Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

People Don't Converse, They Comment. Big Difference

    We have a conversation problem. Social networks have exacerbated it, and the wrong habits keep getting reinforced. People think they are conversing. Instead, they are commenting — big difference.

Here's why conversation and comments are not the same thing.

By definition

    By definition, a comment is a note that explains, illustrates, or criticizes the meaning of a writing. It's an observation or remark that expresses an opinion or attitude and/or a judgment we express indirectly. We enter a comment in a thread, a discussion group, or a stream any time reacting to what is being said, but mostly putting forward our take.

    Rarely we go back to comments to update our take based on new information, sometimes we do it to edit typos.

    A conversation involves an oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, and/or ideas. For the exchange to take place, listening, and responding are necessary components. Conversation can be an informal dialogue of an issue by representatives of governments, institutions, or groups, or simply an exchange between people.

    During a conversation, we have the opportunity to update our views based on new information. We do it in real time, even if we might not do it often.

    One is about making a remark and stating an opinion. The other is about a structured or unstructured back and forth where participants are engaged with a topic continuously. Yet the two terms are used interchangeably.

Here's why it matters.

Media, networks, and marketing

    Media, networks, and marketing are the three channels businesses have used to traffic messages, find opportunities, and extend their reach to sell their products and services. To attract people to messages, organizations use information packaged as news, offers, discounts, and promotions.

    In the two-dimensional world of print, the only 3D component where the people in the room. Brands shared a physical thing — a paper — or an audio-visual implementation of the same concept, which then streamed through airwaves and images. People on the other end were passive radio and TV audiences.

    When everyone listened to and watched just a few channels, the dialogue or discussion, depending on intentions, happened with others. Sharing among people still included a form of in person back and forth, body language, eye contact, proximity, and some form of context — neighbors, families, coworkers, and so on.

Put "social" in front of those words

    Technology enabled and evolved what was already happening — our desire to talk about what's going on in our world. But it also did something else — it put the screen between people, instead of the people in front of it and next to each other.

    With the development of tools that make it easier for anyone to participate, people can be both consumers and creators of media, networks, and marketing.

    Online, concepts like identity and privacy are tied to a different system. One that is made of clicks, links, search, lists, circles, and visual cues. this system is based on ever more dynamic content — an umbrella term that includes text, visuals, sound, and video — consumed alone, together.

    Feedback loops are an essential part of this new system. Which is why content needs to be front and center for people to have something to react to, for marketers to identify and enroll or build and engage connections with people, and for participants to have an indication of how they are doing.

    Business brands and people as bands are in a race for attention, the only scarce and expensive resource we have online. Cut loose from any one specific platform, and reimagined for each one, content is the new media for trafficking messages, where story, combined with interaction, drives to engagement.

    We develop expertise in a field through skill, experience, and practice. If we focus on developing a body of work online with a blog, it takes 2-3 years to start to see results and inbound inquiries from our efforts. It takes patience and commitment to get there. Social networks then become distribution channels.

    As I said in a comment to a thread on LinkedIn recently, the number of comments or likes to an article is not a good indication of the value of its contents or the author. We all know exceptional thinkers, researchers, makers, and scientists who can save lives but receive recognition twenty years later or after they're safely dead (and the current popularity of the stoics demonstrates.)

    True engagement is difficult to score because:

Public engagement is a proxy and as such we want to take care to parse between popularity and real results.

Many things that are quite popular and engaging have less meat behind them that makes them sounds like work — inspiration is great, and likeability is an asset people naturally flock to. Both leading to “being seen by others and the poster” vs. “I've tried this and it works as advertised.”

Engagement also costs energy and time, and we have less of both.

Most doers would rather apply effort to trying something instead and may gravitate toward bookmarking, emailing an article to themselves to try things out in private later rather than jumping in to talk — i.e. “walking the talk” vs. “talking all over.”

    Engagement is built on permission, time, and attention. But it requires we master media, networks, and marketing skills in addition to expertise and competence in a chosen field — some people are better than others by virtue of their nature. 

Access as attention cue

    Many social networks have been around long enough to become significant and hard to ignore socially and for business. Because everyone seems to be there. Ben Thompson at Stratechery has introduced the term ‘Aggregation Theory’ to describe the phenomenon. 

    While in the pre-Internet era, distribution was concentrated in the hands of a few, with social media and networks, creators and makers can go direct. In the past two decades, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have commoditized distributors in product/service/content supply chains across a number of verticals like publishing, transportation, hospitality, commerce, media, and so on.

    When Google launched its social network, Google+, everyone was trying to figure out its usefulness for business and work, starting with network features. One week out the network enjoyed a lot of attention. Based on the search business Google developed, of course.

