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Getting to Cooperation: 4-C your work

10 Dec

In modern organizations, indeed in our digital world, the key modes of working will rely on connection, communication, collaboration and cooperation.

With whom you do work, and with whom you make that work available, are in fact more important than the task itself. This can seem like a radical departure from the way most people think about how they work. And, I suppose it is. That’s why, however, it is at the heart of the disconnect and dysfunction that we feel in our working lives.

The maxim is true: Anything that can be automated will be. With the advent of scripting, coding and AI, nearly any task that one can complete in isolation and anonymity will be replaced by automation. From truck drivers to data specialist, the machines are coming.

Rather than dystopian, I see this as an opening to something greater: The things that machines will do in our place will also liberate people to be more human.

Connection

The key function of human work will be to search for insights: “Computers are for answers. Humans are for questions.” (I’ve seen this quote attributed to several people, but I think it is Kevin Kelly. Please correct me if I’m wrong.)

cooperation-1237280_960_720At its core, forming the right questions and working to make sense of the answers that come back to us is a creative act. It is a human act. Creativity thrives on connection, discovery and the combination of ideas and objects that we exchange with others. Any creative output is not complete until others react to it. And if the creation is purposeful (=work), then it is only as useful as the feedback we get and how we revise and recreate.

Our ability to connect broadly, with a diverse trusted network of people that pulls together multiple disciplines and viewpoints, is the essence of purposeful creativity.

Communication

Building your network to find new people, ideas and processes, requires an active practice. There is no substitute for personal, deep, intimate conversation. When you find those opportunities, treasure them and capture the outcomes in a way that makes the ideas applicable.

In our digital world, however, we have more opportunity to communicate widely than was ever possible before. Email was a good start 25 years ago, but it’s usefulness is limited. The key is to communicate widely and openly: Let your voice be heard far and wide if you have something to say. Conversely, listen to conversations among others. The human voice will still carry the news.

Find channels that allow you to contribute and listen to those whom you are not immediately connected, or may not know (yet!). Ideas travel and their originators obscured. But the channels create a collective greater than is possible between the few. For me, Twitter has served this purpose, because I can choose to “listen” to whom I choose, and the act of contribution and the constant pruning of my community is an important part of my practice. You may choose other channels, but without communication, there is no growth.

Collaboration

This is the easiest part for people to grasp, and probably something you already do (and do well, hopefully). Working with others to complete specific tasks and projects can also benefit from the other “Cs” discussed here. The question is, what can others learn from your current collaboration, and how to share that?

Cooperation

It doesn’t surprise me how much confusion there is about what it means to act cooperatively: In ways that create the potential that others will benefit from what we do though if, when, and how is unknowable.

True cooperative functions actually fly in the face of command-and-control, competitive, hierarchical industrial-military systems that we are often so familiar that we may not even be aware of them most of the time.

Acting cooperatively is really the culmination of communication, connection and collaboration. When we share ideas, pass on our stories of success and failures, we lay the crumbs for others to follow. Even as we are following in the footsteps of others. We are all in it together – no matter how you define your current it. Serendipity happens, but only when we are open to and contribute to cooperative channels.

Learning, unlearning, relearning through and with others. Synthesizing ideas. It’s what I call The Learning Age.

 

 

 

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Aside

Courage Camp: Yes is the Answer

15 Aug

At the end of June I attended Courage Camp, in Avignon, France. In many ways and (to be truthful) quite unexpectedly, it was the start of something potentially transformational. I’ll share more and put it into a more professional context another time. What follows is my very personal reflection. Courage is a practice, and sharing something as personal as this here is part of my own process.

The answer is: Yes.

I’ve been thinking about the symbol I created to represent my personal courage and encapsulate the experience I was having at Courage Camp, in that time and place. And indeed, it was an at-the-moment manifestation of the internal movement that Courage Camp was provoking. The provocations continue, were I to be honest.

When the original idea was pitched – that we were all to develop our own symbol of courage to paint in semi-permanence on the wall – I had a notion about sowing seeds. Growth and renewal. Nurture and harvest. You know, all that crap. I did some sketches and felt settled on the idea.

But as the moment approached, I allowed something else to reveal itself.

  • Why was that particular song playing over and over in my head?

  • Why did the phrase I often use suddenly seem even more apt than ever? You can’t push the river.

  • Why was a blog post I wrote three years ago suddenly in mind? When you get to the fork in the road, take it.

  • Why do I so often say no to being courageous? What am I afraid of?

  • Why is David’s ghost hanging over me today?

Believe me when I say this is not like me. It is not. I closed my eyes and listened… Yes is the answer.

