Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How Remote Work Will Impact Your Company's Strategy

[Calculated risk. Illustration by Andrea Ucini for Certo magazine]

Before digital became a pervasive part of our lives, companies looked to the strategy introduced by Michael Porter to sustain long-term competitive profitability. Porter's 1979 five forces theory of competitive advantage# shaped a generation of leaders.

Digital technology upset those assumptions. Speed of change opened the door to agility practices. It also created the “adapt or die” imperative. Responding to adaptive challenges is still important, but not in the tech industry ways.

Ironically, the disembodiment of work and divorce from physical locations of recent months, revealed a new opportunity in the real world. There's a physical revolution going on, and it will change how people live, learn, and work.

Countries, regions, and cities will vie for a slice of economic prosperity brought in the form of taxes. That's not from corporations, but from people based where they choose to live.

This revolution is called working from home (WFH),# the opportunity is work from anywhere.# A better way to think about remote work is smart working.

 

Where and how to play

In Playing to Win, A. G. Lafley explains the importance of deciding where and how to play in order to win in business. An autobiographical side note is useful to understand the difference between deciding among options and making choices with longer-term impact.

“In my now forty-plus years in business, I have found that most leaders do not like to make choices. They'd rather keep their options open. Choices force their hands, pin them down, and generate an uncomfortable degree of personal risk. I also found that few leaders can truly define winning. They generally speak of short-term financial measures or a simple share of a narrowly defined market.

In effect, by thinking about options instead of choices and failing to define winning robustly, these leaders choose to play but not to win. They wind up settling for average industry results at best.”

The company's former Chairman of the Board, President and CEO details how Procter & Gamble picked markets and developed products based on competence, strength and a robust investment in understanding people's needs and wants. These are still the prerequisites for winning.

At the heart of the network P&G built, there’s consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, go-to-market capabilities, and scale. But you don't need to be P&G, or to have the same research and development budget to be strategic. 

Understanding people, innovating, and building brands and capabilities make a lot of sense when you're a global company playing in the consumer space. They also make sense when you're a small company trying to prosper in a global market.

What's important about where to play and how to win is remarkably similar from company to company:

• Your industry—which segments are attractive? This is where your company can start differentiating. The temptation is to try to be all things to all people. That's a mistake.
  
• Customers—what do they value? Many companies skimp on research in this area. Other mistake.
  
• Relative position—how does your company fare in the jobs-to-be-done competitive set? What are your capabilities and cost structure? Do you factor in time and energy as an opportunity cost? What's not there that could be important?
  
• Competition—what will competitors do once you've chosen a course of action?
  

Strategy is about finding a smart playing field and the choices you make to drive what you'll do to win in that field. How depends on each context. But moving faster will not save the day if you lack preparation. You'll need to think both deeply and broadly about those choices.

A large slice of the context has potentially changed for good—where employees live.

 

A changing playing field

In March 2018, the World Bank issued a call to action urging several large regions to prepare for internal climate migration.# By 2050, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America could see more than 140 million people move within their countries’ borders, it found.

Projecting out from the current 64 million forced migrants in the world fleeing wars, hunger, persecution, the UN forecast between 25 million and 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050.# These are serious displacement numbers.

A few cities in the U.S. are preparing for climatic and demographic changes. Ann Harbor, Michigan is including these variables into its Capital Improvements Plan (CIP), planning upgrades to its water treatment plant and other critical infrastructure.# Access to water and agricultural land, and moderate weather are solid pre-requisites.#

South Working is a movement in Italy that aims to reduce the economic, social and territorial gap between North and South. By facilitating a more equitable redistribution of the workforce, remote work can help the country rebalance.# But its not just about working from anywhere, it's about working smart. 

Politecnico in Milan defines smart working, “A new managerial philosophy based on giving people back flexibility and autonomy in the choice of spaces, times and tools to be used in the face of greater responsibility for results.” Greater autonomy and the ability to demonstrate results through individual work are important components.# 

Before the pandemic, many companies were dragging their feet on digital transformation. Backed into a corner by safety and health concerns, most confronted their limiting thinking. Because by-and-large it worked pretty smoothly for most knowledge workers.

This was most evident in companies and regions of the world most adamant about in-person, in-office. A recent study by Forum PA in Italy, found that 93 percent of public workers would prefer to continue with smart working.# People found they could get more done with less hassle.

Once people experience what is possible, it becomes critical to rethink what is desirable. Technology may not have faded into the background just yet, but it has given us this experience of being able to keep working. It happened globally and swiftly.

Italy's timid steps became a giant leap forward worth capitalizing on. Many people discovered they preferred to live closer to their families and friends who they'd left in search of work up North. People left New York City, San Francisco, and other large cities in the U.S. Whether temporarily or for good depends on context.

 

Working out who and what

Take another look at the strategic importance of where and how to play of A.G. Lafley. Add to it the idea that humanity has just experienced en masse how the nature of our work has changed.

Yes, we still need physical presence to produce and make things, to service needs. We still need safety for many industries that are limping along while trying to reinvent themselves. But increasingly, we've discovered that we can do many important things from somewhere else. Our policies and agreements have not kept up with what is possible.

The change had already happened. It was many years in the making, now it's here. Some city mayors want their commuters back—in Milan# as in New York City, London, and other large metropolitan areas—an entire economy was built on the assumptions that hundreds and thousands of people would move, or shift daily.

What happens when companies shrink or eliminate central offices? When people don't go out to eat or for coffee, stay in hotels, buy expensive air fares for business, etc. It's really hard to predict whether those activities will come back in full force.

But what we could see is a call for greater standardization of the new ways of working. Would we lean into or resist the same-ification of experience? Robin Hanson says,

Places that resist integration and standardization will suffer, and that is likely to especially include the richest and poorest places. But for the rest, market integration will ensure more equal wages and prices for products and services.

As usual, this will help those whom the prior fragmentation hurt, and hurt those whom the prior fragmentation helped. And everyone will gain from new economies of scale and scope.

The boom in personal habits and skills better suited to this world—introversion, self-discipline and motivation, writing, communicating—suit people who've been preparing for this world for 10-15 years. It helps if you've learned to operate in this new paradigm from your early education.

I'm seeing more remote job ads. But what I'm not seeing, yet, is a shift in recruiting mindset. Companies are by and large still seeking to hire the same mixes of old-style work habits and skills that were valuable in prior contexts of offices, high rises, work suits, parking garages, freeways, and cars.

 

Collaboration is a new competitive advantage

Greg Satell has been calling out how value has moved to the center of networks. Strategic advantage is already going to those who can aggregate and coordinate specialized skills. 

Lorenzo Sistino says when starting something new it's essential to find and choose the right collaborators.# Sistino is ex top manager at FCA and CEO of MiaCar, an online marketplace to buy local new or used cars ready for delivery, with clear and transparent pricing.

Luca d’Alessandro concurs that you need to find complementary skills and converge on philosophy of work. D'Alessandro, PhD PoliMi and MIT, is CEO of Phononic Vibes,# a company founded on the research and philosophy of two cultures and geographies. Its new patented technology uses a circular economy approach to provide greater insulation from vibration and noise control. 

Eliana Leo says collaborators are fundamental. Competence and past experience are important. Trying out a collaboration through a project is the best way to figure out compatibility. Leo is associate professor of pharmaceutical technology at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia# and co-founder of PerFormS, an innovative startup focused on cosmetic and inflammation nanotechnology.

A former GM and manager at a large multinational auto company, a product startup founder and a professor and researcher are examples of the mix of skills and experience companies like P&G and IBM have embraced for more than a decade.

Smart working is a paradigm shift. It requires a revision of the leadership model and the organization, strengthening collaboration and encouraging a new view of working space. Office becomes any place that favors creativity and encourages relationships.

Many multi-generational family businesses in Italy have long created research labs that rival the sophistication of those of multinationals. People can be anywhere, a central hub for synthesizing discovery and innovation is useful.

 

Strategic impact of smart working

You should not have to be a consultant to have less rigid work hours. Smart companies are already making it easier to do non-work tasks during usual work times. Integrating life back into work promotes endurance and staves off burnout.

Several executives and specialists who've been working this way say it's about quality of life. Extend this concept to working from anywhere, and you can see how we could rebuild communities around the world.

I'm not so sure the firms in this new world are larger, or that things will work quite as Robin Hanson says.# I'm inclined to think more in terms of ecosystems of value. More network than chain. More combination of in-person and remote than either one at the exclusion of the other. Smaller, networked teams collaborating across geographies.

Imagination and creativity don't have scheduled hours. They happen mostly in the pauses. In the same way that opportunity resides in the gap between what you know and what you don't, distributed work forces could enrich the idea pool.

Once you zero in on the value to move the strategic needle, you should identify the bottleneck or what keeps you from executing well. When everyone shared a physical office space, having to coordinate across corporate silos or getting multiple layers of approvals were a big problem that cost companies dearly. It happened years before anyone worked from home.

Delays between contract signing and project start or too many projects kicking off at the same time were endemic issues of agency life. This before life moved elsewhere. You can use simple rules to avert or minimize those issues.

The industries that are limping along in this new paradigm are ripe for reinvention. There are likely new product and service ideas most business leaders thought wouldn't work that are doable with smart working. Initially, it may not seem to matter. By the time you notice the shift, it will be too late to catch up.

Like data analysis, disruption is all about hindsight. Agility and speed were the gods in that environment. Preparing to challenge conventional wisdom is another game altogether. In a world of incremental improvements to eke a millisecond advantage, sustained advantage will be due to strategic impact.

And you don't get that from doing more of what used to work. Broadening and deepening connections is a smart bet, as is acquiring new skills, and noticing meaningful opportunities. 

 

+

Companies pay me to write. I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to more than 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you're curious about reframing and rethinking business and ideas.

Innovating: Beyond the Sex Appeal

Innovation, like leadership, is a word that has tremendous sex appeal. But the real sexy part is what happens when it happens. For that, you still need to do the work. Use with care.

The work includes figuring out that innovating is often about behavior change. Whether you're the company doing it or wanting to innovate, the consultants, the sponsor or partner in innovation, your behavior is also up for change.