    Everyone who didn't get into G+ for the first wave wanted in, another form of attention. Google closed invitations from friends for a while to stabilize the platform. Many were curious to see how G+ stacked against Facebook for reach and discovery.

    But Google's Buzz and Wave, the company's two previous social products didn't take off and were scrapped. To balance access with real opportunity for meaningful exchanges, it's good to remember that these media companies and social networks are someone else's business to do what they will. All social media is like sharecropping.

    At the time G+ launched, the New York Times communicated to subscribers that they could share their access with a designated family member. Access is a generative, and a potential opportunity. But because of Aggregation Theory, every platform tries to become many things to as many people as possible.

    Although access is an attention cue, activation requires work. In other words, with social, we have the opportunity to go direct, but to get what we want out of media, networks, and marketing, we pay — either through ads or through content and activity.

Feedback loops and identity

    When we go direct, with the opportunity to gain visibility and create awareness for our message, product, and/or service, we receive feedback.

    Some of the feedback based on what the social platform makes available for free or paid, includes things like views, audience make up, and likes. Which are all useful to determine attention levels. These insights provide us with information about behavior in real time.

    A feedback loop involves four stages:

1. The data, a behavior we must measure, capture, and store. This is the evidence
2. Relaying the information to the person in a context that makes it emotionally resonant to have relevance. This is interesting, but not necessarily compelling
3. To be compelling, we need to add consequence to relevance. If this, then that
4. There must be a moment when the individual has the opportunity to recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and take action

    We measure the action, and the feedback loop can run once again. In many social networks, the feedback loop is a red button, for example LinkedIn and Facebook, and/or a number, as in email and Twitter.

    This framework has been around for a long time. In the 1960s, psychologist Albert Bandura explored the potential of the feedback loop to affect behavior change and motivation. Bandura found that giving people a clear goal and the means to evaluate their progress increased the achievement levels.

    Because media, networks, and marketing are all mixed online, feedback includes all three of the key human triggers — truth, relationships, and identity. If it feels as if all three triggers are getting pulled at once, they probably are.

    But the true power of feedback loops is not to control people but to give them control. They are great for solving problems, even better for creating opportunities.

    Social networks use the button in a Pavlovian kind of way, to keep us glued to the interaction, to teach us to keep coming back to the network and stay active. It works because our posts and actions are tied to our identity.

Comments are not the same as conversation

    Many of the “social” forms of media, networks, and marketing have embedded feedback loop mechanisms in them to get people to learn a platform's desired behaviors. These companies are using access to attract attention to get content for their feeds.

    Content drives comments, which creates a feedback loop for more people to interact within the platform. Comments appearing in quasi real time on home page feeds drive engagement. These rapid streams are a relatively recent feature.

    Before FriendFeed, a social network that enjoyed high adoption by a comparatively small group of people, all networks and communities were asynchronous. People wrote a post, published it, and someone else reads= it and commented at some point in the future. Just like email. 

    We think it's a conversation, like we'd have during a phone call. But it's not. Facebook implemented real-time commenting and streams after its purchase of FriendFeed. Google+ used the same concept and similar technology to support its stream. LinkedIn followed suit.

    Are real time updates and threaded comments conversation? In Dialogue, the Art of Thinking Together William Isaacs says conversation is something we invite and facilitate, that needs negotiating, interpreting, and teasing out.

    Conversation is the white space, the place where people turn together to deliberate, and weigh things out, suspend judgment by listening without resistance so they can explore the underlying causes, rules, and assumptions and get to deeper questions and framing of problems.

    The generative dialogue invents unprecedented possibilities and new insights, producing collective flow. Is this how you feel after an exchange in social networks?

Conversation as dialogue is shared inquiry

    The purpose of shared inquiry is not to move toward discussion, which reflects the tendency to think alone. In a discussion, people see themselves as separate from each other.

    Conversation with the right intent, or influence, is about turning together, connecting. Conversation is the opportunity. You don't get that from commenting alone behind a screen.

    We got the science part down with the algorithms and the prompts. It's time to learn again about the art... of thinking together.

 

[Note: given the many recent comment threads on LinkedIn about missed opportunity to collaborate and build networks on the platform, I revisited and updated an older article that explains the difference between comments and conversation and the limitations of tools as dictated by market forces.]

The Seven Deadly Diseases of Management

 

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]

    Commerce is the result of a number of interconnected and interdependent actions. In order to act in the best interest of the business and organization, in addition to a product and service that solves a need, we need to make good decisions. In turn, decisions rely on various bodies of knowledge.

    This is an over simplification of the process, of course. But it's sufficient to see the role and importance of having different kinds of people in a company — people who have deep experience and skill in a domain, for example, engineers, scientists, underwriters; and people who have broad enough experience to put the pieces together.

