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“I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas.

Ideas have never caused anybody’s downfall.”

Emil Cioran

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Ideas have consequences.

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Crazy ideas with consequences.

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Ideas are tricky things. They get especially in today’s world where we talk ad nausea about how anyone can have a ‘good idea.’

Truth?

While all ideas have consequences, and crazy ideas can have some crazy consequences, not all ideas are created equal.
Truth?

Not all people can come up with good ideas.

Another truth?
Obsession, or the injection of obsession, actually may be what makes an idea more than just, well, an idea.

Why is this important?

Because so often we sit in meetings and brainstorm and flippantly toss out ideas. And they are, well, just ideas.

Hollow? Maybe not completely.

Flat? Possibly.

Deep? Rarely (many are mostly created from some individualistic opinion or belief).

Obsession? Extremely rare. And that is what differentiates ideas. The depth. What I mean by that is there is an obsessive aspect to a great meaningful idea.

To be clear. People can obsess over an idea and that idea can be crappy. But there is a link between obsession and obsessive. What I mean by that is obsession in an idea can (not always, but, can) generate an obsession among people.

So, while an obsessive idea may never become obsessive to people, an idea obsessive to people will always be generated by someone who has been obsessive in the idea and its thinking.

And I imagine that is my point.

There are ideas. And then there are ideas that change people <which means we have an opportunity to change the world>. Uhm. Unfortunately, these types of ideas come with a responsibility — a burden as a matter of fact . And not all people are capable of accepting this burden and not all people WANT to assume the responsibility of these types of ideas.

“Sureness will always elude you.

The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this.

We go on because of it.”

Claire DeWitt

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

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”

Virginia Woolf

Ok. So, if obsession is the glue to successful ideas one begins to wonder where does that glue come from. Well. First. Far too often we seem to judge obsession in absolutes — as in absolutely unhealthy, bad or creepy. But what if the obsessive ideas are actually generated from an obsession with learning — some specific topic like science, math or woodworking or any ‘increased knowledge-based’ aspect of Life — which creates the underpinnings of something someone can become obsessive about.

That kind of seems like a good worthwhile obsession.

But let’s take a moment on obsession with learning.

Life, and learning, and even curiosity in general, means most of us are trapped in an endless chase.

The real scam people try and sell you is that some milestone or some objective represents some end point. I imagine another part of the scam is something I tried to debunk back in 2010, the whole concept of “well rounded” learning and people.

What we are taught about learning — how to learn, what to learn & what learning is important – is very different than what most of us feel & perceive when we encounter learning. And the rules look even more out of whack if you are one of the ones who is obsessive about learning something.

Those of us who have encountered, and embraced, obsession recognize that the learning game is rigged and has rules opposed to what we view as maximizing learning. We know there is no ‘well rounded’. We know there is actually no end. We know that our obsession is a means to an end and more often a favorite piece of clothing we will inevitably store away on the closet to be replaced by some other piece of clothing we will wear endlessly until we become obsessed with another.

What this means is that anyone with a relatively healthy obsession will endlessly circle around whatever they want more of and do so willingly because it was what he/she wants.

We visit the extremes seeking the extreme edge of something that is infinite and, yet, we find solace in the extremeness and not an unhealthy pursuit of something that will never actually be sated.

What this means is that a good obsession may actually mean you have the high unrealistic expectations and yet are able to mix and match them with the curiosity exploration of the day.

What this means is that obsession is what creates ideas with depths & dimensions that people can become obsessive about.

I tend to believe good obsessive learning is effective for a variety of reasons.

• It is self imposed.

• It is defined by a chosen environment & topic rather than a dictated one.

• Measurement is self-imposed and the measurement objective is an unquantifiable “enough when it is enough” <we dictate the ‘satedness’>.

At its root level obsession is all about “wanting more.” And with regard to learning the ‘more’ is not some well-rounded evenly shaped smooth journey. And therein lies obsession biggest challenge in life. Unevenness makes people feel uncomfortable. They seek ‘well rounded’ and ‘planned exploration’ in terms of what is right. Therefore, if you are obsessive on one topic or one task you are not, well, doing it right.

And that kind of seems silly to me.

I am sure that someone will point out that there truly is a ‘righter way’ to learn but in my pea like brain learning driven from the inside of someone is significantly more powerful than learning dictated by someone outside of me. I also believe in my pea like brain that an idea created from an obsession, maybe with some uneven edges, is more likely to create obsession because it has some uneven edges.

Anyway.

I tend to believe part of youth is learning about obsessions and constantly being obsessed with something and some things. Unfortunately, adults confuse exploration with youth obsession. Sure. Sometimes the exploration can verge on some unhealthiness, but more often than not it is a pursuit of ‘more’ within something liked or desired. The pursuit itself becomes a means to a different end in that exploration means one encounters new things which can encourage a diverting/diverging path and a new obsession.

That is partially what youth is. It was in my day and it remains so today <although reading things online suggests many adults seem to think the young are more obsessive than ever – note: no research proving that>.

• For some this obsession learning path provides a focus for adulthood.

• For some this obsession becomes an unhealthy adult pattern.

• For some this obsession becomes a healthy relentless pursuit of something ‘more’ in adulthood.

I would never suggest that an obsession with learning is easy mostly because, well, anything extreme runs the risk of edging a little toward madness <or at least maddening to the people around>. But I will suggest that an obsession with learning is one of those youth obsessions which translates fairly well into adulthood but also seems to get beat out of people as they grow older as ‘obsessive is bad.’

Me? I could suggest that an obsession with learning, as long as you don’t get too full of yourself, means you maintain a certain youthfulness toward Life.

To be honest, I haven’t completely figured out how to resolve obsession I simply manage it and think I am always working on it. What I do know is that those of us who are obsessed with learning will always be dissatisfied with what we do not know and, yet, sometimes find satisfaction in the ideas our obsessiveness creates.

The ‘ideas’ portion is important I have learned that the pursuit of your obsession has to have meaning in order for it to be a healthy obsession. And meaning can take form in a variety of ways, but it cannot be a simple milestone or objective but rather an embodiment of some growth or ‘moreness’ <not actual attainment of something>.

To finish up … I will end where I began. Ideas have consequences. Crazy ideas have consequences. Great ideas have consequences.

Choose your obsession and idea well. Ponder.

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“As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.”

Benjamin Franklin

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Silence when it is because you didn’t say something is a, well, a haunting silence. It haunts because inevitably we must account for our idleness when it happens. It is the repercussion of the version of ‘things you don’t say.’ (see: https://brucemctague.com/things-people-dont-say ).

That means this is not about things you purposefully ‘don’t say’ … because that is about selective silence … this is more about regrets and missed moments and shit like that.

This type of silence is more a ‘regret silence’ and is about accountability in our own minds, ie., accounting of the repercussions of choice, and choices, we make with regard to ‘idle silence.’

—-

In my voice

there is at least a sign

of living geometry

the words of life

I have never understood

the absurd

difference that runs

between death and the illusion

of the heart’s beating.

Salvatore Quasimodo

—

Despite the fact I think the words you stop yourself from saying are the ones that will haunt you the longest <and I am fairly sure most people know this>, we still struggle with warring impulses to speak up and shut up.

