From the 60s to 60

Having just read Groundswell and other information about technographics (http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/), I realize that I’ve got a poor fit generationally with the most popular social networks. I’m a 60 year old Caucasian female, who is not only a product of the 1960s but raised and educated in the liberal Northeast with a father that was (and still is) very involved in technology. MIT was always part of our life, from the role it played in bringing my father east for the Radiation Lab during WWII to the summer school programming classes we had in high school. My father and brother are both early-adopters so I’ve had the benefit of learning about bleeding-edge technology from those two engineers. I must have the same DNA because I, too, like the bleeding-edge and am happy to have been involved in reading and thinking about AI from the early years of the Media Lab. (Probably too much science fiction in my youth!) However, my personal technographic background is not representative of the profile of the people in my age and my socio-economic demographic.

This technographic disparity is evidenced by my reaction the first time a colleague (my age or older) suggested I put a profile on Facebook. I was a little shocked—I thought Facebook  was only for young people. This colleague had been out of the country for many years and was now single, back in the country, self-employed and trying to make social connections. One of his grandchildren had suggested Facebook and he, being the extrovert he is, joined and invited me. I signed up several months ago so that I could respond to him but that was about all I did with my profile.

Well, I’ve  spent several hours over the past few weeks, uploading photos to my Facebook profile. This is all part of my new online social networking/social media research (so I tell myself). The truth about why I didn’t do anything with my profile earlier is that I still felt a little embarrassed about being on Facebook at age 60. From all that I’d heard and read, it was one of the “cool” places to be if you were in high school or college–but not the place for mature adults. I thought LinkedIn was the adult (professional) version but it didn’t offer as many features so I ‘m trying out the functionality of Facebook to see what I can do.

Now that I’m actually up and running, connected with a bunch of friends, I’m seeing the value of Facebook. I’ve just spent a frozen New England weekend, tethered to my computer, trying to finish a webinar design. Normally, the isolation of doing this would have driven me to the local coffee shop, seeking connection and distraction. Fortunately, I was able to fill that need by “friends” on Facebook doing doing status updates, sending links and generally providing entertainment. Wow! I think I get why this can work for those of us who straddle the narrow zone between introvert and extrovert. Electronic “reach out and touch” filled my social needs while still allowing me to stay focused on what I had to get done.

Plus, I discovered  a wonderful new female vocalist while listening to last.fm

Chris Guillebeau’s Prompt for the Emerson Challenge

If we live truly, we shall see truly. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not everyone wants to travel the world, but most people can identify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there? Author: Chris Guillebeau)

When I read this prompt my first thought was that I don’t want to go anywhere! Twenty-four hours later I still think that is my answer. I can think of some exotic (and not so exotic) places that I haven’t been that I might want to see but they do not seem sufficiently interesting for the effort necessary to get there.

My attitude is likely the result of spending at least 25 years traveling for business, much of which was done a city a day. Actually, the more foreign reality for me is the experience of staying home day after day, sleeping in my own bed and preparing my own meals. I remember my sense of wonder during the first few years after I stopped traveling intensively. I would marvel at daily life, mumbling “So this is what people do who come home from work every day at the same time.” It was during that time that I became aware of how strange my adult life had been or how far removed it has been from mainstream experience.

I belong to that strange nomadic, subculture that George Clooney modeled in “Up in the Air”. Our job duties were different but the lifestyle was the same. I see now that it was a very unique subculture with its own rituals, ceremonies, membership badges, uniforms and status tokens. I was privileged to be allowed to join “the club” in the early 1970s when very few women traveled for business. As a matter of fact, it was a time when very few women had fulltime professional careers, other than in nursing and education. This reality was brought home to me when I questioned how it was that the Hertz car rental personnel at the Detroit airport (DTW) remembered my name from week to week.Their reply was, “Do you know how few women rent cars?”

Early on I observed that this nomadic life style was either a good fit for a person or very toxic—with little middle ground. I watched men leave the company who were very talented and competent at the consulting work we did but who could not adapt to the traveling lifestyle. The organizational culture, lifestyle and working conditions became a more important factor in job fit and job satisfaction that professional qualifications, aptitudes or skills. Observing this difference in job fit, I began to reflect on how and why the nomadic lifestyle of the business consultant worked well for some but not for others.

