People in onboarding to any team need accelerated learning curves. They need to know their ever-evolving iterations of questions. They need to know who can best help with their questiins. They need understandings with team members on how work and communication gets done, how feedback happens and how decisions get made.
The partner frame
The labels for those we service are many. They include clients, customers, buyers, patients, students, members, citizens.
A useful frame for all is partner. Peter Block says it best: partnership is a relationship based on mutual service for mutual gain. It works.
MindFlow
When we do our best listening and talking together, our thoughts flow together to create new ideas that work. We experience mindflow.
Mindflow is the lively and productive playing with options, perspectives and curiosities. This when everyone feels free to voice considerations, clarifications and concerns. Mindflow raises the collective IQ of the group and leverages the group's capacity to be optimally creative, realistic, mindful, discerning and aligned in action. It does this because it engages simple listening. It creates understanding which opens possibility space.
We simply practice the 3 what's of mindflow:
Considerations: What if...
This is suggesting ideas, alternatives, options, additions and enhancements.
Clarifications: What are you thinking about...?
This is asking for more details and examples on anything that emerges. It's curiosity assumption testing.
Concerns: What about...?
This is describing potential issues, problems, downsides, exceptions and questions about implications.
In any conversation aimed at agreement on anything from easy to complex, all we do is engage the 3 what's.
When we're not engaging with each other in mindflow, we're presenting ideas as undebatable, defending ideas, taking sides, demeaning or dismissing what others think and wonder about, dominating or disappearing in the conversation or going along in pseudo-civility. Each of these lower the collective IQ of the group and diminish the group's capacity to be optimally creative, realistic, mindful, discerning and aligned in action.
Mindflow is ideal for any conversational context.
*from the upcoming “Simple Listening” due January 2019
What kinds of teams need what kinds of leaders?
When we help leaders develop, we need to give prime considerations to the capabilities, challenges and constraints of their teams in order to clarify what kinds of leaders they need to be and become. Assessing them against a pool of generic leadership criteria is interesting and yet usually irrelevant because it doesn't directly take into account the topology and ecology and ontology of the team.
A realistic approach to prioritizing approaches
It doesn't matter that we generate a variety of approaches to the future. There are two realities that matter: our shared capabilities and action dependencies. We have a finite scope of time and capacity. Certain things must happen before other things. This simplifies the timing of everything. Prioritization is not a question of importance but one of timing.
We're good as we are
To do well together, we don't have to analyze or change people's personalities. All we have to do is know and engage each other's knowledge, curiosity, talents connections and resources.
Project management, simple
Whatever the scope and conditions of a project, we can manage it simply by keeping our interests clear and agile, our questions varied and agile and our actions focused and agile. Agile is clearly the priority beginning to end.
The early gains prioritization question
It's useful to use the question, What could be early gains in moving forward from this interest? It's not just progress, it's actual useful outcomes. If we want to explore visiting Europe, what all the things in the short term we can discover locally and virtually like art, culture, film, music? Who know what else interesting this could lead to? It's the small is smart principle. If we want to start a new services business, how could we just get one paying client or customer?
Getting alignment on interests
Working from shared interests as a group means first agreeing on the selection questions to be used to vet options. This goes well when the group already has explicitly shared values, beliefs and a sense of their common narrative.
The problems we want to have
It is common to hear leaders, from any generation, wrestling with their “problems” with a tone of hoping to finally solve all of them.
They are between perplexed and interested when I suggest they will always have 39 problems, 39 being a fairly symbolic number. Changing the number is not in their purview. Deciding what kinds of problems they want and going after those is.
Distinguishing priority interests
When we consider what interests us in the future, it's a proactive reflection. We're thinking about what good we would like to create. We can base our priority interests on any number of questions. Here are a few examples.
For how long into the future could this interest provide value to me and the most people?
How strongly is this interest aligned with my core gift, values and beliefs?
What kinds of new good stories could this interest generate?
Why we (naturally) resist goals and plans
Goals and plans tend to be based on assumptions about unknowns. Assumptions provoke doubt. We resist what provokes doubt in us.
Question-based interests are different. They instead evoke curiosity and enthusiasm. Not an insignificant distinction.
The unpredictability of new emergent interests
As move from multiple priority interests with our questions, it's impossible to know where our questions will lead, what they will deny and affirm, provoke and evoke, inspire and spawn. We don't know until we keep moving forward one question at a time.
Can we commit to interests?
Why not? Why can't we commit to interests the way we would to any worthy desired future direction? We can prioritize our interests and dedicate ourselves to moving from our highest priority interests.
The optimism edge
Biomedical researchers are beginning to see evidence that imagining desired outcomes in a context of interpersonal caring can significantly influence physiological and psychological wellbeing.
This illuminates the power of dreaming together. It supports why dreaming energizes us in the direction of our greatest interests.
The limits of open discussion
It's interesting watch a group waste time in open discussion. Usually, many listen to a few debating and arguing opinions.
It is the opposite of getting the group questions right, working them in small groups and weaving it all together in a coherent whole of next steps.
Interestingness
Writer Zat Rana talks about interestingness. It's an antidote to the fixed presumptions of goals. It's the idea that the best way to create an optimum future is by working from what most interests us.
This liberates us from the tension between shoulds and seductions. It liberates us from goals that make us feel continuously inadequate and insecure in their attempt to predict an unpredictable future. We are no longer closed off to noticing new opportunities and treasures.
The future demands attention, and while focusing all of our energy on it is self-defeating, we do need to be intentional about directing some of our effort towards it as we orient ourselves in the world.
“Goals are one way to do that. They give us a way to make concrete what is otherwise uncertain so that we can make progress without losing ourselves to anxiety. The problem, however, is that they often mistake what exists to provide orientation as a thing of value in itself.
The best way out of this trap is to pursue what is interesting — to use our intuition for what it is that we find novel in this world to make the process and the goal one and the same thing; to continually update our sense of what is worth pursuing without being confined to false certainty.
Interestingness seeks out the riddle of life. It gives us a reason to turn the next page, to see the next scene, to give form to the unknown.
Feynman embodied this, but he also once said something that captures what it is that differentiates such a pursuit from mere goals and certainties:
“I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives… In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.”
Goals, incorrectly, assume that we already know what it is that we want. Interestingness is more humble. It makes up its mind as it moves, slowly blowing from one thing to another, until it eventually grasps something that lies beyond prediction.”
Working in sync
Working together in sync in the long term requires working together in sync in the short term. It’s all about coherence, connecting the directions we’re interested in with near term questions that represent progress in these directions. It’s immediate interests that help realize ultimate interests.
Planning inaccuracies
One of the most persistent inaccuracies in planning is that we must have a dependable set of assumptions about the future in order to move forward. This is an intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty which leads us down a road of unrealistic approaches.
The easiest way to overcome this problem is back working from questions. Are question is in power us in the face of any kind and scope of uncertainty and ambiguity.
Why would directions change?
Directions change for any number of reasons.
We discover better ways to get to the same good
Others join us and we shift to accommodate their directions and gifts
We achieve enough progress and create space for new directions
We develop new talents and interests that position us differently
We find out a direction is not feasible or realistic relative to our values and beliefs
The world changes and we change the world