The Art Of Arguing

When people don't know how to argue well, they tend to avoid or delegate conflict. The denial adds another layer of complexity to what remains unresolved. We fabricate an uneasy and inauthentic consensus that masks rather than benefits from the conflicts at play. Arguing well is dialogue from an attitude of relentless openness. We talk with openness about what we know, what we don't, what we wish. We sustain openness about what is unresolved, complex, ambiguous and uncertain. Even when we come to conclusions and agreements, we stay open to the unfolding of other possibilities. We talk with faith they we can surprises each other and ourselves with new questions and insights beyond whichever we declare significant.

We don't take the unresolved personally. As we expect life to remain intrinsically contradictory, we don't create the negative tension of fighting from the sides of either-or. We come together in the more fertile spaces of both-and.

When we create a culture of arguing well, differences becomes rich possibility opportunities rather than sources of tension and avoidance. We become smarter together.

Moving Groups To Adult Conversations

Good things get done when we have adult conversations. The character of these conversations becomes clear in contrast to adolescent conversations. In both cases, questions mark the essential distinctions. Adolescent conversations

  • How do we get permission?
  • How do we divide the world into friends and foes?
  • How do we compete for power, pride and prizes?
  • How do we achieve freedom without responsibility?

Adult conversations

  • How do we listen?
  • How do we contribute?
  • How do we take and share responsibility together?
  • How do we include others?
  • How do we enter into dialogue that works for all?
Moving any group from adolescent to adult conversations means changing the questions we're working from. Not everyone will be ready. Some people will and engaging them moves things forward.

Creative Pairs

In this past weekend NY Times, author Joshua Shenk praises the power of creative pairs. More evidence denies the myth of lone genius. Lennon and McCartney were just one pair example of many in the world where genius is more collaboration than individual pursuit. I see this all the time. Pairs are more productive and creative than loners or in whole groups trying to share work. It's a simple design shift in how we invite and assign thinking, creative and throughput work.

The Key To Engaged Millenials

Fast Company this week produced four strategies for engaging Millenials who will dominate the workforce in the coming decades.

  1. Trustworthy leaders
  2. Ability to contribute to the growt of their field
  3. Making a social difference 
  4. Participation in the organization's crowdsourced innovation

These are all achievable, as evident in many organizations who will continue to benefit from the engagement these practices produce.

The End of Democracy

A recent scholarly political science study finds: That majority-rule democracy exists only in theory in the United States -- not so much in practice. The government caters to the affluent few and organized interest groups, the researchers find, while the average citizen's influence on policy is "near zero."

The exaggerated version is that we cannot call the US a practicing democracy if it's a country of wealthy forming policy to serve other wealthy. And if we define practiced democracy as policy determined by the majority of citizens across the economic, educational and social spectrums. They're talking about the whole spectrum of policy including financial, education, jobs, foreign, health care and social programs.

This invites an adult conversation about what an engaged citizenry would look like. Defining this would be no less challenging than moving towards it.

Rethinking Startup Funding Contests

As we rethink startup planning to feature iterative growth, we need to concurrently rethinking the way we fund small startups. This applies whether we're talking about capital intensive or bootstrapped models. Business plan competitions generate a large number of losers in a community for every one or few winners. You don't build a thriving economic ecosystem of entrepreneurs by creating new generations of losers. The new model replaces the old model that brought together competing startups and to divide them into two classes of business plan contest winners and losers. In the new model, funding development is ongoing, not periodic with each new funding contest.

Then, everyone in a qualified group of startups would receive incremental funding, like $1-5k for each milestone reached. Funders and investors would outline key milestones. These would include things like: first Agile Canavs completed; first round of crowdsourced and 3F's (friends, families & fools) funding achieved; first round of early adoptor paying customers achieved, and so on. Given that many startups succeed with less than $10k this is a viable and sustainable model based on agile planning principles which are highly more valid than old business plan models.

This would energize a community of startups and a sustainable ecosystem of support to foster their growth and success.

Adult Conversations

In my facilitation work, at the core of what I do is foster adult conversations, which are understood in contrast to adolescent conversations.  Adolescent conversations are about getting attention and approval for one's ideas and wants. There is a dominating need to be right. Adult conversations are about shared learning, understanding and helping each other succeed. 

Organizations and communities move forward at the rate they have adult conversations.

