imagination is vision of possibility. In any community, there are people who imagine possibilities that they feel certain they will not help make happen. And there are people who imagine possibilities they feel compelling to engage in their realization.

We benefit from both kinds of people because they inspire each other in virtuous spirals of creativity, innovation and transformation.

Reality is that communities with financial and social capital also need equal measures of imagination capital. Currency and connections are vital but insufficient for meaningful change. That's why it's important to cultivate people to keep their imaginations alive and their lives aligned to their realization.

What Makes Community Engagement Authentic?

Many of us have seen our share of faux engagement in communities. People labelled as authorities and officials invite people to give voice to their disempowerment. This makes people feel and function more disengaged because they are not invited as empowered adults, but as dependents pleading to empowered parent figures. Two things make community engagement authentic: education and empowerment, measured precisely by what people actually do after these events and processes.

Authentically engaged people do two things. 

They actively learn more about the assets of the community, rather than wallow in its deficiencies. And they engage and connect these assets to start new projects, initiatives, relationships, programs, crowdsourcing and businesses. These reflect authentic engagement. Not going home with fragile hope that someone will finally save them from inconsolable victimhood, but rather thriving at the intersections of social, imaginative and economic capital.

Is Being Too Positive Possible?

In any group, positive can mean appreciative and optimistic. Appreciation imbues the group with positivity that supports openness and courage. Groups do not suffer from too much appreciation.

Groups can think unrealistically when they take optimism too far. They can use optimism as a way of not doing necessary research, verification or fact checking. Curiosity and optimism provide equal value and work best in balance.

The Magic Of Peer Learning

Research indicates that people learn better from peers. Peers facilitate a more relevant approach to learning because they share beginner's mind often more than experts. Learners also take more risks in learning with peers because they experience less inequality in the relationship than with a superior as teacher. Given this, we need to leverage the power of peer learning in organizations and classrooms. In this model, we teach a few who teach a few others. The other dynamic at work features the fact that people learn better when they teach what they're learning. The practice can extend into communities where we dedicate time before community events for peer teaching and learning any kind of skill and area of knowledge possible.

The Mindfulness-Creativity Connection

New neuroscience research indicates that a key factor in creativity is openness to new perspectives. This is the essence of mindful living in the present. When we live in the present, we notice more new things in each fresh moment than we do when we go through life mindlessly not in the present and instead in the trance of past or future.

This is important to organizational and educational contexts where creativity is essential to success on all levels. I still encounter massive illiteracy when it comes to creativity and innovation. Many organizations and schools still operate from the unsubstantiated superstitions that position creativity and innovation as factors of personalities, incentives, threats and herding people in rooms to free associate whatever ideas occur to them.

It's long past time we approach creativity and innovation from the science that solidly associates them with living and working and interacting mindfully in the present. We need to make mindfulness a core competency in any context where creativity and innovation are vital to success indicators. And this needs to begin with leaders and teachers. No one should be put into or kept in any leadership or teaching position without being adept at being and teaching mindful living. 

That's what we'd be doing if we actually based practice on current research.

Being proactive in an unknowable future: The power of small, agile inspired actions

I'm facilitating a ton of strategic planning these days. I continue to meet people who relish the sound of being "strategic" with all of its competitive and military mission connotations. Others use the word as code for planning related to growth without the adversarial and anxious implications. However we frame the exercise, it's fundamentally about being proactive. Industrial Era strategic planning held prediction as the centerpiece to action taking. The practice continues with even more compelling seductiveness brought to us by the purveyors of new scientific data gathering and analysis methodologies. Companies can do deep brainwave studies to predict consumer patterns.

Yet even with big data getting bigger, the future remains largely unknowable. This fact makes us rethink the nature of planning.

In my work, planning is creating small achievements that creates meaningful learning and momentum in the direction of new possibilities we wish to bring into being. Small inspired actions do not require the costs of prediction. In a world where the future is intrinsically unknowable, rather than predict our way into the future, we create it in small, agile inspired actions.

 

 

Learning how to think about the future

Every organization has to learn how to think about its future. The learning can come through subject matter expertise, experimenting and reflection from experience. I continuously see organizations, and communities and schools, that do not know how to think about its future in an inspiring, compelling, engaging and realistic way. As a result, their conversations are stuck in speculative circularity and backwards looking analysis that moves nothing forward. They get bogged down in past time and spin their wheels in the present, insanely hoping that more of the same efforts will yield different results.

