Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Why Honesty is Catnip for Collaboration
In Class Today: Here’s Where I Failed
I first encountered “fail faster” in Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody. In that book it started to make sense to me that getting something right was a goal, but perhaps not the first goal. Maybe I saw traces of “fail faster” in The Cluetrain Manifesto. As a writer I knew I had to write many (verily: many, many) drafts before I started to approach the thing I really wanted to say. I also knew that the work of moving toward that thing I wanted to say was built on failure after failure, and that each failure left me with something closer to what I intended. Each step in the work shaped the next step in the work And each step in the work also shaped the one doing the work.
motivational pictures
In our Social Media Marketing class last week students presented their critique of their community-building activities (we publish content to define and attract the student’s desired target audience). Midway through these presentations I remembered why I love this day so much. There is an honesty to it. Students describe what they’ve used blogs and Twitter and Facebook (and Instagram and Pinterest and Reddit) and other tools to create for the past six weeks. They show successes. They describe failures. They talk about what they would do differently. In some cases they reimagine the entire exercise for themselves and their team. And sometimes I can see the seeds of a much larger purpose. Sometimes it is quite clear that this person’s passion will push them toward building this community for a long, long time.
And then we discuss failure. Truly, these are fascinating moments in the Q&A that follows each presentation. The great news: everyone fails. Not the course, but in building the grand vision they set out to build. Six weeks in they realize how they could have adjusted their purpose, how they could have set more clearly defined metrics to reach very specific goals. Some realize they did not give it their best shot but instead rushed through and sort of wasted their moments of contact with their target audience. Some realized they could make a solid point with 350 words when they came into the class needing at least 1000 words. Some realized their target audience lived over in an odd unlit corner of the Interweb and this other particular tool would have faithfully delivered them to this audience.
The Big Reveal: It isn’t until you try to actually build something real, with real people and real purposes toward a real end, that you realize life doesn’t not just coalesce around your pet purpose. In fact, this shouting into a crowded, noisy concert hall that is social media must be very deliberate for even the smallest thing to happen. And I mean even the tiniest purpose to move forward.
And as we detail our failures together (I have my own dozens of examples to share), new ideas pop to the surface and classmates who had not talked with each other are now offering ideas and are engaged in the purposes of this other community.
It’s the honesty bit that pulls in collaboration—the telling it like it is. The missing the high mark in a major way that when shared, evokes collaboration rather than pity.
That seems like a solid life lesson to me.
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Stuck and Reframe
Just How Real is Our Imagined Beginning?
I’m stuck on a client project. Late in 2015 I devised a social media communication strategy that calls for weekly themes. But one of my weekly themes provides very little fodder for producing content. And so I’ve been spinning my wheels and getting exactly nowhere.
Maybe it’s a good time to be stuck, because this is the season of reframing. Old things ended as 2015 shuffled out and new things began with the calendar change. Everything outside my window looks the same, but we’ve all group-thinked (group-thunk?) ourselves into what we call a new year. Is it an imagined new beginning? Of course. But that doesn’t make it any less real. Somehow that calendar change gives a bit of courage to consider releasing the strategies that don’t work.
Reframing—trying to see a problem or need differently—is a way out of stuckness. My tools for building a new frame around a client need or personal problem include words on pages and dumb sketches and mind-maps and fartleks and conversations. You already know that conversations hold quite a bit of promise: telling someone else about your stuckness has the effect of bringing to light a problem and beginning to find your way through it.
If you are of the tribe that makes resolutions, you also know that telling your resolution to someone can have a positive effect on keeping those resolutions. And you may even have someone who holds you accountable.
I’m stuck on a client project.
I’m going to talk with my client.
Staying stuck is not an option
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
When Hoax-Busters Give Up
And so we descend into irrationality
Our Bright Shining Future
The end of the Washington Post’s “What was Fake” column had the writer quoting academic Walter Quattrociocchi, head of the Laboratory of Computational Social Science at IMT Lucca in Italy:
Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.
The entire last article is worth reading: What was fake on the Internet this week: Why this is the final column.
To sum up this moment: we read what agrees with our viewpoint, we talk with people in our tribe who agree with us, we label those who disagree with us and we generally see facts as “facts.”
This moment does not represent the future I hoped for.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
The State of Conversation is Strong
Despite the stupid stuff we keep saying
My fellow humans, the state of our conversation is strong—though “strong” may not the first word that comes to mind.
I’ve spent the last few weeks in a funk. Given Trump’s call for banning Muslim entry into the U.S, and Franklin Graham’s approval of that plan (never mind that Graham’s inherited salvation-industry hinges on reaching out to the very people he wants to ban, which is bad for his business model); and given Jerry Falwell Jr.’s call to arm his student body; and given what seems to be tacit agreement with these lunacies by a too-large percentage of my nation’s population, it seems the voices calling us to act on fear are winning.
But here are two hopeful signs:
- A poll out today suggests that the majority of Americans do not agree with Trump’s fear-mongering.
- An open letter from Wheaton College students to Jerry Falwell Jr. rejecting his strange twist on Christianity and reminding him that the religion he espouses has little in common with the hostility he voices.
Beyond those signs, the inflammatory rhetoric flying about can at times serve to stimulate solid conversation. For me those conversations have come out of a pit of despair, but they can still be productive. Just saying aloud what we really think can be like draining the pus from a wound: ugly but necessary. Maybe our conversations can start a long-term suturing that can help us heal. But we’ll need to listen to each other and not respond out of our instinctual fear.
All this fear-rhetoric is pivoting me away from the rabid voices and back toward seeking conversations with people who are different. At our best we welcome people even as we trust. We start by engaging in conversation.
Fie on the fear-mongerers.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
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conversation is an engine 