Archive for the ‘Communication is about relationship’ Category
Coursera Learnings: The Close Reading
Word by word, pay attention to the text
It’s actually what I did yesterday with my visceral response to the Dassault Systemes commercial from Casual Films which appears to have touched a nerve.
Not so long ago I wrote about the Modern Poetry class I’m attending with ~30,000 new friends. We’re watching Professor Al Filreis and a team of dedicated UPenn student TAs react to and discuss Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg and others. The class involves a fair amount of dissecting meanings and is lots of fun. And now we are grading each other’s close readings of a Dickinson text. The Coursera machinery for dealing with a massive online open course is startlingly easy to use and even (sort of) personal. Kudos to Professor Al Filreis and team!
For me this was to be a year off from grading college essays, but these essays are different. People from all over the globe are struggling to sort out what the assigned Dickinson poem means. Some—like me—have never worked this closely with poems. Many of us read our own meanings into the text—often this is linked with a lack of close attention to the words. Even word by word: the close reading demands the individual words add up to something. To gloss over the words is the thing that allows me to pack in my own meanings. I’ve noticed this tendency for years reading ancient texts with small groups: the farther we get from the words on the page, the easier it is to attach our pet peeves to the author’s supposed/assumed point. But the words themselves lead into or out of meaning and belief.
I was struck by one of our course readings: this poem by Cid Corman:
Cid Corman, “It isnt for want”
Naturally, there is lots to say as you go word by dash by word. But one thing—from the perspective of conversation—Corman focused on how we know something about ourselves as we stand together in conversation.
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An Open Letter to Best Buy: Teach Sales to Hear
It’s Counter-Intuitive, but Listening May Actually Clinch a Sale
It’s OK to veer off script
Hubert Joly, I know you are trying hard to be more than Amazon’s showroom and believe me, we’re behind you! I can’t speak for everyone (hey—why let that stop me?), but all of St.MinneapolisPaul wants the Blue Shirts to win! We like you! (except, ahem, for those who don’t, of course).
Would you entertain a suggestion? I spoke to a kindly Blue Shirt yesterday about another obscure, jury-rigged set of applications that keep my Microsoft products talking together. I’m just looking for ways to get away from the fussing that enshrouds my mobile use of Microsoft. I asked open-ended questions seeking new solutions. Mr. Blue Shirt started his spiel about features and benefits—a reasonable place to begin. I drilled down with explanation and more questions. I could tell he was not catching my drift, so I searched for the key words that would help him see why his banter did not fit. The recently abandoned “activesync” turned out to be the word that unlocked introductions to the Microsoft rep hanging around 100 yards away. This gentleman ran with “activesync” and provided answers that seemed to fit my situation, but still with enough unanswered blank spaces that I knew I needed more research.
I May Be A Tough Customer
I may want more detail than other people because of my quixotic quest to make Microsoft work across my devices. I may have had too much experience with sales people saying whatever they must to make the sale (AT&T, take note). It is also possible that I need to read things to believe them. Granted.
Here’s My Point
What I need is help with complicated products. Or solid advice to give up my foolish Microsoft quest. Is that the kind of thing of I could expect from a quick conversation on the Best Buy floor? Maybe not. But if you had someone who listened, who knew what was available and who could step away from features/benefit sales script—that would be worth something to me. I’d make an appointment with that person—like I did at the Microsoft store (I’m not optimistic).
I know my cult-of-Apple friends are punching their faces now and saying “hopeless.” I’m not quite ready for the Apple tattoo on my…wallet. Ok?
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The Decline of Fact in Our National Conversation (and How to Avoid Despair)
Louder Preaching is Not the Answer
It seems wrong to call it a national conversation when we mostly monologue at each other. And most of our monologues are meant only to reinforce the already-believers listening. Republican Paul Ryan’s recent string of verbal deceptions was a stunningly brazen example of half-facts delivered with full-on force—but both sides are equally guilty. That both Democrats and Republican play loose with facts is neither a surprise nor anything new. So it has always been: we persuade each other by twisting facts in our favor and choosing not to reveal the truths that would balance our cherry-picked facts.