It's important to remember that innovation demands trade-offs. For example, satellite radio offers a broader selection, but you lose free music; online grocery shopping gets you home delivery, but you lose the ability to pick the freshest foods personally.

It's also about starting with mindset. Innovating is not about fixing a problem, it's about seeking opportunity in the gap between what you know and what you don't. Because it moves us from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance, innovation leads to breakthroughs towards where we want to go even as we may not know how to get here.

To be meaningful, the gains need to be greater than the losses. Based on what motivates us, there are typically 4 main forces that drive innovation: curiosity, fear, wealth, and significance. But even when you have all of that, companies still confuse the structure of innovation with that of strategy.

I've selected three books that provide different perspectives on what it takes to innovate to get you started thinking in the right direction. Below, I'm also sharing a useful framework on seeing patterns and keeping opportunities open.

 

Looshots, Maps and Mechanisms

We're not short metaphors in innovation. That's because often people invent things for which there are no real words, yet. Bringing something new to the world has its risks and the rewards are not certain. Take for example the telephone.

Antonio Meucci invented it. He began to work on a device to communicate through distance when he was 26, in 1834. He was working as chief engineer in Florence Pergola Theater. He built a contraption to provide direction from the stage. He perfected his idea first in Cuba and then in New York, where he started looking for financing. 

Due to poor English he was having difficulty finding a sponsor. Therefore he applied for a loan with Western Union. Meucci sent all his technical notes and a prototype with the application. Western Union rejected the loan, but kept all the materials. The excuse was that they had misplaced them.

Here's my first sigh on his behalf. Two years later, the poor man didn't even have the 10 dollars he needed to renew a 'caveat' patent application. In waltzes Alexander Graham Bell, Western Union consultant with a lab right next to where Meucci's document were in deposit.

Bell might have been no inventor, but he was an opportunist. He deposited the telephone patent, became a celebrity, and sealed a fabulous agreement with Western Union. Make no mistake, it was not his patent.

In 1887, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the real inventor and found a judgement for fraud against Bell, but Meucci’s death two years later stopped the case. The Florentine invented one of the most amazing technologies of modern times and died a poor (and almost forgotten) man. His economic success went to another man.

The inventor of the telephone has not been officially designated for more than 100 years. On June 11, 2002, with resolution 269, the United States Congress officially recognized Antonio Meucci’s work in inventing the telephone.

If you look for these cases, you'll find them everywhere. There's a deeper reflection on ethics and behavior in this story. What world do you want to live in? To find the Meucci in your industry or company, start with who. Look for these 6 characteristics of deep innovation smarts.

Use good reference material to think about innovation—its nature, orientation, and process. I selected 3 books for your reading list to get you started. Don't forget to stay until the end, where we talk about a framework.

 

3 books on innovation

These references are quite different from each other on purpose. Thinking differently is key. Each explores a different part of the innovation equation. I know from many conversations that what most people would love to have something simple-and-easy to do.

Give me the formula, they say. Add pixie dust and water, whichever is on hand. But, like everything worth pursuing in the field of leadership, innovation happens at the end of work. It takes work to figure out what you're not seeing or doing. But you're worth it.

1.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

The key is nurturing. Bahcall proposes a new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior. What's a loonshot? “A neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged.”

Book's thesis: The most significant and influential breakthroughs are often the results of loonshots, where the ultimate outcome’ pioneers are initially dismissed, written off and laughed away as being loony.

Or die in poverty, like Meucci.

Bahcall is a physicist and entrepreneur. His aim with the book is to show why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice.

Loonshots have their genesis in company structure and not culture, drawing a parallel from the science of phase transitions. In the author's language, to generate loonshots, you want fluidity: smaller teams with mostly creative folks (“artists”).

While to generate franchises, or even just to bring the loonshots to market, you want solidity: bigger teams staffed with “soldiers” who have well-defined roles. Perhaps this is the inventor and opportunist distinction.

Loonshot Rules:

1. Separate the phases: Separate your artists and soldiers.
2. Dynamic equilibrium: Love your artists and soldiers equally.
3. Critical mass: Have a loonshot group large enough to ignite.

In the latter part of the book, Bahcall presents a plausible quantitative model for the various forces that incline team members towards loonshot vs. franchise behavior, and how to tweak those variables to get the kind of company you want.

Two thoughts worth pondering:

“The twisted paths leading to great discoveries are the rule rather than the exception. And so are their revisionist histories: victors don't just write history; they rewrite history.”

“As teams and companies grow larger, the stakes in outcome decrease while the perks of rank increase. When the two cross, the system snaps. Incentives begin encouraging behavior no one wants. Those same groups—with the same people—begin rejecting loonshots.”

Update: When I mentioned this article on LinkedIn, Safi Bahcall pointed me to a Twitter thread he created to synthesize the key ideas of the book.

2.

Mapping Innovation: a Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell

Navigating is the operative word. The biggest problem with innovation is that it's a very broad term. Dig deeper into applications―what works for startups doesn't work for large organizations, building a new app is not the same as working on discovering something new in the lab.

I asked Greg Satell about the difference. His experience in different cultures, which is illuminating. As you saw in my example above, Italians have plenty of smart, innovative people but so little funding and structure around it.

This is a strength in Satell's book. His “Innovation Matrix” and his “Horizons of innovation” frameworks are powerful, yet simple tools to understand the continuum of innovation, activities, time horizons and resource allocation.

As he says:

“The purpose of this book is threefold. First, it will help you get a better understanding of innovation by dispelling destructive innovation myths. Innovations don’t happen just because someone comes up with one big idea. It takes many ideas to solve an important problem, and that requires a collective effort.

Second, this book will give you valuable tools to help you frame the problems that are important to you. As you will see, it is only by framing problems effectively that you can find the approach most likely to solve them. Finally, it will help explain how innovation in the digital age is different from what it was in previous generations. Simply put, technology has given us powerful new tools, and we need to learn how to use them effectively.”

3.

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley

Flourishing is a key concept. Ridley makes a stronger case for the conditions that prevent it.

His 3 main ideas:

1. Important innovations tend to arise from many people improving incrementally upon the work of others. The singular inventor's “Eureka!” moment is largely a myth. This point resonates with Greg Satell's, “You don't need the best people, you need the best teams.”
2. Recent regulatory hurdles have hindered innovation, particularly in Europe.
3. The net impact of intellectual property laws has been to hinder innovation as well.

Ridley seems to focus on points 2 and 3:

“Innovations come in many forms, but one thing they all have in common, and which they share with biological innovations created by evolution, is that they are enhanced forms of improbability.”

“The twentieth century saw only one innovative source of energy on any scale: nuclear power. (Wind and solar, though much improved and with a promising future, still supply less than 2 per cent of global energy.)  In terms of its energy density, nuclear is without equal: an object the size of a suitcase, suitably plumbed in, can power a town or an aircraft carrier almost indefinitely.

The development of civil nuclear power was a triumph of applied science, the trail leading from the discovery of nuclear fission and the chain reaction through the Manhattan Project's conversion of a theory into a bomb, to the gradual engineering of a controlled nuclear reaction and its application to boiling water.”

Update: Here's an interview with Matt Ridley by Naval.

Seeing patterns and keeping opportunities open

I promised a framework to get oriented. This is courtesy of Steven Johnson. In Where Good Ideas Come From, he provides a framework to look at the general laws of innovation.

For all the talk about innovation, though, we still do little of it. There are many reasons why. Ridely put it best, “Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of innovation is how unpopular it is, for all the lip service we pay to it.”

Overused has many interesting synonyms, including: drained, dull, exhausted, mildewed, overworked, stale, tired, worn and worn-out, stereotyped. They depend on context, but all have something in common—there's no energy there.

Innovation thrives on energy. Make it positive, and you're on your way to creating value, and impact.

[image of mental models and innovation]

+

I've been sharing more book lists, ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to more than 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you're using this time to reflect and learn. It's free.

How to Argue and Win Every Time

Do you have something to say? Could you benefit from improving how you argue your case? Are you looking for something concrete to help you? Given that my recent article on how to argue well went viral, it's safe to assume this is a hot topic.

You may think this is a skill only lawyers need. But you'd be surprised at how far you can go when you can weave a strong argument. For example, you'll ace your pitch, and you'll find the real insight (or close to it) faster when you learn to argue well.

I'm working with clients on writing powerful arguments for articles and pitches right now, and I developed some tools to help them. Could the executive of a large financial company use this advice? Could the veteran executive recruiter do better on behalf of companies and senior talent?

These two examples have one issue in common: how to build the narrative structure in a way that keeps interest high, and gives readers (and listeners) the information they need to make up their mind and pick their idea or product — in other words pick them.

It's a different style than journalism, and not only for the obvious reasons. Let's take a look at the ways in which they diverge and examine the elements of a powerful argument.

How news stories inform

Once you've picked a topic, there's a proven structure journalists use: they call it the inverted pyramid. This means you're attempting to answer all the basic questions about a particular event by asking: who, what, when, where and why (the 5 Ws) and often also how in the opening of your article.

News stories also consider their readers' interest. Thus they include information about proximity, oddity, or consequence. They take into account human interest, prominence, and timeliness. I could write an entire article about objectivity and point of view. But let's keep it simple here.

Your headline is critical. You want it to draw attention to your topic, but also be accurate in describing what you'll say. It's a good idea to use active voice as much as possible and clear, short and to the point sentences. Use your conclusion to summarize the key point(s).

Look at Pulitzer Prize winners for examples. Take the 2008 story by Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post where he chronicled a world-class violinist who, as an experiment, played beautiful music in a subway station filled with distracted and harried commuters.

“Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.” That was the headline. You're probably familiar with the topic as it was popular in behavioral science circles.

Here's the set up:

He emerged from the metro at the L'Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

Read the article here. Can you see the key elements?

Weingarten won a $10,000 prize# for a distinguished example of feature writing “giving prime consideration to quality of writing, originality and concision, in print or in print and online.”

Arguing takes you a little further.

How arguing impacts decisions

You don't need to be a lawyer to argue well, but it helps to learn from one. Gerald Spence is a semi-retired American trial lawyer and author of How to Argue and Win Every Time. It's a book filled with great stories and examples from the person who won some of the most famous cases, like the Karen Silkwood case.

