Co-Intelligence writer Tom Atlee blogs about Citizen Deliberative Councils. The randomly selected groups of 10-20 diverse and representative citizens participate in multi-day processes of learning, dialogue and conclusions. have no permanent or official power except the power of legitimacy and widely-publicized common sense solutions to compelling public problems. Part of the idea here is that current government leaders live in a world unrepresentative of the the many who could otherwise be more empathetic in governance. Brilliantly simple, and profoundly radical in truth.
Raising The Bar on The Quality Of Elected Politicans
My tweet from this morning: When you find yourself in criticism of politicians, remember that in your country intelligence and empathy might not be election requirements. One implication suggests that communities do a more intentional job of growing bipartisan and multipartisan intelligent and empathetic political candidates so we those lacking these competencies are more the exception than the rule.
Most communities already have the resources they would need to make this more possible. It's neither a simple nor complicated task. It just takes the vision, commitment and engagement to create the possibility space.
The New Direction Of Public Education
I had the fortune of an accidental conversation with two inspiring teachers from Cleveland's International School, an innovative partnership between Cleveland's School District and Cleveland State University. It was unlike previous chats with school system teachers who often complain about the disengagement of their students compounded by their own disengagement. Instead I hear, in excited and inspired tones, about innovative education that focuses on building inquiry, character and community. These are what I consider the core competencies in this world of increasing and unprecedented complexity, connectivity and change.
And the market metric: compared to peer public schools students and parents are eager to leave, in this school, they have to have a lottery for applicants because of the attraction. Very exciting.
Defining Ourselves: Lessons From Successful Women
In her business aptly named Flourish, Rachel Talton adroitly addressed my interest yesterday in how successful women compare themselves now and before their success as they define it. At the core of their transformation, these women move from being defined by their relationships to being defined for their relationships.
This is not a subtle shift from role based to authenticity based narratives. An important part of Rachel's work is creating the space for these kinds of transformations to emerge and for these kinds of stories to be told. Our world in every sector will move forward at the rate more women empower themselves in community with each other for this shift.
Systems Make Collaborations Easier
Whether we talk about communication or organization in collaborations, systems make things easier. The question is simple: are there any kinds of systems we could put into place that would make what we're doing here easier? A system could be a regularly scheduled routine or habit, a technology tool, even a space like a wall for capturing and communicating mindshare.
It's good practice to regularly critique and improve when necessary any systems we have in place to make sure they're working for most people most of the time.
Why Complex Adaptive Systems Can't Be Managed
Our usual way of thinking about management is controlling predictable variables for repeated planable outcomes. Management works with simple and complicated problems where we engineer solutions from proven formulas. One of the hallmark characteristics of simple and complicated contexts is that all of the variables are learning disabled. No variable has capacity to learn. Everything can only do what it does unless some outside agent or force alters function by altering form. Building a subway car is a simple context. Building a subway system underneath a large urban city is a complicated context.
A complex context is one where the system involves variables that have learning capability. It is a complex effort to get people who never used subways to use them. Learning makes behavior unpredictable and therefore the consequences of actions are not predictable. In complex contexts change cannot be managed, it can only be enabled. Our capacity to learn becomes more important and relevant than our capacity to conform to formulas.
In complex contexts, when we experiment with something on small scales, we can work to spread any success gleaned rather than try to scale. Complex contexts literally have minds of their own because of their learning capabilities. We cannot engineer compliance in second application contexts any more than we can engineer compliance in second children based on the successes of the first.
Two Different Approaches To Opportunity Discovery
We can take two different approaches to the discovery of new market opportunities: market research and possibility thinking. In market research we listen to existing, emerging and potential markets with interviews, observations, neuroscience and prototypes. In possibility thinking, we go out as far into the future we can and imagine the "impossible" we would love to see possible, the new and the wow.
Each approach has validity. When it comes to improvement contrasted to innovation, market research is often the better approach to improvements and possibility thinking is the better approach to innovation. Ultimately, the synergy of the two provides a powerful way on either path.
Mind Integration, Not (Just) Creativity
Research continues to point to integration as the higher level competency over simplifying to creativity only. Integration means linking and leveraging the polarities of creativity and analysis, long and short term, familiarity and discontinuity. Some people call this whole brain thinking and as it turns out high performers and people who innovate successfully are whole brain integrators.
There haven't been sufficient studies to definitively uncover the rich mix of nature and nurture that fostered mind integration in these people. What we know is that many of them didn't get there through degrees, training and motivational speeches.
My experience of people observed growing into whole brain thinkers and doers is that it was a rich pastiche of freedom, creative networks, serendipity, boundless curiosity and exposure to a rich world of possibilities that contributed to their development. This leads me to wonder if people at any age and any background can unleash their potentials for whole brain experience.
Art Of Connecting: PostScript
It is a naive and innaccurate expectation that training people in interpersonal, social and emotional intelligence skills will necessarily lead to higher quality and density relationships. In the same way two neighbors can be expert in people skills and yet have little or no quality connections, people at work can be skilled and disconnected for all sorts of reasons. There are people for whom introversion is not a lack of social skills but rather a choice.
Working to connect people is its own art form and responsibility. We have it explicitly help nurture and build new and stronger connections between and among people. It's more than making the better skilled. It's actually creating and growing the quality of connections. The spiral dynamic here is that the better people are connected, the more easily and likely they are to engage the social skills they already have.