Look.

I am a no regrets guy. I kind of feel like it’s a waste of energy looking backwards and regretting shit. In fact. Most of the time I would argue the things you think you regret probably did more to make you the person you are today than anything you didn’t regret.

That said. Idle silence can be fixed in some cases. Yup. You can if you spend a little time thinking about some of the things you didn’t say, recognize them and figure out if you can do something about it.

By the way.

This is not navel gazing <of which I am not a huge fan of>, but rather an examination of your actions, or inactions, in assessing and improving. And maybe in the examination you will find yourself seeking an opportunity to say one of these things:

“I’m sorry I didn’t …”

We’ve all have made some bad idle silent mistakes. And apologies, when used well and sparsely, can have real meaning.

Not cheap meaning, but valuable meaning.

To someone else, or, to yourself.

So say you’re sorry.

And don’t attach a “but” excuse to the apology. Eliminate ‘but I was really upset …’ or ‘but I thought …’ or any ‘but statement’ that diminishes the apology, absolves you of the mistake or shifts even the tiniest amount of blame back on the other person.

Say you’re sorry, say why you’re sorry, and take all the blame.

No less … no more.

Acceptance is a small quiet room, no less than you want, no more than you need.

“I’m sorry I let you down.”

By the way.

This is not “I’m sorry.”

This is sorry attached to something.

Attached to something because sometimes people take a chance on you and for some reason you don’t step up and get it done. This means someone else stuck their neck out and you didn’t care enough or were not good enough or … well … just not enough.

To be clear, once again, this can be someone else or it can be yourself in terms of how this is viewed.

Most times in these situations we make excuses … or simply ignore the fact someone took a chance on us and we put our head down and get on getting on. We rarely take the time, or maybe don’t have the guts, to stop and say … “I know you went out on a limb for me and I’m really sorry I let you down. I will do my best to never let it happen again.”

Yeah.

I know you can’t go back in time.

But maybe if you are lucky, you can still say it even though it is better late than never.

My real point is to ‘never let it happen again.’

If you don’t step up when someone puts you in a position to step up, own it. No excuses … no caveats … own it.

It ain’t easy. But this is a good hard. The kind of hard that makes you a better person.

Anyway.

I am chuckling as I wrote this because there will be a shitload of people who will not ‘get’ what I am writing about. I say that because there are a lot of talkers in the world. They talk and talk and … well … talk. They bludgeon you with words. And some of them may look back and actually find some idle silence to be accountable for, but then they will use gobs of words to try and be accountable for the idle time.

—–

 “Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”

Robert Frost

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Look. We all have some ‘idle silence’ to be accountable for. We all have made some silence choices we most likely regret. We will never always get it right. That is Life. But we can always be accountable for our choices. And we should be accountable for the things we didn’t say … the idle silence. Ponder.

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“The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.”

Umberto Eco

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“We made a drywall list of keyboard buttons we would like to see:

PLEASE, THANK YOU, FUCK OFF, DIE, OOPS…MY MISTAKE, DO SOMETHING COOL AND SURPRISE ME.”

Douglas Coupland

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Archaic as it may sound, writing things down may be more important today than ever before.

Yup. Crazy, huh?

Writing shit down does matter.

Which leads me to how many times do we hear about someone complaining about how they missed a deadline or forgot to do something?

Well. If you interviewed all the guilty parties the overwhelming answer would be. 

“TIME! 

THERE’S NOT ENOUGH TIME!”

 Yup.

There is the culprit. That bastard Time.

It pretty much is a consensus in business, and Life, that the only thing that creates missed deadlines and missed ‘task doing’ is lack of time.

If you think about it just a bit, that’s kinda nuts. Ok. Maybe it is just a bogus excuse.

The reality is the issue is not Time but rather, uhm, “everyone is always looking to do an unreasonable amount of things in an unreasonable amount of time.”

All that said. I say “nuts” to that.

Critical deadlines are part of business and will always be a part of business. If you can’t live with crazy deadlines, get out of business. Go be the person behind the counter at the bike rental place or a government employee at the driver’s license department or a park ranger.

Now that I am done being an asshole let’s assume you have a real job in a real office with real responsibilities.

This is where the whole writing shit down topic becomes relevant.

You may have heard of the Yale <or Harvard Business School> study of goals in which only 3% of the graduating class had specific written goals for their futures. Twenty years later that 3% was found to be earning, uhm (clears throat a bit), 10x that of the group that had no clear goals.

Oops.

That is an urban myth so please do not screenshot that portion and expound upon goals.

No actual study done. In fact. Fast Company published an article about the alleged study: “If Your Goal is Success, Don’t Consult These Gurus”: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/cdu.html . So all those “list business consultant gurus” and the gazillion self help list making books are full of shit.

However.

Just to be fair <not to the expert blowhards, but to lists> a clinical psychologist at Dominican University in California has conducted research on goals.

1. Types of goals:

Participants pursued a variety of goals including (in order of frequency reported) completing a project, increasing income, increasing productivity, getting organized, enhancing performance/achievement, enhancing life balance, reducing work anxiety and learning a new skill.

Examples of “completing a project” included writing a chapter of a book, updating a website, listing and selling a house, completing a strategic plan, securing a contract, hiring employees and preventing a hostile take-over.

2. Goal Achievement:

Group 5 achieved significantly more than all the other groups; Group 4 achieved significantly more than Groups 3 and 1; Group 2 achieved significantly more than Group 1.

  3. Differences between all writing groups and the non-writing group: 

Although the previous analysis revealed that Group 2 (written goals) achieved significantly more than Group 1 (unwritten goals), additional analysis were performed to determine whether there were also differences between the group that had not written their goals (Group 1) and all groups that had written their goals (Groups 2-5). This analysis revealed that the mean achievement score for Groups 2-5 combined was significantly higher than Group 1.

Conclusions:

1. The positive effect of accountability was supported

Those who sent weekly progress reports to their friend accomplished significantly more than those who had unwritten goals, wrote their goals, formulated action commitments or sent those action commitments to a friend.

2. There was support for the role of public commitment

Those who sent their commitments to a friend accomplished significantly more than those who wrote action commitments or did not write their goals.

3. The positive effect of written goals was supported

Those who wrote their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not write their goals.

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 My point here is simply that lists can help in a variety of ways. This study shows some evidence that a combination of accountability, commitment and writing down one’s goals demonstrates writing shit down enhances the likelihood of goal achievement.

But here is the most interesting point. Its not really about accountability, its more about eliminating stress. Yeah.  List making has its highest value not in actual productivity, but actually with stress reduction.

Stress?

Yup. There is a guy named James Fallows who wrote in 2004-something the fact that our brains may not be able to remember shit when it gets overloaded and, yet, at the same time the brain also can’t forget. Basically that is the cognitive paradox – overload and locked & loaded.

Regardless.

That sucks.

At some deep and not very efficient level the brain is always chewing over all the things you should have done, but haven’t. Worse? As it chews away it tends to remind you of them at the worst time – typically in the middle of the night.