Having never lost a criminal case in his 40+ year career, and achieved a remarkable record of multi-million dollar verdicts in civil cases, Spence came up with some elements that make up the power argument (in italics).

Let's build on them a little here:

1. Prepare. Prepare until you've become the argument — you do that by writing things down and thinking about your argument like a screenplay. You're the good guys, the misunderstood side, the underdog. But, if you're not completely clean, find a way to come clean that still makes you win. (more about this below)
2. Open the other to receiving your argument — literally empower them to receive or reject your argument by telling them the truth, being who you are.
   
3. Give the argument in the form of story — your boss, your family, your colleagues are all primed to listen to stories. It's part of being human.
   
4. Tell the truth — use ordinary words, talk about how you feel, yes even about fear, if that's what you're feeling. Truth is power. It's also liberating, no need to keep track of lies, and it enhances your reputation.
   
5. Tell the other person what you want — if you're arguing for money, ask for it. The idea is not to leave the other party guessing, because they may be wrong. This is also true of pitches. It hurts your credibility if you're casual about it. There's incredible power of justice embedded in each person. Nobody can live with injustice for long or at all.
   
6. Avoid sarcasm, scorn, and ridicule. Use humor cautiously — it may feel good to play the cynic or mock things that others hold dear, but it leads down a blind alley. You being petty doesn't help anyone. Respect is the best course. It's also reciprocal. My mentor once asked me if I liked someone I was interviewing. Yes, very much, I said. That's an indication they liked you as well, he said. As for humor, use sparingly and only if you're certain it will reveal the truth and you can pull it off. It's tricky not to fail here.
   
7. Logic is power — you can ride it all the way if it's on your side. But if it leads to unjust results, it has no power. Opt instead for a creativity in your approach, often served by logic. (more on this below)
   
8. Action and winning are brothers — or sisters. Take control, don't let the other get you into defensive mode. Attack, if you must. But take the initiative. Now, if you're arguing in a relationship with people you care about, do it with love. We're not going to talk about this part here. But it's worth exploring for the sake of stronger families and communities.
   
9. Admit at the outset the weak points in your argument — there's no point hiding them, and if you bring them up first, you'll have a stronger position. This supports a few of the previous points. Honesty will also take part of the argument away from your opponent.
   
10. Understand your power. Give yourself permission — only to win — but not with arrogance and disrespect. Find the vision within yourself, open up and let the magic out.

All these points are related. Spence believes the argument starts with the person. It's more than mere technique. It's about discovering who you are and bringing that into the world.

Your ability to argue well impacts the decisions of others. But it also impacts what happens to you. While you consume a news story, even a Pulitzer Prize caliber story, cannot get you what you want. A good argument will.

To make a power argument, consider the casting carefully

Say that you're preparing an argument to get a project reinstated. You cannot cast your boss in the role of the villain. That's because the ultimate decision-maker(s) will throw their protective cloak around the executive and reject your appeal.

Maybe you don't have a stellar track record, because the project wasn't quite going that well. Plus you had strong words about its cancellation. So it's hard for you to be the good person now. Your manager and the decision-maker(s) have already claimed the role.

The thing is you had to fold that project because of shifting priorities before it could bear fruit. You had no choice. But the lack of results left your boss with no choice as well. Maybe you also had harsh words in front of everyone. Now your boss' position of power in the company is at stake.

Who's the villain then? Circumstance, is it not? Circumstance would dictate the same result in every case a competent manager in a position of authority came in conflict with an enthusiastic, hard-working and strong-headed employee. Both manager and employee are victims of circumstance.

Since you cannot claim the high ground because it's already taken by your boss and the decision-maker(s), you cast yourself and your boss on the same side. You both want what's best for the company. A power argument thus may start from a position of power, one that generates acceptance (or approval).

To make a power argument you must be right, or justice must be on your side, or you must be the underdog seeking redemption. You must evoke respect and understanding, if not admiration. Sympathy is the weakest power position. You don't want sympathy, you want to get going with the project.

How you start to open minds, and close to get the deal

Your opening to decision-maker(s) might go like this:

When you go home tonight, no one will tell you have have done the right thing. No one will give you public recognition for having saved a project that could lead to opportunity in a new market. No one will reward you for your caring and your foresight. But I thank you now. You're wise decision-maker(s) and this company has intelligent, experienced and caring executives. My boss is among the best.

You understand the situation they're in, and respect them. Maybe you also sound a bit like you're trying to ingratiate yourself. But it's true, you are. Yet, careful that what you say in your own words is sincere. Own the argument in its entirety. Get to what you want quickly:

I'm speaking with you to ask you to give me another chance. I'm hopeful that when we're done talking, the project will be under consideration again.

Then outline what went wrong, why pulling the plug too quickly was a mistake. Keep it to circumstance being the villain and both you and your boss being on the same side: results. You know the facts, review them again with the decision-maker(s). Acknowledge that your boss was in the right to make the call and that the project was taking longer than you had anticipated.

Circumstance did intervene with company priorities shifting. You were wrong to speak out of turn when you did. Put anyone else in both roles — yours and your manager's — and you'd likely have had a version of the same predicament happen. No enthusiastic, hard-working employee would back down from proving they could open a new market. No manager could back down from reassessing priorities.

Close strong. Restate what you want: an opportunity to finish the project and prove the viability of your hypothesis for a new market. You'd like to tell your boss how sorry you are for losing your temper, and ask for advice and counsel on how to proceed to make the project a success. Or something to this effect.

The argument I've outlined is spoken. But remember that before you even deliver it, you've worked on a screenplay outlining the characters and the argument. Writing it out helps you make clarity on what you're thinking. Does it hold water? Would you accept if you were the other party?

Winning pitches are the best arguments in the marketing world. The best have no jargon, no frills, just layer upon layer of rationale and emotional story delivered with wit, humility and effortless charm. Advertising legend David Abbott is a good example.

But you may not be soft spoken like Abbott; the rationale and emotion may warrant a more energetic approach, or a gentler one, or one filled with love and restraint. I have several examples of winning pitches here.

As you review them, including the selection from movies, notice what all the winning arguments have in common: laser focus on the issue, no side conversations or back stories if they don't support the main argument, and a strong dose of caring for the outcome to benefit all involved.

+

I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to nearly 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you're curious about reframing and rethinking business and ideas.

Are we Living at a Moment When Significant Change is Possible?

“The best way to predict the future is to create it,” said Abraham Lincoln.

The future is hard to predict. Yet, that's not for lack of trying. A thriving trends industry says forecasts are in high demand. Futurists work outward from data and evidence, seeking to identify highly probable events.

While unpredictable in scope, pandemics are undesirable parts of our past and highly probable events. But proceed with caution. Labeling an observation about what's going on “insight” doesn't make it so. Further, insights are not as useful to understanding changing habits, behaviors and attitudes and what will stick as you'd like to think.

It takes time for events to run their course, and the present is squishy. Knowing how things will end, and which end of a developing trend we're going to end up on is very difficult. Hence why sociologists, anthropologists and journalists examine one small aspect of what's happening. Best when from differing perspectives.

It's counter-intuitive, but it's valuable to look at the question: are we living at a moment when significant change is possible? As a historian would. To figure out what could happen, looking at it as a horizon of sorts, is more useful than trying to keep up with the speed of developing events.

 

1970s: battles are a serious thing

Military history used to be a collection of names and dates with a sprinkling of technical details. That's because it was written by tacticians and military professionals. It was an example of what regular people didn't want to know.

Then in the early 1970s, historians discovered that battles where a serious thing. They found that when a society was engaged in battle, it invested all its energies. Rather than being just an unfortunate event to know about, war revealed ways of thinking and doing of the time.

By studying what happened around a battle you could start to peel back people's mindset and infer how things worked. When you have an event significant enough that everyone or most people need to do something about it, the wheels of change set in motion.

Many have compared the current pandemic to a war. This is not like other recessions, they say: we have constrained supply and higher moral demands. Thus, leaders with principles should forego profits for the greater good. At least for a while.

Since we're comparing the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 to a war, let's take a look at how we entered the last major war that was quasi-global in scope: World War II. In Strange Defeat: a Statement of Evidence written in 1940, leading up to the war, historian Marc Bloch says:

The generation to which I belong has a bad conscience. It is true that we emerged from the last war desperately tired, and that after four years not only of fighting but of mental laziness, we were only too anxious to get back to our proper employments... That is our excuse. But I have long ceased to believe that it can wash us clean of guilt.

Bloch taught medieval history at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944). His remarkable life was cut short: shot by the retreating Nazis in June 1944. But his contribution to history endures.

 

Strange Defeat was a sort of autopsy of the France between wars outlining failures in the French mindset. The loss of morale of the soldiers and a failed education of the officers was manifest in both character and intelligence. Focus on testing drained entire generations of originality and initiative or thirst for knowledge, and created an “appreciation only of successful cheating and sheer luck.”

 

Could we have a similar failure in mindset leading up to the pandemic? Could the last economic recession that impacted the world as we know it not be also leading up to a humanitarian crisis? Saving lives comes first, but should we not question expending energy to preserve our previous ways of life?

 

Let's start with a simple assumption.

 

Is it useful to track speed?

This “war” we're fighting is revealing a lot about mindset and how things worked up to this point. Speed is often an obvious, because desirable, element of trends. But is it useful to tracking what will stick? It's complicated, but the short answer is likely, no.

 

A new narrative and way of doing things emerges from events, but is also the product of energy accumulated over time. Occurrences happen within the deep flow of history. Things that change slowly tend to influence people more than we think or suppose. Because they have more staying power.

 

Take technology, for example. The narrative seems to suggest that technology has changed everything. Yet, the pace of human change has not really picked up much. Look for example at movies from the 1980s/90s on.

 

Forget hair styles and clothing, look at themes, the fundamental behaviors, attitudes and habits. They've remained pretty predictable. Where demand goes, that's where attention goes. Investments went to the quick buck, not the sustainable safety nets.

 

What's changed in tangible ways from the 1970s on has been much slower. We hardly saw it happen. But now you have more freedom in the little decisions—what color mask and material do I pick?—and minor things—should I cut the grass every day because I'm bored?—not in important things—every region of the world supports proven strategies to contain the pandemic with policy and collaboration.