    Entrepreneurs know all too well how difficult it is to work in the business and work on the business at the same time. Creating the product, delivering a service, often also getting the word out and developing customers are a full job already. Yet we also need to take some time to step back and look at the big picture — where is the business going? What opportunities might we miss because we simply don't see them?

    Working on the business is critical for making it sustainable. The small business administration shows that for the years 2009-2010 in the United States more than 500,000 entrepreneurs opened their doors for the first time. But nearly 600,000 shut down theirs for the last time with thousands of other business struggling to get by.

    The organizations that do make it through the rough patches do so because they figure out a way to make decisions that impact the interconnected and interdependent nature of the business. They do more of the things that matter. A stronger sense of purpose, great execution alone are not enough, we also need to be more aggressive at seeking feedback, both quantitative and qualitative.

    It looks more like this:

• strong sense of purpose
• great execution
• more money coming in than going out
• ability to make sound decisions with imperfect information
• while at the same time seeking and distilling feedback as a habit
• ability to delegate some of the non core work through partnerships, virtual teams, etc.
• knowing when to scale up teams and when to hire whom is critical
• while knowing when product reaches maturity, service needs expanding are part of it
• and more

    Our ability to create, think, and act for the short, mid, and long-er term is the result of constancy, determination, and preparation. Which means entrepreneurs are highly motivated people who get to a point (could be how they start, too) when they say:

“Well, I'm tired of seeing all of my good ideas being dropped on the floor by the corporate types. I also think I've learned enough about running a business that I'm ready to try my hand.”

    Those who make it are not straight-line strugglers, they get that it takes a lot of tacking, but they see it differently than everyone else. Because they're able to do more things that matter, they come to orchestrate tacking as steps on a staircase rather than a random series of starts and stops in different directions.

    When organizations grow in size beyond what small teams of three or five can handle across the board, it becomes the job of some people to put the pieces together. Hence the manager, who more than anyone else has responsibility for helping the company work on the business by aligning resources, making decisions, and all the other good things that help it grow.

    “By adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs (by reducing waste, rework, staff attrition and litigation while increasing customer loyalty),” says William Edwards Deming, American statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant.

    Deming believed that to deliver on their job description, all managers need to have what he called a System of Profound Knowledge. This included the understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers of goods and services, knowledge of variation in quality and the ability to use statistics in measurements.

    Managers should also understand people and appreciate of the limits of what can be known. Sometimes it's easier to see things in the negative, when they're missing. To Deming, management's “Seven Deadly Diseases” are:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose to plan product and service that will have a market and keep the company in business, and provide jobs — it's a chain reaction from the purpose to the jobs, all interdependent and interconnected.

2. Emphasis on short-term profits: short-term thinking (just the opposite from constancy of purpose to stay in business), fed by fear of unfriendly takeover, and by push from bankers and owners for dividends.

3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance — when asked about this point, Dr. Deming would mention Peter Scholtes thoughts on why performance appraisals were bad management. In Abolishing Performance Appraisals, Scholtes suggests alternatives. Scholtes et al say that even the recently-become-sacred 360-degree appraisals can be fatally flawed, if what they are about is judgment and evaluation, rather than helpful feedback. Quality feedback mechanisms including coaching and support structures are a strong alternative.

4. Mobility of top management (too much turnover causes numerous problems).

5. Running a company only by visible figures, with little or no consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable — this is an obvious statement that runs counter to what some incorrectly claim Deming taught, that you can only manage what you measure. Deming did not believe this and if fact saw it as a deadly disease of management.

6. Excessive medical costs — this is more US-focused than the others.

7. Excessive costs of liability, swelled by lawyers that work on contingency fees — also more US-focused.

    Lack of constancy of purpose, emphasis on short-term, little or no consideration of figures or data that is unknowable or not visible plague our thinking and prevent us from doing better, internally and on the customer experience end. Excessive executive pay could be added as another disease — it cripples (especially US) companies, in many markets they're not competitive.

    In an evidence-free environment it becomes quite hard to make decisions on next steps. Feedback is the useful bit when working with others. Everything else can get mixed up in confusing ways.

    Successful entrepreneurs have a set of beliefs that can help managers:

• The moment you blame, you lose: Jonathan Fields
• The little things matter. Do them: Chris Guillebeau
• Your business is worthless if it depends on you: John Jantsch
• You can have both your soul and success for your business: Sonia Simone
• Don't wait to get it perfect, get it going: Stu McLaren

    Still curious? More on Deming's plan, do, study, act system of learning and improvement.

 

P.S. It takes someone who's sees the world like entrepreneurs to become fanatical about feedback in a good way.

 

The Three Kinds of Feedback and our Triggers

     

    Every time we engage in a transaction or renew a membership, we're asked for feedback. We receive feedback after events and meetings we organize with clients and colleagues. The problem with feedback is that we rarely know how to give it well, and seldom learn how to take it.    