What this suggests is that most of our stress comes not from having too much to do, but from trying to keep track of it all. Which explains why, when you’re feeling so overwhelmed and you finally sit down and make a list you tend to experience a sense of relief. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this sense of relief occurs even if the tasks just written down remain as unfinished as when you began.  Yup. But now your brain has a plan to chew on. Basically you have offloaded the job of remembering them to an “outboard brain” which then permits your actual ‘inboard brain’ to relax a little.

Regardless. Here is the deal.

If you are in a business you can make lists until you have an entire wall covered with nothing but lists, but, frankly, all the shit on your lists and why they never seem to get done are typically a reflection of the systems around you, or more specifically, the lack of systems as well as people who do not follow the system. Yeah. I just gave everyone who isn’t getting things done an excuse.

I am kinda okay with that excuse because, let’s face it, most companies just have crappy systems. Mostly because most business is done verbally or via email and true project management gets relegated to behind “all the shit we have to do now.”

Please do not misconstrue anything in what I say because project management is hard.

REALLY hard. Especially in a business organization.

Which leads me back to the main point of today’s piece:

EVERYTHING IS PUT INTO WRITING.

NO EXCEPTIONS.

It keeps you organized, because you no longer have to keep stuff in your head, but you can externalize it to a piece of paper, and later you can process it.

Why write it down?

It’s pretty simple. I don’t need research nor any guru to tell me the key thought.

Although there is no proven limit of how much stuff you can remember, there is always an opportunity cost. You cannot focus on too many things at the same time. Writing shit down is a powerful simple way to focus your attention, keep track of shit, and create a permanent record for the future.

Here is another factoid that should encourage you to write shit down: the Act of Writing Helps Your Memory.

Yup.

Have you ever noticed that when you write a shopping list, you can remember almost all the items on it without glancing at it? Or when you have a bright idea and scribble it in your notebook, you can remember it all day? The very act of writing things down helps to get them lodged into your long-term, not short-term, memory.

Look. Writing shit down on a consistent basis seems like a Time burden and often seems to not bear any obvious benefits. But, beyond achieving goals, lists can actually saves time.

——

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

Goethe

——

Lists can save you time because they can help you decide what to do. I say that because not everything on a list is of equal value. Suffice it to say there are want to do’s and need to do’s. It was Stephen Covey who did an excellent job outlining how to think about things on your lists. This matrix is the creation of Stephen Covey <which he discusses in his book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”>.

Central to this matrix is organize and execute around priorities.

If we classify activities by urgency and importance, you arrive at the matrix above. Urgent means it requires immediate attention. Important has to do with results, it contributes to your mission, values or high priority goals. He advocates spending as much time as possible in Quadrant II, feeding opportunities and starving problems. The time you’ll need to add to Quadrant II will come from Quadrants III and IV. As you begin to spend more time in Quadrant II, the issues in Quadrant I will begin to dwindle.

Which leads me to writing shit down and the quality of idea output.

Simplistically, off target ideas are bad ideas.

<yes … there are bad ideas>

Many people equate success in ideas to how nice the idea looks or feels or how quickly it was “turned around.” Some people equate success to quantity + speed to generate. And, yeah, I cannot argue that those things are important in today’s ‘cram 10 pounds of shit into a 2 pound bag’ and slightly frenetic <if not verging on chaotic> business world, but bad ideas are bad ideas and quantity & speed are not enough.

In today’s world just getting shit done doesn’t hack it; it has to work. It has to produce results. Turning crap around around in record time only means that you are an excellent crap producer. You check a whole bunch of shit off your lists, and you may show up in monthly meetings pointing out how much shit you have checked off your list, but at some point someone is going to point out all you have done is generate shit lists.

But, back to poor ideas.

I’ve been around the ideas part of business for almost forty years. In the process of doing thousands of ideas assignments, I have learned there are basically two things that contribute most to good ideas:

quality input

=

time

Good input is critical to good ideas and the proper amount of time for the input ingredients to cook to create the idea pretty much will make or break the quality of your output from your list items. I would like to note that adequate time may be one of the most underrated important factors in the ideas process. Yeah. The difference between bad ideas, good ideas and great ideas is always about having the opportunity to look & think about what you did yesterday. I can guarantee an idea given a chance to be finessed, to be rethought a little will be a better idea in the end.

Time <some … not an infinite no deadline amount> makes an idea better.

Anyway. I thought about this after seeing another one of those lists of ‘5 things successful people do’ and, humorously, making lists almost always seems to be on that list.

It’s kind of crazy <in my mind> because we Americans are, and always have been, list makers.

—

“Americans are good with to-do lists; just tell us what to do, and we’ll do it.

Throughout our history, we have proven that.

Colonize. Check.

Win our independence. Check.

Form a union. Check.

Expand to the Pacific. Check.

Settle the West. Check.

Keep the Union together. Check.

Industrialize. Check.

Fight the Nazis. Check.”

Marianne Williamson

—-

In the end. What is the best reason to write shit down?

You avoid verbal project management <which is a 98.32764% chance of failure if verbal>.

If you want something, or something done, write it down.

Nothing should be done on a verbal basis.

Things get lost when not written down. Thoughts, ideas, input, well, anything.

There you go …  writing shit down means the shit has a less likelihood of getting lost. Ponder.

———

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

John Maynard Keynes

———————–

 “man trapped in the world of machines, unable to grow as a human being and become himself.”

Clockwork Condition (the unfinished sequel to Clockwork Orange)

———-

This is not about collaboration in the traditional sense. I tend to believe most collaboration discussions are misguided <utopian> and most actual collaboration leads to consensus and a less-than-optimal conclusion. That said. Every organization would benefit if every employee was able to maximize their potential which, in simplistic terms, means everyone contributes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone ‘contributes’ now, but what I mean is everyone contributes to the whole of the system and not just their part. I imagine what I am suggesting is dialogue throughout the organization which creates an exchange of information, knowledge, ideas and execution.

“If you really want a Learning Organisation you must build the capacity to change the internal dialogue. It is dialogue that has created who we are and only a change in our dialogue will change that. Networks will decide on their topic of conversation based on their sense of identity.”

Atkinson

Through interactions with the knowledge, and each other, the organization itself continuously improves – sometimes in small increments daily and sometimes in velocity driven shifts with emergent opportunities – and the people continuously improve. But it is also not just improvement in the traditional sense it is also improvement in terms of efficacy. One of the most overlooked and underdiscussed aspects of successful business is the alignment of resources to ‘the idea’ <strategy>. A paper trail certainly offers a schematic of who and what is available and when but the truth is it is only through conversations, and dialogue, where the nuances <which can make or break any strategy> can be discovered. Additionally, I would also note that an innate sense of organizational identity is crafted by the individuals within the organization through each and every interaction, iteration and action. But when everyone contributes there will be a constant tension found in the pushing & pulling and the tug of war between those who see the world pragmatically and those who envision the possibilities which keeps shaking the business etch a sketch. All of this happens within the frame <boundaries> of the organization culture and principles. Yes. All of that happens when everyone contributes. It is a constant feeding frenzy of what is and what will be fed by what people want & need driving new ideas and new ways of doing things and better ways of getting things done and … well … a better version of who you are as an organization.