 

The value of the changes brought about in the '60s rippled through society in the 1970s. Then things sort of hovered. The past becomes value in the present. Yet, that value started getting diluted over time.

 

People channeled the energy that created the initial wave of change into commerce. Prosperity followed investment in infrastructure, which in turn created constraints and constancy. Governance brought about a new social contract, change got slower in the big things as it stayed fast in the small ones—the ones you can affect directly.

 

Speed is interesting, but itself not as useful to understand how change happens. Further, change is a spontaneous part of how the universe works. However, when people talk about future change, they mean the immediate things that they'd want in the here and now to extend a little farther out.

 

1300s: a period of great progress

History is everything that ever happened to humanity. The difficulty is that there's nothing insignificant, because a small habit or detail like what farmers had for breakfast at the time could help us understand something unexpected.

 

Take for example the Middle Ages. It was a period of great progress. People were very active. Commerce was flourishing. Technology was making new things possible: the ships that took Christopher Columbus in his first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, the compass, our first GPS, the printing press. It was a formidable civilization.

 

What else happened in that great period of time? A great crisis that extended for more than 100 years. Famine, plague, and wars were constantly succeeding each other in waves. It's hard to fathom how people got anything done. Never mind brewing the Renaissance.

 

What innovation could possibly happen as witches were put at the stake, entire crops were lost across Europe due to climate change, half the population emerged from the succession of super contagious plagues (1348 - 1399) and France and England were at war (1337 - 1453)?

 

Consider that at the time, nobody measured anything. Yet, we know so much about what was going on because of the accurate tax and deed records of Italian city state functionaries and diary entries made by contemporary chroniclers about the steep increase in the cost of bread. Everyday things were recorded because it was possible—paper was invented in the '200s, paving the way for the printing press.

 

The plague of 1348 happened on top of years of poor harvest. People were dying of hunger starting with the catastrophic harvests between 1315-1317. For years the climate had been stable and warm seasons guaranteed a plentiful harvest. Suddenly, the climate went crazy with torrential rains and floods across Europe.

 

People were starving. It was a weird crisis—the Pope and the King of France clashed violently. France was the richest, most populated and powerful country in the Christian world. The Pope moved to Avignon and would stay for 70 years. Meanwhile, the vacuum left in Rome created low morale.

 

It was a century of farmers revolts. Yet people continued to trade and grow commerce. In Florence, while artists like Donatello and Masaccio were born and created amazing works, the Ciompi wool workers organized an uprising. It was one of the first protests organized for economic-political purposes in European history.

 

The quality of products continued to improve. A thriving construction industry started building churches and palaces of increasing splendor. Many things also were interrupted and never completed.

 

Siena was a super wealthy city that was projecting an exponential population growth. Its unfinished Cathedral is a clue—a marble wall that leads nowhere on the side was the prelude to a bigger central nave. When the plague came, the work was left unfinished. Today, the Cathedral would still fit everyone in the city. That's how bit they were thinking and projecting!

 

Creating the future

Each of the crisis factors in 1300s also provoked a positive backlash. Those who knew how things were going figured out how to use it to thrive. For example, while famine and plague were tragedies, they didn't reduce buildings to rubble or dissipate estates. Survivors could rest during the worst of the plague, then redirect funds and uses, kick-starting a new chain of innovation.

 

Needs and uses oriented production. Those who stayed with the old ways didn't do well, those who changed with the times made money. Fewer wool workers could charge more for their skills. More money then meant drinking wine at the Osteria—wine making a flourishing profession. Hence more fruit trees and wine cultivation. Extra cash also meant families could afford meat. Butchers become a powerful trade.

 

Animal breeding meant more pasture land and irrigation investment. In the big Po Valley in Emilia-Romagna, milk turned into Parmigiano Reggiano and other fabulous cheese the region still exports today. Savings created demand for clothing not made out of wool at home. Along the luxury brocades, the cotton industry developed to cater to the needs of farmers and laborers.

 

Even war created business. Mercenaries needed horses, saddles, armor, swords, etc. To tax, the state needed records. Hence functionaries, administrators and other intermediaries who became the new middle class. Italy was quite literate in the 1300s. The Italian communes and commercial republics enjoyed relative political freedom conducive to academic and artistic advancement.

 

The facts themselves about the prolonged period of crisis of the 1300s didn't change. What changed in the 1970s is that historians refused to look just at dates and battles, Popes and Emperors. They started looking at events with a higher attention to details.

 

If the conversation is to favor the important, then the war of 1oo years is more important than meal times and buying clothes. But if your question is to understand why people started doing something else entirely after the war, anything can give you a better sense of how the past impacts the present.

 

The first to talk about history as the actions of human beings over time, Bloch believed in a multidisciplinary engagement towards history, blending research with geography, sociology and economics. 

 

Creating the future is the best way to predict it. But if history is to teach us anything at all, it is that knowing human beings is essential to sorting through the catalogue of everything people do. You never know what event will define an age, nor what detail will be relevant.

 

Two implications:

• Just because many small and simple things people start doing may not stick, as is, doesn't mean it's not going to impact change longer term.
• All human actions are part of a larger effort or journey through life.

Studying only the things that seem to be loudest or biggest cuts you off opportunity. Anything can give you a better sense of what's going on. What's in the background is also likely going to have fewer competitors.

The real work is not in sifting data, topics, problems and questions, though that is important. Writing and documenting is a responsibility. But a greater one rests on the decisions you make about what's written and said.

+

 

I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to nearly 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you're curious about reframing and rethinking business and ideas.

How to Help People Make New Choices

Reframing is a powerful tool in business. A small change of posture can make a big difference. The circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them, says adman Rory Sutherland. The global pandemic does provide a context of unprecedented scale (at least in my lifetime) to take a look at how we make decisions.

Coronavirus didn't create many of the issues we're confronting today, it accelerated them.

Companies were wrestling with change for a range of issues before—from hiring, working from home (WFH) and open office, to digital transformation, sustainable business models and innovation.

As individuals, communities and countries we were also wrestling with change—patching what's broken at the moment of need, using workaround around policies and rules that are beyond their usefulness, working faster to lose less ground.

Covid19 lockdowns created a pause of global proportions. Experiences vary based on resources and means, community support, policy, rules and roles. Reality can be so fragmented that we agree on little anymore. Yet, there are many things we have in common with each other.

Sociologist Aldo Bonomi says the situation shines a spotlight on the structural gaps in care. Health has become a value again, but the jury is out on valuing it, creating the appropriate structures and allocating resources where they're missing.

Making sense of what's happening

Many agencies and companies have been releasing trend reports. I've been tracking those in my weekly note that goes out every Friday morning. Things will change—f o r e v e r, say some, not at all, say others.

My take is that some choices that changed short term could stick, other mid-range changes will have longer term implications. “Could” gives you room to act. Change happens slowly at first, then all of a sudden. I've seen this happen in several industries.

There are ways to make sense of what's happening, and methods to keep the pulse of what's going on with your customers and markets. Nobody likes to be blindsided. Assuming is close to not knowing and can also be expensive.

Pick up the phone and talk to customers, suppliers, partners and colleagues. Keep checking in on what they're seeing and doing. Stay open minded and ask open questions.

The focus is on how the other person sees and experiences.

Navigating tensions

I worked on the report for the first batch of key themes from conversations that 119 contributors had with 176 people from 35 countries between late March and mid-April 2020. Keeping an open mind and letting the data speak to you is hard work.

We talked to people from Australia to Azerbaijan, India to Israel, Pakistan to Peru. I talked to people in Italy and the USA—participants signed up on the website. The experiences of engineers, audiologists, taxi drivers, housemaids, nurses, executives, comic book illustrators and many more pointed to 7 areas where change could happen:

1.

CONNECTION: Self-reflection and relationships under lockdown: learning to live with uncertainty—People are adjusting their expectations and we’re now seeing new manifestations of fear, hope, and change.

Why we believe this is important:

For many, the COVID-19 crisis feels like THE most important life-changing time of their lives. But that comes with the pressure of having to figure things out when they feel least in control. How might we ensure that individuals have the emotional support they need to get to the other side? What could encourage self-confidence and a growth mindset? Is this new wave of creative and altruistic energy temporary, or will a spark from a few individuals drive change towards a more mindful society?

2.

COMMUNITY: From “me” to “we”—For many, COVID-19 has created a new or renewed sense of community. As this plays out differently between regions, questions still remain about whether it will last.

Why we believe this is important:

While expressed very differently across regions, what we are seeing worldwide is that in times of global crisis, a strong sense of community brings relief in various forms. This opportunity may come from recognizing these shifts in how people now see their social circles and networks, and/or finding ways to support and prolong favorable aspects (which will differ between regions) of this new sense of togetherness.

3.

COLLISION: Work and family life colliding—Productivity, boundaries and family roles are new challenges for those who are now working from home. Working parents juggle both aspects of their lives, but still find unexpected moments of joy.

Why we believe this is important:

There is an opportunity to help people establish new routines, rituals and mental or physical spaces that help them feel in harmony, or develop mechanisms to better deal with an unbalanced reality.

4.

COMMUNICATION: Calling, messaging, video: the new essentials—People are rethinking the role of Calling, messaging, technology in their lives.

Why we believe this is important:

This is a time for technology to shine – to bring people together in a genuine and authentic way. There is an opportunity to better support those who are new to these technologies, and help understand their unarticulated needs.

5.

COPING: Self-acceptance, re-evaluation, the unexpected—People are appreciating themselves and evaluating Self-acceptance, their consumption patterns in the face of change.

Why we believe this is important:

Will buying behavior now shift more towards filling the emotional vacuum and making aspirational purchases? Will the dilemma of whether to live life as previously or to reboot cause businesses to rethink their strategies? A simple question of ‘who am I?’ is perhaps up for deeper introspection.

6.

CLARIFICATION: Roles, responsibilities and rituals—Increased recognition and appreciation for primary front line workers and an awareness about missing human contribution towards climate, physical environment and nature is evident.