    Maybe we fail to recognize that feedback is a conversation. Carl Jung said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Michel de Montaigne said, “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”

    We live in the tension between being and becoming. For any significant growth to occur, we want to develop greater awareness of our impact on others, because that is the system that feeds back wisdom to us. The way we engage in it speaks as much about how we think and who we are and want to be as it does about the circumstance, transaction, or product and service in question.

    Feedback is often highly subjective while at the same time valuable. It helps us zero into what is useful, important, event critical, interesting, and entertaining. Feedback is how we get so good they' can't ignore us. Comedian Steve Martin seeks feedback systematically as he explores lots of ideas.

    Marvin Minski, the pioneer in Artificial Intelligence (AI), said there is tremendous value in negative knowledge. For example, looking to never make mistakes. In space, “there is no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse,” says Colonel Chris Hadfield, because conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement.

    Feedback is information about us that can teach us something we can combine with the direct experiences we have to improve. Without it, we have no way of knowing what others hear, see, like, and so on. For any learning and growth to occur we want feedback. 

    But if providing feedback is difficult, receiving it is even harder. We can learn to think about it in more ways than one to make it useful. Not all feedback needs ranking, sometimes it means we're thanking someone, commenting on something.

    We can choose to either invite it or drop it. In similar ways there is tension between knowing and learning, there's tension between our desire to learn and our need to be accepted. However, “we can't focus on improving when we don't know where we stand,” say Douglas Stone and Sheela Heen in Thanks for the Feedback.

We're all familiar with how it feels to be on the receiving end. Says Stone:

“Before you tell me how to do it better, before you lay out your big plans for changing, fixing, and improving me, before you teach me how to pick myself up and dust myself off so that I can be shiny and successful—know this: I’ve heard it before. I’ve been graded, rated, and ranked. Coached, screened, and scored. I’ve been picked first, picked last, and not picked at all. And that was just kindergarten.”

    Whatever form and intention it may take, being on the receiving end of feedback challenges us. To up our game, we want to “take an honest look at why receiving feedback is hard. Learning to take it means acquiring the skill to engage in the conversation mindfully and make better decisions about what we choose to keep and how we use the information.

Pulling the right trigger

    As we embark on our mission to make feedback useful on the receiving end, we should first learn to identify three kinds of triggers:

1. truth triggers — are about the substance of the feedback, which triggers cognitive and emotional reactions in us. We're familiar with the mechanics of how these go because we're quick to think or say the other person is simply unfair, unhelpful, and wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet when we give feedback, we're always right...

...the challenge here is seeing properly.

2. relationship triggers — are about the particular person who is giving us feedback. Relationships exist at the intersection of things and people, which means we want to understand the system we're in to move past the blame game and create joint accountability...

...the challenge here is “we.”

3. identity triggers — are all about our sense of who we are. When we're hit in our very sense of self, we clamp up as we try to defend our own respect...

...the challenge here is “me.”

    How do we go from it to me to we productively? By learning to separate the type of feedback we're giving, seeking first to understand, seeing our blind spots, separating what from who, identifying the relationship system, learning how wiring affects our story, dismantling distortions, and cultivating a growth mindset.

Purpose goes a long way

    There are three possible kinds of feedback we could give — appreciation, coaching, and evaluation. We should choose wisely to achieve our goals. Because the challenge in how we receive it also depends on our state of mind and mood, is based on the situation and context, learning how to deliver the proper kind of feedback goes a long way in helping us hear properly what we're getting.

    Building from experience on the material of the book:

1. appreciation says “I see you,” “I know how hard you've been working,” “you matter to me” — it's motivating, empowering even, to be acknowledged, especially by a manager or a leader, but also by our peers. Because we want to know what we do matters.

This is where most customer service battles could be better. Businesses that show customers they care, people who show they notice things alone go a long way in connecting emotionally, which then opens the door for more cognitive data and support.

Stories play a significant role in conveying appreciation. But we must take care to be specific for it to count. Follow, “I appreciate you” with specifically how and why to activate the good feelings we want to elicit.

Appreciation must be authentic and substantial to work well, not just ring as such. Imagine what it would be like to get a star just for showing up! There's little growth here.

2. the purpose of coaching is to provide more direction, to help someone grapple with change, learn, and grow. We need coaching to improve our knowledge or skill and build capability so we can tackle new challenges. In this case we're proactive in seeking support. 

But there's also a kind of coaching where someone else identifies our need to develop certain skills because they see we could use improvement. In this case, signs of anxiety, fear, confusion, hurt, anger prompt the need for fixing the emotional problem.

Coaching is useful for collaborations to work better, but in many organizations it's either not recognized or rewarded. To be effective, coaches need to appreciate what the person they're providing feedback to need in specific situations.