There is a wonderful simplicity to a life that is contained in one suitcase, four walls and briefcase. The simplicity facilitates a single-minded focus on work that makes high levels of productivity possible.  This was especially true in the world before universal connectivity—before cell phones, laptops, WI-FI, streaming video, streaming audio, Skype and all the other low cost ways that we can stay in touch with our personal world. I also got a lot of reading done during those years.  My metric for flight lengths was the number of books I could read during air time—one-book flights, two-book flights and the  rare 2+ flights. My idea of extreme deprivation was being stuck at 30,000 feet with nothing to read but the inflight magazine! Occasionally, I would have an interesting seat mate but usually my flight followed 8 hours of speaking and was my only regeneration time before another 8 hours of speaking the next day. So I didn’t want to talk with anyone—no matter how interesting!

Some of the other characteristics that I think contribute to a successful nomadic life as a business traveler are high need for novelty, the ability to adapt rapidly to changing conditions, comfort with unpredictability, openness to new experience, curiosity, and an ability to survive periods of depersonalization. I’ve often observed that being self-employed as an itinerant consultant has been the best way for me to utilize personality traits, character strengths and talents/abilities that were often found to be problematical in a traditional corporate position. The same factors that were identified as “what’s wrong with Pamela” performance appraisals soon became “the reason Pamela is successful is…” simply by changing my work environment.

Jenny Blake’s Emerson Challenge Prompt

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? . . . Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.

Today I’m thinking about writing and all the resistance I’ve had to it.  When I was doing a lot of
public workshops people would often ask if I’d written a book yet or if I was working on a book. I would always reply glibly, “I talk; I don’t write.” Kind, helpful people, believing the rationale I’d given them, offered solutions on how I could transform my oral presentations to written work by having
everything recorded and transcribed. Since I couldn’t reveal the real reason for my resistance, I now have many pages of transcribed talks from the 80s and 90s sitting in my files.

The glib statement I made about talking and writing wasn’t even true. I had been writing long before I started doing public workshops. In fact, I had started in an academic career where writing was considered as important if not more important than teaching.  When first offered the opportunity to do
public workshops, I had to wrestle with my fear of public speaking. I had been so terrified of public speaking that I got laryngitis on the final day of my speech class in college. Fortunately, I discovered that my passion for the content of the workshops overcame my self-conscious fear of speaking.

The irony is that I went on to have a successful career as a public speaker for 15 years, working throughout the US and Canada, yet it never became a part of my self-identity. I always thought of public speaking as something I was doing while I was waiting to do my ‘real work’. In the early 1990s I had an opportunity to do something that felt much more like my ‘real work’ when I became involved in research and development in the field of personality. The first R&D project involved developing software that
delivered custom interpretations for a personality assessment that was widely used in industry, education and social service. That project led to revalidating and revising the assessment, now known as DiSC Classic, published by Inscape Publishing. Then, in 2002, I had an opportunity to create a new assessment based on a revised understanding of the DiSC Model. The product, DiSC Indra, was released in 2003 and is still being use by consultants and coaches. In addition, the new DiSC model became the development platform for the next generation of Inscape products.

Now the question for me is, “Having done all that, where do I go from here?” This Emerson challenge is giving me the opportunity to reflect on what I want to do and what is keeping me from doing it. Yesterday, I received a deeper understanding of my current resistance to writing when I thought about posting my Emerson challenge writings on FB and experienced my fear of being publicly naked. Since I’ve done a lot of writing in my field that has been published both formally and informally, I began to wonder what caused my discomfort. After some reflection, I began to see that the issue is not about writing in general. The dilemma is that the only things I want to write about at this stage of my life are the same things that will render me most naked and vulnerable.

With this new understanding, I took Jenny Blake’s prompt and created 3 Sticky Notes of my intentions framed as questions and placed them on the bathroom mirror. I must confess that they are posted inside the mirrored cabinet,  in a place that no one else is likely to see them…

Buster Benson’s Emerson Challenge Prompt

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?

