===

“The coming struggle for power will increasingly turn into a struggle over the distribution of and access to knowledge; not just consumption. Power seekers’ will use this struggle to further their power ambitions. While mass media could have been seen as sweeping generalized manipulation of attitudes and beliefs, technology is using fragmentation to have those with power divide and conquer.”

Alvin Toffler, 1981

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It is too simplistic to suggest any society, or nation, is divided. The reality is that society, and communities, have become fragmented, each isolating into its own cocoon of mindsets, attitudes, beliefs and even performative metrics (proof). If we step back, this is a natural consequence of years of rhetoric and unhealthy narratives. What else would we do after years of businesses suggesting business was a war and the other businesses were out to get us and it was a battle of us versus them, kill or be killed. Or your church is telling you only you will go to heaven and everyone else is designated for hell (or heathens). Or some Cause suggests it is Armageddon if you do not agree with them and if you don’t you are part of the problem. Even issues like climate change, abortion and vaccinations have become battlegrounds of us versus them. And the politicians, well, they are an onslaught of ‘the other party is evil and will destroy this country” or “that country is evil and out to destroy us” or whatever us versus them derivative they can create. Each, individually, divides, and each contribute to fragmentation. There are two main consequences to all this which leads to the creation of smaller groupings, communities, of like minded people:

• –         The more dividing issues occur, the more complex the world seems and the more inept, or unable to contend with, any centralized center of power is, which leads to decentralization (of everything) which only compounds the sense of lack of coherence.
• –         From a whole cloth perspective this cacophony of dividing creates an overall sense that everything is out of control and the world is spiraling downwards into the depths of despair (this is the roots of cultural despair).

But then we get too technology.

Technology, in and of itself, is nothing. Without people, without people generating content, it is a passive tool regenerating itself to its own purposes. Yet. Once humans become involved technology begins to amplify – amplify divides, fragments, communities and tribes. It is within the fragmentation aspect in which we begin to pause on the benefits of technology with regard to society. The fragmentation, the phrasing of ideas, ideologies, values, norms and actual ideological commitments just begin to blur the greater truths associated with each. Fragments get emphasized to strengthens pieces of views all the while blurring larger issues and societal coherence. The extension of technology into our lives has only seemed to accomplish the fact that people everywhere sensing their control over their lives slipping away as the world becomes increasingly complex. With that mindset/belief people begin discerning specific scenarios within which they can find meaning, self identification & success and then go about creating a subsystem, a likeminded community, where desired actions and direction are created, further intensified by a sense of their own survival within the larger system. There is a general feeling of remoteness from the centers of decision making so they create their own decisonmaking centers. These choices are supported by a feeling (which becomes a belief) that those in power don’t care what “people like me think” which only increases an increasing sense how little capacity individuals, alone, feel they have to shape events. Individuals recognize they cannot flex power to manipulate any meaningful levers of control, they end up groping around almost desperately for ways to bring back some order and sense to their lives, and inevitably smaller likeminded communities are forged. What ends up happening is that society becomes an interaction between these likeminded communities and their changing micro boundaries at a community level all trying to exist in a macro larger system attempting to shape boundaries and pull levers itself for the collective good. The consequence of this conflict/tension tends to make the likeminded communities only double down and increase close identification with those within that particular group. This means that society has become fragmented and not divided.

To state again, a major part of the issue is that people have come to believe that whole systems are simply too complex to meet their needs or serve their wants. So, they’ve sought to regain control by turning to subsystems, in likeminded communities, less complex relatable groups, in the hope that their interests can be better served and some control is regained over the distant impersonal forces that intrude upon their daily life. Simplistically, people have simply given up on the distant big structures of power striking a “big is threatening” and “small is effective/beautiful” pose. Technology has simply taken a gentle sloping trend rising towards skepticism and doubt, laced with some conspiracy theories, and exponentially made it a steep climb.

This has become a period of cultural despair and creation of likeminded communities is an active response to fight despair. I say that because this smaller group creation is an adaptive response to the problems of complexity; not an abandonment of responsibility. The creation of likeminded communities should not be equated with indifference nor is it an expression of apathy or cynicism. Development of smaller communities is simply a search for new structures around which to organize scenarios and which the individuals’ micro needs can have macro consequences. I highlight this to make two points:

• –         This is active participation in society, not a passive reaction. These people are not retreating, they are going on the offensive toward things they actively care about. This is important if we attempt to engage with a collective future in mind. As with any self-decentralization if we seek to regain some centralization or, at minimum, coherence, the fragmented communities must be solicited with sincerity, not disdain or a belief they are not ‘smart enough’ to know better.
• –         Technology feeds on active participation. This is more a warning than it is anything else. If a likeminded community ‘feels’ something, the internet will feed that feeling until it hardens into a belief. It will also actively feed other likeminded people into that community. Contrary to opinion, technology can create blindness and will actually encourage people to go blind.

Which leads me to proof in a complex world.

In order to have some legitimacy and just survive within the larger system the likeminded communities construct scenarios, assume responsibilities, and assign analytics to everything they are involved in. In other words, likeminded communities have their own analytics, they have their own narratives and, unfortunately, sometimes they have their own facts. In fact, the larger the macro societal crisis the more likely it will involve a shift at the subgroup level performance criteria that they will attach to their own legitimacy. This expanded use of metrics may dispose people to rethink what has long been taken for granted and decide to shape their own performance criteria themselves. I would be remiss I remiss if I didn’t point out that media plays a role in subgroup performance criteria development. For example, what Fox News cites is important can often become a community criteria. This criteria becomes a measurement for the larger system – even if the larger system may not have the same criteria. So, while the larger system may actually be quite effective in totality, if not the very specific issue at hand, the performance analytics are not aligned and the conflict only creates further dissonance between the groups and the system.