I lost David in December 2016 – truly a brother in every sense of the word but genetic. We’d been friends since we were 12. He died in a traffic accident in Uganda, while working on a documentary film about refugees from Sudan. He was the most courageous person I ever knew. He was also funny as hell, incredibly creative, and a real pain in the ass much of the time. He was a Yes Man.*

Want to take a road trip? Yes!

Jump off this cliff into the water? Yes!

Walk on the wrong side of the fence? Yes!

Go to Africa to make a film?

* I am very aware on the non-gender neutral term here. Since I am using it ironically to reflect off the original negative connotation of “Yes Man,” please forgive the anachronism. 

So, the symbol is a Y, of course. Yes.

Courage Symbols

But it is also a fork, and inflexion point, a decision to make and from which there is no return. Blue, the river flows and spills forward and down to the sea to be taken in by unimaginable vastness. I leave my mark on the wall. I may return to look at it again, but the moment will be gone. Yes is also a kind of impermanence.

There is an apocryphal story about the first time John Lennon met Yoko Ono. Yoko was already a known artist in the London avant-garde scene of the mid-60s (talk about courage – a single Japanese woman travels to London in the 1960s to be an artist!).  One the installations was a high-ceilinged white room with a nothing but a tall white ladder in the center. Above the ladder hung a magnifying glass. John climbed the ladder and used the glass to look at the black spot floating on the white ceiling: YES.

It made an impression. In 1973, he wrote Mind Games, the title song of his album of the same name. It is a beautiful piece, one of my favorite Lennon songs.  As the soundtrack in my head, that song left its mark on me that day in Avignon. The proof is on the wall.

Yes is the answer. You know that for sure. / Yes is surrender. You’ve got to let it go.

Addendum:

Mind Games was the first album that John Lennon produced on his own. To be honest, I think he covered up several beautiful songs with overproduction and unneeded flourishes. It’s my opinion to take or leave.

I have been playing Mind Games (the song) on my guitar for many years, and so I include my own version of it, recorded just here and now (18 July, 2018; Geneva), on my phone with my travel-sized Martin guitar.

I encourage you to listen to the original if you are unfamiliar with it. John Lennon’s was a beautiful voice, instantly recognizable and unlike any other. I believe he, too, was a Yes Man.

Me? A work in progress.

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Curious or Ignorant: The choice we have

15 Feb

I have been and remain a big believer in curiosity. A curious mind prepares us to be open to new ideas, assimilate and synthesize those ideas with our own thinking and operations, and lays the foundation for those serendipitous moments that unexpectedly reveal themselves.

So, it has been delightfully reaffirming to read Ian Leslie’s Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. While I’m still a couple of chapters from completion, Leslie’s book is a fine read and a well-reasoned argument for making curiosity the key to unlocking our world of information abundance.

curious: the desire to know and why your future depends on it

Ian Leslie’s book is not only a good read, it has a fantastic cover!

There is one section, however, that keeps playing over in my head: He argues that the (over-) abundance of information is making us less curious. Put another way, easy answers make us less curious, and less able to do the necessary sense-making.

[Curiosity] is also about discrimination; it involves choices about which knowledge we want to explore. The Web can give us answers before we’ve even had time to think about the question. It can also make it too easy for us to ignore our own ignorance.

Google… is more like a railway booking office – a place to visit when you know your destination. A truly curious person know that she doesn’t always know what she wants to know about… Google never says, “I don’t know.” (pp. 72-5)

The idea that it is all the easier for us to ignore our own ignorance given the ease of answers alarms me. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. But taken with what we already know about the dangers of confirmation bubbles, I now think that Leslie is quite right.

True intellectual curiosity may be harder than ever to maintain. As he suggests, curiosity is stoked by unanswered (perhaps even unanswerable) questions. It’s been my experience that it is the constant sense-making, PKM practices and networking with other curious, smart people that stokes my own curiosity.

The good news: These are learned behaviors! So, who is teaching them? I’ll follow up soon with some ideas about this means for workplace learning in a future post. This is still fresh in my mind’s gears, so I welcome your thoughts.

How Fast Can They Learn?

20 Jul

I’ve been part of a complex change initiative for the past 18 months or so, at a large legacy organization that is struggling to catch up to the realities of doing business in this century. By which I mean, in large part, to live and make use of the digital world we now inhabit. One of the primary things we are trying to do is to get people to think about their business data in different ways, and to unify standards of data across a far-flung enterprise.

speedometer-1063350_960_720People are asked to learn new tools and processes, the areas of traditional learning solutions. But also, to think about how their actions improve their teams, departments (lines of business) and client experiences, the ways in which they cooperate and collaborate, and the changing environment that is rolling out around them.

“So,” my client asks, “how quickly can we expect them to learn this?”

