Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

A Reading List for the Culturally Curious

“Looking at life from a different perspective makes you realize that it's not the deer that is crossing the road, rather it's the road that is crossing the forest.” Born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., Muhammad Ali was an activist and philanthropist who became known in America and the world as one of the greatest professional boxers of all time.

His convictions cost him at least four years of peak performance. Sports Illustrated declared the heavyweight “Sportsman of the Century” in 1999. Ali won numerous awards throughout his career. But it was his appeal that won him a large following. As Rolling Stone put it, Ali spoke with his body, mind, and soul:

“The only things quicker than his fists and feet were his mind and mouth: Speaking truth to power, the loquacious Ali said things in a confrontational, even 'arrogant' manner that mainstream America was not yet prepared to hear, especially coming out of the mouth of a young black man.”

In 1999, David Bowie talked about how the Internet would become an instrument of conversation, changing the relationship between artists and audiences. That same year, Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen talked about the artist's struggle in a Commencement Speech at Mount Holyoke:

“every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel.

Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had. And that is herself, her own personality, her own voice. If she is doing Faulkner imitations, she can stay home.

If she is giving readers what she thinks they want instead of what she is, she should stop typing. But if her books reflect her character, who she really is, than she is giving them a new and wonderful gift. Giving it to herself, too. And that is true of music and art and teaching and medicine.”

You probably forgot many of the remarkable things that happened in 1999. We were all focused on Y2K: the round number that promised to bring havoc, if not properly managed. Hindsight being 2020, from this vantage point we're thinking little of all the things that happened in 2019.

 

The power of culture

But here's where culture has power. You, we, still did many things in the years that we have a hard time remembering and may consider trivial. Culture is messy that way. It's a rich store of rituals and tradition that keeps building in communities, countries, and companies.

Unlike money or product, things you constantly have to replace because they lose value quickly, culture doesn't lose value through use. You can turn your time into something that can live forever with culture. Muhammad Ali, David Bowie, Anna Quindlen were and are culture makers: spiritual fathers and mothers of nascent phenomena by recognizing and putting them on record.

What strikes me when I listen to conversations with people like them is that

they can use reason to account for facts and lies.

Ali writes poems to describe experience. The way he talks is itself poetic, “very often, a wise doctor can cure you through word of mouth alone because they realize the power of man is needed.” When Ali talks, he has rhythm: listen for yourself in this conversation with Irish broadcaster Cathal O'Sannon. “Very few boxers can come on a show and match a wise man like yourself,” you need personality to do that, to know how to talk to people. Plus Ali can energize the causes and groups he stands for and all of a sudden, “you have a very large crowd.”

Bowie observes the development of a new cultural phenomenon. His quiet and steady cadence asserts without contradicting, “I embrace the idea that there's a new demystification process between the artist and the audience.” To a skeptical Jeremy Paxman of the BBC, he notes how the Internet has taken over as the conveyor of rebellion, how there isn't “one truth, but always 2, 3, 4, 5 sides to each question.” His insight is that Internet shows us how “we're living in total fragmentation.” And foresaw what it was going to do to society, both good and bad.

Anna Quindlen talks about how fashion shifts reference points in culture. “Trying to be perfect may be sort of inevitable for people like us, who are smart and ambitious and interested in the world and in its good opinion. But at one level it's too hard, and at another, it's too cheap and easy.” 

Because it really requires you mainly to read the zeitgeist of wherever and whenever you happen to be, and to assume the masks necessary to be the best of whatever the zeitgeist dictates, or requires. Those requirements shape shift, sure, but when you're clever you can read them, and do the imitation required. But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations.

Imitation doesn't produce ideas.

 

What energizes creates value

The process of producing an idea and creating from it energizes you. When an experience has value—something you listen to like music or read like the conversations I shared here—you know it because it fills you with energy. The same happens when you receive great service: your heart rate goes up.

That feeling is there to tell you, to acknowledge the creation of value. This is how you can put money into things that have more value, like culture, to encourage good decisions.

A sense of disgust for an experience or situation is literally the feeling of energy exploding in you. Energy that could have gone back to the company or a person, instead dissipates. When something lets your down, it collapses. It takes the energy that was available and shatters it.