Technology is the ally and the enemy.

Information should be intrinsically beneficial to society and, yet a fragmented flow of information and communication results in increased knowledge AND fragmentation. Technology plays a role in where we go from here, but first, people need to think about the future they desire which, typically, rests on the most fundamental assumptions we make about reality. In the present competitive view of the world, we often think that the most capable are those who are the most competitive, and accordingly that competition creates and secures long-term viability. On a societal level, we have essentially adopted a zero-sum dynamic behind most of the things we do. This separates everything, and everyone, into a binary 0/1, yes/no, good/bad, this way/that way design world (software, algorithms, business individuals and even countries). This current design belief has only made the divide between winners and losers constantly grow and this polarization leads to radicalization (of ideas, opinions, behavior) and, well, society does not benefit. A fragmented society is not one that will effectively build a future good for the collective whole.

We do need technological advances, but our humanity and society must develop at the same speed as technology develops. As our technological ability to impact the world is radically scaling up, our human ethical choices as to how to implement that power must scale up accordingly.

The solution resides in being able to see clearly.

It may be difficult for a likeminded community, from all views within a healthy community, to recognize that humanity – even theirs – is lagging our technology. It may be difficult for a fragmented society, specifcally the smaller communities themselves, to see beyond their loose talk about obsolescence and the rot at the core of our society and institutions and business when the existence of that community may be grounded in some apocalyptic view about every systemic crisis. It would behoove each of these smaller communities to understand it stretches credibility to extend each individual systemic indictment to the entire structure of business, government, justice, and institutions. Every debatable action does not demand some mandate to destroy the entire system and every disappointment or concern about the larger system is not a mandate to shrink away to a smaller community mindset. We need some optimism, not just in humanity, but in the grander systems and institutions. Not blind faith, but optimism. I always recommend reading Rutger Bregman’s Humankind to remind everyone about humanity. I recommend for the ‘We’, those who seek to find solutions to what seems like a dysfunctional society, we need to recognize the difference between fragmentation and divided because the solutions are different for each. Divided is about building bridges and fragmentation is about building coherence. Ponder.

“Because of the different rates of change of its components, a building is always tearing itself apart.”

Stewart Brand

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“The unapparent connection is more powerful than the apparent one.”

Heraclitus

———————

Is everything moving faster? Is change occurring at a mind-numbing pace? While it may feel this way, and at almost any conference someone will be espousing this, the non-hyperbolic evidence suggests different. Gravity is still gravity, a minute is still 60 seconds and actually meaningful innovation has slowed to a crawl (in innovation terms). But the feeling of faster, and having to move faster, remains.

That said.  “Since 2016 the Earth started to accelerate.” Yeah. This is reported from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. So maybe its possible we just feel earth spinning that fraction of a second faster (note: doubt it). Beyond the earth, the acceleration of innovation we have experienced in recent years, although real, has not appeared to have increased productivity growth as much as the hype would suggest. Some people would call this issue ‘speed versus velocity.’ Regardless of what you call it, the business consequence of this is you can constantly feel at any given point we are stuck in the past (or the status quo) while discussing what’s next – all the while feeling like you are constantly missing out on something you are fairly confident everyone else gets and you don’t. There is a natural reason for this; reality is made of layers.

Which leads me to Stewart Brand and Pace Layering.

The idea is that there are multiple levels of pace in the world spanning from nature to fad/commerce speeds.

“The outer layers—fashion and commerce—move fastest while the inner layers of nature and culture move much more slowly. Because they’re all moving at different speeds, the system is better able to react to shocks. Some parts respond quickly to the shock allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity.”

Stewart Brand

Circling back to the point on rate of innovation, pace layering can even be applied there because many people would argue speed of innovation has increased, yet, the majority of those ‘innovations’ have a short shelf life (source: Professor Bram Timmermans, co-editor of Industry and Innovation). So, innovations can exist on different pace layers too. What this means is when we talk about business, we are constantly trying to parse out what is on the outer fastest pace, the fads, fashion and hyped, and what is on the slowest pace – culture, people, and nature. In other words, discerning what is important and what is not. Generally speaking, business doesn’t handle this discussion well.

To be fair.

It’s quite possible in a complex world with so many dynamics your brain can quickly turn to fluff that we attempt to simplify things into the graspable.

It’s quite possible that’s why business is often discussed in 2-dimensional framing and ‘this or that’ decision-making.

It’s quite possible in doing so we over simplify and end up in some simplistic-summary-world or an oversimplification which appears useful, but is useless.

It’s quite possible we heighten “we must do this” as a technique to overcome an overwhelming sense of uncertainty.

That said. The reality is the world is not changing faster than ever, it just feels that way. Certainly, many things are fundamentally moving faster and its possible that all levels of pacing are moving slightly faster, but to suggest nature (biology) moves at the same speed as culture is nuts. BUT. It creates a sense that everything is not only moving faster, but things are moving too fast to grasp. It creates a sense we are living in a totally liminal space and, frankly, when we feel that way, we will hold on to whatever appears to be stable.

All of this gets compounded because, within all this complexity, people will inherently pick & choose what they want making “the more things change; the more things stay the same” a simplistic trope encouraging everyone to ignore purposeful change as a necessity because stability simply becomes not only a means to remain sane, but also because it is unclear what change is the change to do.