And therein lies the power of purposeful possibilities: finding the “better” within what is.

This is a version of always seeing what will be, what could be, driven by ‘what is.’

I call this ‘better inside for a better outside’.  The better inside is obvious. This is purposeful adaptation and a constant fine tuning of how things are done and products & services offered.

But we cannot, and should not, forget that all of the ‘better inside’ feeds a ‘better desire’ outside.

Pragmatically customers want a better product, better efficiencies, better effectiveness and a better benefit offered.

From a possibilities standpoint your customers, even the business decision makers huddled over productivity reports and P&L statements desire something better than a good numbers report. Sure. That is the day-to-day ‘meet the needs state’ type stuff going on in their heads but at some point, they lean back in their chairs, either in the office or in the comfort of their home, and they desire, maybe even need, to see something better to validate themselves as human beings beyond simply ‘doing their job well.’ They want to feel they have done something better, offered something better or contributed something better, or, being dynamic themselves beyond their own practical purpose. When everyone contributes there are a greater sense of meaning and impact which is easier to articulate in your own head as well as to others that aren’t involved in the business but involved in your life. Contribution has a nice ability to translate well everywhere.

Anyway. My next point on everyone contributes. There are a lot, a shitload, of crazy smart business people out there. But there are not a lot of crazy smart business people who seem to be willing to do something crazy like ignore the business books which articulate principles and focus on ‘blueprints for success.” I imagine my point is that most businesses don’t consider ‘advantage’ as temporary. They see it as planned or when it actually happens, they treat it as sustainable.

And ultimately that becomes their downfall.

Windows of opportunity close. And often they close quickly. And maybe that is where the ‘sustainable’ belief really screws most businesses. They jump through the window of opportunity, and let’s say they even treat the stark contrast opportunity correctly, they then act like they are going to stay on that side of the window.

Wrong.

Bad decision.

Windows of opportunity are meant to be jumped through, opportunity maximized, and then you jump back before it closes again. I will say this. Windows CAN be held open for a bit, but only of everyone contributes. Because windows of opportunity, for the most part, are unplanned, so if people and resources flow to the opportunity that opportunity can be exploited and expanded upon. The corollary to that is if everyone CAN contribute it is more likely you get a better clue as to when to stop <which is actually one of the trickiest things in business>.

Anyway. My next point on everyone contributes is, well, lets call it the collective mind or the relationship between people and accessible knowledge through technology.

The cloud elevates all businesses to the level of the best generic technology <note: I do not know of one company/business who does not have access to Cloud technology>. Think of it as the common power grid from which a business opens up for business daily. But the real power of the cloud is it elevates the greater potential of any business as it taps into shared information to supplement, and compliment, the institutional data – while maintaining privacy of the institution itself. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out here that “people” <memory, knowledge, skills> represents institutional data in a significant way. That said. While the cloud represents an almost limitless pool of ever-growing knowledge and data, let me say that the cloud, in and of itself, can be just as stupid, if not stupider, than any one individual. More knowledge, used poorly, simply makes one stupider rather than smarter. The collective knowledge is only as good as who uses it.

As a corollary, individuals, and small groups of people, within an institution <augmented by the cloud collective knowledge> get smarter iteratively (even if they misuse knowledge because they learn from mistakes and discuss). Conceptually they get smarter than the cloud due to understanding of context and experience. I mention this to provide the possibilities and problems. When everyone contributes there is just a likelihood that everyone gets smarter as they will get stupider. Ponder that.

“In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all.”

Booker T. Washington

In the end. We are in the midst of change. I will not call it disruptive because I simply think it is transformative. The context and dynamics of the world have shifted and business, as business does <albeit kicking and screaming>, will shift to optimize against the new dynamics. I would argue at the core of this transformation is an increased ability to learn AND need to learn. Paradoxically, the learning most impactful will take place on the periphery or edges of the businesses. This shift is even more important because I view this transformative change not as incremental change <slow & steady>, but rather discontinuous <asymmetrical> evolution which can radically reconfigure opportunities <and problems> from the expected ones. This means knowledge dissemination isn’t simply about distributing information/knowledge, but what kind of knowledge critical to the business model AND the discontinuous opportunity. This means shedding some of what one knows and adding some new to create an optimal strategic decision. It is an art of knowledge that arises from analytics of the context, instinctual sense of interconnectedness <and dependence>, lateral thinking and imagination. It will demand that everyone contributes everything they are capable of – not just some title or existing responsibility. This also requires some change in how we think about thinking. As Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute, says “retreat and reflect: allow the inner knowing to emerge.” In a world suggesting we need to move faster we need to give thinking, and thoughts, space. Far too often we try and squeeze our thinking believing if we strip everything away the truth will be uncovered. The truth is we would be more likely to think of something useful if after watching and listening and gathering information if we stepped back and let all those thoughts and scraps of information roam in the empty space a bit. In addition, it helps if you think on the periphery looking in rather than from the middle looking out. What I mean by that is we can far too often get caught up in attempting to wrangle things we know which sometimes means the solutions or ideas simply work in that moment (becoming less optimal from that point on – natural degradation). Instead, if you perch on the edges, the periphery, you can see how an idea plays out in the empty space as well as if there is anything beyond the periphery that may change your view. How do you do that? Well. Have everyone contribute.

Ponder.

—————–

“We get together on the basis of our similarities; we grow on the basis of our differences.”

Virginia Satir

==

“There’s nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.”

Thornton Wilder

————

Well. There are a couple of things to think about with this quote.

–      What we think is not always what everyone thinks

This sounds basic. But, boy oh boy, we forget this – all the frickin’ time. In fact not only do we forget it we actually do so while remembering it.

Huh? What do I mean?

Well, c’mon, how often have you sat there and said ‘no one has been thru what I have been thru and can understand this’ or ‘no one understands how I think’ and, yet, when we look around and assess what people are doing <and thinking> we sit back and go ‘whew, I bet they’re thinking this …’

It’s kind of crazy.

It’s kind of hypocritical.

Suffice it to say whether you think you are normal or think you are abnormal what is happening inside your head is very often different than what is happening in the outside world. In other words … it is very very likely what you think is not what everyone thinks.

Next.

–      We should listen more

In business, in personal life, does not matter; we should just listen <without preconceived filters> more often.

I am fairly sure that it was Henry Miller who said “the street howls with the truth.”

Smart man.

Listen to the howls.

So let me share some observations for business.

I am an avid trend watcher, people watcher and behavior studier. I listen by watching. People give you massive cues <clues?> as to what they are thinking and why they do the things they do. You just have to listen to the music of their Life and find the beat of their individual drum. I say that because far <far> too many business people say “we need to do consumer research and hear what people say.”

Well.

You may.

But you may not have to.

In fact. Even if you do the research, if you are not a good listener, every dollar you spend on that research is wasted.

Regardless. Listening isn’t just with your ears, it is also with your nose and eyes and all your feelings.

People’s lives talk.

You may not understand the language immediately, but if you listen closely … really closely … you will understand.

Why is it so hard? Why do you have to listen so closely?

==

“I do not think I’m easy to define. I have a wandering mind.