I just realized that I feel uncomfortably naked when I share my  Emerson Challenge blog postings on Facebook. That realization let to the  question of how could I ever write (and allow to be published!) the autobiographical book that people often tell me I should write. From that awareness, I immediately remembered the discomfort I  felt when reading today’s challenge.

I can think of several strong beliefs that aren’t shared by my closest  family and friends. As I imagine listing the beliefs and making them known to  others, I am struck by the same sense of feared nakedness. I know what I believe  and what I’ve done to actually live out the belief but the thought of risking public knowledge of it still rattles me.

Then I think of what I read in the Self-Reliance  essay today—all the ways that Emerson spoke of “to thine own self be true”and realize I am once again confronted with the dilemma presented in the quote  above. Earlier this week I thought my challenge just was not to be distracted  from remembering my own opinion in the busy-ness of life. Now, I see the deeper  challenge is my concern for the ‘world’s opinion’ and how that concern silences  my response to today’s challenge prompt. When I think of naming a strongly held  belief not shared by my personal world opinion—my friends and family—I want to  evade and avoid the question.

I spent many years as a public speaker, being rated on a 1-10 scale  every day I worked with an audience. Often I would be asked a question that had  at least two different answers—the one that was desired by the questioner and  the one that was I thought was true. Each time this happened I would compare  the risk of saying something I believed was true but controversial and likely to be met by audience disapproval with the “safe” answer. The safe answer  wasn’t necessarily false but it wasn’t the whole truth either. Over time I  learned that when I sold out for the safe answer I was left with a sense of shame and inadequacy.

But none of those audience questions seem as risky as  telling the truth today about a strongly held belief and how I’ve lived it out. Perhaps it is because the beliefs I am thinking about today are more central to  my sense of self than the types of questions audiences asked. And it is Emerson  who has prompted my thinking along existential and metaphysical lines.

I’m thinking that perhaps there are beliefs that are more  peripheral and some that are more central to my sense of self. Sharing the peripheral ones seems to be less risky than the central ones, but isn’t that  Emerson’s whole point? Perhaps the more peripheral ones aren’t beliefs at all but instead are issues of fashion, convention, habit and convenience. The central ones—the ones that seem to be so risky to share publicly—are issues of  the nature of reality, the nature of God and what I think our purpose is. I see the safety to be found in preaching the old religion as Emerson describes it when he  writes, “ Everywhere I am hindered of meeting God in my brother, because he has  shut his own temple doors, and recites fables merely of his brother’s, or his brother’s brother’s God.”

So I haven’t answered the challenge question yet, have I? Let’s say I’m still circling around it, trying to find a comfortable place to settle in…

Liz Danzico’s Emerson Challenge Prompt

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. The force of character is cumulative. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.

I remember a time early in my professional life when I said to a boss who had just given me a difficult assignment that he better not tell me that it was “character building”. He responded immediately with, “Oh, no, Pamela, not character building! You are already enough of a character!” Somehow I don’t think Emerson is using force of character in the same way.

I know much of how we have felt about life is etched in our face as we age. I also know that one of my major midlife tasks has been to review the choices I’ve made and accept responsibility for them all, even those that have had unintended consequences. When I find myself not accepting responsibility for the unintended consequences in my life, I remember a friend who shared how painful he found it to realize that he had made decisions without a full awareness of the consequences. Before his sharing, I didn’t understand that was what I was avoiding—the knowledge of the untended consequences of my decisions. His personal wisdom now informs my understanding.

Yet, after reviewing my decisions and assessing the woman I’ve become, I’m pretty sure I would make many of the same choices all over again, unintended consequences notwithstanding. The task I face now is admitting this to myself and others.

Today I was visited by tornadoes, a new moon and an old friend.

Emerson Challenge Day 2

“Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve had the chance to live out, “wherever you are, there you go” enough times to know that what Emerson is saying is true. The first time I realized the truth of this aphorism was in the 1980s when I was being paid  to work in Honolulu one day every six weeks. From the first time I landed in the Hawaiian Islands and was embraced by the trade winds, I knew I was in paradise!  Unfortunately, I also learned that some of the greatest emotional pain I’ve experienced was felt while in Oahu, Maui and Kauai.