Personal Tech At Work As Cultural Metaphor

Many workplaces have policies in place to guard against overuse of personal technology that gets in the way of productivity. People are prohibited from cell phone and social media use. It's a reasonable expectation in favor of productivity.  Like all behavior at work, I think how it happens makes a difference. The process of rule making and enforcing can create more of an adult or parent-child culture. In an adult culture, people organize their own rules and compliance strategies. In a parent-child culture, superiors do this to inferiors. It matters which is reinforced because culture significantly impacts how people ultimately feel, behave and perform.

Moving Questions Forward

When I construct presentations with colleagues, they often assume that presentations end with finally inviting participants to declare their questions. It's not a bad move. It's just a large missed opportunity. We need to invite questions right up front after we share the context and intention. This engages people in the spark of curiosity and cues us about what to add and possibly emphasize differently in the process. It's an easy and potentially priceless adjustment.

Connected Customers

I'm always intrigued hearing any organization making it easier for their customers to get to know and connect with others. This is especially interesting when talking about any small local businesses. I would argue that peer2peer connected and engaged customers would be more loyal partners in the business. Plus it builds community and the stronger a community the more likely it is to buy local. It's an opt-in play. Customers who want to connect will and those who don't want to won't. It's just enough to make these connections possible with introductions, events and other creative media. Ironically or not, many apps design in the opportunity. It's certainly business not as usual.

The Simple Power Of The Agile Canvas

From beginning to end, every collaboration is a challenge. We each come with our own personalities and perspectives. Whatever we plan, change promises to be a constant. Most of us prefer to be engaged freely rather than managed by someone who thinks they're smarter than all of us. We never have all the resources we think we need to achieve what we desire together. Keeping everyone on the same page takes continuous attention.

Interestingly, when I reflect on the thousands of collaborations I have facilitated all over world in every sector imaginable over the past three decades, I have noticed that in every collaboration, there are five conversations at play every time that makes a positive difference.

When we understand what these five conversations are, collaborations become opportunities for flourishing rather than struggling. They prevent the group from getting bogged down in conversations of assumptions, complaints, stuckness, blame and excuses. They empower and engage people, getting them on the same page and moving them from talk to action.

These are the Questions, Facts, Principles, Stories and Sprints conversations.

In the Questions conversation, we talk about all the things we need to research and decide. This includes everything we don't know and are interested knowing and clarifying.

In the Facts conversation, we talk about everything we have discovered and decided. This includes everything we have data for and have agreement on.

In the Principles conversation, we talk about what matters to us and why. This includes what matters about the impact we desire to make together and how we work together.

In the Stories conversation, we talk about what we think would represent success and progress. This includes events we would love to see possible as far put into the future as we want.

In the Sprints conversation, we talk about what we will do every two weeks to achieve our stories. This includes everything we will research, decide, communicate, design, build, test and launch.

The Agile Canvas is a simple, intuitive and powerful tool for guiding and capturing these five conversations. The Agile Canvas is a dynamic set of 5 conversations that keeps us continuously focused, realistic, aligned, inspired and productive. The Canvas engages everyone's talents, builds relationships and produces measurable impacts. It adapts to any kind of collaboration possible and can include any number of people, locally and virtually.

Because it features the five conversations that happen naturally in every collaboration and that make a positive difference, it's a model that works every time in any kind of collaboration context possible.

 

The Empowering Leader's Individual Time

At dinner last night, my friend and colleague Rene Silva who directs international teams for a global company, raised an interesting question relative to how much time empowering leaders need to spend weekly with individuals to help them feel engaged. Do leaders who empower their people with decision making need to spend a different amount of time with them than leaders who keep decisions to themselves? I have no data to offer, only the suggestion that the quality of their time would differ. I would also guess that empowered people need less time from their leader to feel engaged because their empowerment intrinsically engages them.

Leadership Time & Engagement

Fast Company this morning features a Leadership IQ study of 32,000 people finding that engagement increases by 30% when people spend up to 6 hours weekly with their leaders. The law of diminishing returns kicks in after 6 hours. This implies quality time and that leaders should have about 7 people each. The report doesn't define the character of time other than it can be in person or virtual. I would suggest it also need to be strengths based, authentic and mutually beneficial.