Why we believe this is important:

Appreciation, illumination, and de-stigmatization are silver linings of COVID-19. How might we take advantage of the positive changes to create lasting improvements in our societies? Will this restructuring lead to new taboos and social disparities?

7.

CONFIDENCE: Rethinking trust—The volume of news and views is overwhelming. Who Rethinking trust do we trust? What information is helpful? What is the official government line?

Why we believe this is important:

When the power of trust and guidance goes to non-official groups, people grow uncomfortable. They fear that many pretend to help in order to advance their own agendas. Could a crisis like this require us to be more morally flexible and let natural leaders do their job, regardless of their credentials? How might official and underground leaders come together to lead for a greater good?

I've included the headlines, brief explanation and the why we believe this is important, but you should go ahead and read the details. You'll also notice that many themes overlap—fear and trust, technology and people, hope and uncertainty, connection and re-evaluation.

How people are navigating self-others and community-country tensions is also part of context and can influence choices.

Designing conversations to introduce change

The jobs to be done is a concept the late Clay Christensen put forward to explain why we “hire” a product or service. JTBD forces is a tool (see diagram above) I've been using with clients to explore what is and what could be next. Bob Moesta & Chris Spiek have developed a robust set of resources around the concept.

Choices are the product of four main forces. There are things that push you to make a change, because you're not satisfied with the current product or solution. There are things that pull you because they sound pretty good, so you see upside in changing.

But on the other hand, uncertainty makes you cautious, while force of habit or inertia makes you stay with the current way. Think comfort of what I know when so much is destabilizing. It keeps you going with the flow.

To help people make changes and new choices, you want to address the strongest forces that could keep them rooted to the current ways. A brief explanation:

Push — the struggles people are facing in their current situation. These struggles are strong enough to push people to look for and adopt a better way or solution to the job they want to get done.

Pull — the appeal of a new way or solution. This new way looks good enough to attract people into its orbit.

Anxieties — the concerns and uncertainties people have about the new way or solution. Will this get me what I need?

Habit — anything with business as usual that makes it harder to change. For example, is there risk involved?

Every decision is a journey from what I know, buy and use to what I don't know, could be better, yet I'm not sure if it works. Understanding whether people are in progress on that journey is helpful.

In marketing to businesses, that's how we quality leads. Think about who's making purchasing decisions for a company and the parameters they use to make that decision. Can you help them? A simple example:

Push: “We know we've been having trouble getting visibility into who are our customers and prospects are. What we're doing now gets us there, but it's difficult and fragmented.”

Pull: “Using a software that can help us integrate the data we have in separate systems into a central CRM can really help us. We could see what everyone's working on and where we need help and free resources to do other things.”

Anxieties: “Getting marketing to implement the new solution can help us centralize important data, get higher adoption by sales. We can use our company meeting to see how it’s going.”

Inertia: “What do marketing and sales do today that is desirable in the new system? Is there anything they'd miss from the current methods?”

Inertia is corporate habits, a powerful force.

In marketing to customers, that's how we look at potential innovation. Any time you find a place where people are struggling, you can find an opening for something new. Even better if there are no words for what you're inventing.

Struggle is an indication that you care about something, or you wouldn't be after it. As I look at the themes we found with Not Everyday Life, I see many tensions. Conflict is fundamental to change and innovation. Right now, it's everywhere.

Using the JTBD forces framework has helped me study and promote the switch to new ways of doing things.

+

I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to nearly 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you're curious about reframing and rethinking.

Stop Chasing Your Tail, Make New Sense of What's Happening

How do you make change happen?

I'm not talking about setting out for the big transformative change or the stuff of revolutions. That's also important. But, in the here and now of your life, how do you keep things moving forward?

Another way of asking the same question: how do you get unstuck? Out from autopilot and into creative thinking. Or, facing a crisis, how do you keep anxiety at bay to do what you need to do to keep calm and stay safe?

There's a simple tool you can use to get more of what you want. It can get you clarity, answers and next steps. That tool is asking questions to engage in conversation.

Why too many decisions spoil the day

Have you ever found yourself in front of your office building, or a store with no recollection of how you got there? Are you the kind of person who can buy groceries while on the phone? I won't probe about texting and driving... it's not a good thing. But you get the idea.

Every day, we make hundreds and thousands of decisions, mostly without batting an eyelid. Because we don't even realize we're making so many. What happens is that some decisions you programmed into habits, some you estimate using rules of thumb.

A shopping list, taking a specific route to work, putting the keys in the same place, you may even pick clothes for that important client meeting the night before. On a good day, when things are fairly ordinary, there's only a limited number of situations where you need to make conscious decisions. Some people are really good at focusing on what's important.

Being in autopilot is a fairly common way to operate. Culture influences decision-making to some degree—directly, and indirectly. How you go about doing things (your personal style) and how you see yourself (your identity) include social pressure.

We're not as original as we'd like to think. Yet that can be a good thing. It helps us conserve energy for what's important. But if you want to get better at taking control of your decisions, a good place to begin is to look at the range of possible outcomes.

Your decision-making landscape could have changed drastically by now. Some fundamental things have changed (temporarily). How do you make sense of the world when you're (likely) called to make more new kinds of decisions and are (maybe) anxious about the future?

Humans are sensing machines

The process you and I use to give meaning to our collective experiences is called sensemaking. People are constantly doing things while figuring out what's happening and what it means. This is one reason why companies that organize their messages in a way that follows these natural inclinations get a slice of attention.

Let's think about attention a little further. When we're in unfamiliar environments, some (or many) things change, and we have a chance to make a fresh start. People say this is a reason they love to travel: certain aspects or degrees of their experience change.

Travel is a temporary part of experience, it's like a simulation. You get to test-drive a different life for a period of time. Exposed to another context and culture, you renegotiate your identity based on who you meet and what you work out.

Normally, you and I protect our attention and energy with autopilot to be able to get through the day. Being very tired or feeling a bit listless is probably an indication that your brain was working extra hard in manual mode. That circumstances have changed many parts of your normal routines.

A pandemic or other catastrophic situations require a sustained manual mode. This is why many of the people I've talked to for Not Everyday Life said they felt exhausted, especially in the beginning of the lockdown.

Behaviors, habits and attitudes shift as you deal with new information. Families had to renegotiate roles, routines varied, and the normal flow of information, including social media, went up exponentially. People were trying to get to critical data while the situation was developing. All while trying to keep safe.

Leaders had to make decisions with impact to the people in their spheres of influence—family, employees, partners, collaborators, etc.—and consequences beyond the immediate future. That's a lot of deciding in a short time span. Think of the complexity of knowing what to do and communicating it clearly at the same time. Then there's the messages out there: ads, marketing programs, deals, etc.

Because we're not really good at predicting the future, deciding who to trust and what things to take at face value are also forms of decision making. This is where we try to take shortcuts and go on autopilot to save energy.

Yet, a well-developed ability to make sound decisions has impact on the future. Which is why, on a personal level, it's a good idea to have a system to get back to basics on how to choose for oneself. Whether the choice is a source, or a course of action.

What do you do when something doesn't make sense?

If you're human, you do one of three things. You either (1) ignore it, if you think it doesn't matter. Maybe you get back to it later if it looked interesting, but not relevant to what you're doing now.

(2) You estimate what you think it means. Or, if you've got time and you're not too busy, you (3) try and work out in detail what something actually means. Since this happens hundreds of times a day, this is where your autopilot helps. 

We get really good at deciding which ones of the three to pick from past experience. But this breaks when we face something new. Then, it becomes risky to figure things out on your own. Go down the wrong path, and you're facing a bigger problem.

Alan Arnett is an engineer who became fascinated with how we make decisions and what we do when things don't make sense#. He says we actually split into two functions. The part who ought to know what to do, the grown up part that gets paid loads of money and is trying to get things done.

Then, slightly in the background, is the part that is constantly checking and trying to figure out if we're doing the right thing by comparing what we're doing now with what we've done before.

But with decisions, it's not just you. You've got the situation you're dealing with, the other people involved with you, plus the way you see and deal with things—all happening at the same time. Noticing your reactions and dealing with them is very important to everything you do.

It can go either way. You're checking things and see a problem, you then start arguing with others and trying to avoid it. If you're optimistic and think things will go well, you could go in too fast and still find a stumbling block later on.

This way of thinking is from the mind of an engineer. And I really appreciate it, because it looks at the process and tries to understand where it goes wrong. If you have teenagers at home, avoiding and arguing are familiar reactions.

You can get good at avoiding and arguing, but you don't make as much progress on the thing you'd like to move forward. There's another way of looking at differences that is more constructive—Arnett calls it colliding and creating.

Some things already make sense. They're the things for which we use patterns to figure out what's happening. This is where we store the stories we tell ourselves, the habits we form with our routines, riding a bike, walking down the street, these are all activities that use patterns we already formed.

But there are also situations where we need to make new sense.

This is when we're called to explore the specifics of a meeting, a question or circumstance. Often, we get so caught up on the pattern-seeking side of sensemaking, that we overlook what's different in the thing right in front of our nose.

Trying to solve a problem in one context using what worked in another is a common example of this.

Can I fix it?

Back in the late '80s early '90s I worked with someone who had used this same thought process in the neurological field. Glenn Doman was a physiotherapist who noticed the need for making new sense to rehabilitate people who had lost physical and/or mental function.

Instead of fixing the limb, where the symptom was, he found a way to collide his knowledge with that of a brain surgeon to see what was happening in the brain. He then set out to study how normal development happens to see what what missing and how it could be retrieved or rewritten.

He created a method to connect the two data points. He came up with a developmental profile. What needs to happen on the input side to get the type of output that makes you function as a human being. The key functions.

It's a long story that helped get thousands of brain-injured children better by creating the environmental conditions that would program new patterns in the brain. Working with him changed the way I look at problems.

Doman asked the three fundamental questions Arnott proposes:

1. What are we solving?
2. Where are we heading?
3. How might we get there?

This is the shortcut a medical professional and and engineer have used for over fifty and twenty five years respectively to make new sense of things. I've been using a similar process to break down complex situations and strategize new directions with clients. 

If you're in the middle of something and getting very frustrated and stressed or excited and eager to jump in front of a fast-moving train of thought, you can use questions to slow yourself down and make new sense.