Someone may bee seeking appreciation and got evaluation. Maybe we intend to give one kind of feedback but the person receiving it misunderstood us. Understanding the gap between expectations and what we deliver helps us provide feedback that is more useful.

Another wrinkle in coaching is that evaluation plays a part in it. We assess where someone is to help them practice how to improve. On the receiving end we can help ourselves by slowing things down enough to check in on whether we're in a bad mood or situation when the coaching hits us.

3. evaluation is typically not our favorite, but it's the most valuable tool we have to help align expectations, clarify consequences, and inform decision-making. We need evaluation to get a baseline, to rate or rank things. As long as we have a set of standards that everyone understands, we should embrace it.

Sometimes evaluation includes judgement that goes beyond the strict assessment brief. We call this judgement opinion and usually comes wrapped into either negative or positive undertones. The negative part is what we don't like about feedback. We embrace reassurances.

Evaluation is the loudest form of feedback. It can drown out the other two, but it is the one we want to know where we stand. Without evaluation we're left to guessing, or trying to infer from situations. This would make it harder to improve.

     Mixing types of feedback or crossing wires on purpose do not help. Moving targets also make it hard to achieve clarity. With feedback, agreement can be the highest form of misunderstanding. Which is why we should actively seek explicit disagreement. Enemies do make for better allies than frenemies.

    But we can also learn better ways to make our input positive. When we founded The Searls Group, Doc Searls set out to build better markets, not just better marketing by “helping clients understand and engage their markets, rather than helping them craft and send messages to those markets.”

    Whether you need feedback for a product, service, or personal growth, Thanks for the Feedback provides a framework and some tools that can help us metabolize challenging information and use it to fuel insight and growth. It will also make us better feedback givers. With more power, leaders and managers also have more responsibility to get it less wrong.

    There's much more we can learn about feedback and its different applications. I'll leave that to future posts. Learning how to improve in receiving feedback is critical in our ability to succeed in our work and lives, but also in giving feedback to others.

    When we become better at evaluating, coaching, and appreciating others, our relationships improve, we're better customers and buyers, we're better clients and consultants, collaborators and individual players. All of which makes us good leaders, managers, and contributors.

    A good starting point in conversation:

• seek first to understand — what kind of feedback does the situation warrant? What are the truth, relationship, and/or identity triggers? Are we getting what we need?
• watch for the role of opinion — are we letting negativity color how we perceive remarks? Are we getting positive feedback but not specific enough to be helpful?
• separate what from who — are there two topics weaved together here? Is where we stand in our relationship in there? Are we too keen on trying to get respect to miss the useful bits?

  

Five Sure Ways To Ruin a Conversation

“The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation,

not overturning it.”

[Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton]

    Martin Luther King, Jr. did not start his speech with a PowerPoint filled with bullet points and statistics. He started with, “I have a dream,” then painted a picture with his story, a story of what could be, not what should not.

    By doing that he connected with all the people who were listening to his address as they went about engaging in their internal conversation about a similar dream. Using a word instead of another can make a tremendous difference — it literally changes the conversation. 

    Conversation is an emotional tool we have to negotiate meaning, to create strategic direction and impact, and much more. Yet we are unlearning how to stay in conversation long enough to benefit from it.

    But there are sure ways to ruin even a casual conversation. When we're not as thoughtful about the impact of our behavior on others, we miss opportunities to connect. We do that by:

1. Limiting a conversation's potential by just telling — the old writer's axiom of “show, don't tell” applies here as well

2. Thinking about what we're going to say next while the other person is talking — this applies to most circumstances, whether we're talking to a spouse or a dissatisfied customer

3. Falling back on the old customer service trick — telling someone “I hear what you're saying,” rather than addressing the substance of what they are saying

4. Lying — we live in an increasingly transparent age; eventually someone will find out more about an issue topic, or statement. Nothing kills a current or subsequent conversation faster than deceit

5. Deferring ending a conversation — not ending a conversation when it's over is poor etiquette. Good sales professionals, for example, know not to talk past the sale. The same goes for conversation. When we stay on point, save something else for next time, maybe there will actually be a next time

    We cannot expect to bridge our distance in conversation when we don't even try. Lack of conversation means decreased empathy, which is the root of the characteristically human qualities we increasingly need to succeed in the future.

    Conversation matters, it's a reliable tool for thinking, alone and together. The back and forth, listening, building on what someone else said, and getting feedback are all built into conversation to help us accelerate learning.

    Most of us do look forward to the experience of having the conversation. And no, it's not just a promotional opportunity. When we match our words to intent, we make them count. Which is how we can count on good conversations, including and especially those with our customers.

    But the conversations that many organizations have, if at all, leave little room for customers and relationships. In many instances, the experience customers have with brands is all over the place, reflecting more the organization chart than the purpose and desire to connect.