Until people learn how to grow an intimate relationship with their future, they keep the future at arms length with fear, worry and clinging anxiously to their past. When they grow this relationship, they dream and invest in small manifestations of their dreams. Everything they do in the present is inspired by the future narratives they create. They refuse to outsource their future to anyone or anything they hope will save them from their illusion of powerlessness.

The Web Turns 25

As the Web turns 25, it's astounding what a generation worth of innovation and engagement has done to change our world globally more so than any other generation since the beginning of the human narrative on this planet. I was there. My first online experience began in 1991, the first year of public access to the Web. No images, scrolling only using keyboard arrows, getting kicked offline regularly and waiting literally hours of pinging attempts at reconnection.

Now, the web is an indispensable tool for facilitating and archiving virtual and local collaborations. Tools as simple and accessible as Google Docs to complex apps and websites make possible what was only possible through the crude collaboration tools of fax and email.

We still have a long way to go in socializing people to using shared documents in seamless collaboration with love media like face meetings and video/conference calls. In this, we are just in the infancy of possibility.

The Accountability-Dependability Distinction

There is a profound and nuanced distinction between the connotations of accountability and dependability.  The difference has to do with the locus of control involved. In accountability, someone feels responsible for someone else's actions. This is the standard Industrial era model featured in hierarchies. A superior assigns actions to inferiors and "holds them accounatble" for that which the inferior doesn't choose. It's a external locus of control relationship of dominance and subservience. 

Dependability is chosen. People choose the actions they will contribute to the whole. They operate from an internal locus of control. In this context, if there are "leaders" they are inviters, conveners, facilitators, champions and supporters. They do not take responsibility away from others; they empower them with continuous opportunities for dependability. A dependability culture interestingly demands far more personal integrity and honesty than an accountability culture does.

This distinction leads to a transformational question for organizations. Do you want people who are accountable or dependable? My experience over the past decades has clearly shown that in a vast majority of cases, in attitude and aptitude, dependable people far outperform accountable people. Creating high engagement organization is an effort built on a foundation of dependability.

Shiny objects: Why meetings go nowhere

When a group has no effective model for working together, people believe meetings are places where everyone talks about whatever shiny conversational objects appear, whether from participants or the person supposed to be leading the meeting. This ensures nothing will be achieved, which is sometimes the agenda of the leader and others in the group who seek to avoid all forms of responsibility taking and sharing.

Having agendas makes no difference in a shiny object culture. Within the scope of any topic, the group can free-associate itself into endless and fruitless discussion and debate on whatever shiny objects appear to attract people's attention.

The antidote is an effective model for the process. These can be and often are a logical yet flexible series of questions that can move the group from ambiguity to action. 

The flaw in the weak chain link metaphor

The deficiency perspective that believes that focusing on weaknesses is the key to success is a mechanical model that certainly applies to mechanical rather than living systems. One of the hallmark metaphors of this school of thought is that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This is an accurate depiction in chains as mechanical systems. In living systems, success is measured in characteristics of smart. The system is as smart as its smartest members because intelligence is shared. This forms the foundation of a strengths-based system and has important implications for how we structure conversations and interactions. Living systems thrive because of communication of strengths.

How My Writing & Work Connect

I didn't start writing professionally until a couple decades ago. I admire the emerging generation of writers who correctly started in their 20s. I was 40 when I started and have never looked back. It's been mostly books and blogs often on topics related to my work of shifting conversations in organizations and communities. This year I will do books 15 and 16, one on rethinking our relationship with time and a cookbook on improvisational cooking for people who want to cook more.

My writing mostly informs and reflects my work. I stay creative along the way with books that focus on things like photography, poetry, short stories and in this year's case, everyday cooking.

It took a while to realize that organizational and civic leaders engage me in projects because I'm a writer. Looking back, many of my best projects were initiated by people being inspired by one or more of my books. They thrive on the fresh perspectives I bring from my writing to inspiring and facilitating differences in their world. I keep my writing rich by keeping it heavily researched. Writing drives my relentless passion for the kind of learning  discovery and creativity that help groups realize their potential together as never before, transforming their lives.

What Happens In Good Meetings?

Good meetings are all about getting things done by the fewest number of people with the most relevant information and abilities. No time is wasted uploading status and other information that could have been shared virtually before a meeting. No time is wasted having everyone do what a few could even more efficiently do.

We make decisions. We make commitments. We check in and see who needs help with anything and who wants to help with anything. We use the least time necessary. We end when we're done. These are good meetings that people love having.