I completely understand how she believes this to be a straightforward question, driven by her “learning” budget. She struggled with my answer: “It will take as long as it takes. And it will take something like a lifetime.” I see how that is not a terribly satisfying or reassuring response.

So, I turn it back to her learning experiences. I asked her what kind of phone she had. An Apple iPhone 7, as it happens. “How long did it take you to learn how to use it?” She hesitates, and then answers that she learned how to use it in the first few minutes.

“OK, do you use it in the same way today as you did the first day you got it?”

“No, of course I discover new things and new apps and what I can do with it all the time.” She is starting to catch on to my line.

I get her to see that she has an internal motivation to continually learn its many features, discover new apps (mostly via word of mouth and observation – social learning!) and keep up with her peers, if not her children.

Right. I explain it is very much akin to the same thing.

We can train people on the new technology platforms up to an advanced-beginner level. However, unless they have the motivation to learn, internalize why they should do so, and start out on their own journey of discovery through social learning, peer support (or pressure not to appear behind, if you like) and organizational allowance that learning is as much about trial and failure as it is about success, they are unlikely to ever achieve a state where we can say, “Now they’re done learning.”

In fact, we need to reset hearts and minds to never say they’re done learning. We are teaching a set of technologies, it’s true. But to live and adapt to the modern workplace means learning that is much more like the iPhone than it is like traditional corporate training.

Learn the basics, observe what others are doing, share your own discoveries, and adapt and learn constantly. How will it take you to learn to use a computer? As long as it takes, and it takes forever. That’s the world we live in.

Exactly. That’s where Learning & Development needs to be. Training, sure, if it’s needed (none was needed for the iPhone because it was well designed). But training is the starting blocks. Our primary function is to teach people to be learners. Our organizations depend on it.

Things I learned on my trip to India

4 Dec

I recently returned from an amazing 20 days in India (Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan). It was overwhelming (in a good way), and I’ll be processing my experiences for quite some time. Just last night I dreamt about being in the beautiful desert city of Jodhpur.

Inspired by Kate Pinner’s frequent reflections on her life and how it relates to our chosen profession, I thought I would share my half-baked reflections even as they are still being sorted.

  1. Chaos is normal, and fuels productive activity
MKH_4729

(Old) Delhi, on the eve of Diwali, November 9, 2015.

MKH_4699

I’m not sure I’d been so happy to see the other side of the street.

I heard it constantly during our journey: “India is ‘organized chaos, but somehow it all works.’” It’s a pretty apt description. I have seen traffic in Boston, Bangkok and on the Bay Bridge, but nothing was like Delhi on the eve of Diwali. The key to getting through the cacophony of cars, trucks, ox carts, tuk-tuks and pedestrians is to be both single-minded and good humored about the moving maze. One large man walked by our rickshaw as it inched forward, and said with a wide smile, “Welcome to India!” Indeed. Chaos, cross-traffic and distractors are the reality for most of us, and best option is determined acceptance rather than short-tempered resistance.

  1. There’s power in diversity

I knew of course that India was a very diverse country, but as compared to North America it is remarkable how people intermingle. Whatever the divides of religion, region, caste, income, education, etc., people are in constant contact with each other (literally). Where in the US, folks can live in a gated suburb or specific ethnic enclave without much rubbing shoulders with others, in India the mix and flow seems constant. I think that is truly to the benefit of all, no matter what tensions may exist.

  1. Specialization works when part of the tight tapestry (network)
MKH_4639

Each vendor sells one thing, and one thing only…

India still appears to be a land of specialization. I saw very few supermarkets or “box” stores. Primarily, if something needed to be purchased or a service provided, you went to the specialist. The knife vendor didn’t also sell saws, the barber didn’t also sell high-end shampoos, and the vegetable vendor sold vegetables, not fruits, canned goods or condiments. But, since each specialist is in close proximity of hundreds (thousands?) of others, one can frequent the expert, the favorite vendor, on the way to and from all the others. All things being equal, I’d rather by my cookware from a cookware vendor than from a department store (or Amazon). You?

MKH_4621

…And there are thousands of vendors. Find whatever you need on the narrow streets of (Old) Delhi. Here, Diwali decorations.

  1. Say “Yes!”

This is true for travel – and life in general: Let your first and last answer to opportunities be yes. But even more so in India, where every single day, all day, there was something new, fascinating, thought-provoking and unexpected. When we spent a day at a tiger nature reserve, I was not feeling well at all. Through the morning drive, where we didn’t spot a tiger or much else, my head cold was terrible. I almost decided to skip the afternoon drive, as the bouncing and dust was hard on my head, and the chance of seeing a tiger was not good. But at the last minute I said yes, and was rewarded for it beyond my dreams….

India Nov 2015 1444

India Nov 2015 1480

Thank you, India (apologies, A. Morissette)

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