It is natural (though not necessary) to become cynical about our national exchange of monologues. Recognizing that any speaker is likely persuading you with only half the relevant facts is probably not a bad strategy to adopt for the next three months—or the next 30 years. It is also easy to see how this strategy only accelerates skepticism about the official word of any authority. And so “Question Authority” returns as a relevant bumper sticker, several decades later. Or was it ever out of style?
How to Avoid Despair and Reject Cynicism
Remaining skeptical of facts presented as truth is a good starting point. And perhaps seeking a generous spirit that questions facts even while looking behind the facts to ask what broader point the monologist is making. But we must speak up and expect dialogue rather than more indoctrination.
More preaching will not do.
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Today I start a Coursera Modern Poetry Class. I have over 29600 classmates.
It’s a big room.
I’ve always had a hard time with poetry. Except for Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, and William Carlos Williams and a few others, I mostly don’t get it. Over the years a few smart and patient friends have helped me glimpse what I’ve been missing. Those few glimpses have made me hungry for more.
So I signed up for a Coursera course. This one is taught by Al Filreis through the University of Pennsylvania. It’s free to take and so far, even the readings look like they are freely available on the web. The fact that nearly 30,000 people signed up for the ten-week course seems to have shocked everyone, including the instructors.
Why Poetry When There is So Much Real Work to be Done?
Poetry and copywriting are joined at the hip.
I see you rolling your eyes.
Listen: reducing a big idea to the shortest, most succinct nugget that cannot be ignored by a target audience is the heart of copywriting. Yes, it’s true we often waste that succinctifying power on soda and beer and lingerie and the Reliant K-car. But not always: sometimes we write to expose human trafficking and to raise money for refugee crises or to invite people to reconcile with God. All these uses—whether mundane or transcendent—use that succinctifying muscle. Longer-term readers of this blog might argue that whether mundane or transcendent, the work of serving with words is valuable. I agree.
Sharpening that succinctifying muscle is what interests me. I hope that will be one outcome from the course, as I see what poets have succeeded at encapsulating experience into words and phrases. Of course, I’m guessing there will be much, much more to it.
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Image Credit: Dr. Seuss via thisisnthappiness
Why Leaders Flee
A Tale of Two Organizations
One organization was a for-profit and well-respected, with revenue growth of 15% per year and generally thought of as on the way up. The other was a non-profit, well-respected in the community, gaining hundreds of new attendees every year and generally thought of as on the way up. Both organizations had a mandate to grow leaders.
The for-profit harvested fresh MBAs from Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg and other high-octane B-schools to populate corner offices and lead the common folk. They provided these new grads with some authority, though few needed permission to whip the employees into shape.
The non-profit built a leadership program and invited people in for up to three years of hands-on experience. People came from all over the world to participate—for no pay—and were given all sorts of jobs to organize among the constituency.
In both organizations, the new leaders were issued mandates, which they interpreted and issued to the employees (for-profit) and constituents (non-profit). And work began.
“Well done,” said the top leadership to each other. “Things are getting done. These are the leaders we need.”
And so it seemed as they looked from the top down.
But from the bottom up, things looked different.
The employees and constituents realized the newly-installed leaders had energy but not experience. Worse: they didn’t know what they didn’t know. Even worse: the organizational leaders were now only talking with the newly-installed neophytes. The employee and constituent voices—the ones that shouted in joy at a shared mission and offered small course corrections the leaders had previously listened to—could no longer be heard. And as they realized this, the able thinkers, the natural doers, the low-key champions of the larger mission and the natural leaders started making exit plans to find a new place where they could again have a voice in the mission.
And while both organizations seemed instantly more efficient, their poverty would not become apparent for several years.
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Say What You Will: Dummy’s Guide to Conversation #10
How to Not Feel Bad About Voicing Your Opinion
I grew up wanting to not disrupt people. Sadly, I remain a people-pleaser.