 

P.S. If this is you, I can help. They'll love you.

What Happened Ten Years Ago.... is Still Happening Today

 

“We like lists because we don't want to die.”

[Umberto Eco]

    It all started quite innocently in August 2007 with the idea of publishing a list of top women in PR we knew about in our circles to help spread the word. This site was barely a year old, and it was a place to put ideas out there, think out loud with others when people started reading, and build on the resulting ideas.   

    The list gained velocity as people started spreading it. Then all hell broke loose. There's a very good reason why the phrase “you can't please everyone” is a cliqué, because every person interprets the world somewhat differently. Blame mixed with push back mixed with controversy — a Shakespearean brew. It was a situation where men resented the omission, and a prominent women blogging association wagged the digital reprimand — “how dare?”

    Never mind that I explained the thought process that went into it, that the intention was noble, that many of these people knew me for real and otherwise had been reading my thinking for at least a year. Never mind that men do this sort of thing online, in government, on boards, in the top ranks of organizations all the time, every day. Never mind that to me treating women differently because of gender is such a missed opportunity on the humanity side of things. And that at the same time, reports of women being like men are greatly exaggerated.

    It was a battle over turf. Something that holds little interest to me because it's about making the opportunity bigger, not playing smaller. As a society, marketers especially, we have embraced the war metaphor fully. But we keep forgetting people die in wars, they are displaced, they witness and experience things that are unspeakable... and yet survive. Which bears witness to our incredible resilience even as it breaks our hearts.

    Physicists understand well what the fragmentation of thought is doing to society and civilization right now. How it encourages a focus on truth rather than meaning. How thought tricks us and how we get stressed out — our brain is pouring neurochemicals into our system, “as if we were being attacked in the jungle.” We think we're different because we see some differences, but we're all flesh and blood, nerves and bones.

    It was a good lesson, publishing that W-List. My next list was a comprehensive list of 100 people worth following on Twitter, which was shared 4,000 times in the first 30 minutes, on a Sunday. Then I posted a follow up to the reactions, useful to those who study online behavior and good to know at a human level.

    Author Jane McGonigal shared a status update on Twitter that has a familiar ring recently. The tiny rant, which I reproduce here as a quote, reads as follows:

If you are given a high-profile platform to list people who inspire you, especially if it is a list of people in technology or science who inspire you, and yo talk about only men, I want you to know that many women (and maybe some men too!) will read your list and notice.

Some women may feel that all-too-familiar twinge of demoralization that is a constant undercurrent of women's contribution being under-recognized, and you've just made their efforts to feel included and stay engaged in their field just a tiny bit harder.

Other women, maybe women with influence, power, funding, or platforms themselves will notice, and be less likely to think of you as a potential ally in the future, because they prefer to work with people for whom women who do great work easily spring to mind.

And if you are a friend or colleague of mine, and I point out to you that you are using a high profile platform to praise exclusively men in your field of technology and science and ask you to be mindful of how this might affect others, or even affect you if you're perceived as only seeing value in the efforts of your male peers, don't hear it as criticism. Hear it as a constructive, concrete opportunity to do something small and positive in the future that could have a ripple effect on many people's lives for the better.

Because at the end of the day, including women and POC in any list you make about people you admire is just how things should work in 2017.

    It reminded me of another evergreen conversation about influencing panel and speaker decisions at events. Plus we're never a prophet in our hometown — looking at you Digital Tech event organizers in Philadelphia. Ah, the missed opportunities...

    My colleague Anne Libby tweeted a response, with many more sharing names to add to the new list. But why are we still having the same conversation ten years later? Because things have not changed. In biology as in life, we cannot stay still, every organism is constantly moving not to die. When we're not moving forward and progressing, we're moving laterally, or backwards.  

    Brands and businesses are made of people and people buy products and services, invest in the companies, work in those organizations. Same people, which may explain why we're over optimistic about the role of automation, artificial intelligence, and robots.

    For example, when Twitter came up with the idea of publishing a collection of stories about the platform, and decided to call it Twittertales in 2010, it totally ignored how one of its potential customers had published that very project in November 2009. It also ignored the person on its own platform. How did they not see the tweets, the hashtag, the participation? It was a sad display of not seeing.

    Isn't it time to start thinking differently? When we seek first to understand we make a difference. Noticing things — all things, not just what is convenient — would help us with humanity, not just with board issues, business problems, and the next viral video.

    All things are not equal but they exist and we exist. The difference between despair or misery and a spring in our step is often a matter of being heard, being seen, receiving acknowledgement, and speaking up.

    Learning from history is useful — reading widely can help here, not just history books (they say the victors write them), but also biographies, literature (many a blog of yesteryear was a book, a poem, a play), and watching documentaries, going to museums.