Questions create space. Questions have the power to get you energized or calm and get other people engaged.

What are you hoping to accomplish?

Mike Wagner works with leaders. He's helping them make sense of what we've come to see as the great disruption. The image above is from a webinar he's done recently. Mike uses conversation as a discovery tool to observe what's going on and get people to engage in making new sense.

For example, to help a company understand why they were having more product returns, he listened to dozens of customer service calls. He noted three main types of company representatives' behaviors: those who dominate the conversation, those who believe the client right off the bat, and those who get quickly to a next step.

That seems an obvious range of behaviors. But what's not so obvious is how you help people see what they're doing and how it holds the company back. If you don't know what you're solving, if you can't see the evidence and how reachable it is, you won't get aligned on getting there.

Mike labeled the behaviors. Because it's important to have shared words for understanding what's happening. With new categories, you can create mental models around who says what and what change would look like.

Once you make new sense of a situation, you can figure out how to transition people out of automatic mental patterns and into new mental models. Mike told me he created a program for the reps to practice leading a guided conversation.

Imagine a call starting with: what are you hoping to accomplish? 

Is it confirmatory or exploratory?

Siamack Salari is a leading expert in ethnographic research. For more than twenty five years, he's been pioneering development in qualitative research. He's also the founding contributor of Not Everyday Life.

Our collaboration in steering the 1,000 plus crowdsourced project to make new sense of what's happening is reinforcing the importance of reframing when exploring specifics of a situation.

The job of a researcher and strategist is to help see things through a new lens. If this is your work, what you do is literally to: learn what's a desirable endpoint for the client (the brief), observe what's there (reality) and make new sense of things.

It's critical to set the right expectations throughout. That includes for the role you play.

Siamack says he's been lucky in his career, most if not all the work he's done has been exploratory. That means making new sense to understand a situation. That's where you can ground a program.

It can be tricky if you forget to figure out the main question: is this confirmatory (i.e. validation) or exploratory? Your direct client usually has a bigger client in her/his company. Even when you work with the CEO, the private equity company or the board of directors could be the ultimate client. Yep, that works even in government and media. Direct and indirect interests could collide.

Here are some examples of reframing in brand strategy.

1. Pirelli comes to you and says I want people to buy more tires. You help them by reframing the goal from the point of view of their potential customers: drive around more.

2. Rai3, which is the national education channel in Italy, comes to you and says viewers are complaining, this is proof they need to change programming. You help them reframe the context from the point of view of the audience they want to attract: people who like to think deeply.

3. Illy caffe' says people are saying their coffee is more expensive compared to drip coffee. After you inwardly swallow a cup of amazing espresso, you help them reframe product positioning. Illy is inexpensive compared to Starbucks.

Reframing is about looking at the question differently and asking a better question.

Making new sense to help you move forward

The point is that our pattern-seeking brains can keep us stuck in first gear when we're facing a new situation. Avoiding and arguing can be a career-ending proposition. In a riskier situation, they can get you into dicey spots.

I've spent a lot of time inside companies working on re-imagining brands to revitalize businesses and getting people to believe in them again. I've been involved in responding to major crises. I've also been on the other side of the fence as a consultant and coach to help businesses with digital. 

Engineers and technical people get very excited about the stack. Business people get energized thinking about the business results. Then you've got to think of customers and everyone else in the company. The technology changes, but it's getting people to talk to one another that matters most to success.

A certain amount of friction is useful to create traction, so colliding is favorable to creating. Generations don't matter as much as we think. It really is about being human and figuring out: why are we here? Where are we trying to go?

Back to the original question: How do you keep things moving forward? Which is a more personal way of asking how to make change happen—from stasis or stuck to forward motion.

You can borrow from the tools that work for many disciplines:

• notice—critical in research and structural thinking.
• breathe—critical in meditation, athletics and other kinds of artistic performance but also in life. Even better if you train yourself to do this every time you wash your hands, which now is very frequently.
• question—valuable in strategic work for many disciplines. Asking questions is a way to bypass our pattern-seeking brains and make new sense.
• explore—how to reframe situations from different perspectives. Essential in development work.
• practice—what everyone is here to do. When you do it with intention and the intent to define direction, more practice makes progress.

I came across two essays recently that have reinforced the same sense of fragility we face as humans I have felt during personal and family difficulties: lessons in perspective. The more we are willing to make new sense, the more sense we make.

I'd like to thank Mike and Siamack for prompting this conversation on sensemaking, where grounding outstrips groundbreaking.

+

I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to nearly 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm. Subscribe here, if you'd like to join our growing community of sensemakers.

[image courtesy Mike Wagner, White Rabbit Group; here's a link to Mike's video conversation on How to Lead During the Great Disruption]

The Coronavirus Shows Why, if They are to Stay Healthy, Companies Need to Rethink Practices

It was obvious before the pandemic. Companies spent less and less time and effort at the micro level, trying to sort out what's desirable for people. I've heard it from strategists and from qualitative researchers: a mandate to figure how to capture and manage attention quickly.

Understanding, like relationships, take time and commitment to build. But technology moves at a faster pace, enveloping everyone into its speed and growth potential. Hence the widening gap between the things we must choose to do and those we leave on the cutting floor.

It's taken a global pandemic to realize that we don't know what we don't know. In fact, the people who know the most themselves don't know enough with any sense of certainty. Distributed networks all over the world are helping people stay safe and informed better than official channels.

Why is that? Because complexity plus chaos change the game. We had complexity before, of course, even though companies tried to manage for ordered systems. To keep some form of control. Technology had already changed the trajectory of, well, change, making it difficult for creatures like humans to think exponentially.

But with the additional complication of accidental chaos brought about by the crisis the degree of uncertainty has become very high. Hence why the people selling certainty right now are doing so well in getting attention.

Your results may vary

When is efficiency actually detrimental to brand health? You're correct if you're thinking that it could be catastrophic when context changes. Checklists fail outside of their context. They fail when you implement.

In early January, when I naively thought the new SARS emerging in China was like the previous SARS and could be contained, I purchased a ticket to go see my mom for her birthday in late May-early June. British Airways sold me the ticket, but I bought it through American Express. Good thing I did.

When in early March it became obvious that Italy had a problem, I started worrying about my upcoming trip. Due to the uncertainty of the developing situation, however, I did nothing. At the time, BA was offering a voucher, and I didn't know that I would be able to use it within a year if the trip had to be canceled. So I waited.

In April, it had become obvious that the trip was not going to happen. When borders close, one takes a hint. Many airlines were refunding tickets. BA was still holding onto the voucher option. Even when the U.S. government communicated that they were going to fine airlines that did not provide reimbursements.

I reached out to American Express, my travel agent. They told me to wait a few days. I waited and monitored the BA website, no change. After more than one week, I was able to get the refund through American Express. It should not be that hard!

Yet, even with potential sanctions looming, BA had canceled the London-Bologna portion of my trip with no refund and was sticking to its policy. Eventually, the entire flight was canceled and reimbursed.

However, a few days later, I got this message:

It's true, I've been a member of the Executive Club, Silver Status. It's not that easy to get, you've got to spend quite a bit, especially if you don't travel as much for work anymore. Last year I traveled to Italy three times (the status expires every year) to see family and work on a side project. I earned the points. Still, I do feel like a guinea pig on a spinning wheel. One-way loyalty sounds like bribery to me.

But it gets worse. I have no idea when I'll be able to fly again. Because borders are closed, I care about my mother's health, I have no easy access to reliable testing, and neither does she. We have no idea how flight processes will change... and if we'll still feel like flying when so much is up in the air.

Here's the clincher, though. When I got that automated message from the BA Executive Club email system, I cried. Because it reminded me not of how stupid efficiency is in companies that try to save human effort by automating as much as possible. I cried because it reminded me of the widening gap between my desire to see my mother and reality. I can't go.

Take that emotional wake in association with your brand. BA has demonstrated three levels of insensitivity to my needs as a loyal customer with a considerable lifetime value: 1./ giving me just one option, voucher, for as long as possible; 2./ not doing the right thing, i.e. more options, until forced; 3./ not reorganizing marketing processes around the emergency. 

Dear companies, I understand why it's prudent to take a look at marketing budgets when the market contracts. But please, please don't be foolish. Every impression counts. Operations is marketing. Contracts are marketing. Privacy language is marketing. The messages on your website are marketing.

Hence why your results may vary.

What you should do instead

Let's get very real. This is simple, but not easy to pull off. That's why leaders get paid the big bucks. To, hopefully, know the difference between what operating system to adopt when.

So the first question is are you operating in an ordered, complex, or chaotic system? This is actually another good case when you can pick two, just like fast, good, and cheap. I get it, there are tensions to manage: shareholder primacy, stakeholders soundbites, lives are at stake. Could the “pick two” paradigm hold here?

Let's hold onto that question as long as possible so we can find a better answer while we work through the problem. With decision-making, it's useful to understand when decisions need to be made. Timing is everything. Or maybe everything is time. Don't fly blind. Making decisions based on old information is like flying blind.

I've taken some notes from the 90-minute session on complexity that addresses covid-19 challenges to add to my own experience. Every company right now is trying to hold onto previous investments (loss aversion is very human), and figure out what's next, to find a path forward, fast.

Seminars promising answers via trends are selling like hot cakes. Some are interesting, some could be useful. But as a leader, you have the responsibility to provide direction to your company, not a generic company in a generic industry.

How do you know what's going on with your customers/market?