So what do we do?

Vision, tactics, coherence, and possibility plans. The reality is business, and in particular marketing, demands action now. Most actions bridge then and next absorbing aspects that worked then and embed brand value into the needs of the now with an acknowledgement of building future value. The trick is always to not get too caught up in the now, in other words, blinded by the outer layer of fads and cultural whims and short-termerism which sacrifice brand value creation. This demands some vision to navigate the layer noise.

I believe it useful to think of the layers in terms of technology and people. Why? The truth is technology almost always wants to work faster than most people want or can. Maybe worse is that technology engages people on a superficial level, which can create some activation, therefore neither embedding the full product value nor engaging in a substantive way.

Which leads us to “possibility plans.”

In general, a business is better when they have plans, but not all plans are created equal. Plans should be built to work toward something rather than working to do something. “Doing something” creates fragile businesses through ‘objective blindness’.  Here is a counterintuitive thought, plans are good because broken plans represent disciplined opportunities, therefore, well made plans are more about possibilities than they are simple execution. Remember. The best laid plans always fall apart. Always. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a plan. And even a plan for when the plan falls apart. And maybe even another thought on another plan. All those things involve change. And then of course there is the plan you hadn’t thought of that actually becomes the plan you actually do. Simplistically, all of those broken plans are about possibilities. Possibilities are change at its best.

The truth is the best business people don’t waste time stopping or slowing down to try and glue a plan back together again. They keep moving and make the best of what pieces are still within grasp. Maybe create some new pieces of the plan to replace some that broke off. They keep an eye on the vision or the goal and let some pieces catch up later if they can. Yeah. Success in navigating multiple levels of pace is you don’t stop to fret over broken plans, you simply seek out new possibilities (in fact often finding innovative fresh thinking on the move) and leave behind anything not key to achieving the goal (and that can be people and materials) always plucking out the possibilities that may exist on a different plane and different pace (but are pluckable at that time & place).

• ** quick note on the feeling of not keeping up. Far too often in a world shouting at you that speed is the only thing that matters, people will grab onto things that are only going fast. This is a mistake. In fact, broken plans may actually reflect dispensing of pieces & parts that are going too fast. Your plans should reject ‘too speedy things’ – fads would be included in this – as being too asynchronistic for what the greater objective narrative is. I am not suggesting this is always the case – you can eject too slow, too burdensome components also – but simply maintaining something because it is ‘fast’ is absurd.

Possibility plans are not exactly linear, but evolving. This is true because of pace layering. The best plans interconnect the different paces cognitively, tactically and within the vision, i.e., coherence. The plan fits into the flow of business activity.

Navigating the pace of now and next, well done, captures possibilities.

Navigating the layers of a business’s pace, well done, captures present & future, now and next.

Navigating the pace of the organizational strategies, well done, captures what if’s, what nexts, what (and where) could be’s.

In the end navigating the pace of now and next effectively means your business is not tearing itself apart, but rather building it up. Ponder.

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“Everything solid melts into air.”

Marx and Engels

We talk about uncertainty in a number of ways, but for most everyday people its experienced like quicksand – the ground you are standing on, solid, melts into air. It’s a shock to the system. It’s kind of like someone you trusted suddenly becomes untrustworthy or an institution, which has reliably met its responsibility, is suddenly unreliable and exploitive.

Anyway. So google uncertainty you will gets millions of hits with tips to deal with or coping with, but none on the moment in which solid melts into air. This is a really important point because, conceptually, ongoing certainty degrades thinking and while research suggests ongoing uncertainty upgrades thinking, there is the wretched space in-between. It is within this in-between answers are elusive, it is difficult to discern right from wrong and much of what was important has simply melted from solid to air.

Which leads me to society.

For a variety of reasons, a lot of what people deemed as part of ‘solid society’ has melted into air. As a consequence, we are seeing is the emergence of a new social configuration that may be at odds with the ideas that constituted the beginnings of the social life as they have developed up until now. This social transformation involves major efforts by individuals within that society to redefine their social places with the outcome of these efforts almost always being uncertain and, yet, driven by a certainty of some purpose. It is the odd conflict a feeling like their social identity has been uprooted and therefore attacking social configuration to actually uproot social identities as they are currently defined. What is at stake is certainly a new relationship between individual interests, social rights, and economic efficacy. But the outcome, in terms of a new solid fusion of all of these things, is uncertain. It is interesting that in this uprooting we are simultaneously seeking freedom for self and, yet, defining bounded social practices.

Which leads me to individualism as solidity.

Right or wrong, many people shrink back into individualism when faced with a moment of solid melting into air. This is important because virtually all the present major social issues focus on the individual right to self-define one’s situation and possibilities for action and on the definition of the boundaries and rights of the collective an individual is associated with. Much of this tension emerges from a foundational belief that human beings are not only enabled, but compelled to self-create their own rules of life. This is a semi-important thought because nobody ever creates rules from nothing in an empty space – context and history matters. It was Karl Marx who said “human beings make their history themselves but they do not do so voluntarily, not under circumstances of their own choosing, rather under immediately found given and transmitted circumstances.” I imagine my point here is that when something solid melts everyone struggles a bit to be able to proactively reflect on underlying assumptions. I believe it was Andrew Grove of Intel who used the term ‘learning to effectively worry.’ You worry, a bit, about some of the basic assumptions commonly made and whether they work within the situation at hand – or do they put a modeling constraint on which, in this situation, can be set aside.