And I’m not anything that you think I am. “

Syd Barrett

==

People are not easy to define. Most people are difficult to ‘slot.’

Yup.

Sorry about that.

I feel especially sorry for the people who think they are good at assessing people. The majority of them are, well, not. At best they are simply good judges of their own bias.

Anyway. We desperately WANT to slot and segment and cluster people because it makes it easier for us. But as soon as you do you stop listening. Yeah. That bias filter thing again.

Shit.

All I really know is that we need to listen more. There is nothing better for you than eavesdropping on the world on occasion. Ponder.

==

“They display all the distinctly reductionist habits of expecting to come to ‘know’ the problem and objectively find the ‘right’ solution by dividing the problem into discrete elements to be tackled by experts who ‘know’ how to do it. Any range of solutions can be tried because, if they go wrong, they can be reversed with little consequence for the system. They will expect, consciously or unconsciously, that once the ‘real’ solution is found, the problem will go away and they will now have an ‘evidence-based’ decision that can be applied again should ‘the’ problem emerge again.”

Fostering Complexity Thinking in Action Research for Change in Social–Ecological Systems

==

When I scribbled the “where did business go wrong,” I realized I could write a book in answer. Today I will focus on one thought – how business was stripped of substance which, inevitably, is about reductionism.

When discussing some of the issues business is facing, or has created, inevitably a lot of the discussion will be around “is capitalism good,” a lot of misguided conflation of materialism & capitalism and greed. Personally, I tend to shelve all of those believing business is about people making decisions for other people and whether those decisions are made to benefit people or dollars (ROI, stock market value, etc.). If business has gone wrong, it isn’t because of some system (because people created the system) its because people have got it wrong. So let’s focus on people.

The reality is the state of work has improved pretty significantly over the past century or so despite rampant Taylorism (partially because Taylorism DID improve overall business conditions for the worker). Today’s work, generally speaking, is less tiring and of shorter duration. The challenge is the other side of the Taylorism coin sapped work of substance, workmanship and meaning. Business, for the worker, became a relatively aimless pursuit of promotions or milestones where a worker often found themselves feeling relatively useless within a callous business environment tied to a clock. The way business was conducted only created worker resentment (in terms of meaning and later in money as inequalities increased) as one’s labor fell further and further away from any kind of personal craftsmanship. The reality was business began demanding different qualities in people than people would normally have brought to their work. This dissonance mandated the absence of the intrinsic humanness and the presence of only the extrinsic tools and labels. Work became subordinate to “necessity” and the ends (not the means). Along with this have arisen new technologies. These technologies have effective new uses, but they also come with new risks and challenges to business. In fact, many of these non-manufacturing/machine technologies raise questions about if and how not only AI technologies should evolve, but how all technology should evolve with regard to its effect on people. One could argue the only way to be able to design a better future of work, we will need to not only understand the threats but need to understand the AI systems themselves and how they work ON and With people (we should do the same with machines too). This will almost be a mandate as AI tools begins to help us make more and more types of decisions. As exciting as this technology is with great potential for good it also has the potential to disrupt the work as we know it today, hence, the workers as we know them today. If we are to steer the technologies between the benefits it can bring and the challenges it can create, business needs to seriously think about and build a set of mindsets, behaviors, attitudes, and standards that can guide the development of these technologies. You may note I did not suggest government regulation for policies because while they will be important in the future the most important aspect of the future of business and technology will be the involvement of humans themselves.

Which leads me to the stripped down version of business we have today.

In a world in which we tend to want to oversimplify things, far too often “business instincts” get stripped of any context or the rich & royal hues most typically associated with ‘good business instincts.’ In fact, instincts tend to be associated more with speed than effectiveness. In addition, we also strip leadership down to its barest and far too often suggest the importance of ‘’good business instincts’ as some superior skill <and instincts are not a skill but an attribute> inherent in good leadership. Basically substantive business decision-making has been stripped of reflectiveness and effectiveness in the interest of speed and efficiency. ‘Stripping down’ has led to ‘fail fast’ and ‘you are only successful of you are moving.’ What this means is business has stripped itself of its largest consistent value creation – people. Yeah. A slew of people talk about the next age of capitalism or ‘moving beyond industrialization’ as if industrialization was the issue. It wasn’t and isn’t. The issue is humans and their mindsets with regard to what work is and what business should be about. We can certainly let the tools decide those questions and a bunch of people are going about doing so – digital transformation, the “AI Age,” customer capitalism, creation economy, pick your buzzword poison. But I believe it would be a mistake to allow tools – who do not have human’s best interests in mind – making civilization shaping type decisions. In the end what stripped down business has done has hollowed out some meaningful substance and removed any slack so that when shit happens, it happens really fast with little to soften its blow. This has consequences not just on business, or the business, but the people.

—

Sometimes life happens slow, then really fast.

—

What business has done, as a machine built with a specific purpose to continue with growth at all costs, is actually burn the future in the present – ‘burn the future’ being not only global resources but human energy and intrinsic desire to contribute. To be clear. Progress, in and of itself, is not a bad objective, nor is growth (progress’s cousin), but over the past 100 years or so business has slowly stripped progress of its morality – or at least any serious moral reflectivity – replacing it with unqualified quantitative increases in transactions measured as prices paid in money. Growth, similar to technology, is uncaring of what is good for humankind. It is a measure, an objective, an ideology, bereft of morality in its means as it trudges toward its desired ends.

Which leads me to clarify growth as an issue.

It is lazy to suggest worshiping growth is where business went wrong. Growth, in many aspects, is good. The ‘wrongness’ is actually found more in, well, a constant desire for consistently more. What I mean by that is once you have attained a 15% margin, that becomes the standard. Lower means “you are doing something wrong” and higher means “you have done something well (and we should do more of it because this is the new standard).” If you grew 3% last quarter, less than 3% is bad. If your stock price hits X++, anything lower is bad. And maybe even worse is that within a growth mindset, maintaining where you are is bad. Everything is a stair step upwards or, well, you are getting worse in this business world. That is nuts. It is nuts because in order to maintain this kind of growth mindset you need to make sacrifices elsewhere (as I noted back in 2013 in how the generations have impacted how business has been conducted) and in business’s case it has spiraled in a negative direction. Suffice it to say, productivity kept on getting stripped through “do more with less” in order to maintain the profits that had been established in a different time, different environment, and different context. The context changed, but the “growth” standards did not. This mindset, which drove a shitload of unhealthy behaviors and working cultures/attitudes, clearly contributed to where business went wrong.

Which leads me which leads me to how business stripping has had real societal consequences.