Like Emerson, each time I went to Hawaii my expectation was to be “intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness”.  How could I not be transformed given that Hawaii as one of those places where you can quickly OD from all the beauty? After all, just how many beautiful sunset, roadside waterfalls with cascading orchids and endless white sand beaches can a person take in without becoming insensately intoxicated!

In my way of thinking all that beauty should factor into the reality equation in a way that yields this outcome:  Incredible Beauty + Pamela = Unspeakable Joy. Unfortunately, one of the two factors in the equation is often negatively loaded so that it renders the outcome as less than positive. Not only do I not experience anything like “unspeakable joy”, instead I experience even more sadness and disappointment from acknowledging the gap between the joy I expected to feel and whatever negativity I’m feeling.

That’s not to say I have never experience transcendent moments of joy but that those moments are a lot harder to come by than simply as a byproduct of traveling somewhere exotic. In my experience for those transcendent moments to exist, there has to be an interior state of receptivity such that the outside condition is met by something that resonates with it—a complementary feeling-tone.

If I am “blue” then everything around me is colored with that feeling. I like the old fashioned term ‘blue” better than the newer, clinical language around mood disorders. First of all, if I use clinical language, someone will want to give me medications for it. Secondly, I think ‘blue” is appropriate because that’s how my feeling-tone changes the color of my immediate reality. Thirdly, I’m not sure I want to change that feeling state—after all, melancholy has been the curse of many great artists and writers. (I’m also aware that it’s been the curse of regular folks, too!)

I remember being struck by the validity of Peter Kramer’s argument in Talking Back to Prozac when he questioned the “personality engineering (my term)” of drugs like Prozac. His concern was that we were creating a society of “happy” people so that no one had to be distressed by another’s unhappiness. In reading Kramer’s book, I wondered about temperament and how drugs like Prozac affected melancholics and how the practice of using them reinforced an idea that everyone should be “sanguine”.

The ancients had a different approach to temperament. They saw an individual’s temperament as part of their life journey, something the person needed to learn to balance through lifestyle, music, art, specific food and drink, herbal remedies, etc. I have Ficino’s  manual in my library and while some of the formulations seem archaic, others are quite contemporary. Culpepper’s Herbal (also in my library) lists very specific remedies for bringing temperament into balance.

So I think my challenge is to find ways to live as one of those  William James called the “twice born” in Varieties of Religious Experience.   Constitutionally, I’m not “once born”, someone who is innately predisposed to happiness, but rather someone who fits James’ “twice born” definition of “sick souls of the universe with a natural demeanor of pessimism”. Fortunately, James saw a positive prognosis for the “twice born” if their attitude toward life leads them to a crisis (second birth) that results in a new view of themselves and the world.

I find thinking parallel to James  in the emerging field of Positive Psychology which is producing valuable insights on temperamental “set points” and positive psychology practices. I was quite relieved to read Seligman’s description of himself as someone on the lower end of the optimism-pessimism scale for temperament as I would have trouble taking in his recommendations if I thought he was someone who was constitutionally happy. (Personally, I prefer the more cumbersome term,
subjective well being (SWB), to the term happiness. I believe I can be experiencing a high level of subjective well being while an outside observer would not describe my state as happy.)

I think PP is definitely worthy of more study and I will continue to wrestle with my understanding of the ancient model of temperament as it relates to contemporary psychological practices.

Note: the actual Godin Emerson challenge for today came in later than my ‘morning pages’ so I went with one of my own….

Seth Godin and Emerson Challenge Part 2

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

I can’t imagine how I can write this assignment but I’ve made a commitment to do it so I set the timer and now I’ll start typing.

I can say that I have been afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death and afraid of other people in differing intensities
throughout my life. I think the most important thing I’ve done for the past 63 years is increase my capacity to be present for life, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Now I wonder what it was that caused me to be so fearful.

Last night I had a dream that summarized my awareness of this increased capacity to be present for life. It was one of those very long, complicated dreams involving many people, many different periods of time, and many events. Much of the dreamtime was spent in an old Victorian resort hotel by a seaside wharf–not any place that I ever remember being. I was there because there was some mix-up on my travel plans and I hadn’t made my flight connection so I was waiting there until another one was available (something that has been part of my reality). I had lots of interaction with young, creative people. The final scene was with a man who seemed to be my traveling companion. I had commented to him that I was surprised that we were getting along so well (translate to no fights!) and he responded, “I’m a very nice person.”