This means, in the moment, someone needs to assess how the mood, or your mood, affects how you are addressing the situation. While this unique type of uncertainty tends to breed some aspect of fear (uncertainty itself), how you are framing the situation affects the mood – problems create anxiety (and desire for probabilities rises) and opportunities breed optimism (and increased risk acceptance).

Which leads me to recreating something solid.

The ability to regulate, and reshape, our own attitudes & behavior provides us the hope that melting is fleeting and navigating the sheer complexity of a seemingly simple moment between solid and melting is possible. The suddenness of solid melting into nothing does not, and should not, imply total destruction of all, and everything, that is solid. Most often when solid melts into air it is simply taking some time to reshape itself into something sold again. It may not be the same ‘solid’ as before, but it will end up just as solid. It is within that, well, where we escape the series of quicksand solid-to-air moments. Ponder.

What day is it? It’s today.

“My favorite day”

–

Pooh

Happy Thanksgiving.

It’s been an odd year and this will be an odd Thanksgiving but possibly a bit less odd than in the past several years. That said. This past years has been a nutty year in a string of nutso years. So, maybe, of all years, we can ignore the dysfunctional family, the crazy uncles, politics and the general discomfort of gathering over a big turkey. Maybe this Thanksgiving we should start thinking of it as the first of favorite days.

Because, yes, every day was Pooh’s favorite day. This is actually a nice attitude <of course he did have fluff for brains>. Its not really any positivity mumbo jumbo its just more about having hope. If every day is your favorite day, that means you think there must be something hopeful that will occur, or, at least the possibility of something good & hopeful. And you know what? Pooh’s right. If you pay attention, look around, something good usually happens every day. Which, well, means that every day can be your favorite day.

Look. Today may not be my favorite ‘favorite’ day, but it is certainly a good day to say thanks for whatever Life has given you.

‘Cause we all have been given something <even if it seems hard to find it on occasion>. This year has been a tough year. Everything got shaken like an etch a sketch (again) which made good plans go astray and new plans get re-planned and, well, plans went to shit. That doesn’t mean some good things didn’t happen just that more often than not they happened without a plan (which then makes them seem either lucky or non-repeatable).

So maybe I am suggesting this Thanksgiving maybe you can not only give thanks to the people around you, but thanks for some plans not going to shit and some going to shit and you created some things to go well and maybe, just maybe, you had more favorite days then you think you did.

Look around. Think about it. Find it. It is always worth the time and effort to do so.

Plus.

It gave me an excuse to use a Pooh quote.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions, but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to great titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – the farmers, mechanics and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors for themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their government.”

Andrew Jackson

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The future is always dependent upon the development of talent. I don’t care if this is business, philanthropy, education, science, humanities or simply society in total, if you want to be better tomorrow than you are today as a civilization, you need to cultivate talent. When society loses its ability to cultivate talent the implications filter across society and all its trappings. First and foremost, the worst consequence is missed potential. Researchers called this “the lost Einsteins” or the talented overlooked (typically found in minorities and poverty/less fortunate) and it costs countries multiplicative-level potential innovation and thinking.

This came to mind when someone tossed out the infamous “merit based” system for talent.

Simplistically, a merit based concept is the eugenics application of talent. A horrible idea. It sure sounds good, but it isn’t. Talent is not a race. It is a tricky concept, one which is not always a measurable thing and even when measured one could argue the highest scoring do not always offer the highest talent. Regardless of your belief, as a society we suck at cultivating talent. We tend to to give the mediocre wealthy disproportionate advantages from the non-mediocre less-than-wealthy. We tend to dismiss the importance of some foundational young age talent optimization stepping stones like daily nutrition, home security and positive support network as integral to future talent optimization. We tend to treat talent as a race meaning that when we assess ‘talent’ we always view those who are ‘ahead’ as the ones who have the most talent. Basically, we tend to not only not cultivate talent, but in some ways don’t even assess the talent well.

And maybe, while this is certainly a societal issue, the core issue is us – people.

What I mean by this is that I sometimes believe one of the hardest things you can learn in your career is that your best is not particularly special, i.e, your ‘talent’ may be a bit closer to average than you feel comfortable with. This is the realization, a Life fact, that your talent, in reality, is matched by a shitload of people. Learning that your best is relatively easily matched by a shitload of people. Basically not understanding that your own talent could have been matched by 1000’s of other people if it had been recognized and cultivated somewhere in the past. Whenever asked about this (because a bunch of people feel uncomfortable when I say this) I bring up the Janis Joplin documentary: Little Girl Blue.

“… at 27 i realized there are a lot of people with talent, the difference is ambition.”

Janis Joplin

Talent is talent.

Smarts are smarts.

And expertise is almost always relative.

At any given point in Life and your career you can look around you and if you are self-aware you will note you are rarely the most talented, rarely the smartest one in the room and rarely the only expert. You realize that even on your best day you may not actually be the best. I imagine that is a tough thing to get your head wrapped around. Okay. Let me say it is a tough thing to wrap your head around.

It’s not that you truly want to be the most talented, the smartest or the most expert, most of us don’t really care, you just want to feel that at some point you are smart, talented and an expert at something.

Which leads me back to cultivating talent.