The Art Of Connecting
At the core of leadership, network weaving and change agency is the art of connecting. In the growth of any living system, the quality of relationships is as important as the quality of individuals. An organization or community or education system that focuses more on the dots than connections between the dots will squander resources in an unsustainable strategy. This conversation about building quality connections begins unsurprisingly with describing the character of quality connections.
One way to think of quality connections is to consider the frequency, mutuality and impact of reaching out and reaching in that occurs between and among people in a network.
First, reaching out and reaching in.
Reaching out is being interested in our well-being that leads to asking others for ideas, help, resources, introductions and influence. Reaching in is being interested in the well-being of others that leads to offering ideas, help, resources, introductions and influence.
Frequency is how often reaching out and in occur. Mutuality is how much reaching out and in is equally initiated. Impact is how reaching out and in affect each person's effectiveness.
In network mapping, we can measure all three dynamics across both dimensions of reaching in and out. We can measure exactly how and where connections are growing by doing simple surveys asking people about the impacts of their most frequent connections of reaching in and out.
This allows us to be strategic and intentional about building the kinds of connections where we most need them to achieve what everyone's trying to achieve. Networks of people will always move at the strength of their connections.
Growth By Aquisition
There are kinds of growth in companies that can only come about through aquisition. There are a few basic motivations behind growth by aquisition:
- Buying another company to leverage its brands
- Buying another company to leverage its properties
- Buying another company to leverage its markets
- Buying another company to leverage its talents.
Each can make sense and each presents opportunities in growth and challenges in combining organizations and cultures. Purchasing another company often proves to be an easier process than connecting cultures well. Getting culture right counts because at the end of the quarter, culture trumps strategy.
The Primacy Of The User Experience
Everything we do in organizations, communities and education contexts, intended and not, impacts users of whatever we produce. We can narcissistically define our success on how well users comply with what benefits us. I would argue that the most sustainable and innovative approach positions the user experience as central to our success metrics. This is opposite to designing for our convenience and advantage.
This user centric perspective had us listening more deeply than ever to what users reveal as what actually would represent value to them. It means studying them in context, before, during and after their interactions with us and they we deliver to them. It means putting in perspective our assumptions and long held beliefs about them. It means radically making them not us experts about their experience even when our science seduces us into believing we are intrinsically smarter.
It means empowering everyone in the organization to interact and listen directly to users, whatever their position in the organization.
Connecting The Civic Minded
In every community, there are businesses, institutions and public leaders who care about the growth of the community. It's not everyone. Some people only have agendas for their own growth, which can contribute to the well-being of the whole. Communities grow when the interested become more connected. Then amazing things happen that are impossible in a culture of isolation or competition.
Connections mean new peer2peer introductions, experience and resource sharing, joint research and collaborations.
inquiry Based Engagement
Every genre of engagement whatever context can begin with participant questions. It can be a meeting, gathering, presentation, project, workshop, class, seminar or expert panel. No matter how smart we think we are we cannot and should not presume to know what people want or need to know. We cannot assume to know their unknowns, uncertainties, interests, concerns, assumptions or ambiguities all of which represent their questions.
Other People's Stories
In his recent TED talk, Sting attributes his breakthrough from a multi-year writer's block to telling other people's stories instead of one's own. He also notes that we learn as much about ourselves through other people's stories as our own. We can exponentially expand our storytelling repertoire simply by collecting more of other people's stories. It requires time and the willingness to interview people and listen to the stories they have already woven for their experiences. With 8 billion people on the planet, the possibilities are endless.
Why We Need Good Leaders
In a world where we are committed to engagement, we need good leaders for this transition from the world of disengagement. Recent Gallup research indicates a global rate of over 80% disengaged employees. I would expect that it's the same rate for disengaged students and citizens. We need good leaders to remind people they are in charge. We need good leaders with the will and skill to facilitate people's empowerment. We need good leaders to connect people who remember they don't need permission to innovate.
Reverse Mentoring
The proliferation of technology dividing generations into a two-class society in tech literacy brought about the idea of reverse mentoring where the younger generation coaches their seniors in all things tech. I think the value of the trend points to the truth that younger generations have all kinds of things to teach some of the older generation. Age does not guarantee diverse experience, expertise or wisdom that can be more prevalent in the young. Our education and development and coaching approaches needs to reflect this reality.
Assessing Learning
I was asked recently how we should assess the degree to which workshop participants' expectations were met. I'm clear that just asking the question usually yields zero actionable insights. The most accurate assessment is to have participants identify their questions going into a workshop and assessing on how well the workshop satisfied those questions, a practice I find rare in workshop circles. It's rare because most training and education programs place little value on the actual questions of learners as core to the design of learning. They place far greater value on what presenters and teachers find important.
The Case Against Parental Leaders
The old industrial model of leadership positioned leaders as parent figures, knowing better. This erodes engagement, relationship building and flow of information. The model was based on the simplistic, naive and ultimately inaccurate assumption that any one of us could know more than all of us. The Information Age alternative argues that we are smarter together. This position leaders as facilitators empowering people to leverage shared knowledge and acceptance of responsibility for the whole. Here leaders are not parent figures. They are committed to connection and engagement. This is the new model required for high performance cultures.
How Organizations Can Revolutionize Education
Organizations can revolutionize education in a single step. They publish the learning portfolio required for each open position. Portfolios spell out the kinds of experience, knowledge and skills required. Anyone can build portfolios. Schools help them do this. The education success metric shifts from graduations to portfolios. This is the shift from academic definitions of completeness to actuall job portfolio completeness. This is the next revolution.