I realized when I awoke that his matter-of-fact comment contain a whole life perspective. His comment meant, “Of course, we’re getting along well. You get what you expect. If you expect people are nice then that is what you will experience. There’s a whole world of nice people out there.” At that point I realized that the whole dream had been about “random acts of kindness” that people had performed on my behalf. As  I wandered through my dreamscape, I had repeatedly encountered people who were actively engaged in their own creative process but who didn’t hesitate a minute to reach out to me either in welcome or in assistance.

The dreamscape world view in which I awoke is a lovely picture of life! It would be silly to fear people, truth and fortune if that is how life is. As for the fear of death, I hold to the belief that there is something after this life. I may be wrong—and I’ll find out at some point—but believing in life after death makes it possible for me to live life more fully in the present.

The timer went off—I’ll stop writing but continue reflecting.

Now that I’ve completed my “morning pages”, I’ll head out to engage the world….

Seth Godin and the Trust Yourself Challenge Day 1

Seth Godin and the Trust Yourself Challenge Day 1

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

After a long holiday weekend of solitude, I’m now facing Emerson’s challenge of keeping “with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” as I return to the world of communication and commerce. Can I keep the understanding that I discovered through my reading, writing and contemplation? My world view seems so clear right now but will it still be clear by noon?
I’ve spent the holiday weekend listening to some of my favorite books while I worked in my gardens. I wanted a voice other than my own in my head while I worked so that I wouldn’t ruminate on all things negative. After many hours of digging in the dirt in the hot sun, I would go inside physically worn out, shower, eat, and begin to write in my journal about all the things that were bothering me.
I started the weekend feeling “funky” with no clear understanding of what was going on. Day by day, as I listened, worked and wrote, the “funky” feeling began to take shape into specific thoughts, feelings and beliefs about the present and future. My dream life provided a technicolor narrative at night to further elucidate my less than fully conscious process. Clearly, something was at work under the surface.
I’m grateful for the years of exploration that have led me to understand my own creative process. When I was younger, I was afraid of these “funky” periods because they felt too much like depression. In fact, I didn’t have much capacity to ride them out at all when I was in my teens and twenties. It took until my forties to understand that this is how my creative process unfolds—that I have to go through this period of “funkiness” where I experience much unrest, dissatisfaction and anxiety before something new crystallizes.
I’ve also learned what supports creative emergence from this period and what makes it a frustrated and unproductive stuckness.

The first supportive thing is that I need to do is to supplant my rumination with someone else’s world view. To facilitate this, I have scanned some of my favorite books (not currently available on Audible or Kindle) so that my Kindle can read them to me while I do something physical. The combination of repetitive, mindless physical activity (like gardening, house cleaning, and interior painting) and thought-provoking books colludes to shift me to another way of viewing life. The physical activity manages my physical agitation and the narrative occupies my mind. Then, when sufficiently exhausted by the activity, I need to sit quietly and contemplate the gradual emergence of new thoughts and ideas.
I also needed to redefine this “funky” period as something positive rather than negative. I’ve been helped in this reframing by remembering Marion Woodman’s caution not to give into the darkness when in the chrysalis. I was very comforted by what I read in her books (Addiction to Perfection, The Pregnant Virgin, The Ravaged Bridegroom) about how the creative, transformative process can be seen as a necessary and protective chrysalis for the incubation of new life. I have also taken to heart her wisdom around the importance of dreams and the need to value your inner process by using your journal as a mirror for your soul. I honor her for all the ways she has been a mentor to my journey—both through her books and in person.

Using “The Five Why” Root Cause Analysis in Personal Conversations

I spend a lot of time in dialogue with people as they explore their reactions to people and situations. I have found that they often talk in circles or use what I call “lateral” explanations rather than digging deeper to the root causes of their reactions. Skillful questioning enables them to move deeper and uncovers the “root” of their reaction. Once the root cause has been identified, more questioning may be necessary to help them determine whether the thinking in their root cause is accurate or a valid representation of reality. Often their thinking is based on distorted ideas about themselves, other people or the world around them but they have not been able to raise the root cause to the light of discernment that will give them accurate feedback.