• distribute situational assessment—more ears on the ground. Ironically, that's what a good social media employee policy ten years ago would give you today. If ten years ago you had put in place a mechanism for all employees to listen for trends, ideas, market forces using social (and yes, even help out with customers issues) via personal channels, you'd now have an amazing network of skilled and trusted people you could rely on. Lacking that, hopefully you put in place smart working at your company years ago. Your people also know your business, or they should. Net/net: Companies that have ready access to distributed networks based on relationships of trust right now have an advantage. They can learn more, faster.
• disintermediate (raw) data—you want to get your hands on as much raw data as possible. This means hearing out the 17 percent of people who don't fit your idea of customer or partner. That's the missing data, by the way. Companies rarely get their hands on it. Because the propensity is usually to focus on the low hanging fruit. Innovation is a special project, if it exists at all, not a way of operating. This is the reason why some company people, maybe even some people in your company, decided to join Not Everyday Life. They get that it's important to access raw data, their marketing budget was cut. They joined as individuals, but they'll help their company, or try to if company leaders will listen, of that I'm sure. I was one of those people when I worked in corporate. It's a very lonely place. Net/net: Leaders, find those people in your companies and talk to them.
• embrace granularity and redundancy—when your automated systems are failing the emotional test with customers, you see the importance of people, a redundancy. The people who are taking initiative and have been helping your company through their private social media channels and email accounts are not lone wolves. In fact, quite the opposite. That's how they survived through the frustrating experience of executives rarely listening to them, if ever. They are part of small, informal groups inside your company. Small, distributed groups can coordinate much faster than larger groups, especially in times of chaos/emergency. Because they likely know how to get stuff done when the processes break or make no sense. They're used to going around the bureaucracy to get things done, because they care about customers more that the system does. Net/net: If you're lucky and these people survived inside your company, they're your lifeline. 

Coronavirus doesn't care about your company. It has no body, nor mind. Hence, it's not even an enemy. It survives by mutating in human bodies. Its mechanism to spread is to inhabit the same human bodies companies seem to want to eliminate.

When we don't know what the (real) problems are until much later, we need to capture intelligence in a radically different way. This means operating at several layers at the same time.

But execution looks very different from the example I provided from British Airways. Their three levels are not a good example. That way of operating lacks imagination, and imagination is an actual cognitive process in your brain. It helps you put things together, in a way you cannot do logically.

Distributed cognition is a way to gain different perspectives fast. Use it and you have at least a chance to increase diversity of input in your decision-making. Do try this at home. Results may vary.

+

I've been sharing ideas and perspectives about business and culture in my weekly email to nearly 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize issues by theme to minimize overwhelm.

Ten Books to Gain Perspective

People have asked more questions in the last few weeks than in the last ten years. They all start with what's the future of—work, cities, travel, faith, science, education, government bodies. Every day brings in new questions, few answers.

But this is not for lack of trying. The questions are just too complex to work out individually. Networks started forming around each of these questions, scientists, academics, researchers are pooling their thinking and experience to make it more difficult for the virus to spread and improve humanity's odds.

People connect on similarities—like language, body of knowledge—yet benefit from differences—such as cultural context, specific experience. You can take advantage of this principle and explore the ideas and experience of others.

You don't need to be part of a specific network to do that, you can learn through books. Human beings have the ability to imagine. Through imagination, you can put things together in your brain in a way that is not possible logically.

In my quest to accelerate my imagination and cognitive process, I've come across several books, articles, and webinars to help gain different perspectives. I've been sharing most of the material in my weekly email to nearly 1,000 new subscribers and growing. I organize those by theme to minimize overwhelm.

But every so often, I like to group books into a list. People find them helpful. For example, recently I shared thought provoking readings to build a better future. Here, I'd like to push a little bit outside my own comfort zone.

Ten books to gain perspective

I've come across these books through a very organic process. Down a rabbit whole on my path to understanding complexity and questions.

1. Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World: Designing for Emergence by Ann M. Pendleton-Jullian and John Seely Brown—thesis: in a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence.

Imagination is a big muscle we can flex. John Seely Brown talked about its role in helping you ask the right questions:

“The real key is being able to imagine a new world. Once I imagine something new, then answering how to get from here to there involves steps of creativity. So I can be creative in solving today’s problems, but if I can’t imagine something new, than I’m stuck in the current situation.”

Ann Pendleton-Julian was one of the four members of a conversation on a 90-minute session on addressing covid-19 challenges (via Tim Kastelle). If you're a leader called to make decisions, listening to this could make a real difference in your thinking.

2. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell—thesis: in a world where our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity . . . doing nothing may be our most important form of resistance.

The book came after a talk, you can find the transcript here. I followed many of the citations you'll find in the talk and the book.

3. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit—thesis: how disaster throws people into a temporary utopia of changed states of mind and social possibilities, as well as the cost of the widespread myths and rarer real cases of social deterioration during crisis.

4. After the Future by Franco Bifo Berardi—thesis: our future has come and gone; the concept has lost its usefulness. Now it's our responsibility to decide what comes next.

Berardi has a European perspective in the way he describes labor. But perhaps it resonates in many parts of the world now:

In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine. … The workers are deprived of every individual consistency. Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary.

He proposes individual actions that can open doors. Specifically to quiet “the proliferation of chatter” to reclaim your attention and thinking. And that is worth considering.

5. One Square Inch of Silence: One Man's Quest to Preserve Quiet by Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann—thesis: sound portraits of nature and the importance of the quality of sound in our lives.

Silence is not only nearly impossible today. Even working from home with everyone on lockdown has the frenetic, incessant grass cutting activity of neighbors and their landscape companies compete in breaking concentration. 

6. Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice by Pauline Olivero—thesis: guide to ways of listening and sounding. 

When you enter an environment where there are birds, insects or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received. Your presence may be the difference between life and death for the creatures of the environment. Listening is survival!

I've written about John Cage and his work on the sound of silence. Olivero was a performer of his music and focused more on embodiment and improvisation.

7. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta—thesis: a special way of thinking, of learning to see from a native perspective, one that is spiritually and physically tied to the earth around us, and how it can save our world. Reads like a travel journal.

This as one of the two recommendations from Tim Kastelle in his recent webinar on taking along-term view. I've also been exploring these thoughts in my research about the connection of leaders with their territory in Italian companies, especially in my native region, Emilia-Romagna.

8. The Theology of Hope: On the Ground by Jurgen Moltmann—thesis: thick thinking about hope from a western view and eastern view (and even the more central German/Italian peoples who view context and objects as fairly equal in giving or taking away hope).

Read reviews of the book if you're considering it. It was a recommendation of Dave Snowden, creator of the Cynefin framework. The future is not based on historical events of the past, nor just more of it.

9. The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Steven Barnes—what would it take to colonize another planet? The problem of making the trip, the earth animal and plants that you needed take, the psychology of the people involved, leadership, the sexual and ethical morals, the technology are all covered.

This is another Dave Snowden recommendation. The book illustrates how people can learn to adapt, society can change. My take is that there is a moral conversation that needs to happen about the intent.

10. Negotiations 1972-1990 by Gilles Deleuze—traces the intellectual journey of a man widely acclaimed as one of the most important French philosophers. He had a lasting impact on a variety of disciplines, including aesthetics, film theory, psycho-analysis, and cultural studies.

…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

He wrote the passage above in 1985. Silence makes the space for thinking better, for finding something useful to say. The interviews describe what the philosopher was trying to do with his work.

One more thing

I've mentioned this book before. This is a reading for the brave, for those of you who are willing to get in the mud that follows a war. it talks about profiteers, displacement, and the pain of destruction.

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe—from the close of the war right to the establishment of an uneasy stability at the end of the 1940s. Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries.

It gives you a dimension of how recovery and rebuilding were not easy nor quick. The war took more than six years out of people's lives, reducing many parts of Europe to rubble, many people to inhuman behavior.

So we should be very careful about using the war metaphor now. War language tries to push accountability onto an “enemy.” A virus is not a sentient being. It's worth choosing more appropriate language, lest the metaphor transfers to the profiteers of this new, imagined war.

+

[A network map of a portion of the 6000+ scientists who are collaborating on #covid19 research. This network self-organized/emerged over the last few months. Links represent collaborations in 2020 only via Valdis Krebs]

Find Signal in Noise to Draw Meaning and Make Better Decisions

Cognitive biases, we're not leaving home without them. Well, right now we're not leaving home, period. It's just so interesting that there's an obsession over productivity and time spent on tasks, and yet, so little proportional attention to how what occupies brain waves impacts it.

I don't know if you've ever wondered why are there are so many cognitive biases. There must be some reason they survived through the centuries to modern day. And yes, I'm aware this is a rhetorical question, because cognitive biases help us address key needs in our lives:

• filter and sort information
• organize data
• draw conclusions
• simplify

Let's take a look at each of these first, then we'll talk about how to hedge your bets and avoid blind spots.

Too much information

What's going on now is that we all have too much information from disparate fields and sources to filter and sort through. It is rare that we feel we have too many trusted sources of information, however.

If the goal is turning noise into signal, how do you avoid depending too much on:

• things you notice in your memory
• unusual things that stick out
• change that gets noticed
• details that confirm your beliefs and attract your attention
• easier-to-spot flaws in others

Rather than give in to the brain's natural inclination, save effort in another way. Take a structured approach to figuring out the wheat from the chaff. For example, define elements that are critical to the evaluation, then use assessments made independently and based on facts. 

Use this method through thin and thick in news cycles and over time to assess the credibility of sources. Then perhaps you have a stronger base to start from moving froward.

Not enough meaning

Compounding the sorting challenge comes a need to organize data in a way that makes sense to you. By nature, news and public information are general. It takes more work to make it specific and applicable to you.

If you're in the process of constructing a story of what's going on right now, and how it applies to your company, you could observe how it's easy to:

• find stories and see patterns in sparse data
• fill in using stereotypes, generalities and prior history
• imagine things and people you're familiar with and like, rather than those who are unfamiliar
• simplify probabilities into numbers that are easier to remember
• think you know what others are thinking
• project current assumptions from the past into the future, getting timelines wrong

Resist the instinct to “fill in,” which happens in an instant and is an effortless process. You're rarely aware it's happening at all. You don't know that something is missing because it doesn't reach your attention threshold.

Like rational choice theory, common sense insists people have reasons for doing what they do. Maybe, but predicting what they will do and their reasons is anything but simple. You can only do that when you look back and rationalize or come up with a neat story about what worked and why.

This is a frame problem. But beware of papering over gaps where significant and critical information is missing. It could be a costly proposition.

Need to act fast

Once your mind wraps around a pattern you're tempted to use the emerging story to make decisions. The need for speed and uncertainty don't mix well. Right now, they're both high, which means we're right in the middle of chaos.

Some people do well in chaos, others need to create order to function. When things move fast in real time, order is an illusion. But this doesn't mean you need to jump to conclusions too quickly, either.