Business has a nasty habit of believing their business is their business and not the business of anyone outside of their business. However. Whatever business does and how they conduct their business has consequences in the marketplace, in the community, in culture, and in society. When business strips itself down to only the essentials internally it puts higher stress on external performance and less slack to deal with inconsistencies. While risk taking is the obvious sacrifice in this game, the larger impact is on how the business approaches the market and how the market responds. Stripping the business down to its bare bones creates an almost survive or die mentality with regard to how it deals with the marketplace. This means that encouraging consumption – even if it takes persuasion to some fairly uncomfortable moral places.  In addition, encouraging people to believe materialism is the pathway to happiness becomes the norm and essential to feeding the business. As a consequence, this shapes the actual conduct of the business. This happens because the margin of error is minuscule and success is almost an imperative. Societally this manipulation of purchase, attitudes, and societal beliefs is driven by the business because it has no slack. When you have no slack, you give no slack. It is a take or be taken world. It’s not even zero sum, it is less than zero. The impact in society and communities and at the kitchen table goes way beyond any simplistic “shareholder value” impact. Business doing wrong by people begets people believing wrong, in some form or fashion, is right.

Which leads me to say we have a long way to go.

Many of my peers, 50 & 60somethings, do not think business has gone wrong. Well. Assuming you didn’t want to talk about “woke” or “purpose” or social involvement where they clearly think that is business going wrong. But if you want to talk profits, revenues, and growth, well, they struggle to see what I would see. I get a lot of ‘blindness’ to misogyny, systemic racism and even a warped view on what is ‘work.’ And I almost get disbelief with regard to the malfunctioning of business and the linkage between business and society? Well. That’s crazy talk.

I say that to suggest at the C-level of corporations things are going pretty much in the wrong direction. Culturally, below the C-line, my bet is that a lot of things are happening in the good direction. The revolution to make business right is already happening—it’s just that we don’t always see it. And maybe it’s good that we don’t see it yet, until the very moment where it makes a lot of things shift, and the commitment to creating thriving sustainable businesses that create thriving sustainable societies can’t be stopped by people thinking business has not gone wrong. Maybe what I am suggesting is that the wrong in business will reduce everything to such a meaningless level that the good in business will be able to step in with a more meaningful future. Ponder.

==

“In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
Isaac Asimov

==

“A golden ray of sun. Rebellious, it seeks out a storm / As if in storms it could find peace.”

Mikhail Lermontov

==

Most things in life are much more like chess than we like to admit. Things rarely happen in straight lines, moves are not always straightforward, there are multiple players on the board with a variety of skills, and there is almost always something playing against you (seen and unseen). What we possibly understate, however, is that life is more like multiple chess matches happening at the same time. Its kind of a different way of suggesting the world is complex, dynamic, and more like a system than a machine. What it also means is 99% of the time life continues even after checkmate because that is one game and there are numbers of other games still doing on.

Which leads me to doing the right thing.

We tend to view ‘doing the right thing’ as the path to growth at scale. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that doing ‘the thing’ is less often a ‘thing’ but things strung together, i.e., a pattern. And patterns are tricky bastards. What I mean by that is groups are notorious for identifying patterns thru consensus and build up general concepts from experiences (agreed shared experiences in this case) creating less-than-optimal growth – its just mediocre if not dangerous as it is oblivious to future contexts and/or consequences. We all have this ability to identify patterns, make associations and use the knowledge to navigate life. The tricky part is this ability is dependent upon patterned experiences as well as the environments in which those patterns were identified and that, often, stratifies some bias. What I mean by that is it creates an implicit assumption that whatever is will continue to be. As a corollary, this creates an implicit assumption that one game is just like another game and avoiding checkmate in one game is similar to another game. That is a dangerous assumption.

I will say that business’s (and, increasingly, individual’s) unhealthy marriage to data analytics tends to reward this type of dangerous thinking. It is dangerous because it fundamentally extrapolates the ‘patterns of what is known’ and offers what is commonly seen as a sensible set of assumptions. Well, that is, they are sensible until they run into unforeseen or ‘what was unknown at the time of the analysis’ and they either just don’t work or work less effectively than what was planned. Suffice it to say that once we have learned a pattern for something and have experiences, the usefulness of the identified patterns (regardless of the environment/context and regardless of whether it was optimal usefulness or simple usefulness) makes us stop learning. We do not seek to ‘re-learn’ anything, but rather actually seek out that pattern (or what could be construed as something close to that pattern) as a default bias to thinking as well as behaviors/solutions. This is pattern recognition and just as with almost anything good, it can also be bad. Bad because, well, if life is a series of chess matches played at the same time, not all games will follow a pattern you may know; let alone like.

Which leads me to Follett’s theory of integration.

Mary Parker Follett’s theory of integration suggests the person as continuous with community and that things are in constant relation to each other – acting on and being acted on at the same time. This is a pragmatic and possibilities view of Life. Pragmatically you are part of a system, a community of people and matches, wherein “the group and the individual come into existence simultaneously” offering possibilities that as an individual one would struggle to reach without the community of matches. Follett suggested our being in the world as a process of “progressive integrations” with others and with the world around us – a process of “ceaseless interweaving of new specific responding”. This means life is an ongoing process of moves and countermoves each integrating experience, knowledge and attitudes into decisions and behaviors. Well. That sounds like chess, no? Anyway. She understood that whenever one engages with others, the person as well as the other have been mutually influenced. She also stated: “our happiness, our sense of living at all is directly dependent on our joining with others. We are lost, exiled, imprisoned until we feel the joy of union.”

And maybe therein lies my point for today. While we may seek patterns to lean on and data to offer us easier answers than Life typically demands, maybe we should feel the joy of the chess match, the matches, the checkmates, and seek out the storm for maybe, just maybe, true peace comes from within the storm or, well, the chess match. Ponder.

———

All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary
All of this is temporary

———

Ok. I was tempted to call this ‘the glimpses of perfection’ <which I also call “the flickering of perfection” somewhere later>. What I mean by that is if you put any real effort into what you do, in business or in Life, you will actually brush up against perfection on occasion. And that’s the maddening part.  Life is pretty maddening in that it often gives us these little glimpses of perfection, but at the same time refuses to let us actually keep it for anything longer than a glimpse.

This is where it all gets tricky. Therefore <because we like … no ... LOVE ... those glimpses> we constantly attack Life & business always slightly tainted by this ‘temporary perfection’.

Why? Because the temporary glimpses, those ‘moments’, they suggest perfection <or a version of it> is achievable. And you try and plan, and replicate, those glimpses so that they become the norm. Unfortunately, we people are imperfect so replicating perfection is almost impossible. We struggle in this wretched in between almost everyday.
Now.

First. Let me be clear. The whole idea of perfection is shit.

Second. That doesn’t mean we cannot achieve perfection <whew … there was a contradictory thought, huh?>

The difficulty resides in the fact that perfection is fleeting and we only get glimpses of it. I sometimes refer to it as the flickering of perfection in our lives.

And you know what? That’s good <that flickering>. In fact I would argue it is often good enough. In fact I could argue it is as good as it gets.

Look. I imagine most of us probably feel like we are ‘doing’ somewhere between okay and good in most areas of life. We are, in our minds, doing a decent job day to day. Some days better than others, but overall decent.

But perfection? Whew. I don’t think so. Maybe at moments … but all the time in life? No way.

That said. Maybe the key point, or issue, most likely comes down to my ‘definition of perfection’.

Here is my take.

I sometimes believe we see perfection as a home to move into.

It is not. It is a hotel <or maybe a motel>. You may stay one night … maybe a week <if you are really really lucky>, but you can’t live there.

Am I saying this as a way of condoning mediocrity?