 I find this is true with organizations, too. In problem-solving discussions, groups quickly jump to solutions without really taking their root cause analysis deep enough. Frequently, the group is quick to say that the cause of a performance problem is poor communication—and then think that they are done with their analysis. It is the role of the process facilitator to ask more questions to take the discussion deeper. “What about the communication process is not working?” What evidence do you have that the communication is inadequate?” In what ways is the communication process inadequate (frequency, duration, content, specificity)?

People often lack the necessary language skills and vocabulary to engage in an effective interpersonal problem-solving discussion. Situations are described globally as being “good” or “bad”, “I like it/him” or “I don’t like it/her” or “I feel bad” or “I feel good”. None of these statements provide enough information to do any real problem solving. What does “bad” really mean in this situation? What is it that the other person is saying or doing that I don’t like. What is happening in this environment that I don’t like? What is feel bad—sad, scared, hurt, angry? Many people are not able to articulate more completely because the lack a glossary of terms for describing this subjective landscape. They have very little experience in crafting this kind of description nor have they heard others articulate an internal process around cause and effect other than in like and dislike responses.

However, people do have the ability to recognize what fits and what doesn’t. They can respond to statements describing situations or select from a list of statements or evaluate statements on the degree to which they do or do not apply to the situation. Or, they can sort the statements into categories such as strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree—more of, less of, stay the same—relevant, not relevant. Providing content about the subject area and structuring the inquiry process traditionally has been the role of counselors, therapists, spiritual advisors and consultants. Knowing the right questions to ask, having knowledge that can be used to “reframe” the content, driving the questioning deeper rather than sliding sideways into more rationalization requires expert skill and broad experience.

 These dialogue skills are not easy to acquire because they can’t  be scripted beyond the first few questions. As we see knowledge work migrate to lower skill, lower wage markets, this type of expert inquiry is not likely to be replicated easily nor replaced with computerized expert systems. Many call centers use a scripted process in responding to customer support requests but the limitation is that they all have to start at the lowest level of problem-solving and can’t jump to a more complex problem statement without completing the whole decision tree process. And the process is most binary, “yes/no”, go/no go” questions but human problems are seldom binary and usually are multi-faceted falling into the “it depends” category.

Another  common problem that I hear has to do with someone’s dissatisfaction with another person and how they want to other person to change. The first step is to shift the focus from the problem person’s character or personality to the behavior that is causing discomfort/distress. Often discussions start with global statements like, “she’s so lazy”, “he’s so self-centered”, “she just doesn’t care”. All of those statements need to be translated into behavioral statements. “What is it that she says or does that looks lazy to you?” “What is it that he says or does that seems self-centered to you?” “How have you determined that she doesn’t care?”

For many people, shifting to open-ended questions rather than yes or no questions is quite difficult.  Even though we call this root cause analysis process the “five whys”  when we use it in problem-solving or trouble-shooting activities, why questions don’t work well in interpersonal dialogue. This is  because most people become defensive when someone asks, “Why did  you do that?” It’s hard not to hear accusation in the question no matter how well the questioner modulates his/her voice to sound warm and open. Using a question like, “what were your reasons?” is more likely to sound like reasonable inquiry to the person being questioned. Or you could say, “What was your thinking?” but very easily that can move into “What were you thinking!” which often is about thinking at all!

One of the best root cause analysis decision-making trees I know is embodied in the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

the Courage to change the things I can,

and the Wisdom to know the difference.

 

The first step in this prayerful problem-solving process is to ask if I can do about the situation—a simple yes or no question, a “go-“no go” path. Then it offers two different solutions based on whether the answer to the first question is yes or no. After that, the rest is pretty simple—simple but not necessarily easy!

DISC and Motivation 3.0

I received an email yesterday from Inscape distributor, Ron Nielsen, in which he mentioned that he was going to use some of the ideas from an article I wrote in 1991 for the CLC learning journal in an upcoming conference speech scheduled for the end of April. Ron’s comment spurred me to revisit the article content in light of some of what leading thinkers are saying about the global skills and achievement gap and where DISC training might fit. I haven’t rewritten the article but I’m thinking about it. Amazingly, much of the content is still relevant nearly 20 years later!