There's a cultural undertone in the conversations of Ali, Bowie, and Quindlen that hints at working on the idea, doing the work as yourself, rather than trying to please an audience.

Trying to please an audience takes the power away from the idea, it dilutes it.

When you seek acknowledgement, it may not come, especially if your idea is new. Stay with the idea. It is the power of the idea that will energize the people ready for it.

 

Readings for the culturally curious

Fast gets all the attention, slow has all the power. Slow is continuous over time, it remembers, and disposes. Curiosity helps dig further and seek depth. It's the act of talking with customers to learn about how they see the world. That is slow. Michael Dariano says deep curiosity is good digging.

Reading books, rather than quick takes is how you build the muscle for extracting ideas, seeing things in new ways, and spotting places that might be interesting to dig.

Ease and convenience hamper curiosity. Enthusiasm ignites your desire to be curious. Our culture is filled with opportunities to care for the body. Books are an opportunity to nourish the mind. Here are a few books where I found new ideas:

1.

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony de Mello

Thesis: You can handle the truth. Most people don't want to know.

de Mello was a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist who became widely known for his books on spirituality. A few quotes that made an impression from this loose collection of thoughts:

“We were brought up to need people. For what? For acceptance, approval, appreciation, applause - for what they call success. Those are words that do not correspond to reality. They are conventions, things that are invented, but we don't realize that they don't correspond to reality. What is success? It is what one group decided is a good thing. Another group will decide the same thing is bad.”

“What you are aware of you are in control of; what you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. You’re not controlled by it; you’re not enslaved by it. That’s the difference.”

“Because agreement and disagreement have to do with words and concepts and theories. They don’t have anything to do with truth. Truth is never expressed in words. Truth is sighted suddenly, as a result of a certain attitude.”

You cure loneliness by contact with reality. I appreciate how he talks about not identifying with a feeling (or a belief?), instead watching and observing it with curiosity.

2.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

Thesis: How the physical characteristics of countries affect their strengths and vulnerabilities and the decisions made by their leaders.

Marshall was Diplomatic Editor and foreign correspondent for Sky News. Originally from Leeds, he arrived at broadcasting after a wholly unsuccessful career as a painter and decorator. Choice quotes:

“Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?”

“Analysts often write about the need for certain cultures not to lose face, or ever be seen to back down, but this is not just a problem in the Arab or East Asian cultures—it is a human problem expressed in different ways.”

“Technology may seem to overcome the distances between us in both mental and physical space, but it is easy to forget that the land where we live, work and raise our children is hugely important, and that the choices of those who lead the seven billion inhabitants of this planet will to some degree always be shaped by the rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes and seas that constrain us all – as they always have.”

Geography was a seemingly easy course in University. But it's a complex topic, especially if you bring in politics, as this book does. It's imperfect, missing Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia, speaking little and incompletely about Europe and Africa. Also, get yourself better maps than what included. The idea is quite interesting. Imagination and curiosity can help you fill the void with additional research.

3.

What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz

Thesis: Culture is how a company makes decisions.

Horowitz is the co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs building the next generation of leading technology companies. A few bits to give you a taste:

“Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”

“Culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.”

“That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision—it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time. No one person makes or takes all these actions. Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.”

Strategy and context always play a role in determining why make some decisions rather than others. But we often just look at the official leaders, rather than looking at how tribal epochs and communities make unwritten rules work. That's because in our desire to bring order and provide formulas, we notice superficial elements.

 

DNA of culture

We connect on similarities—like language and body of knowledge. Yet benefit from differences—such as cultural context and specific experience.

With remarkable sense of humor, Ali is as light with his words as he was on his feet in the ring when he describes society in 1972.# There are several layers of culture in his stories and examples. Ali is a generous and articulate conversation partner. He talks about how he's entertaining for the Irish audience, because he's from somewhere else.

For David Bowie in 1999, “the gray space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be about.” In 1979#, a suave Bowie talked about isolation, how he loved rather quickly from afar, his art, and putting himself in situations he detested to see what it did to his writing.

For example, as a Brit in Los Angeles, Bowie felt people were putting on a show in real life. As a producer, writer, and performer, Bowie experimented with separating his stage characters from his backstage self. He could tell the difference. After he left America, he sought another kind of friction in Berlin.

