THE LEAFLET
December 28 2023
will it change your life, tochas constraints, values before data
DO YOU EXPECT THIS TO BE LIFE-CHANGING?
A favorite Peter Block question of mine is:
On a scale of 1-7, with 1 being a waste of time and 7 being life-changing, how meaningful do you plan for this experience to be?
I like bringing this question to a team at the outset of a project or near the formative moment of the team itself. As Block recommends, I also bring it with an explicitly stated lack of judgment of the ratings - some folks assume, especially because I can be a rah-rah kind of leader, that this question is a veiled attempt to get everyone to say they expect their experience to be life-changing. I don’t expect that or even want it.
I like to follow up with a second question:
“What do you commit to doing so that your experience is at least as good as what you just planned?”
This is useful in the early moment as an exercise in creator thinking instead of consumer thinking. It prompts ownership of an unknown future.
Read the rest here.
CONSTRAINTS LEADING TO ABUNDANCE, E.G., YOUR TOCHAS
If you and your team are in an early design phase of your work, which I’d define as one where you aren’t immediately beholden to a clear customer or end user, it can be tricky to find the fulcrums, the tradeoffs, the criteria. The sturdy, plausible reasons to choose one move over another.
Sometimes I think of these as the edges of the gameboard. Sometimes I think of them, more floridly, as beautiful constraints.
I offer below three statements of constraint. Each can serve as a prompt for better design thinking. You might use the statement in its raw empirical form. You can also carry the statement with you as an adage - you’re not going to use it for the concrete fact it describes but for the line of thinking it opens. More #yolo than schematic.
Read the rest here.
COMMUNICATING VALUES BEFORE DATA IN A COALITION
A failure mode in coalition communication is trying to motivate others with your dialect and data. Your beautiful pie chart may register as an insult. It’s worthwhile to look instead at a) shared values and b) peculiar incentives.
I try to find my way to those by completing these sentences:
Shared values: “The reason we’re all here together is a common belief in ______, which is rooted in an even deeper belief in ______.”
Peculiar incentives: “This other Diverse Group in the coalition does not believe they are doing what they exist to do unless they are ________ and they know that’s going well when they see _________.”
In communication to coalition members, consider leading with the contents of those blanks, making them the thesis you’re providing evidence for. Consider keeping your pie chart in reserve.
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on being good via openness and fragility:
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves on hope and building:
What is hope? It is a presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress is not the last word. It is a suspicion that reality is more complex than realism wants us to believe and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual... Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved... and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Nigerian-British poet Sir Ben Okri on stories working on us:
Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric