Do you really know what is going on?

Oh sure, you have an opinion about how things are going at work/family/religious institute/etc. And it may be going pretty well for you, you are quite happy with it, thank you. But if you are serving in some form of leadership, you desperately need to know how it is going for the people who it is supposed to serve, you being only a small part of it. Check out this quote from Peter Drucker (Managing The Nonprofit Organization, 120):

Force your people, and especially your executives, to be on the outside often enough to know what the institution exists for. There are no results inside an institution. There are only costs. Yet it is easy to become absorbed in the inside and to become insulated from reality. Effective non-profits make sure that their people get out in the field and actually work there again and again.

Who are the real customers for your product or service? Take a look at what bloggers are saying, take a look at customer service records, and actually try to use the service yourself to get a real look. Ask a friend to try it out and see what others think.

You may like it, but how is affecting your family? Are they having to put up with it just for you? Take a look at what they are saying on their social networks. Ask a good friend who isn't afraid to give you the truth, and then don't punish him or her for telling you.

What is the real cost of self assuagement?

We have a tendency to make our surroundings convenient to our own comforts without thinking about the repercussions on the people who also are affected. It is possible to have it work for you and for them. But chances are your real satisfaction will come when you know that customers are satisfied/family members are served/you are making a real difference in the lives of others.

It is so easy to think the world revolves around us. There is only one you, and that is a good thing. But it also means others don't necessarily see what is going on through your eyes.

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You Are In Control

Well, you actually have very little control over most of the things that you want to manipulate. How did you like that word "manipulate"? It has that sort of greasy type of meaning and feeling, especially if we think it is directed at us, yet the vast majority of our frustrations in life are associated with a failed attempt at manipulating someone or some thing. Yet Goethe says we are in control:

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather."

I saw this quote in a daily email that I receive from ScreamFree Parenting, a group that espouses the need for parents to grow up if they want to be influential in the lives of their children. The message is difficult to swallow because we all want the easy fix or the easy technique that doesn't really push me around but gets me what I desire.

We all want to be the bulldozer, not the bulldozee.

I know this, yet it is so stinkin difficult, until I realize that it is also easy. The difficult part really isn't controlling your emotions, it's being consistent enough about it that you create a brand new way of being you.

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Back Again

I was out for a while because my vocation was in flux. Well, it still is, but I'm itching to get back and write again. Posts will hopefully come at the pace of 2-4 per week.

It certainly helps me to remember and distill ideas as I think through them on this blog, and hopefully and readers that happen to wander this direction will have something to chew on. Look for something tomorrow!

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Conversations with my 6 year old...

Having a chat with my son Hunter is rarely boring. Here are some of our conversations this morning while getting ready for school:

Me: Come here, Cutestuff.
Hunter: Like I always say, there is no such thing as Cutestuff.
Me: Then you must not exist!
Hunter: Now why would I be such a thing?

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Hunter: What is for lunch today on the school menu?
Nancy: Hotdog.
Hunter: No.
Nancy: Chili.
Hunter: NO!
Nancy: Peppy pizza salad.
Hunter: What is that?
Nancy: I don't know.
Hunter: Ok, then no.

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Are You What You Buy?

I finished the book Buying In by Rob Walker and thoroughly enjoyed it. The last chapter ends with the question: does what you buy define who you are?

I have the belief that every person is intrinsically valuable. If this is true, then what you buy or what you have does not make you more valuable as a person. But the objects that you surround yourself with does answer another question:

Who do you wish you were?

That is why advertisers tell stories now rather than promoting the practical usefulness of their item. They are working on your insecurity. You know this. I know it. It works anyway.

As one contemporary ad agency executive has put it: "Few stronger emotions exist than the need to belong and make meaning. And brands are poised to exploit that need." (257)

We need food, basic clothing, and basic shelter. Everything after that is novelty that wears off fast because of our adaptive behavior. We adapt to the object, and it isn't as exciting for as long as we thought it would be.

But, I asked, what exactly does it mean to say "the wrong reasons"? If someone creates a symbol that has meaning, if it's Polo or Ecko, and I buy into it and it makes me feel more classy or urban, isn't that okay?

