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Founded in 2002, the blog here continues to be a space of daily conversation about the science of mind and its implications and applications
It's the exceptional CEO who cares about her people and her markets over her own ego greed and narcissism. That's the message from the conversation today with a serial entrepreneur woman who continues to innovate in the tech space. She is evidence that leaders do not lose empathy as they gain power and wealth, as the sciences now clearly indicate.
Barry Johnson is a pioneer in polarity management. His groundbreaking article outlines the incredibly important distinction between problems and polarities. Problems have one right or several independent right solutions. Lost keys and navigating highway detours are problems.
Polarities have two or more right interdependent approaches. Polarities are opposites like inhale-exhale, self-other and save-share, control-empower, support-challenge. Polarities are well managed when we leverage the strengths of both poles, not when we try to decide which is right. Polarity management implies validation of the necessary complements of opposites.
When an issue is a polarity and we treat it as a problem, it gets worse, every time. This explains why societies, institutions and organizations can do poorly with chronic problems that by definition are polarities rather than problems.
The research indicates that empathy can decrease as power and control increase. This has particular relevance to leadership. The dynamic plays out when we see leaders sincerely unconscious of how their exertion of control over people directly influences the very behaviors they seek to punish. When adults feel others work overtime to control them, they are likely to become:
Of course every human being is capable of these behaviors, however they become more likely with controlling leaders. By definition, controlling leaders grow blind spots that make them literally unable to see this dynamic until they take time to personally discover its realities and costs. This is the first step to learning how to shift to a more skillful approach to leadership.
We have enough evidence to make clear that nothing connects people like personal stories shared. And connection is key to all manner of learning and performance, whether we're talking about people in workplaces, classrooms or neighborhoods. I'm suggesting that time is taken for people to share their stories of significant personal events they are willing to share. We're talking about births and deaths, graduations and achievements, engagements and weddings, travel and discoveries and the like. These create the space for the shared related stories of others. A very powerful opportunity for relationship building.
Work space design looms large in how people feel at work. As organizations decide to keep shrinking office and building costs, they do well to keep top of mind the four core dimensions of work spaces.
Built Space: The fixed and flexible structures, features and constraints of the physical environment
Personalized Space: The space experience aspects people can personalize related to their five senses
Socialized Space: The group agreements on how space needs are expressed and managed on a scheduled and real time basis
Virtual Space: The ways people manage connection and privacy through their available technologies
Each leverages important and unique opportunities to shape spaces that support optimum conenction, engagement and well-being. Each works from a focus on core principles including:
There is a curious breed of people in organizations and communities that feel entitled. Entitlement is expectation of benefits without the costs of contribution. Some were born into it, some develop it and some are thrust into it by circumstances. A life of entitlement is a life requiring all manner of medication because it is a life that denies the inherent significance of every life.
We have a social responsibility to always ask more of them. Asking sends a message that implies their potential value beyond their perceived value. Whether they get the message or not is immaterial. It's our opportunity to invite more simply because it makes their contributions more possible.
Every team is a network. We map networks by identifying the frequencies of exchanges of ideas, resources and help between people in the network, we do this through observation and survey. The survey questions are simple: With whom do you exchange ideas, resources and help and how often? We draw strength-relative lines between people based on the connections we discover. Every leader should do this to undertand where to focus their relationship building. This effort can take on an infinite array of forms, inlcuding basics like:
The network maps become powerful tools to growing relationships on teams. This is important because the quality of the team's performance is less the the sum of individual efforts and more the quality of relationships.
The conversation about the value of mentors continues to be valid. Students, young employees and emerging leaders benefit from good mentoring. There is an implicit and important kind of maturation that only happens in the context of what we have been calling mentoring relationships. I have benefited immeasurably from giving and receiving mentoring conversations. I owe a debt of gratitude to my old mentors.
The old model was related predominantly on explicit grooming of next gen leaders. These days, mentoring is more about conversations and less about the formality and continuity of roles. We might get to the point where we talk about mentoring quality conversations instead of mentors and mentees. If we do, it might make these conversations more accessible and the whole point of mentoring might scale as it needs to.
There is research and logical evidence that trust accelerates communication, decision making, alignment, action and learning. Here are notes on trust from a project I did with an organization a few years ago. It speaks to building trust at work among leaders and teams.
Trust is a feeling, not a skill. One cannot "learn" how to trust people they don't. And even the absurd command to "trust more" actually lowers trust in the culture because the implication has no credibility.
Trust builds for two reasons. Leaders become more trustworthy and employees develop more realistic (read: fulfillable) expectations of their leaders. Lack of trust obviously emerges from non-trustworthy actions and unrealistic expectations.
If we agree with this construct, we take an approach where trust building becomes the shared responsibility of leaders and employees. It is a construct that explicitly implies that neither is able to bring trust about, in the same way that one person cannot build or renew a relationship.
Entrepreneur has a great piece on whether customers have a legitimate role in the innovation process. Customers are important when the conversation is about problems rather than solutions. Because of the fixed mindsets dynamic, when asked for solutions to a given problem, customers typically think of incremental version differences of business as usual, meaning not innovations, especially when we define innovation as surprising the imagination of the market.
When we ask instead what problems they want to solve, we enter the land of novel potentiality.
When we want their input into (the solution of) better irons they give us what we ask for. When we ask what problems they don't want to have, they say they want a zero-ironing life which could lead to innovations instead of improvements.
Companies that get the deep logic of this realize that and how they might only reach new levels of growth by innovating their own disruptions as they enter into unpredictable spaces.
Yes and no. On the yes side, people feel demoralized seeing their "blue sky" ideas smacked down by non-transparent reality considerations and constraints articulated after people get fairly excited and attached to their ideas. So making known constraints transparent, and even soliciting others, prevents this and gives ideas opportunities to shape their growth in the direction of reality.
On the no side, the most innovative ideas make constraints irrelevant. The U of Michigan is innovating translucent solar power applications that in about 5 years will make every window in the world a potential source of usable energy. This makes panels and roofs and all respective constraints irrelevant. This kind of idea comes about when a group is also asked to generate options regardless of known constraints.
Groups need time to work on both sides of the creativity equation. That's where the magic happens.
While the independent book store industry has grown by a healthy margin over the last few years, one of our local indies is closing shop. It did all the rights things -- live music and events, beer and wine -- except good servce which in this neighborhood is the definitive market deal breaker no matter how sexy your venue or offerings. Trends are seductive. This is up by this percentage; something else is down by another. Whether we look at national or global trends in any field and interest, there are always local exceptions. There is always a margin of those who aren't trend compliant. This is true whether we're talking about business, economics, medicine, technology, education, sociology, culture, politics and religion.
Knowing macro trends tempts us into local assumptions. Trend data, no matter how valid and compelling, often do not equip us with the ability to better undertand if local conditions fit inside or outside the trend profile.
No matter how much macro data we collect or purchase, it cannot substitute for studying the actual conditions and dynamics of local contexts.
A recent Inc. Magazine article suggests that one of the more powerful statements we can make at work is a statement declaring that we would like some help with something. It needs to be respectful of people's time and something they can do. When a whole team practices this, strengths shared make limitations and constraints less a factor in their performance.
Asking for help is a act of humility, wisdom and validation of other people's value and gifts. Not asking for help is a position of weakness; requests for help are positions of strength.
Now that the technology is ready and a critical mass of people have smart phones, it's time to make it a requirement that every student, employee and citizen go through a 101 course on how to use voice search on smart phones. The course design is simple:
How to turn your situation into a variety of questions
How to experiment with different variations on questions
How to access and assess referred sources
People would go through dozens of everyday and special situations related to health, finances, math, grammar, writing, sciences, arts, travel, repairs and remedies of all kinds, current events, culture, psychology and every how to imaginable. A knowledgable society is an empowered society.
A new brief article on The Business Case For Storytelling
Harvard Business Review posts on the fact that the best leaders are insatiable learners. One of the premier champions of this perspective was the famous John Gardner.
In these head-spinning times, even more so than when John Gardner offered his timeless advice, the challenge for leaders is not to out-hustle, out-muscle, or out-maneuver the competition. It is to out-think the competition in ways big and small, to develop a unique point of view about the future and get there before anyone else does. The best leaders I’ve gotten to know aren’t just the boldest thinkers; they are the most insatiable learners.
Learning is the prerogative of conscious leadership. Those who truly lead are not those with the leverage of position but those with the power of learning.
A new St. Louis Washington University study turns out three conclusions about gender, competition and creativity:
Women dominated groups become less creative when they compete against each other for rewards
Men dominated groups are more creative when competing against each other for rewards
Women dominated groups are more creative when working together to compete for a common reward
Keeping these gender dynamics in mind makes for more successful collaboration designs.
The tension between faith and science predates the famous Church condemnation of Galileo who as a 69 year old scientist was punished for trying to teach the absolutely unforgivable heretical science that the Sun rather than Earth was the center of the universe.
In a recent paper, Princeton economist Roland Bénabou and two colleagues unveiled a surprising finding that would at least appear to bolster the "conflict" camp: Both across countries and also across US states, higher levels of religiosity are related to lower levels of scientific innovation.
The future of the "strong negative relationship" between faith and science is unclear. I expect that people representing more moderate religiosity will bridge the gaps and allow the epistemologies of faith and science to coexist as two unique and valid ways of knowing in ways that allows for innovation to flourish.
Our need for innovations continue to grow as we still have over 2 billion people without access to healthy water, cooking and plumbing and we still have the incredible condition that 85 individuals own as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet.
In a workshop this week on the new book I introduced the idea of creating a sense of harmony in how we use our time on any given day. I suggested, with enthusiastic reception, that we create a sense of harmony when we make sure we have had things we started, continued and completed on any day. This creates a sense of harmony that gets lost if we spend most or all of the day doing predominantly any one of the three. It also add it the quality of our experience to do things that cycle through all three within a few minutes or couple hours.
According to a number of neuroscience studies, just 20 minutes a day meditating changes our brain structures in ways that make us more present, creative, focused, centered and adaptive. This can happen in a 20 minute period or several 5 minute bursts. Any form of meditation works. In basic mindfulness meditation, we keep returning our distracted attention back to the center of a single focal point. The focus can be anything: the breath, specific sensations, an image, object, sound or word. It can be done sitting, standing or walking. The point is not to eliminate distractions but to practice the art of returning attention back to center.