Also, I’m fresh from hearing Daniel Pink “live in Providence” yesterday. Inscape distributor, Bill Ring, in his usual eagle-eyed fashion, had spotted a blurb about Dan Pink speaking in our backyard and passed it along to me. I’m a great fan of Pink so naturally I registered right away! Bill, Cynthia and I made I way through torrential New England spring rain to the early morning session and came out dry and very energized by what we heard!

Between reengaging the content in my 1991 article ,  Learning Design in the Knowledge Era, and Pink’s presentation yesterday (plus a recent HBR article about the impact of Peter Drucker’s ideas by Rosabeth Moss Kantor) I’m revisiting what I think about the role and design of DISC training in contemporary learning and performance applications. Peter Drucker was the first writer I encountered (after Peter Senge) who made a strong case for the changing nature of work and how it would require us to rethink all our systems. At the time he wrote (1991), he stated that the workforce in US and other developed nations had shifted from an industrially-based economy to an economy where only 20% of the workforce being employed in manufacturing and moving goods. This represented in his opinion a tectonic-level shift from an industrial to knowledge/service era. His concern was that all our management systems were industrial era legacies and had not been adapted to the new environment.

Pink expands on this concern in his new book, Drive, where he talks about how the traditional, industial Motivation 2.0 strategies don’t work in “heuristic” work when there is even a minimum of cognitive load required. Motivation 2.0 “carrot and stick” strategies (developed in the industrial era of the 1850s) still work for algorithmic (procedural) work so they don’t need to be completely eliminated but supplemented to meet the changing nature of work. Pink challenged us to think of any other technology (quoting Gary Hamel on management as a technology) from the 1850s that is still in place. He then proceeded to talk about how two old, erroneous, beliefs about human nature and motivation continue to shape management practices today.

• People are machines so if you pull the right levers you’ll get the results you want.
• People are passive and unless you provide external carrot and stick motivators they won’t do anything productive.

Even though I had both read and listened (audible.com) to Pink’s book in the past month, these statements hit me with new impact while sitting in the audience at his talk. I immediately started wondering how much my DISC training design was influenced (either subtly or obviously) by these beliefs. Was I just teaching people a new set of levers, buttons and switches to pull, push and flip, to get people to do what you want to do? I’m still mulling over the question and reviewing my learning designs to see where I might have reinforced those erroneous beliefs.

I’d be interested in what others might think about this concern.

Are You a Mechnical Turk?

Or are you in danger of being replaced by one? Seth Godin introduces this term in his new book, Lynchpin, citing the Amazon service by the same name. Amazon took the name from a 19^th century chess-playing “computer” that was actually not a computer at all. The chess game was being played by a small man in a box. Amazon uses the term for services that appear to be performed by technology but are actually parceled out to many pink and white collar workers who perform the clerical or computational activities behind the scenes (such as transcribing audio recordings).  By chunking the requirements, Amazon is able to provide a quick turnaround at a low cost.  Godin uses this example to talk about what is replacing white collar work that is highly proceduralized and structured—what Pink calls “algorithmic work”.  After listening to the audio version of Godin’s book for the second time, I find myself thinking abou tthe ways I was replaced by the equivalent of a Mechanical Turk and what I did that created this vulnerability to a low cost replacement.

 In the first months of this decade, I was approached to do a last minute fill-in for the University of Toyota. The work came about in the usual fashion—referral by a colleague who knew that I had the skill and flexibility to do something “overnight”. I was able to provide next day standup presentation services for a course I had never seen, working for a client that was new to me. It was a stressful couple of days but it opened to door to a seven year contract for UOT.

 In the beginning of my association with Toyota, I was contracted to do courses that I designed and delivered for dealership automotive personnel around the country. As UOT matured into a full corporate university, they added layers of management and worked to standardize their courses. After some cost review, the decision was made to regionalize training so that facilitator’s would now need to deliver all 30+ courses in their region. On paper this made sense but it required standardizing all the content and reducing it to the lowest common denominator. Facilitators were now seen as interchangeable parts with no particular uniqueness or strength. This was a significant shift from the “specialized” approach of prior years where facilitator’s “owned” a course and delivered it nationally.

