The 99 and the One
Merry Christmas! 
Over the course of 2013 I’ve voiced criticisms and critiques of religion and Christianity, trying to sort culture from subculture and truth from fiction. Eisegesis vs. exegesis. Questioning which texts I privilege and why. Such unwinding and rewinding seems like waking up to the world around me. I’m mostly happy with the process. But it is also unsettling.
One enduring piece of this—one mystery that pulls me in again and again—is the birthday we celebrate today.
It is always dangerous to reduce this to that, so without reducing, I’ll simply point to this small story and say I like how it sets the mystery front and center:
What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.
Some will ask “What is astray?” Others: “What is perish?” Some will say, “Why ‘Father?’” All reasonable questions and of a piece with how we process the world today. But this notion that God wants relationship with people is mysterious and, for me, quite compelling.
I suspect 2014 will be even more full of mystery.
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Image credit: Dumb Sketch by Kirkistan
What paths opened for you in 2013?
Turn and look to see where you are going
It takes a look back to begin to see where a new path has been broken.
The space between Christmas and the New Year is a natural time to look back, especially before leaping into 2014. Angie Ward over at Intentional Influence reproduced a list of eight questions from Brad Lomenick. Those questions put a bit of definition around such a review.
The first question on Mr. Lomenick’s list: “What themes personally defined 2013 for me?” seems particularly useful. For me, 2013 was a sometimes careful, sometimes headlong exploration of foundational structures and beliefs I’d taken for granted for years. The year’s writing has taken up questions and provided answers and far more questions, most of which I had no clue perplexed me. While many of those foundations are just as solid, in many cases the scaffolding and superstructure has been stripped away.
What themes presented for you in 2013?
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Image credit: gifmovie via 2headedsnake
Chief Conversation Officer: So 2009
Still…what if we armed someone with authority and charged them with getting us talking?
Not just some C-level social media manager—I mean someone really interested in starting conversations throughout an organization and (especially) outside the organization. A sort of gadfly armed with an attitude and a purpose. That purpose would not be selling (it seems natural to put a garrulous salesperson in that position, doesn’t it?). The purpose would be collaboration. And the attitude? Open.
This chief conversation officer would not deploy monologue with all her contacts. Instead, she would be skilled in the art of the open-ended question. She would be relational and vulnerable.
Yikes!
But those are the building blocks of conversation.
Anyone intent on climbing through an organization will read those words and be repelled—“relational” and “vulnerable” represent the opposite of the power trip and pulling rank. Just think on the best, most productive conversations you’ve had and you’ll see you were free to say anything, you were pulled in by the enthusiasm of your conversation partner and by the crazy fun of participation. You were not worried about how you were coming across—which is the collateral damage of most boss-focused rhetoric.
The Chief Conversation Officer (CCO) will be a fearless talker and an optimist. He’ll be a mindful connector. He doesn’t know where the next terrific idea will come from. But he fearlessly pursues conversation with janitors and CEOs and middle managers and walks along with line workers to hear their concerns and ideas. The CCO is boundary-crosser and synthesizer: processing information from everywhere and spinning it into, well, gold.
Launching people left and right.
Sounds like a fun job.
And this: the Chief Conversation Officer could work effectively from nearly any actual position.
What if 2014 were the year of the Chief Conversation Officer?
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Image credit: Ho-yeol Ryu via MPD
Listen Your Way Into a Larger Story
Start to stop. Stop to hear.
There’s an old story of a woman who could not get pregnant. Her rival got pregnant with unrelenting, vexing regularity. Read the story here—it’s from an ancient text many of us privilege as telling true stuff about the world.
I keep returning to this story because of what it says about how desperation drives our listening habits. The truth is we don’t listen well. Often we don’t listen until we have to: maybe we need some information and it kills us to slow long enough for the clerk/cashier/spouse to spit it out. But we need that information to get where we need to go.
But what if we made a habit of listening? Intent listening. Close listening, rather than listening only when backed into a corner. What if we eagerly sought out answers in the conversations right around us?
What if the clue to the way forward after our recent lay-off was in the conversation we’ll have at 2:30pm with an old work colleague? What if insight for a growing doubt we’ve had about our faith was just inside the threshold of a chance conversation with an old friend? What if answers to our questions were spinning around us constantly?
That sounds like magical thinking, right?
The woman in the story prayed in her vexation and angst. She prayed so hard the feeble old guy watching her thought she was drunk. The old guy was no prophet and not all that well respected, still, his words formed an answer to the woman’s long-standing question. The story goes on to tell how the answer to her question was part of a much, much larger story with questions an entire nation was asking.
