tools for building the future
Lowering the tone is easy, often funny, and sometimes desirable: lofty conversations gain traction (or evaporate) when touched to earth. Laughter liberates.
It’s much harder to raise the tone, and harder still to do it with humour and grace… but it’s almost always desirable. It’s a way to lead.
I propose that we aim for a 2-to-1 ratio of raising the tone to lowering it. And that we hold some fart jokes in reserve in case things get too serious.
If you keep butting up against the same problem with a colleague – a problem you think you’ve fixed, but that comes up repeatedly in slightly different variations – it could be a sign of conflicting values.
Values conflicts often seem to arise over:
If it is a values conflict (and it’s worth double checking that it’s not a case of your own poor management), you can be pretty sure that it’s going to keep on appearing until you do some deep work to address it.
These conflicts are tricky to handle because they’re often both emotion-laden and subjective. That is, we’re all pretty sure we’re right, and we’re indignant about being wronged – and our feelings of indignation double when realise how the other side of the argument perceives the things we say and do.
Some questions for working on values conflicts:
Why are our compromises so often invisible to others?
We take a deep breath, struggle to assume the best, let go of a few things and then stretch out with all the patience and generosity and grace that we can muster to offer a compromise and meet them in the middle…
… and nobody sees it.
If only our families, friends, colleagues, suppliers and customers would be more reasonable, they’d compromise too.
We think we see good starts all the time, but most of the time we see wrong.
Most of the time what looks like a good start – of a work day, a career, a diet, a business, a life – most of the time what looks like a good start is a long way into the story, the business-end of the iceberg.
That athlete off to the dream start in the 800m? He really started years ago. Quite possibly, someone else started things for him, tied his shoes, helped him train.
That overnight musical success? They started a decade ago in a garage before moving up in the world… to being ignored in tiny clubs.
That kid with the law degree from a top university? They probably got a good start by choosing excellent grandparents and even better parents, by being born in a nation and at a time where their particular skills are valuable.
Most of the stories that fed into ours were entirely beyond our control. We can be grateful for the good bits and we can mitigate the bad, but in one sense, none of it really matters.
What matters is, what is now the start of – the start that no-one else will see?
Everything changes if you can see the thing you’re doing as a gift.
Happy Christmas 2018.
A discipline, culture or scene is a network: a mesh of people, things, ideas and ways of doing things.
It might be tightly defined, with a clear centre, tightly woven middle, and a strong sense of a margin.
It might be clustered, with areas where the web is thicker and deeper, but with threadbare valleys inbetween, fading out to the hinterland.
It might be looser – candyfloss or mist – a ball of tenuous connections at a distance.***
Whatever the form – and if you zoom in or out far enough, they all look much the same – a key feature is that there are no edges. The margins are always porous, threadbare, and frayed, and everything is intertwingled.
We find our way into a network by joining it – by making points of connection, by crawling the web, ravelling the edges of the network.
For a field of study, we ravel the references, following the threads of footnotes and references to position ourselves in the network.**
In a culture or scene, we hop from person to artifact to text to place to practice, each one leading us on to another – and back and round again – as we get familiar with the landscape.
Start somewhere: Show up. Make connections. Be generous.
**Citations formed a web of knowledge long before the internet.
*** Word on the street is that candyfloss is tougher, denser and less tenuous than you’d think (hat tip: RudderlessSalamander)
Make something people can use.
Put it in their hands.
See what happens.
If they’re eager to pay – attention, time, money – you’re onto something.
Watch them. Listen to them. Tweak it. Make more of it. See what they think.
If they tell their friends – and if their friends tell their friends – then you’ve got it.
What change do you seek in the world? Who are the people you seek to serve?
You’ve got it when they’ve got it.
You’ll know you’ve got it when you meet someone for the first time, and the thing you made is already in their hands.
If you’re in a book group, social pressure is going to get you to read that book. The act of joining the book group is the hard part. Once you’re in the book group, the books are going to get read, because now you’re playing a game. It’s a game you’re enrolled in, it’s one you want to move forward.
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The easiest way to start creating this game dynamic is to form a group. To find others, to find others and challenge those others to play the game with you. Because we all know that solitaire might be a little fun, but solitaire isn’t the kind of game we dream of when we dream of games.
We do better when we do it together.
Seth Godin – Akimbo – The Wedding Industrial Complex
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Make it happen. Find others. Say the words.
The best – the only – way to prepare our kids for any future is by showing them a vision of a flourishing life, and by equipping them with the best tools we have to achieve it, and with the wisdom to use those tools well.
Stu Patience / Driverlesscroc
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“Our kids” can mean several things.
My biological children.
The children in my extended family.
The children of my friends.
The children of my neighbours, colleagues, fellow members of groups I belong to.
All the kids in my district, city, region, country.
All the kids. Everywhere.
Which kids are yours?