The Myths Of Non-Redundancy In Communities

In virtually every community engagement event I attend or facilitate, someone invokes the old conversation about the social evils of redundancy.  According to this model, people newly energized by something someone is "already doing" needs to find a different passion. They are expected to confess their unwelcome passion and join an existing effort. Funders leverage this old conversation to justify social program funding cuts via mergers and acquisitions.

Much of this mindset is based on the implicit assumption that bigger is better. One larger program is more efficient and effective than a few or several smaller ones. I don't think we have evidence to support the assertion, especially given the data that many people in institutional social programs feel more disengaged than people sharing ownership in smaller entrepreneurial programs.

We need to invite new conversations about how to create rich ecologies of social programs and innovations.

Can Good Judgment Be Taught?

In a conversation this week with friend and wise leader Robert Schepens, he raised the question whether good judgment, which obviously can be learned, can be taught. The poignancy of the question relates to the growing complexity of work that defies mindless compliance to predictable rules. My first reflection is that yes, it can be taught. I think several elements would need to be at play to make this possible.

It would take an immersion experience where people repeatedly get engaged in a variety of scenarios where they learn the tacit skillsets and mindsets required for good judgment. The process would be designed so they learn the core of good judgment: imagining possible implications of action options. They would also learn the corollary competency of knowing what questions they need to be operating from. Wisdom is always knowing the right questions especially in contexts where right answers might not be immediately obvious.

I've taught these competencies and have seen people make gains in their development. They become new mindsets operating at the level of emotions, which is what gives them their power and sustainability.

I think learning good judgment is absolutely critical in any organization committed to engagement because engagement only occurs in a culture of trustworthiness and good judgment is absolutely critical to trustworthiness.

Happiness, The New Competition

I'm still fascinated when people excuse monopolies and market dominators for their lack of innovation because they "lack competition." First, not only doesn't competition lead to creativity, the data shows that obsession with competition actually reduces capacity for creativity. Second, creativity doesn't improve with improved incentives.

Organizations that have competition get more innovative because they know how to. For every competitive organization that is creative there are others who aren't. They try to grow by more business as usual, the antipathy of innovation. They all have the same amount of threats of market erosion and incentives of market growth. The ones that make difference in competitive markets are those with the competencies and structures to be innovative.

Now with the happiness research, certainly including my own global studies, we learn that happier people innovate more and better because of the reciprocal relationship between happiness and creativity. Happier people are more creative and the practice of creativity increases people's happiness.

This takes excuses away from the monopolies and market dominators. That they lack competition is not only irrelevant, if they committed to cultures of happiness, they would naturally and sustainably innovate more and better in the markets they serve.

Simplifying Complexity In The Civic Space

Today I worked with food system and network weaving colleagues in a rural country. It was the first workshop there on transforming food systems, hosted by one of the local funding leaders. As usual, I used part of the Agile Canvas process to facilitate dozens of people to dozens of committed projects and an unprecedented richness of enthusiasm and connection. Every time I do this work anywhere in the world, I'm struck by the nature of complex issues like food security. Of course these issues intrinsically resist big money into more of the same and silver bullet solutions. Nonetheless, I observe that what makes them feel so complex is that they exist in a space where the only possibilities come from self-organization.

In these contexts, unlike hierarchical and plutocratic organizations, no one is or can be "in charge." Power as influence is earned not entitled or assigned. No one wants to be managed or controlled. If anything new is going to happen its only going to happen because people come together in new conversations.

The power of the Agile Canvas is that it brings people together as peers to become inspired and productive together. This significantly simplifies the complexity in profound and important ways.

The Primacy Of Feelings

I think the whole business of organizational behavior and leadership development still suffers from the long shadows of rationalism. Rationalists argue that reason and logic should be and are the basis for human behavior, choices and interactions. This epistemology invalidates feelings as legitimate signals or guides to how we interact. This is not my experience talking with people, even the most disciplined and intentional. The feelings behind their actions are clearly significant. People act from feelings all the time. Not all their feelings, but always from some kind of feelings. Feelings of care or apathy, love or fear, greed or gratitude.

This being the case, we would take a different approach to how we think about things like innovation, collaboration and strategy in organizations. We would undertand that culture is key to both, that when you get the culture right, good innovation, collaboration and strategies follow. Culture is how people feel. Growing culture starts with emotional literacy, undertanding what makes people feel good. Culture advances when we design the organization for people to feel good about themselves, each other and their work.