If you're feeling a compulsion to draw conclusions, you'll notice the:

• need to act fast to project confidence
• need to focus and favor the immediate, relatable thing vs. the delayed and distant gratification
• desire to complete what you started to get anything done because you already invested time and energy into getting to that point
• motivation to preserve autonomy and status over the desire to avoid mistakes from irreversible decisions
• simple over the complex and ambiguous

It's hard, but with practice it becomes easier to resist the temptation to go from stories into decisions. For example, every company looks at competition in terms of what they do and say. Yet. it's why they do and say it that matters. Often, it takes more digging to uncover why.

Everyone can copy tactics or words, but without looking under the hood, it's hard to copy results. There's a better method to figure out what's going on, and that is observing what customers do.

What to self-reinforce

One thing to remember is that each person has a certain way to look at the world. A point of view and perspective often based on reinforcing what is already known. It's what I call the view from somewhere.

Clarity is a moving target, because you're always competing with the story people have in their heads. Let's not forget how your own story sometimes gets ahead of what's really going on.

If you're keen on keeping yourself honest, you could take the extra step to be mindful that you tend to:

• edit and reinforce memories after the fact
• discard specifics and nuance in favor of generalizations
• reduce events to lists, bullets and key elements
• store memories differently based on how you experience them vs. their informational value

Thus make decisions based on potentially faulty mental models rooted into what was, rather than possible futures scenarios.

To be less wrong, it's useful to engage multiple perspectives, to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of ways to interpret information, or to see multiple answers and not just one.

When in doubt, run small, low cost experiments to test and learn. Repeat to accelerate understanding.

The will to move forward

Divergent thinking is useful when you're exploring new situations. Typically, this is a skill honed through practice. For example, by applying ideas from different industries and roles to a question.

Beyond the ability to think differently, you also need the will to act differently.

This is the domain of creativity, or the ability to combine different bodies of knowledge and observation into a plan and execution. When you have enough dots to connect, you can see beyond the obvious and get going.

The core issue in companies and governments alike, is the ability to process a lot of information in a timely manner, sort what's important, draw meaning from it, and find a systematic way to make decisions. All good so far. Then nothing good happens. Why?

Because you can have all the expertise, resources, and capacity in the world, but if you have a weak leader whose mental models are more important than the facts, you're stuck.

Or maybe you're leading by committee and there's disagreement on how to move forward. Each person pulls in a different direction. You can have immense wealth, scientific knowledge, and readiness, but if the governance is terrible, you'll have terrible outcomes.

You need the means and the will to make things happen. And this is not just in your head, at the level of reasoning, where you can deal with cognitive biases. It's also in the rolling up of sleeves and building the infrastructure and governance to do what you've thought about. Stick with it long and often enough to learn.

Many organizations and companies have become mechanisms to respond to special interests, or keep things as they are, more or less. This works alright when things hum along, with the occasional speed bump.

But when a crisis hits, that's when you know if you have all the equipment to respond. For example, companies are now discovering that breaking the glass in case of marketing doesn't work so well if what's inside is just fluff.

The opposite if fluff is a decision. In fluid situations like the current one, it's useful also to update your thinking and decisions as more information becomes available. To avoid blind spots, leaders can:

1. Create a structured approach to filter and sort information, organize data, draw conclusions and simplify that will flag cognitive biases.
2. Build a team with divergent thinkers to expand horizons and convergent thinkers to get things done.
3. Create opening for dissent and conversation.
4. Listen to understand what others are saying, having defined the critical attributes that matter in advance.

Bonus points if you use Bayesian inference to update probabilities of things happening as more evidence or information becomes available.

+

I send out a chatty weekly email with links to resources to feel less lonely, lead better, and absorb some Italian style in good company.

A Quarantine from Reality: Italian Goes to America, Son Opens a Bank, Helps Rebuild a Community, a City, a State, and a Country

It seems that what's dictating the human agenda right now is fear. Each day we get our rationing of counts—who lived, who died, who told a story. Right out of Hamilton, the show. The avalanche of articles and news alerts seem to indicate that anything goes.

In a business setting, which is what I'm used to, when a new situation like the one we're facing creates a change, the first line of defense from letting it overtake you is what you say to others and your internal conversation.

Because those words are birthing the emotional wake you'll need to live with as you try to wade through the crisis. Nobody knows how things will be as time passes. A sure bet is that they won't be the same as they are today.

So I thought of taking a quarantine from reality. Come with me down history lane.

Italian goes to America, son opens a bank

I came across this story thanks to an exchange on LinkedIn with an expert in behavioral finance from Rome in response to an article someone shared. In fact, he pointed out that the author had mentioned Amedeo Peter Giannini in closing — and with little detail.

It turns out that Giannini, born in an Jose, California, to Italian immigrant parents (his father was from a town near Genoa, at the time still part of the Kingdom of Sardinia), is the inventor of the modern bank and the concept of banking marketing.

Giannini's father bought a farm with his gold rush proceeds and settled to grow fruits and vegetables for sale. He was fatally shot by an employee after a pay dispute, leaving a widow with two children and one on the way. After his mother remarried, Giannini called it quit with school, thinking he could do better in business.

He worked as a produce broker, commission merchant and produce dealer for farms in the Santa Clara Valley, was successful and married well — the daughter of a North Beach real estate magnate.

Retired at 31, he administered his father-in-law's estate. When he became a director of the Columbus Savings & Loan, a business in which his father-in-law had invested, he saw an opportunity to service the increasing immigrant population that were without a bank.

But there was no persuading the other directors, so he quit and started his own bank. He invested everything he had, including his wife's assets in the risky business. The bank guaranteed honest and lower exchange rates than the others to immigrants who sent money home and granted credits for small amounts to those who had little or no guarantees.

That is he set out to do what all the others don't do because “a banker worthy of the name — it was his theory — must not deny anyone credit, provided that he is honest.” Giannini founded the Bank of Italy on October 17, 1904.

The institution for “the little fellow” was in an old saloon in North Beach, the Italian quarter in San Francisco. He went street by street, house by house, to present the services offered by the bank. They say he looked at how many calluses the person who was asking for a loan had on his hands to decide whether to grant it or not.

He opted for popular shareholding, he had dealers, farmers and artisans subscribe to shares and decided to finance the builders who guaranteed good prices to those who wanted to buy a house. Deposits on the first day were $8,780. Within a year, they soared above $700,000 ($13.5 million in 2002 dollars).

When the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires leveled much of the city, Giannini set up a temporary bank, collecting deposits, making loans, and proclaiming that San Francisco would rise from the ashes. He was fast.

They say Giannini took gold and money out of the half-destroyed office of his credit institution hidden in fruit carts similar to those he used to sell vegetables with his parents as a boy. Other stories talk about him hiding the money under rubbish in a trash truck, then later giving employment to the driver's son as a thank you for saving his bacon.

However he moved the money, he used it in the days immediately following the earthquake to travel around the city and lend to those who lost everything. In return, he asked only for a signature and the commitment to return the sum as soon as possible.

While the other banks were struggling to get back on their feet, the confidence of the Californians in the Bank of Italy increased and with it the deposits. In 1912 they already amounted to 11 million dollars. The reconstruction of the city attracted large sums of money, which passed through the bank's coffers.

Amadeo Peter Giannini became the symbol of the desire to rebuild the destroyed city. In 1909, right after legislation made branch banking possible, he opened the first branch of the bank in San Josè, the city where he was born. The Bank of America and Italy were created from a branch of the institution in 1919. In 1934 there were already 423 branches. The bank continued to be profitable.

In 1928 Giannini gave up his share of dividends, equal to over 1.5 million dollars. “A man who wishes to own more than 500 thousand dollars,” he used to say,  “should run to the psychiatrist.”

He was a banker, but also a patron. Giannini was once again able to see far into the future when he started offering loans at low interest rates to the nascent film industry. Fascinated by the educational potential of the new art, he wanted the Bank of Italy to sponsor Charlie Chaplin's “The Kid” in 1920.

A few years later it was the turn of Walt Disney's “Snow White” and “It Happened one Night” by Frank Capra, a director with whom the Italian-American banker made friends. They say Giannini inspired Capra for “It's a Wonderful Life.” In all, between 1936 and 1952, Giannini's bank financed over 500 films, for an amount of over half a billion dollars.

There's much more history in his story.

He bought bonds that helped finance the Golden Gate Bridge during the Great Depression in 1932. Designed by Joseph Strass, the long San Francisco bridge was a great work nobody wanted to finance. Giannini did, at zero interest rate, because he was convinced that the connection infrastructure would help restart the city's economy.

Meanwhile, nationalized in 1927, three years year later the Bank of Italy changed its name to Bank of America National Trust and Saving Association and survived the difficult years of that crisis unscathed.

When Giannini went to add the numbers, he realized that the loans he had granted without guarantee over the years had been repaid over 90 percent. The “bank of emigrants” had given confidence to the poorest, did not lose capital, produced profits and contributed to the development of California. He won his bet: The Bank of Italy had become one of the largest credit institutions in America.

Giannini's bank also faced the years during World War II without too many problems, financing the American war industry. Italy, however, had remained in his heart. After the end of the conflict, the bank advanced the funds necessary for the management of aid for the reconstruction of the Marshall Plan in Italy at zero interest. He also financed many Italian companies directly, including Fiat.

An elderly Giannini resigned from the presidency of his credit institution in 1945. His desk drawers were open that day. “I have nothing to hide,” he said. “And neither does the bank.”

Creating lasting impact

Amadeo Peter Giannini died in 1949 leaving a substantial legacy: A banking giant, two foundations that still bear his name dedicated to medical research and the development of the rural economy and a limited personal wealth, less than $500,000.

The “banker of the Italians” had remained faithful to the theory elaborated before founding his bank: “I don't want to get too rich, because no rich man possesses wealth, but is possessed by it.” A lesson he must have learned as a child when he saw his father die in a fight following a discussion over a one dollar debt.#

I'm just tickled that an obscure reference in a short article could provide such a wonderful trip down history lane. “You've got to lend money to the people who don't have it, at zero interest,”# was the reference. History worth remembering.

[Credit for much of the story goes to Silvia de Bernardin, journalist]