I would argue if someone cannot recognize their own talent is not that special, they will inevitably suck at cultivating talent. Why? Because you will only seek out the ones who have figured out how to run the ‘talent race’ well up to that point and attempt to capture them – no cultivate, just capture. Cultivating talent is not, and never has been, about just the best of the best. It has always been about maximizing each person’s potential (because everyone has some talent). Cultivating is not comparing the blooming flowers, but rather simply attempt to have all seeds bloom the best they can bloom and planting seeds of talent. Stewarding the transition from generation-to-generation transition is all about cultivating rather than capturing. We have a responsibility to the future to cultivate talent. Ponder.

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“… the economy cannot stop making us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.”
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

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“Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete.”
Raoul Vaneigem

==

A boatload of people are asking themselves “what is the meaning of all this” these days. I believe we have always done so, sporadically, but now we appear to have an underlying ongoing questioning of everything. This creates an issue. That core issue is “meaning” or “personal meaning” or maybe “is what I am doing going to matter.” This can range from small individual actions, my vote, to massive esoteric thoughts, like a legacy. Suffice it to say meaning/mattering has become a societal issue.

I could argue this meaning issue is a consequence of a variety of things: increased globalization, cynicism of organized religion, consumerism, Taylorism, 24/7 internet and several things that have slowly stripped away some of the vestiges of meaning. The issue has become exacerbated by the fact we are now actively encouraging people to “find your Why.” In other words, we are asking people to stare into the void. By actively asking people there seem to be one of three outcomes; they discover no ‘Why,” they create some ‘Why”, or they actually do have some semblance of a “Why’. 2 out of 3 outcomes are horrible and the third outcome, I am guessing, is a fairly small percentage of people. So, while we have a real societal issue, we are actively encouraging people to pursue things that are most likely fool’s errands. The void will still exist and, well, its human to fill a void (by whatever means may be at hand). It almost becomes a battle between “I & the void.” And therein lies a bit of the issue at hand.

While voids are doomed to be filled, it seems like in today’s society a void, an increasing one, is occurring between individuals and collective good/action. This may be occurring because of extreme individualism which, consequently, has a cost to the collective (individuals owning and consuming shit only creates more bad shit; not just revenue/profit). But ultimately this individualism means that an individual has less meaning (less connectivity to the collective means less opportunity to assess impact) which feeds back into a consumption society in that the individuals consume more to fill that empty space of meaning. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out meaning, while having an infinite value, only truly demands few finite things to fulfill, while consumption is theoretically infinite and the void it attempts to fill is also infinite in that it can never truly offer the highest human value, therefore, people are falling farther and farther into the void.

To be clear. there is a relationship between the void in individual meaning and consumption. No. I do not have proof, research, or any data, but if I were a betting man, I would bet it was so. I would bet it were so because if you attempt to measure your contribution to society by what you have consumed, well, that is a bit wacky and a lot unhealthy. Contribution is a measure of the benefit you have given to society. Consumption is a measure of what you have taken from society. Meaning through consumption is a weird thought because in its emphasis on consumption it is more likely to create division (or divide) simply through the natural dispersion of that consumption and while I do believe some social unification is important, in this case the division is an emphasis on individualism measurement rather than collective measurement (as noted earlier the collective interaction is important to tapping into true meaning).

I am not anti-capitalism nor even anti-consumption/consumerism, but I am anti-void.

Which leads me to how businesses don’t really help this issue.

Simplistically, the consequences of a productivity-focused business world was increased consumption. This translated into actually BEING a customer or consumer was seen as the new success. We made consumption a measure of achievement and, as a consequence, created a society of envy and comparisons in which to be poor means having less than the average; even if the average is quite high and, ultimately, being seen as less than average. Yeah. Consumption has an ugly underbelly – the people who consume less. When society begins to split people by how much they consume, the ‘consumers’ see those who access safety nets as ‘exploiters’ who are simply not industrious enough to be able to consume. To be clear. This is not reality but rather perception and, in this case, this perception becomes a mental reality grounded in a general ignorance of reality. But that ignorance creates a void and, well, we know what happens with voids – they get filled. This warped version of meaning crafted a caste system of, uhm, meaning. A huge swath of business leaders misinterpreted Adam Smith to mean that if we each looked after our own interests some invisible hand would mysteriously arrange things out so that it all worked out for the best for all. We have propagated the rights of the individual and freedom of choice for all, but without restraints, without thought for our neighbors, and it has become license to do whatever you want to win at all costs and mere selfishness. We have forgotten that Smith wrote in a Theory of Moral Sentiments that a stable society was actually based on sympathy and a moral duty to have regard for your fellow human beings. The market is a mechanism for sorting the efficient from the inefficient, but it is not a substitute for responsibility or meaning.

Which leads me back to voids and consumption.

An absence of meaning, of any degree or dimension, creates a void. And I would argue a really personal void. The type of void that either keeps you up at night or just nudges away at you fairly persistently. This persistence almost demands you do something about it. and, sure, you can watch Tedtalks, read books, whatever, but at some point, you want something tangible to show some progress against this brain worm chewing away at you. And with businesses constantly saying “buy me to solve X”, well, you jump on the consumption train. After awhile you point out to people how well you have done jumping on the consumption train often enough that the little voice in your head nudging you about ‘meaning & mattering’ gets shouted down just often enough that while you know you have a ‘meaning crisis’, it is no longer a “crisis crisis” to you personally. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that a crisis is a crisis and all crisis demand a response at some point. And maybe that is my point. Maybe we should all, collectively, answer the crisis rather than constantly suggesting each person ‘find their why’ to only have them staring into some abyss. Maybe we should all see if we can address the void together. Ponder.