No. Absolutely frickin’ not.

It is just a reminder that people are not perfect <most of the time>.

It is a reminder that Life is not perfect <all the time>.

It is a reminder that Business is never perfect despite all the best practices, process, system, ROI & corporate cultural guidelines <never perfect contextually>.

It is a reminder that aiming for perfection <all the time> is wasted energy and maybe to take it easier on yourself.

Now. This doesn’t mean you should try to be your best <because you should>, maybe just acknowledge that your best doesn’t equal perfection <at least all the time>.

Uhm. Uh oh.

It is quite possible one would think that “doing your best” should be, well, our best, no?

And if we believe that, well, our best should equal perfection, no?

Unfortunately it doesn’t actually work that way.

That actually isn’t the formula.

This may be difficult to accept, but your best is a jagged line. Jagged as it is dependent upon what you have and when you are doing something – context as it were.

On occasion that jagged line butts up against the ‘perfection line.’

So.

Unfortunately. Under the harsh spotlight of self judgment you may be tempted to judge this as not really your best. Or maybe you make it a caveated best. A derivative of best as it were.

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

“It’s easy to miss and easy to mistake
For when things are really great
It just means everything’s in its place.”

Aimee Mann

Well. You would be wrong. Its not some lesser version as long as you were truly “doing the best that you can.”

Oh shit. Trouble. In actuality many times we are not actually doing our best.

Huh? C’mon. 90% of the time as we go thru the grind of Life & business you know you could do more <if the measure is truly our best>.

Look. I truly believe chasing perfection is an endless pursuit. And, frankly, if you try to do this you only put yourself under unbearable pressure aiming to be the perfect version of who you are. And, inevitably, this relentless quest for perfection can only bring disappointment because not only is being perfect all the time <if not at any time> an impossible task, but it becomes exponentially more impossible <ok … how can something that is already impossible become exponentially so? … its kind of like getting three death sentences …> if you actually attempt to do “it” all the time.

Planning perfection, which is most often a random confluence of factors, is a sysiphean task. Someone can waste far too much time and energy trying to be the perfect ‘whatever’.

Sure. None of us want to be ‘less-than-perfect’ in anything we do, but it is a fact of life. But. Here is some news.

Ok.

No. Here is the fact.

Doing your best isn’t about perfection and it isn’t always trying to be perfect. Because doing your best is about “good enough with what you can actually do”. Doing your best is about maximizing ‘as long as it lasts.’ And that is often not perfection.

Ok.

In the end. Don’t think about perfection as ‘your best.” Best is simply … ‘effort + attitude’. And … just … well … do your best. Choose the moments and truly do your best <and admit the other times just aren’t your best you are just muddling through>.

Why?

Well. I believe every action has an equal and opposite reaction <actually … each action can have a variety of opposite reactions of which it is difficult for you to discern beforehand what will occur but that’s a different post>. Therefore, if you perform any action the results will come, maybe not today or tomorrow, but at some time. So if people could keep their minds thinking what I just typed above and truly do your best at the right time and mentally unattach yourself from the outcome of the ‘best’ actions <and the concept of perfection> I think more people would be happier and they may actually do their best more often. And, maybe more importantly, if you do not try and fool yourself into believing you had done “your best” in certain situations you may be able to manage your life expectation-wise a little better.

Regardless.

Just do your best and, if you are lucky, you will get a glimpse of perfection. We can try and be our best all the time, but perfection is temporary. While that may sound painfully disappointing maybe look at it is “possibilities”.

——–

I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of Eye—
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—

Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide of narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—

Emily Dickinson

———

Remember. While your life may only have the flickering of perfection it surely seems like a positive way of attacking Life would be to dwell in the possibilities that perfection will visit again.

———-

“Because we are ‘free’ to be hateful, members of traditionally marginalized groups suffer.”

Laura Beth Nielsen

====

The other night I watched a documentary called Can We Take a Joke?  which claims to be ‘an examination of Western society’s apparent contemporary intolerance of edgy humor by comedians’. But, instead, it is a thoughtful exploration of how we often take the easier route of attempting to shut down things we don’t want to hear rather than debating those things.

I admit I don’t get ’cancel culture’ (I cannot figure out who actually gets canceled) and ‘woke’ seems like a blanket term for certain types of political correctness. All that said. There is a weird battle among ‘snowflakes’ <another term I think has to do with being overly sensitive but I am not sure> in which everyone seems constantly outraged at something someone else said. It’s a bipartisan shared stupidity. And while it may have its roots in something meaningful it is has been hijacked by performative politics. And that is where it starts getting really weird. Politicians, using words to create outrage have made words, well, meaningless <and that should be a crime>. At exactly the same time they are making the constitution meaningless or, at minimum, warped to whatever outrage they have at the moment.

Free speech offers everyone the freedom to be stupid, say stupid, but not be free of the consequences for stupidity.

I admit that I struggle to explain the boundaries of free speech to anyone. Despite the 1st Amendment, local, state, and federal laws limit all kinds of speech. We regulate advertising, obscenity, slander, libel, and inciting lawless action to name just a few (but for some odd reason, not politics). Hate speech is hateful, but legal. And maybe that is where ‘cancel culture’ steps in. just because it is legal doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have some consequences. it can be legal and we, the people, can ‘cancel them out’ to show their stupidness, hatefulness or basic lack of decency has some consequences.

That said. Just as I suggested with regard to political correctness, what we consider ‘hateful’ has expanded to include some fairly silly things. By the way, just because I used the word ‘silly’ doesn’t mean that they cannot be important and representative of some serious discussions/issues, but, almost any ‘obia’ with regard to people is going to be hateful to some people, and representative of some people. Do I wish it were not that way? Sure, I do. But with 7billionish people in the world and a belief I don’t think everyone should think exactly the same things, there will be some people who will always think differently. I can’t ‘cancel’ them, I can’t suggest they are ‘woke’ and that’s stupid, all I can do is live with them, talk with them, listen to them, and recognize, for the most part, whatever the part I ‘hate’ is just part of who they are. And maybe my point within that is we shouldn’t make anyone voiceless. If we do, how can we hear what they have to say and offer some dialogue around what they say? Silence, voiceless, does not seem an option.

Now. To be clear. Hate speech is rarely just hate speech. In many cases it is representative, and embodies, actual behavior. So that ‘speech’ embodies tangible harm and a desire to subordinate another’s views <if not subordinate a cross section of a population>. Hate speech perpetuates actual behavior – discrimination, division and inequality.

Here is where I will run into legal issues. There is stupid speech and there is hate speech. The difference to me is one that embodies hateful behavior and the other is simply performative**. Stupid is the latter; hate is the former.

Now.

Some legal scholar is going to come out of the woodwork and challenge me. I am all ears and I am up for the debate.

Some non-legal everyday schmuck is going to come out of the woodwork and challenge me with some simplistic empty constitutional meanderings. Shut up. I have no time for you.