I’m working on it. (so back off.) (darnit.)
But I’m learning lately that every voice really does matter—no matter what condescending tone your client or boss or the VP takes in today’s conversation. Even when she sighs and says “We’ve been over this,” know that if it bugs you, you need to bring it up. And the know-it-all in Purchasing doesn’t really know it all—he just sounds that way. So raise your point. If what you hear doesn’t sit well, say so and tell why. Reject verbal manipulation and say what you will. Be civil. But say it.
That inveterate letter-writer said to speak truth in love, and he was right (again). Each of us hears only what we want to hear most of the time. And it only gets worse over the years as our blinders sit more firmly over our eyes and ears. We don’t see or hear what we don’t know. We’re not even looking for it. But we need to hear it, and sometimes we desperately need to hear the big obvious thing everyone is trying hard to not say. Our words are most effective when they carry with them true care for another person. “True care” as opposed to the catty smites that characterize so many of our public forums.
Say it because your conversation partner will get over it. Or not. It is true that sometimes our words can end friendships—but that is less likely when our words also communicate care.
And beyond our need to hear from outside ourselves, a lot of critical human work gets done within the moving parts of a conversation: affirmation, understanding, self-understanding, mutual-understanding, reframing a situation, brand new ways of looking at things. That list is long.
But none of that happens if we don’t say what we are thinking. So stop worrying about disrupting the day of the self-important windbag. Much bigger things are at stake.
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Image Credit: Eric Breitenbach via Lenscratch
How do your tools shape you and your customer?
We work with tools. Tools work back.
Current Tools Train Us to Expect Collaboration
It is not precisely true that our tools train us. More to the point: our tools sometimes wake dormant skills. Our tools help us exercise muscles we’ve not used so much: for instance, my running shoes help me exercise a different set of muscle than my bicycle typically requires. I know this because I have different pains after using each. An axe requires differing coordination skills than a hammer, which is also different from a ratchet.
Current social media tools exercise our collaboration muscles. From Facebook and Twitter we began to see that collaborating is fun. And we start to look forward to working together. It now feels good use those muscles and skills. It feels productive.
So when we require each other to sit silently in a long meeting, well, that doesn’t feel so good anymore. Or when we tell our employees or our congregation to go do this thing without asking for their input and experience—that just won’t fly anymore. And if we expect our customers to buy whatever we sell with no questions, well, that model has been dead for some time (the cult of Apple comes to mind as one exception).
David Straus in his practical and interesting How to Make Collaboration Work (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler Publishers, 2002) rightly labels this a matter of human dignity:
People who are directly affected by an issue deserve to be able to express their opinions about it and have a hand in formulating a solution. (46)
How are the current tools changing the expectations of your client, customer or congregation?
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In Praise of Brain Picker
Maria Popova shows how to move forward
If you are a fan of Brain Pickings and Maria Popova (if you are not you should be), do yourself a favor:
- Sign up for her blog…
- And tweets (@brainpicker).
- Read for a week and then…
- Read this article from Mother Jones. You won’t be able to appreciate this article until you experience for yourself Ms. Popova’s prodigious output.
If you are unfamiliar with Brain Pickings, it is a resource-heavy blog that pulls together the oddest assortment of topics that will mesmerize and pull you deep into some of the most creative minds our species has produced. From creativity to music to authors to architecture to, well, the list is long. In each post—and she posts three times a day!—she identifies diverse resources and pulls them together with enough depth to change how you think about your work this very day.
The effect is breathtaking. I subscribe to a lot of blogs but Ms. Popova’s posts all require further, eager reading. Much of my Instapaper account is filled with ideas, authors and links that started with a post from Ms. Popova. The Mother Jones article gives more detail about how she accomplishes what appears to be a team effort, but isn’t. Along with working a regular job, she reads 15 books a week, posts three times a day, and tweets every 15 minutes (that’s right, four times an hour: 56,096+ tweets gathering 222,195 followers). Ms. Popova is motivated by “combinatorial creativity”:
But even before I knew what that was, I always believed that creativity is just, sort of, our ability to take these interesting pieces of stuff that we carry and accumulate over the course of our lives—knowledge and insight and inspiration and other work and other skills—and then recombine them into new things.
Her vision for curation is compelling:
…you enrich people with creative resources, and over time, these Lego bricks that end up in their heads eventually build this enormous, incredible castle. And I don’t think that’s an original idea at all—it’s something a lot of people intuitively understand, and a lot of curatorial projects are born out that vision.
When I teach copywriting at Northwestern College, we spend a fair amount of time thinking, reading about and practicing combinatorial creativity. This kind of creativity is at the heart of any good copywriting practice, but it also has the capacity to open hidden vocational doors.
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Gay Marriage and the Desperate Times/Desperate Measures Argument
People of faith can do better
Amy Bergquist’s powerful editorial (“This man shouldn’t get the last word on gay marriage”) in today’s StarTribune makes a strong argument about treating people as adults. Read the comments (59 as of 10:10am, 135 as of 2:50pm) and you’ll be reminded of what a lightning rod issue this is for our culture. Setting aside the lightning and the working parts of Christian conviction in a multi-religious nation for a moment, I believe Ms. Bergquist is exactly right about Frank Schuber/Schubert (The Strib printed his name both ways) methods:
Running emotion-driven ads at the last minute does not give room to debate, discuss or even engage one’s mind. It’s all visceral. It’s all knee-jerk reaction—which is the point: We all know that every institution and cause, from the Axis to AIDS, has played on emotion to move people to action. We each tune out countless of these messages every day.
As a copywriter and a student of persuasion and a Christian, I question Mr. Schuber/Schubert’s tactics: while his ads may move the vote, they do not promote transformation. Transformation happens as people engage with an issue and think it through and talk it through (and pray it through). On a personal level, it is one-on-one conversation that makes things happen. The notion of ambush communication tactics may give short-term gains in Jerry Falwell’s culture wars while leaving the nation’s current inhabitant’s thumbing their fact-checkers as they walk away.
I know these tactics well as a copywriter. But anyone can see that advertising and marketing communications are moving away from the trick-you-into-buying mentality. The marketplace is much more conversational and becoming more so every day.
As a sometime faculty member at Northwestern College where Mr. Schuber/Schubert was interviewed weaving his emotional magic, I wonder if the faith community that supports the college can call for better, more mature, truly Christian communication. I doubt the college sanctioned Schuber/Schubert’s particular work, though clearly the marriage amendment would have a lot of support from the evangelical-minded folks aligned with Northwestern College. But I would challenge the community to find ways to engage people in conversation—sort of like Jesus and Paul did—rather than supporting more rapid-fire emotional outbursts.
Let’s grow up.
Together.
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The Gift of a Fresh Topic
Say Something New to an Old Friend
step away
Anybody can get fixated on a topic. Usually it is the annoyance that sticks in your craw or the coworker/friend/acquaintance who doesn’t act like you think they should. It bugs you, so you talk about it. I know the hot buttons for a bunch of people: things I can say to cause them to automatically press “Play” on their internal dialogue player. And here come the same words out of their mouths every time. People know my hot buttons, too: when I hear “trickle-down economics” the same set of words come to mind and mouth every time, with visceral results.
But consider what happens when a third party comes along: someone without the relationship history, someone unfamiliar with your precious grievance. Someone with an entirely different, passionate focus. This person can step into and through the usual troubled-water topics and help lead you out the other side. And it can be energizing to step away from the little slights we’ve nursed and twisted and inhabited.
I’ve witnessed grandchildren doing this with grandparents: asking an innocent question that led to an articulate explanation rather than the expected tirade. Such is the power of relationship and dialogue. And for those of us all too happy to walk on eggshells, maybe it’s time we say out loud what we’re thinking.
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conversation is an engine 