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“A tapestry is being stitched

story by story,

step by step, thread by thread

Pictures of her life come alive

with threads of gold,

of silver, of royal purple,

of hope, of faith, of love

her story unfolding

in the fabric, the knitted

tapestry of her life”

Raymond Foss: threads of her journey

==============

In my mind everyone should think of their lives this way.

It is nice way to think of Life. It is positive, not dark, and colorful in its hopefulness. And it captures the essence of personal stories & storytelling.

In today’s world we have a nasty tendency to rush our ways through stories trying to showcase a tapestry instead of showing the weave & the threads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Everyone says “time is the new currency” and “shorter attention spans.” That’s … well … bullshit. People will pay attention, for as long as it takes, if it is a good story.

A great story is built thread by thread and time is only driven by how quickly, or how slowly, you showcase the beauty and intrigue of each thread and how it fits into the greater weave.

I see gobs of people talking about storytelling online, on twitter, in presentations, most talking about brands, personal branding & brand heroes and authenticity and, well, a lot of mumbo jumbo that suggests there is some formula.

Yeah.

Sure.

I know there are effective ways of telling a story, but if you just took some care to build the story step by step, thread by thread, permitting the pictures come to life in rich and vivid colors, wouldn’t that beat any formula or “should do’s” that some marketing storyteller expert tells you?

People are inherently storytellers so maybe we should just get out of their way and let them tell stories.

Regardless.

Yeah.

All people should think of their lives this way. Ponder

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I googled and found Foss has a site called Poetry Where You Live: http://raymondafoss.blogspot.com/ .

It has over 13,000 of his poems and almost 1000 of his photographs if you are interested.

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“a manner of speaking becomes a manner of thinking”

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“If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

Albert Einstein

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Being Erica:

“Change. Sometimes it sneaks up on you. Sometimes it hits you over the head. And sometimes you turn a corner, only to find you’re different in some small way, and the world doesn’t look quite like it used to. So, where do I go from here? No idea.”

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‘We call it a disaster, so nothing can go wrong.’”

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In the past week I told two people “change isn’t that hard” and, twice, received a fairly skeptical look. This is possibly one of the most consistent views I have that varies from the mainstream view. To be fair, maybe 12 years ago I was clearly in the change-is-hard camp. Since then, I have inched my way into the “(most) change really isn’t that hard” camp. Let me explain. Not all change is created equal (yet we far too often lump it all together), and, in fact, I would argue the majority of change is incredibly easy. Shit. I’d argue most of our change just happens and we ignore it (maybe because we don’t want to admit change is kind of naturally occurring). The difficulty is that we MAKE things hard so that it can seem like it is hard. The truth is, left to its own devices, change naturally occurs – individual, community, business, society. Change is almost like gravity. If that is true it would appear if change doesn’t happen, its because something, or someone, is fighting gravity – yeah, like people, us, humans. We are the change constraint.

Which leads me to “will” or having the will to change.

I bring this up because in business we often confuse ‘institutional will’ <the will of the business to adapt to a future state> and ‘individual will’ <the will of people to do the will of the institution>. This is a really important topic when we discuss whether change is hard or not, because in business the institution establishes the frame within which anything happens. They create a mindset and very very often create a very flawed plan of action neither of which tend to dictate how people morph to fit the institution rather than have the institution adapt to meet the shape of its employees. If an employee chafes, or even fights, against the will of the institution, the institution tends to tighten the screws down on behaviors and indoctrinate mindsets. This Institutional Will attitude toward employees matters because institutions inherently create systems of motivated blindness <where people follow orders motivated by what they see as for the good of the institution/business>. It creates some seemingly harmless behaviors which actually obscure key downward leveling aspects of the system. In other words, if you motivate to value the outcome too much than the process or the ‘how’ becomes of less value relevance. This matters, in reference to ‘change is hard’, because many times the institution is dictating the change/behavior it desires and ‘changing’ to meet something designed that isn’t natural to what one would do on their own is a hard thing to accept. But even if the institution isn’t dictating change it is often dictating desired behaviors (buttressed by incentives) which are also not natural to what any sane human being would do on their own – so even without change, current context is slightly painful at minimum.  Most everyone knows formal systems are the weakest links and informal systems the strongest <and most resilient to change>. Most of us also know if you disrupt the rhythm of the informal networks, destroy the informal systems and manage the ‘prediction-recollection’ mindset (intuition mental modeling frameworks), you can reshape the system as a reflection of what the people in the system see as their greatest potential. Read that least sentence and laugh if you want. I did. Its right but it would be naive to think anything over 10% of existing businesses think like that.

• ** note: i have always liked leveraging existing informal networks, and have even suggested in some cases in order to reshape an organization to maximize its potential you have to deconstruct (all the way over to ‘purposefully destroy’ on the spectrum) informal networks. Institutional informal networks are social, economic, functional, but no sane business desires an ongoing battle within an organization of conflicting informal networks so i posit that in some cases purposefully deconstructing some of the informal networks as the way to open the way for new and better informal networks. To end this thought. I sometimes believe we do not talk enough about ‘natural resistance’, or institutional gravity, when talking about change as an accelerated effort to fly.

Which leads me to changing the mindset.

We have convinced ourselves, and businesses, change is hard. The effect, and consequences, are we actually did make changing hard. To unravel the consequence, we need to unravel the belief.

