Do A Thing
People don’t learn new things because you make them do a thing. They learn by watching you do a thing.
Fit For Change
We all know the feeling, when a change is needed in an organization or team, but it can be a very hard sell. It is especially difficult when it requires getting a group of people rowing in the same direction and feeling confident and excited about it. Often that challenge of change is that if flows against the current of conflicting agendas or just the innate comfort of what has been familiar.
One powerful technique that can help generate much-needed alignment is to tell the shared story of the group and how this new change fits with the overall growth and positive direction of everyone.
When it’s time to communicate and promote what’s next, be sure to pull in the story of what came before. Creating that connectivity helps to put individuals into the story that they are a part of as opposed to feeling left behind or run over. Showing people where they fit and are valued is like magic.
In Orbit
If you are a leader of an organization, a department, or a team of people, your job is to externalize the soul and mission of that people group. As a leader, if you have not put that into words then it only lives in you and not in others.
Unhealthy organizations and teams share the common characteristic of over dependence upon a single individual where everything related to direction, priority, strategy, and decision resides within that one leader.
When members of this kind of organization go asking about what to do or how to do something they say, “I don’t know, we better go ask our leader.”
Leaders will not be effective if they are the sun at the center of the solar system. Leaders must externalize the values and purpose of the organization and its various parts. That narrative is what the organization needs to orbit around.
Decentralizing yourself as a leader and placing that clear narrative in the center allows you to empower more leaders and provides a beacon that everyone can see and then run towards it.
The Hidden Chasm Podcast Interview
This summer I had a fantastic opportunity to be a guest on The Hidden Chasm podcast sponsored by United Effects. A one hour conversation with United Effects Founder & CEO Bo Motlagh and Co-Founder Designer Josh Smith where we talk about "People Architecture" and its vital role in team dynamics and building escalators to success for people and teams in organizations.
Click here for the episode on “Building Escalators” (Episode 5 of The Hidden Chasm).
Key Focus Areas
- Leveraging individual strengths to build cohesive teams 🎯
- Navigating the complexities of middle management and upskilling 🔄
- Aligning leadership strategies with organizational goals 📈
"Organizations in typical corporate America are very focused on treating companies like machinery. The problem is, it's full of people, and people are kind of messy."
“Psychogeography”
I was recently reading an article about a small community on the coast of Maine promoting sustainable farming. In the process, I came across this word, “psychogeography”.
I am intrigued by this new-to-me word. Psychogeography is about an individual’s feelings and behaviors related to a place, a geographical location. It may not be obvious, but we all have experience with this concept. Think about when you go to our favorite restaurant to meet up with friends and enjoy community filled with laughter, being seen, being heard, and creating connections. That restaurant often becomes one of our favorite places to go.
As humans we create connections to places and spaces through our feelings and behaviors and these connections become conduits for our sense of belonging.
Just as it’s true for places we “go to”, it’s also true in the spaces where we live and work. The human ability for “place making” is all around us. Expecting parents prepare their home for a new baby or “Bob” who works in the Southwest corner cubicle on the 3rd floor has given years to anchoring his “place” to finely hone and optimize his workspace. Both situations are about shaping the connections between the spaces, others, and themselves.
The next time you visit your favorite coffee shop to observe that same person sitting in the same favored spot for the third time that week or you face the wave of intense investment your kids seem to put into “redesigning” their bedroom… again, remember the power and importance of place making and the concept of psychogeography. It’s just people doing a very normal human thing. They are simply looking to create connection through feelings and behaviors in spaces that become meaningful access points to that things that are important.
Excel Is Not A Leadership Tool
One might think this would be obvious but yet somedays it seems this may not be the case. Microsoft Excel is not a leadership or communication tool. There, I said it, out loud.
Ever since the advent of computing and the injection of business productivity application into the business office ecosystem, it has become both prolific and easy for organization and efficiency software to be conflated with leadership and communication behaviors.
Why is this the case? The simple answer is that many business and cultural models are centered on productivity being the definition of success. But the truth is that getting the right things done at the right time is way more impactful and effective than getting a bunch of things done.
Measures of business and organizational success are a much bigger can of worms to pop open but for now I’d like to recalibrate on a simple thought.