There was a sense of impending collapse in Berlin, that the wall was closing you in, he says. From German expressionism, Bowie then went to explore Kabuki theater as a way to bring pantomime in his work. He noted how in Japan they balance heritage and the modern world. More friction.

“Each of you are as different as your fingerprints. Why in the world should you march to any lock step? The lockstep is easier, but here is why you cannot march to it. Because nothing great or even good ever came of it,” says Anna Quindlen. Before she was a successful novelist, Quindlen wrote a New York Times column, Public and Private, that won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1992. 15 years after her first column.

These are just three examples I grabbed from the year 1999. Then I looked at what happened before that led there. What were the ideas, life situations, and encounters that led there? I could keep going. Lives are not linear, but there are themes. Early discoveries become tools for the next project.

In companies and communities, when you step into real culture, the environment is supporting you. There's accountability in reason for facts as for lies. No BS. There's acknowledgement of your work. On the other hand, you know a low energy environment right away: you have to fight for everything. Often this translates to looking out for number one.

Where are you drawing the lines?

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If you're still curious, here are ten books to gain perspective.

The 3-5 Books That Sit on My Office Shelf

This came as a question to me via Jose. It's very appropriate because companies pay me to write. That's also (but not only) why I read a lot. The other reasons include broadening cultural horizons, which often includes disagreeing with other authors. Rarely with the classics, though. Because the classics don't try to sell me a framework, mostly (more further down.)

3-5 books I reference often enough to keep on my office shelf. They've changed little over the last ten to twelve years. You'll see many references to the thinking, research and practice of the authors in my writing as their work impacts mine.

1.

Metaphors We Live By, authored by Berkeley linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon was published in 1980. I have the edition with a new afterword (2003.) I've made plenty of notes in the margins and reasoned about some of the ideas in my notebooks.

EcoQua : Fabriano is my notebook of choice in many colors, in case you were wondering. You can get them with grid or blank paper.

2.

Finite and Infinite Games: : A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility by James P. Carse was published in 1986. Carse says there are at least two kinds of games—he calls one finite, the other infinite. The difference between the two is that we play a finite game for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play.

It's important because play or game symbolizes how we show up in life. Many books attempt to prove or disprove a thesis and exhaust you by asking you to expend energy in going through the reasons why / why not. Carse shares his vision of how to reinterpret the world and lets the reader free to draw personal insights.

This is a book about patterns.

3.

Words That Change Minds: Mastering the Language of Influence by Shelle Rose Charvet was published in 1995. Charvet describes the mental filters or meta programs we employ in communication in practical contexts. For example, what questions to use to elicit a person's position, how to identify what meta program positions are best suited to a given job, how to frame a job or product ad so that it speaks to the audience for whom it is intended, and so on.

I don't reference it as much in my writing as I do in my work. Most pages are lined with notes and I have index cards inserted here and there where I expand on certain chapters with my own examples.

4.

On Dialogue, which collects physicist David Bohm's thoughts on the inclination of modern society to “break things up which are not really separate” and thus fragment the world into “selves” that are at odds with each other.

We hardly experience good conversations anymore, and when we do, we leave unaware of the process that led us to feel satisfied we had a true meeting of the minds. That's because we view conversation as the mere exchange of information where everyone is sending and some people may be receiving.

Taken this way, conversation and communication in general becomes a utility but is not very useful in creating something new. I take this small book published in 2004 from original material by David Bohm to heart. Lee Nichol selected and edited it.

5.

The Clock of the Long Now is the Stewart Brand book I referenced in my article as one of the 3-5 books that sits on my office shelf. This is a curated collection of essays. In addition to The Order of Civilization, which is my most revisited essay, I enjoy reading about Kairos and Chronos, and The Long Now.

The title essay talks about a 1979 conversation with Brian Eno, which instigated Brand's thinking. The collection was published in 1999. Hence the themes and topics were buzzing around Brand's work for two decades. It's fitting as the idea is to expand the now to a period you can experience personally.

Rather that expiring things as they hatch, hatching things through work over the course of three generations.

Reference material

This is my evergreen setup to orient my work. Any time I get stuck, I use one or more of these references to expand my thinking and practice. I also make extensive use of dictionaries—synonyms and antonyms, etymology, translation (technical lingo as legal, medical / scientific especially), and slang (culture.)

As for the notebooks, I tend to jot down notes when I'm listening to podcasts and online lectures. My notes are both in English and Italian as I listen to and read most often in both languages. I read a ton of classics in both languages as well. I never tire of timeless ideas... what makes us human, and the stories of the people whose work endured through the centuries.

I'm curious. Which 3-5 books sit on your office shelf?

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Fast Gets all our Attention. Slow Has all the Power

If you're a futurist of strategist you're in the business of widening your perspective. This is useful for seeing better into potential futures, but it's also a powerful thinking tool for understanding what got you (or your client/company) here.

This is important and often overlooked: what got you here, won't work (as well) or be sustainable in the future. It's valid when you go from individual contributor to manager as it does to go from today's success to tomorrow's.

There's a reason why this is hard to imagine and even harder to do: Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power. Stewart Brand explained how it works in The Clock of the Long Now, one of the 3-5 books that sits on my office shelf for constant reference. His/their work is a consistent source of value.

Life and work go hand in hand in the order of civilization:

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. 

Understanding how what works, works can make a big difference on the likelihood you'll be able to leave a legacy. If your work is important enough, it won't be completed during your lifetime. But you can create so much value through your work that it transfers to people centuries after you're gone.

 

How small tests innovate

I officially posted a test here in September 2006. You can still see “test” in the URL. I forgot to change it when I published. I doubt anyone has been reading for 14 years. You may have noticed an article at some point that got your attention, dipped in and moved on.

The initial fashion of blogging has since turned into new fashions of various social media channels. But because I'd been blogging every day for months and years before many of the social fashions came about, I never confused the infrastructure parts of what I was building—parts in a body of work—with the fashion of testing concepts and ideas.

3,375 articles later, I have a consistent track record, literally, of what I've been thinking about and experimenting on. Versions of what worked made it into my day job as commercial programs and campaigns. I iterated on what didn't work. Sometimes you're ready, and the market is not... and vice versa.

I kept the governance part transparent—see the link sharing / contributed articles policy and the comment policy and social guidelines on the sidebar, and the commitment to share useful resources dating back to the very first post.

Writing and publishing consistently helped me become more self-aware, connect ideas in retrospect, and work on my craft—writing and thinking. There's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship that goes into making a truly new product.

I've enriched many jobs and clients in the last 14 years. And this has remained a reliable lab for testing throughout. It's helped me think and do fast and slow. Continuity is critical to creating good mindset and habits, which form and inform culture.

 

Operating at different time scales

Mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson made an observation about human society that can help you grasp what working at different time scales involves:#

The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales.  To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales.  But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales.  On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual.  On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family.  On a time scale of centuries, the unit is the tribe or nation.  On a time scale of millennia, the unit is the culture.  On a time scale of tens of millennia, the unit is the species.  On a time scale of eons, the unit is the whole web of life on our planet.  Every human being is the product of adaptation to the demands of all six time scales.  That is why conflicting loyalties are deep in our nature.  In order to survive, we have needed to be loyal to ourselves, to our families, to our tribes, to our cultures, to our species, to our planet.  If our psychological impulses are complicated, it is because they were shaped by complicated and conflicting demands.

He reduces the problem of complexity to its essence. Imagine each time horizon and stakeholders represented by a crystal ball, if you like. You have six of them to keep going at all times. Drop one, and it breaks. “Don't drop the ball” takes a whole new meaning.

That's why it's so hard to operate at different time scales. Difficult, but not impossible. Making reasonable trade-offs is a skill you acquire by doing the work. Operationally, you need to think in terms of pace levels and working structure size.

In a healthy society, says Brand, each level can operate at its own pace. I'd say this is also true in a healthy company culture. Ideally, each level is sustained safely by the one below it, which moves at a slower pace. In turn, each lower level can innovate thanks to the level above it.

Conversation is a great tool to test and iterate ideas because it helps you affect change. Dissent is a useful tool in a legal context. Change needs to happen at different paces for fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, and culture to avoid dysfunction.

Another way of saying this is, it's critical to understand how change works, so you can put more energy in the things that have more power.

 

A time for every purpose

Not confusing the layers means working tirelessly in the craft of creating a commercial product or service that helps people do what they want to do well. While also working timelessly at the structure that creates the kind of culture that delivers a superior product or service that does the job.