To be clear. Institutions hate to change. People, as individuals, are more receptive. The former does so for a variety of reasons, but just watch as we move into ‘post-pandemic business mode’ and just watch how ‘the institution’ will come up with a variety of reasons, many of them which sound good, to suggest economic recovery would be better if we ‘went back’ to how things had been done pre-pandemic. They will hold on to the construct and grudgingly change some workings within said construct. But. Do not be fooled. This is institutionally driven more so than individually driven or even business driven. And, yes, I just created a hierarchy – institution within which a business conducts itself and individuals who work within a business, but are parts of the institution. As Drucker pointed out: “society is a conserving institution.”

But people, we, you and me, are different.

To be clear. Humans have some obstacles. I believe it was a French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, who developed a psychographic method to establish different socio-cultural groupings <I believe it is called the Sinus Milieu>.  Anyway. Basically, it is a model that challenges us to think about behavior, preferences and cultural practices. The main premise behind the model is called ‘the lock-in principle.’

The principle simply states that if we get used to something, we do not want to change our habits <or attitudes and beliefs> even if we are presented with something new or different that might be better. Simplistically it consistently shows <to a point that it is almost an unequivocal behavioral truth> that habit is stronger than the desire for improvement.

This thought partially explains that while 50somethings actually share the same desires as young people they are reluctant to let go of what they “know.” That said. We change every day. Mostly not in big ways, but we change. It may not be so easy to see if you sit down on a Sunday night and think “how did I change this week”, but it is easier to see if you look back a year. Business is the same. It changes every day. Why? Because business is made up of people. Yeah. We may try and suffocate the change thru processes, meetings, and protocols, but in-between all of that people are people and the business changes.

Which leads me to I believe we make 30,000 decisions a day (the average person).

Asking everyone to change so that all 30000 decisions change is silly if not absurd. And within that 30000 each of us, individually, will hold on to some of them with ragged claws. They are ‘our rituals.’ Our certainty. Our stability. And your will be different than mine and Gem’s will be different than Giles. But still there are thousands of decisions we can we can change. The trick is to match up the change with individual, herd (as Mark Earls the herdmeister would call it), the business itself, the customer and ultimately, the world/society. The change, big or small, syncs up to shift things slightly into the ‘better’ category. That’s kind of the holy grail of change impact.

I spent the bulk of my career in ad agency account management (although I worked in media, planning, business development, my best friends were in the creative department and was a COO – before I became a business consultant. I mention that because I would rummage around inside the business, operations and people, to seek out what made them tick, how they made money and who they wanted to be (versus who they were). The ideas and creative on the businesses I worked with could make the business feel uncomfortable on occasion not because they were wacky, but because parts of many of them showed a part of them, a better part, of who they wished they could be. Then it simply became a challenge of convincing them that this was the time, and the opportunity, to be it and, frankly, this better version of you (and the product/service you are selling) is what a customer prefers. I saw my job as finding the desired change and figuring out ways to amplify it either thru some initiative, creative, project or idea. I imagine this was my way of encouraging progress rather than achieving some milestone or objective (although I never articulated it that way then).

All that said. Change wasn’t hard.

Sure. I’ve presented hundreds of ideas and thoughts I was unequivocally sure were exactly what was needed and were right for them. Only to find in hindsight, they weren’t. That’s not to say they were 100% wrong or they were boneheaded ideas oblivious to reality, its just that somewhere within the idea was something that didn’t reflect the change they desired or didn’t reflect a fragment of who they wanted to be. And maybe they were wrong to focus on a fragment from stopping doing it, but maybe they were right that the part would affect the whole in ways they didn’t like. But my point is it wasn’t that people didn’t want to change or weren’t willing to change, that it just wasn’t the change that they wanted.

People will find exceptions to what I am saying, and some really good exceptions, but they are missing the forest for the trees.

Businesses change all the time. Maybe not as much, or as fast, as we want. People change all the time, maybe not as much, or as fast, as we want. But we change. And it isn’t really that hard.

People will push back that businesses are mired in status quo. And they may be right, and wrong. I will point out that status quo is not stagnant. Status quo is actually made up of movement. It could be circular doom loop movement or even some less-than-useful movement or the shitty power dynamics that all organizations have, but there is movement and, yes, there is change even within status quo.

People will push back by pointing out ‘being stuck in a rut’ or how businesses do the same things over and over again. and, yes, if you view business (and people also) as running through each day in layers of pacing, some layers do repeat over and over. And sometimes those pieces are really important – good and bad. But. At other levels, other pace layers as it were, brick by brick, day by day, a business is being rebuilt. Small incremental changes, over the course of months and years, amount to huge changes. Some changes are direct impacts, others are indirect, all affect the company – either culturally or even from a productivity stand point – increase inefficiency as well increase effective … depending on how the business manages this change. I imagine I could point out that not all ruts are created equal and not all status quo is bad.

People will push back by pointing out a version of Drucker’s thinking. He stated that society, community and family are all conserving institutions and that business should be organized for constant change (I would note to the consultants suggesting business culture should be ‘familial’ you are simply making change harder, but I digress) and point out that most businesses in today’s world actually act like conserving institutions.

I push back by pointing out that while people make 30000 decisions a day a business makes exponentially more and that conserving is relative and principles, well defined, can shift decisionmaking, in a tectonic way.

Which leads me to the pandemic (and some wishful thinking by some people about change).

It’s possible the pandemic will teach everyone a bunch of these things and there a bunch of people espousing ‘big changes’ because of the pandemic. I am not confident that will happen because, once again, the people are coming out of the woodwork to encourage belief in the wrong things. People will be sorely disappointed if we tell them about some ‘new normal’ (that will never appear as it is described). People will be sorely disappointed if we tell them to go back the way we had been doing things (because it will never appear exactly the same again).