To be clear. Anyone can, and should, suggest protecting hate speech is consistent with and even central to Constitutional founding principles. Where I will debate is when they argue regulating hate speech is a ‘slippery slope’ of overreach <I would like to point out that there is no slope, we – as people – are quite capable of making one-time decisions, and choice making is kind of what makes people people>. Hate speech, tied to behavioral aspects, cannot be trivialized. It cannot be because by association the behavior also becomes a freedom – tied to the free speech. I don’t say this as a ‘snowflake’ but rather as a concerned citizen concerned with societal norms and a better society.

We should not remove voices, simply outline consequences if you use your voice.

We should all remember the right to speak already is far from absolute.

We should take note that often hate speech tends to put disadvantaged members of our society in situations with serious consequences.

In the end.

Words have meanings. Words are ideas. Words shape attitudes. Words inspire behavior.

We should debate meanings robustly.

We should debate ideas robustly.

We should debate attitudes robustly.

We should make people accountable for behavior.

Don’t remove voices, don’t make people voiceless, hear what they have to say and robustly – as is YOUR freedom – debate the accountability for what they chose to say with their freedom. Ponder.

===

** performative: this is another slippery slope but let me suggest people with a larger platform have a higher responsibility than other people. A politician should not have the same level of accountability than an everyday schmuck like me – theirs should be higher. Their ‘performative’ is signaling to a crowd of which someone in that crowd could be inspired to act. There should be accountability.

===

“It is my thesis that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of the designs and in doing so they may be both effective and dangerous.”

Norbert Wiener, 1960

========

“As machines learn they may develop unforeseen strategies at rates that baffle their programmers.”

Norbert Wiener, 1960

===

It’s not very insightful to note that algorithms inherently increase efficiency. Similarly, it doesn’t seem that insightful to note Life, people and business, are inherently inefficient <despite all their efforts to be efficient>. I think the insight resides in the fact this creates a recipe for disaster. Disaster in that what is easy, or even useful, is not necessarily good for us.

Anyone who has even researched AI slightly would see that even if AI systems learn from accurate, representative data, there will still be issues if the data reflects underlying biases and inequalities of the system.

Oh. And it does.

Oh. And, yes, I am going to suggest efficiency is a bias and an inequality driver.

Look. We idolize efficiency and we increasingly have tools which offer some sense of efficiency, yet, the attempted ‘flattening’ of natural inefficiency, generally speaking, only creates, well, dysfunction <and, generally speaking, persona dissatisfaction>.

How the hell does that happen? Simplistically an algorithm offers a binary choice – A or B. Yeah. To do so it evaluates a variety of inputs but, inevitably, it has to choose a 0 or a 1, this or that. Not weighted, a choice. And sometimes that choice is a guess. Yeah. A guess. My favorite line in Brian Christian’s fabulous book, The Alignment Problem, is “the computer is alarmingly confident when it guesses.” When you simplify everything down to a black & white ‘this or that’ you can sometimes simply flip a coin. Now. say you are a algorithm and you not only flip a coin, but you flip a coin 6 straight times. Yeah. You can see the possible problem there. Circling back, let’s assume each of those 6 coin flips are driven by efficiency. Yeah. You can see the possible problem there. Let me stretch the efficiency issue out a bit more. Efficiency demands a division of labor, resources and energy. So, if the algorithm is driving all those things toward the ‘most efficient’, well, there are always consequences to a choice.

As a counterpoint, effectiveness, or efficacy, is found in things that are often fairly inefficient <at least in the short term or present>. Effectiveness is the natural enemy to the incrementalization of standardization.

Range:

Development is not linear, and diversions that set you back in the short term frequently become powerful tools in the long term.

More importantly, effectiveness is the natural enemy of efficiency. How? Well. Efficiency arcs toward improvement of structural character, not improvement of market dynamics. Effectiveness is grounded in the external inputs, efficiency from internal outputs. Basically, efficiency strips away systems dynamics and flattens organizational principles.

Risk is quantifiable, uncertainty is not. It’s one thing to say there is a 50-50 chance on something going wrong. It’s another to not know the chances at all.

How does it do that? Algorithms grounded in efficiency minimize the optimal organization ability to expand and contract. the tendency of everyone in business is to contract (under the guise of ‘focus’). The contracting oversimplifies, but makes it mentally manageable and certainly drives an efficiency objective. Yet. Navigating complexity <which is the standard business> demands one actually expand their situational awareness of the moment.

I imagine I am also discussing the human aspect of algorithms. What I mean by that is algorithms are meant to be a tool for people, not a means to absolve responsibility.

And what do I mean by that?

A collection of people can be stupider than an individual (often even stupider), and, an individual can be stupider than a collection of people. The trick is to always to find when one is smarter than the other.

This gets compounded by the fact technology, well crafted, actually makes people stupider. How? It actually lessens our critical thinking by offering easier solutions (knowledge gifted is not the same as knowledge earned). We need to be sure to break the stupid loop. Because the smarter technology gets (algorithms actually iterate based off of interactions), the less smart people get (we do the hard work of thinking less), so we need to actively use technology to make people smarter. We need to amalgamate company wisdom and institutional learning into critical masses it cannot be ignored and demands some interaction. It seems counterintuitive because we are activating algorithms to do the hard work of ‘thinking’ <assessing an overwhelming amount of data> and, yet, we should actually be thinking harder ourselves <people>.

Look. Algorithms can be used for the forces of human behavior team bad (default, easy answers, let tech decide) or forces of human behavior team good (curiosity, expand upon imagination, innovate).

All I know is algorithms are going to play a big role in navigating business efficacy and shaping business.

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“The future of companies, regardless of size, will be shaped by algorithms.”

Mike Walsh

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The key word is “shaped.” Ultimately it will be humans who use the shapes.

Anyway. Here is my wish.

I hope we will be “directed to act” by algorithms, but not managed by. The latter demands acceptance of algorithm as qualified to make us to do something behaviorally, the former demands we accept algorithms as something that ‘informs’ our doing. Somewhere in between is the decision of how much we, people, are accountable for thinking. Algorithms inherently encourage us to believe business is not best when it is random. Yet. The best businesses resist the urge to suppress randomness.

Which leads me to temporal convergence and temporal divergence.

Temporal convergence is progressive and affirming. By contrast, “temporal divergence,“ is where we cannot see a path from where we are “now” to achieve the goal-state. Temporal divergence may result from insufficient capability/ capacity to navigate with any confidence toward any goal. Also, one may not know if one is in a state of temporal divergence. The difference between these two things is the difference between survival and death in a business. I bring this up because algorithms, driven by efficiency, are temporal, but you cannot actually see whether they are converging or diverging. Well. At least until it’s too late.

All businesses will exist, in some form or fashion, grounded in algorithms. I am fairly sure that’s a given. What is not given is what role efficiency will play in the future of business. Now, I am not naive, efficiency focus will not go away overnight, but efficiency, relentlessly pursued, is simply a path to commoditization. The challenge will be to not get consumed by efficiency driven algorithms and to realize algorithms do not give answers, but outline options. To realize algorithms don’t define redundancies, but rather define the outlines of systems. And, in the end, realize efficiency is the lazy way out and understand algorithms can make us even lazier so the double hit from the dull axe of efficiency will bludgeon us, individuals and business, into a bloody pulp even as the dashboards scream success. Ponder.