In marketing speak, we say jobs to be done (JTBD). JTBD is why we “hire” a product or service. The focus is the thing we want to do, rather than the feature of the product or service that does it.

If you need a tablet or a computer, you could buy one based on price. But Steve Jobs understood that it wasn't just about monetary cost. A computer that was easier and more pleasurable to use was worth more to people. Because it didn't get in the way and frustrated you a lot less. Apple led with design and experience. The rest of the industry eventually followed, in their own ways.

If you need a pair of glasses to read, you could start by buying the cheap kind. But when you're wearing them on your face all day long, you're thinking more in terms of identity and comfort. Designer glasses are fashionable, so you could go that route. Or, you could go get a run of the mill design and still spend a lot to add prescription lenses. Warby Parker solved that problem by brokering the difference between cost and style.

This last example is also a good illustration of how not to be at cross-purposes with layers. When you build a company, you're working at the structure, governance, and culture layers at the same time as you're working on commercial and fashion layers. 

Company's purpose and vision transfer value at the structural and culture layers. Mission and values are useful at helping employees decide how to behave as they do the work. In that sense, they transfer value onto customer experience, but indirectly. As Warby Parker learned:#

After style and fit come value and customer experience. Customers want the highest-quality product for their price point, and at Warby Parker, this means selling $95 glasses made with premium materials that are traditionally sold for hundreds of dollars, all while providing amazing customer experiences.

Third comes our Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program. While customers certainly love the fact that we give back, at the end of the day, it's not a critical factor in deciding whether to buy a pair of glasses.

Customers care about certain things. As a strategist, you keep this in mind when you help people make new choices. But as a leader, you need to keep in mind different time horizons. Warby Parker CEO, Neil Blumenthal says:

But, frankly, the social mission is what drives us. It's what gets us up in the morning. It's what prevents us from hitting the snooze button and spending another 15 minutes sleeping. And for our 1,800 current employees and for people that we're recruiting, we lead with social mission. That's the No. 1 reason people want to come work for Warby Parker.

Hence it's part of the mechanism for the transfer of value of intellectual, social, human, and manufacturing capitals into the product. You're buying a pair of glasses produced by a culture that believes in having and fulfilling a greater social mission.

 

Working on what has power

Writing here is my social mission. It's what gets me up in the morning and builds my intellectual, social, and human capitals. But it's not as important to clients and companies that hire my skills for their jobs to be done.

I've learned to work simultaneously at different pace layers, because they're all important. While fast—as in fashion, likes, follows, campaigns—gets all the attention, slow—as in craftsmanship, competence, sustainability, legacy—has all the power.

Taking Stewart Brand's perspective leads to designing solutions that maximize the resilience of the systems you design. That is to be as good for as many futures as possible, rather than optimizing them for a single future, which seems likely in the short run but is in effect incredibly unlikely to materialize over a period longer than a couple of years.

Here's an example from Philip and Turntoo: light as a service.# 

Architect Thomas Rau worked with Philips to purchase light as a service. The end result was a bespoke 'pay-per-lux' intelligent lighting system to fit the requirements of the space, at a manageable price. Philips retain control over the items they produce, enabling better maintenance, reconditioning and recovery.

It's a way of being in a space that has more power than just putting lamps and shades around an office, doesn't it? Paying for performance draws out how everyone is responsible for the consequences of what they produce.#

I was curious, so I took a glance at Turntoo and I found an example of vision as operating system for the work:

Looking at earth from a distance, it becomes clear that man is a temporary guest in a closed system: earth. In this system, everything is equally important to ensure a stable balance with a future. Within earth’s boundaries our only possible growth is a mental one.

The highest aim is to facilitate the continuity of life. In this respect, economy is the organized alliance between man and nature. We facilitate this relationship with a new system architecture. This results in, among others, innovative concepts, products, and services. Our basic principle remains to facilitate our temporary presence.

It explains well how the firm operates at different pace layers. Architects are trained to become system thinkers. The Turntoo website is a good example of system work: product as a service, service as a product, ideas as material, material as ideas.

Rather than a play on words, it's a smart use of words to orient you along dimensions of their work.

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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. 

 

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.