"Yeah," they answered in unison, and Andrew clarified: "You're spending the money to pay for the advertising that they paid for to make you believe that. That's the snake-eating-its-own-tail of it all." (260)

It's okay to buy things, to own things. But before we do, we need to really think about who we intentionally want to be.

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Did You Really Learn Anything?

Is it possible for you to go through a course or a class and not learn anything? Oh yeah, we've all probably had an experience like that.

But is it possible to go through a course, enjoy the teacher, get a good grade, and still not learn anything? Read on...

I read about the following experiment in the book What The Best College Teachers Do (22-23):

In the early 1980s, two physicists at Arizona State University wanted to know whether a typical introductory physics course, with its traditional emphasis on Newton's laws of motion, changed the way students thought about motion. As you read this account, you might substitute for the line "think about motion" any other phrase that fits your subject. Do you the students in any class change the way they think?

To find out, Ibrahim Abou Halloun and David Hestenes devised and validated an examination to determine how students understand motion. They gave the test to people entering the classes of four different physics professors, all good teachers according to both colleagues and their students. On the front side, the results surprised no one. Most students entered the course with an elementary, intuitive theory about the physical world, what the physicists called "a cross between Aristotelian and 14th-century impetus ideas." In short, they did not think about motion the way Isaac Newton did, let alone like Richard Feynman. But that was before the students took introductory physics.

Did the course change student thinking? Not really. After the term was over, the two physicists gave their examination once more and discovered that the course had made comparatively small changes in the way students thought. Even many "A" students continued to think like Aristotle rather than like Newton. They had memorized formulae and leearned to plug the right numbers into them, but they did not change their basic conceptions. Instead, they had interpreted everything they heard about motion in terms of the intuitive framework they had brought with them to the course.

Halloun and Hestenes wanted to probe this disturbing result a little further. They conducted individual interviews with some of the people who continued to reject Newton's perspectives to see if they could dissuade them from their misguided assumptions. During those interviews, they asked the students questions about some elementary motion problems, questions that required them to rely on their theories about motion to predict what would happen in a simple physics experiment. The students made their projections, and then the researchers performed the experiment in front of them so they could see whether they got it right. Obviously, those who relied on inadequate theories about motion had faulty predictions. At that point, the physicists asked the students to explain the discrepancy between their ideas and the experiment.

What they heard astonished them: many of the students still refused to give up their mistaken ideas about motion. Instead, they argued that the experiment they had just witnessed did not exactly apply to the law of motion in question; it was a special case, or it didn't quite fit the mistaken theory or law that they held as true. "As a rule," Halloun and Hestenes wrote, "students held firm to mistaken beliefs even when confronted with phenomena that contradicted those beliefs." ...The students performed all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid confronting and revising the fundamental underlying principles that guided their understanding of the physical universe. Perhaps most disturbing, some of these students had received high grades in the class.

Have you noticed how hard it is to really convince someone by arguing? People have to be receptive to new ideas for them to really change. It sometimes takes tectonic shifts to get people to change their worldview.

So, either the person needs to be at a point where they want to learn, or they have to be at a point of disillusionment with their worldview. Far more important than providing new information is showing why they should care in the first place.

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Salience Matters

Are the things that matter to you relevant to anybody else?

If not, before you assume that they are just not smart enough to have it figured out, you might want to first ask if it has entered their radar. Maybe it has been buzzing around your territory enough that you had a chance to think through it, to see it as something that belongs rather than just a minor blip or an extraterrestial passing through.

The book Buying In (58) has this quote:

Even today, salience matters: You are in no position to desire an iPod if you have no idea what it is. The more you see something, the more familiar it becomes - not as a result of the thing changing, but as a result of your brain changing through repeated exposure.

I find this true when I am teaching. Sometimes there are ideas that I've been aware of for a while that I wonder if I should even bother talking about. I do, and watch people get an aha moment or struggle with it. I have to remind myself that I might have come across it a while ago because of my specialty, and that it hasn't hit their radar yet.

And the same happens to me. I'll find something and think, "Wow!" and the person next to me is like, "Where have you been?"

I get to watch this happen with my kids, watching as stuff hits their radars and they take notice: "Did you know that 100 times 100 is 10,000?" "Did you know that an earthworm has 8 hearts?"

Salience matters. If it is important to you, find the simplest way to communicate it to those that you believe might care. Throw it out there so that it hits their radar screens.

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