Organizations, full of people, who are very different in a multitude of ways, can find productivity applications like Excel or others helpful as a tool to organize information and make sense of certain things, but truly impactful leadership and communication happens through relational vision, directional orientation, connection, and purposeful contribution. Avoid the risks inherent in planning boards and file folders alone.
Don’t attempt to talk to people or lead them through rows and columns. Instead, look them in the eye and see each other, and apply that connection to what really needs to be accomplished for the organization through connecting and doing it together. Performance will leap forward in a way no pivot table will capture.
Mind Your Antennas
Loud and chaotic environments are full of energy. Kinetic stimulation and potential abound. This is frequently desired and created with intention in many circumstances. Sporting events, concerts, parties, and celebrations of all kinds.
The less obvious catch here is that as human beings we also need recovery cycles. You can think of them as companions to the party bus. Moments in times to quiet things down, rest, get your bearings, and reset yourselves for whatever comes next. It’s part energy management and part psychological and emotional reset.
Without recovery cycles you find fatigue gets too high, you suffer some crazy form of adrenal burnout, and over-absorption of all that positive energy can become a detriment to your own physical, mental, and emotional sustainability and performance.
When in high energy situations, you can sometimes refer to those circumstances as high-signal environments. Think of signals as external inbound information that is captured by your senses. Your senses act like environmental antennas.
Sometimes, when signals don’t stop, they can create a kind of signal fatigue that your internal signal processing center in your brain can find overwhelming and it translates into your body. Have you ever woken up form a dream that was intense, a bit Jackson Pollock in nature and full of random and colorful nonsense. That’s your brain working away at the end of each day to sort through all of it. The sounds, visuals, smells, touch, and all the rest. It’s quite remarkable and amazing that this experience occurs every day but not much attention is given to recognizing it and how it works for you.
Every individual person has their own unique wiring and capacitates related to the manner and speed at which they perceive and process all of the signals in a given day. One person can be ready to keep the party going and another person can be looking for a nearby offramp to some quiet solitude. It’s all quite normal and variation should be expected if not celebrated.
In the end, we all have differences in our antenna sensitivity, tolerances, as well as processing and recovery practices. My hypothesis is that highly perceptive people expend large amounts of their reserve energies on filtering signals and formulation of responses. These are likely your insightful friends who may be better at listening than entertaining one-liner jokes but also compliment others you know who have a gift for simplification and spontaneity.
Sometimes we think we need to insist on and drive everyone to be the same but there is value in embracing the diversity. So slow down the tendency for comparison for sameness and explore the possibilities of deep insights while taking care to reenergize along the way.
The Speed of Pigeon
I was watching a move over the weekend that was set in New York City in 1924. The difference in the 100 years between then and now was fascinating and notable. Our contemporary reality is overstuffed with information with most of it designed to be full of attention grabbing noise. It’s not a shocker that so many of us suffer from various forms of cognitive and emotional fatigue in our day to day.
One key observation: We have lost the context and luxury of “slow”. In 1924 key information related to major world and local sporting, news, and political events were transmitted via carrier pigeons to send very short updates from remote places back to a point of collection where the information was then relayed to the visor wearing telegraph guy. Yes, that guy who makes that tap, tap, tap sound to send morse code over physical wires. Sent messages were short, concise, dense, and world perception forming despite the smallness of the information package.
Those small constraints of the information container and slow transmission practices allowed time for simply processing and gaining some sort of orientation to the subject at hand. Most of all, the entire process only allowed for the important and substantive content. Nobody was trying to sell you a lawnmower alongside the primary information. Imagine that!
To help us slow things down and improve communication in today’s thrashing sea of information, unlimited flavors of perspectives opinion, and targeted marketing, here are three core concepts that might help us when used as a guide when communicating.
Simplicity - Use a format that takes up the least amount of space and captures the most meaning possible. As if you could boil it down into three or four panels of a cartoon strip.
Depth - Even if simple and brief, a complexity of emotions, characters, and themes can be folded into the narrative.
Consistency - Showing up the same way, leveraging pattern recognition over time creates a foundational shorthand for context and creating a trusted connection through building familiarity and predictability.