Yeah. The truth is that all of us, within our own 30000 daily decisions, have changed a bit. We view some of those decisions just a bit differently. Many of us have even changed some decisions. Businesses have also. So when we making sweeping generalizations like ‘new normal’ we are missing the opportunity. Change has occurred, change will continue to occur, and the trick is to amplify the good change for the better.

“An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment.”

Peter Drucker

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In the end.

Change isn’t hard. We do it all the time. Business does it all the time. And you know what? Everyone actually wants to change. I do not know one person who does not want to be a bit better tomorrow than they were today. And maybe that is what I miss most about being in advertising. On a really good day I was part of something that helped people be better. It was always some grand things, more often it was a little thing – offered reliability, offered some comfort, offered added value in a miserable day. But. It was something. And it was something that encouraged change in a positive direction.

I would have argued with Drucker. I would have suggested everything is a conserving institution and also built for change. Its wheels within wheels. And the trick is to find what is worth conserving and what is most valuable changing. Because all of us conserve something, and most of those somethings are valuable, maybe even just for sanity sake. But all of us also change things. Shit. All I know is that change isn’t hard and I wish we would stop saying that.

When circumstances are right, unlikely people do extraordinary things. When the weight of the situation is behind them, the push of events and time tend to align and the extraordinary happens. Then it is just a matter of getting swept up in the events which, as a consequence, change the course of the world – immediate world rippling out to community, world and the future. Change, history, context, future all balance on what a human actually cares about. Yeah. Change is simply a byproduct of what we care about and, I imagine, how much we care about it. Ponder.

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“In the kingdom of glass everything is transparent, and there is no place to hide a dark heart.”
Vera Nazarian

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Most of us shiver at the thought of living in a kingdom of glass. The thought of absolutely no privacy is a pretty uncomfortable thought. So, we build fences, put curtains up and wear things that reshape how people see us. But this is also how dark hearts hide from us. Using the same tools, its not a question of privacy to them, it is a question of subterfuge. A pathway to purloining some of the goodness that exists elsewhere.

And therein lies my point. To get something good for all of us sometimes we have to do something that may feel a bit uncomfortable for the self. We are not machines and we need to have a sense of direction, but progress toward that direction relies on some belief that not only other humans are good, but it is just a bit easier to see the dark hearts that may seek to subvert our progress. Said another way, transparency needs some trust in human kind and kindness threaded through a society, a collection of individuals, who would like to be better tomorrow than today and recognize, collectively, we have a better chance in achieving this than if all of us hide behind curtains and fences. To be clear. Society does exist and is necessary, but as a supplement to individualism not a substitute. We is made up of I’s, and I’s create the We. Society is not only an outlet for our individual contributions, but also a reflection of our collective contributions. It is a place to give to as well as to receive. So maybe we should seek to create just a bit more of our kingdom out of glass so that there are fewer places for dark hearts to hide.

“Tone is the hardest part of saying no.”
Jonathan Price

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This is part of my series of things I learned working the security company job I had in college.

This one is about Big Fred. That is what everyone called him. Big Fred was a mountain of a man. I am sure there was a lot of muscle hidden in there somewhere, but he was Jabba the Hut before there was Jabba. I am not sure he ever had to actually take any action because he was so intimidating.

Anyway. Big Fred’s job was always the same job at every event. He managed the artist/players entry area. He was the last line of defense to the performers. He said who got in, what got in and in general provided oversight for their well being. So when I was a backstage supervisor I was kind of de facto under Big Fred’s supervision.

I would say everyone I talked to thought Big Fred had the sweetest job in the company. After a couple of months watching Big Fred in action I was pretty confident if I paid attention I could learn a lot and very confident you couldn’t pay me enough to do his job.

• **       note: by the way, while I didn’t follow closely, I do believe he was recognized for ability beyond being big because I believe a number of bands hired him to manage their backstage tour.

Big Fred had a big job that was easy to miss because of all the glitz and glamour surrounding everything taking place.

Big Fred was constantly squeezed – by those within (the performers) and those without (those who wanted to be near the performers). He had to balance all that and make it all seem like it was under control. I am pretty sure I never once saw Big Fred freak out (even as the oiled up dancers came racing out of the Van Halen dressing room).

Let’s see. So. I have Neil Young at the back entrance wanting to be let in. I don’t have his name on the list (and you learn VERY quickly it doesn’t matter who it is, if you don’t have them on the okayed list they don’t come in). So me, capable of making many decisions, frankly ain’t gonna make this call.

“Hold on a second, will you Mr. Young.”

Back to Big Fred. Explain. Now Big Fred was a master of this crap.  He knew if he should ask someone, put someone on the list or just say no (all while he has one eye on caterers wandering in, random special guests and keeping riff raff out of the way). Here is where he shared an even bigger lesson to me (the kid). “Nope. He can’t come in” (“oh shit” bubble over my head), but he then says “hold on. Let me come with you and we can tell him together”.

Look. This may sound stupid, but to a 19 year old kid telling Neil Young “nope” was a big thing. And Big Fred kinda had a great sense for how to defuse things as well as delegate and empower. And he wasn’t willing to hang one of his employees out to dry.

I know I say in my bio I have always been a collector of moments and Big Fred gave me some of the most thoughtful formative management moments. I am unclear whether others saw the same thing, but I hope Big Fred is still doing well. He taught me some basics I still utilize today.

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Other CSC security job learnings:

corralling chaos (a management lesson)

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practicing actually means more relaxed

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action has its time

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gaining perspective

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