There were benefits for the facilitator as well. Regionalization made it possible to spend more than one night in each city, have more days booked, greater variety and develop a closer working relationship with a specific region. Most of us were happy to be out of the “city a day” grind and all the travel challenges it presented. (I had spent the first 10 years of  my public speaking career working for a national seminar house, doing a “city a day” and did not enjoy going back to that pace in my fifties!) Toyota paid one of the highest daily rates in the industry for contract training so the mantra became, “shut up and enjoy the money”.

 I tried to follow the mantra, as instructed by my colleagues, but became increasingly unhappy with what I was doing. Most of the courses were designed by young contract writers who had little training experience and not much industry knowledge. The content was stale and superficial. It soon became clear that the training was an exercise in compliance that nobody really believed in. The participants were hostages for eight hours a day and so were the facilitator’s! Every time I thought about leaving, a colleague would remind me about how good the money was and how little effort it took. More and more, I referred to myself as a “talking head” as I became less and less engaged.

 In 2007, the inevitable took place. Now that everything was standardized and facilitator’s were interchangeable parts in a production line, UOT decided they could find contract trainers that they could pay half of the daily rate they were paying us.  It really shouldn’t have been a surprise as it was the logical next step in cost-reduction. They offered us the opportunity to continue to do the work at half the fee or be replaced by someone else who was available at that rate. There was much grumbling and vows of “never, no way!” but several of my colleagues took the offer. They felt they were in a position of economic necessity such that they didn’t have a choice. I didn’t take the offer because I knew that given how negative I already felt about the work, there was no way I could show up and do it for half the daily rate.

 Since reading Godin’s book, I find myself closely examining how I have perpetuated a set of conditions that allowed this and similar events to put me at risk. I think I became too comfortable in performing “tried and true” services without examining changing market conditions and how I would need to adapt the services I offered so that they would continue to have value in a radically different world. I should have been better prepared for this scenario as I went through something very similar in 1989 (which led to the development of PPSS!). I spent the 1980s delivering six different courses for a high-priced national seminar house who collaborated with universities to present seminars throughout the US and Canada. Every course I taught had DiSC Classic 1.0 (paper version) as a core component with application-specific content built around the DISC core. Over several years, I became the #1 speaker for this seminar house and had more work than I could handle. I got to work in Honolulu and San Juan every 4-6 weeks. The work was interesting and meaningful to me and the people who attended.

 Then the bottom fell out in 1989– the rise of the low-priced, $49, Fred Pryor et al seminars took over the market and my seminar house could no longer compete. I had a couple of corporate clients (Avon was one of them) but had been so busy with contract training days that I hadn’t had much time or energy to build that part of my business. So when the bottom fell out and, in compliance with a new CEO mandate, Avon cancelled all contract training for the year, I was in a world of hurt! That long dark year led to significant re-evaluation of my business and I decided to develop training products, based on my 15 years of field experience with DISC. I approached Inscape about developing a software product that would incorporate all the application content I had developed working with clients and the rest is history! (It wasn’t quite that easy because the leadership at Inscape (CLC) didn’t think there was a market for software (or other electronic products) but they decided if Gary Little and I were foolish enough to do it for sweat equity, they wouldn’t stand in the way.)

 The next 20 years flew by and now I find myself in a similar yet different situation, asking the same difficult question, “What is it that I have to offer that is sufficiently unique and has sufficient value to a client that they would pay my fees, rather than using a Mechanical Turk?”

  I had to reinvent myself and my business in 1989 and I’m facing a similar challenge now. Most of my clients are exploring solutions that reduce face-to-face contact and leverage technology. Just as I had to ramp up quickly in 1989 and learn as much as I could about the PC platform and software solutions, I now am ramping up with cloud-based virtual solutions. It works for me because I’m really enjoying the fact that I haven’t been in an airport for over a year and have only spent 3 nights in a hotel in the past 18 months. I’m highly motivated to find solutions that are sustainable when I realize that my 91 year old father is still running his global high-tech company and I’ve probably got another good 30 years at least! I also recently  read my statement of benefits from social security and clearly cannot live on what they will provide from now until the time benefits run out in 2032!

 I’m curious to hear how others are rethinking their business in light of all the changes.