    Our mistakes are part of history, too, even as we're so close to it. The Greeks were amazing thinkers and have left us with a treasure trove of fables, myths, and writings on so much that is fundamental to life, especially our relationship with pain and death. There's a reason why many of those ideas have endured over the centuries. The evidence is clear, we are going to die.

    The paradox of our age is that though we are all connected, our culture is highlighting and encouraging individual credit rather than collective contribution. Learning from and with each other is the opportunity. That's not where the incentives are today.

    But we should remember that the map is not the territory, it's a representation. Imagination is the territory. If there is anything at all that we have learned from digital is that it is both more permanent than we suspect (and visual), but it's also more adaptive and suitable for change. What kinds of maps are we drawing?

What to notice

    I'm all for practical advice on this sort of thing. So next time you're coming across promotions in social, make it a point to notice a few things:

* Does that eBook everyone is promoting include just the usual suspects? Not any one group has all the answers, even experts. Reality and business are more complex, even scientific papers are now co-authored by larger groups to provide a more rounded and in depth view of the issues.

* Are contributors a cross section of professionals from different industries and points of view? This is how we get from “best practices” to most practice, which extracts broader and more applicable lessons.

* Is there just one woman (or zero) in there or a more balanced representation? In the first case, it was an afterthought, in the second it was thoughtful planning.

* Did the people providing advice actually do the work? Did they serve as brand marketers, did they serve a community of practitioners? We can learn a lot from research, in which case the previous points are more important. Doing the work for oneself leads to figuring some stuff out, but there is tremendous value in drawing insights from doing the work on behalf or with brands. We should use the same criteria we use for hiring here.

    In my experience, the people doing the work and the people doing more talk are not one and the same. There isn't enough time in a day to do both well, at least not all the time.

 

P.S. Here's an incomplete list of verbs, they're better than words, which are important, verbs get us moving.

[image via Pixabay] 

A Midsummer Reading List

 

[image library Delfini, Modena*]

    We can find more reading lists than time to read. And many of those lists include the same books. Unlike my experience growing up — among the 5,000 books in my house were so many books I hardly ever hear talked about, timeless classics across domains from theater to politics, science and art.

    My father's library was my antilibrary. Often, when we talk about reading a classic book in some cases we are doing it for the first time, but we say we're re-reading. Italo Calvino wrote some thoughts as to why read the classics rather than what other people have written about them.

“Schools and universities ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite.”

    That has been my experience as well. Eventually I made my way to most of them thanks to classical studies; though sometimes trading evenings translating Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus over going out with friends was difficult. I was lucky. Students from all over the world came to Italy and learned Italian to read Dante Alighieri in the original, a tall task. I did the same for the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Rilke, Hesse, and Voltaire.

    There's a time for every purpose, and summer reads tend to be lighter, especially for the beach.

    It's now become fashionable again to have home libraries, and that is good. Children who grow up in environments filled with opportunities to learn tend to fare better in life. Subjecting what we read to inquiry remains an important aspect of reading. Contrary to belief or assumption, reading critically does the opposite of detracting from the enjoyment — it enhances it.

My midsummer reading list is short, but it punches above its weight:

Resilience

A conversation about purpose, virtues, and deciding what to pack for our journey. The book's structure is a series of letters from a Navy SEAL with a Ph.D. from Oxford University and and his former SEAL comrade he had not seen in a decade.

The conversational aspect and the depth of references from philosophy, psychology, and history the author uses make it an easy read. I love the definition of resilience borrowed from physics: elasticity, the ability to find healthy ways to integrate struggle in life.

As a quality, resilience is often endurance with direction.

See also what makes teams resilient.

The Evolution of Imagination

The book examines the engine of imagination using a cross-disciplinary approach of neuroscience, animal behavior, evolution, philosophy, and psychology. Key questions it tackles are: How is it that a story can evoke a whole world inside of us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience and help us make something completely new? And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society?

Asma writes:

Books about creativity have tended to fall into one of three genres. On the one hand, there have been the breathless and overreaching feel-good paeans to famous entrepreneurs and successful CEO creatives. This kind of book is crammed with amusing but shallow factoids and over-interpreted fMRI studies, all wrapped in a vaguely inspirational glaze.

Next, we have the how-to books that give artists a series of exercises to unblock their creative flow. These books are either therapeutic or instructive, or both, and seek to nurture the joy of our inner prodigy. The third genre is the impenetrable academic baffler, chock-full of erudite and cryptic references to Foucault and the hegemonic phallocentric horizon of being, but otherwise devoid of illumination.

For other views on imagination see the role of imagination and creativity have in our lives and imagination's role in the new culture of learning.

Thanks for the Feedback

Is for those of us who want to learn how to receive feedback and take control of our experience. Giving and receiving feedback is a part of everyone's life, but something many of us have given very little thought to and something that many people do poorly.

I have been aware of the poor feedback I have received, but never really thought about how that feedback failed me. Too often we focus on giving effective feedback (something lacking in most organizations) as the key to building performance. Of course, we can also say we don't want the feedback and set boundaries by saying things “I may not take your advice,” “not right now,” or warn someone our relationship is in jeopardy. But why create boundaries? When someone attacks our character vs. just the behavior, the demands keep coming even after we change, we're dealing with a constant critic. Some of the scenarios can help us with family dynamics.

This book provides a different approach that can be very effective when working with clients.

Explore with how to complain effectively.

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Books can expand our mind and we can learn to read comparatively and competitively.

Many a work of fiction can teach us a lot about human nature, history, and writing well. Fiction writer Rebecca Stead says, “one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself, by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.”

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More reading lists:

Summer Reading List

Another summer reading list

3 Books on Business Culture

Bill Gates summer reading list

Fall reading list

21 books worth reading

What books would you recommend to someone who wants to improve their effectiveness in conversation?

A reading list on human achievement

Susan Cain's reading list for people who draw energy from discussing ideas

Brian Eno's reading list for the manual of civilization

What rational optimist Matt Ridley is reading

Balance reading and doing with Kathy Sierra

Persuasion master Rory Sutherland's reading list

Elon Musk's reading list holds the keys to his success, but only if we look closely

David Bowie's top must-read books

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Find a more complete list of what I'm reading here.

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* The first library in Modena was inaugurated in 1966 and held 3,000 books#. Today, the system holds 308,000 books, 21,000 of which in another language, 10,000 CDs and a little over 9,000 DVDs. The image above is from the central library, housed in a beautiful building with access through an internal courtyard.

Building a Case so Strong that it's Self-Evident

 

“You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”

[Steve Jobs]

What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Why us? These are the three key questions we should ask ourselves when we're working on a new product.

    It's not a question of positioning, that comes later. At this stage we're looking for a set of benefits that is so strong that they're almost self-evident, so we can take customers on a journey with us. Which is what answers the third question: why us?

    When something like this comes along, the connection becomes obvious. Yet, it is the rare organization that sees the obvious before knowing the answers. In June 2007, the iPhone was a revolutionary product. We couldn't buy anything like it.

    Plenty of smart phones were on the market, Moto Q, Blackberry, Palm Treo, the Nokia E62 — their ease of use was debatable. People got really good at figuring out how to type on the little keyboards. Smartphone makers kept iterating on the device, making it somewhat incrementally more usable.

    Not one of those companies thought of reinventing the device altogether. After Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, other companies got to work to build other touch-screen devices. Once we know the answer, everything is obvious. Naysayers only had to see the lines of people sneaking around Apple stores to know demand was strong — a $700 device selling like hot concert tickets.

The one device took years to make and many turns, according to the Secret History of the iPhone:

“The stars aligned. They also aligned with lithium-ion battery technology, and with the compacting of cameras. With the accretion of China’s skilled labor force, and the surfeit of cheaper metals around the world. The list goes on.

It’s not just a question of waking up one morning in 2006 and deciding that you’re going to build the iPhone; it’s a matter of making these non intuitive investments and failed products and crazy experimentation — and being able to operate on this huge timescale

[...]

Most companies aren’t able to that. Apple almost wasn’t able to do that.”

    It was an intense time. It takes years and so many moving parts to make something like that happen. And the demo Jobs did during the Keynote Address at Macworld San Francisco on January 9th, 2007 could have gone terribly wrong at any time. To show the four features people already used on other phones, Jobs used several devices, swapping them under the podium.

    Meanwhile backstage the team — and it was a team of people each who had a team to work on their assigned function — was holding its individual and collective breath as Jobs concludes with a call to Starbucks to order 4,000 lattes.

    But before getting to that part, Jobs resets expectations. He's introducing three devices... which are actually only one — the iPhone, a device 5 years ahead of any other phone. In addition to the technical details that will enable customers to do all the things they want, they already know how to keep this new phone charged and up to date. Thanks to the iPod, 100 million Apple customers were already used to syncing with iTunes. 

   “You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” he said at Apple WWDC closing keynote in 1997. Ten years later, Jobs was on stage showing how to make calls, take photos, use the calendar, and send sms from the iPhone. The things people do on smart phones, with a completely reinvented customer experience.

    The same principle works for products we deliver to other businesses. When we look at the market and competitive options, we want to find the equivalent of that intersection between smart and easy to use. Maybe the product is higher quality at an advantageous price. For many organizations service in an option.

    When we do the work upfront to identify incredible benefits and create something meaningful, customer attraction is built in. From there, we want to look for ways to help people join in beyond the conversation. Do those well and telling the story becomes much more interesting.