Questions and conversations can be a potent mix.
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Image Credit: Kirk Livingston
Lou Gelfand: No More Complaints
How do you love an impossible task?
In darker moments I wonder what good lies in all the words produced, day after day—especially my own words. But if words serve only to remind or tell again the story of a bright spot someone saw, then maybe that is enough. Because bright spots shine a bit of hope.
Lou Gelfand was a bright spot for me.
I am a casual newspaper reader. I read the StarTribune and various news sources on-line. But the StarTribune has been my go-to, privileged (and sometimes angering) source for many years. Lou Gelfand was the long-suffering ombudsman/readers’ representative. For nearly 23 years he listened to complaints and reader’s rants and charges of bias (a countless number, surely). And then he calmly worked it out with words on paper.
Mr. Gelfand’s “If You Ran the Newspaper” columns were a must-read for me because he seemed fearless in taking colleagues and readers and the process itself to task. He aimed for resolution and made everyone mad as he did it. But there was something satisfying in his assessments. His words produced a sort of end-game where conflict and anger were addressed, if not always resolved.
Here’s Mike Meyers, former Strib reporter and friend of Gelfand, on the mood created by Mr. Gelfand’s assessments:
“He was a guy who often ate alone in the cafeteria because reporters were so damned thin-skinned,” Meyers said.
Mr. Gelfand was a kind of pivot point between audience and the communication machinery that was the daily newspaper. It was a no-win position from the beginning—an impossible assignment—which Mr. Gelfand moved forward with aplomb, sympathy and spirit.
His son called him “relentlessly fair” and Gelfand surveyed his own columns and found he split about evenly between backing the paper and the complaining readers.
Read Mr. Gelfand’s obituary here.
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Image Credit: via Frank T Zumbachs Mysterious World
Behold the Power of 22 Words
Abraham Piper & the Second Most Shared Site in the World
Getting shared is the thing today. Maybe it’s always been the thing: interestingness traveled by word of mouth long before the share button came along. Producing (or pointing to) content that is so sticky, so memorable, that you feel like a hero passing it on—that is the point of sharing.
It turns out sharing can be measured.
And somebody, somewhere (Newswhip via The Atlantic), ran the numbers and found that Upworthy.com had the most Facebook-shares-per-article (and it is a huge number). But coming up second was Minneapolis’ own Abraham Piper with his 22 Words. Read Ned Hepburn’s story in Esquire: Second most shared website in the world. Twenty Two Words was way ahead of the likes of the Onion, Rolling Stone, Mashable, NPR and many other household names.
My favorite quote from Mr. Piper—apart from building his empire on the tears of his children along with coffee and Coors Lite—was that his secret sauce was simply, “I can usually guess what my readers will like.” His sensibilities and his occasional wry comment makes his posts must-reads, sort of like the interesting uncle at the holiday table who says very funny stuff at just the right time.
Time after time.
Well done, Mr. Piper.
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Photography and “built-in objectivity”
Hyper-collage from Jim Kazanjian
Lenscratch features photographer Jim Kazanjian, who makes images without ever picking up a camera. Instead, he pieces together found images to form mad hallucinations that are just a bit off—in the way a nightmare is all the more horrifying because it is so close to normal.
I like Kazanjian’s twist on objectivity (which is also a statement on what we privilege):
I’ve chosen photography as a medium because of the cultural misunderstanding that it has a sort of built-in objectivity.
Kaznajian’s aim is to “render the sublime.” His method is, well…
My method of construction has an improvisational and random quality to it, since it is largely driven by the source material I have available. I wade through my archive constantly and search for interesting combinations and relationships. Each new piece I bring to the composition informs the image’s potential direction. It is an iterative and organic process where the end result is many times removed from its origin. I think of the work as a type of mutation which can haphazardly spawn in numerous and unpredictable directions.
Kaznajian’s method is also a sophisticated comment on the creative process. Have a look at the full article: http://lenscratch.com/2013/12/jim-kazanjian/
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Image credit: Jim Kazanjian via Lenscratch
Talk to Me (Life of Privilege, Part II)
Be a Tool Today
It’s what we each crave: the incisive conversation that changes everything. Some of our most thrilling moments are verbal, from “I love you” to a simple “Thank you,” thoughts and affections formed into words can warm us like nothing else on a cold day. Words are arrows snapped directly into the deep-inside-brain-heart.
We privilege words spoken—and rightly so. When Kerri Miller hosts Talking Volumes, we listen in because we want to hear some fresh take on the author’s art. We hope the author will reveal some secret to the writing process that fleshes out what we know of her work. We listen intently for some meta-comment that shows how he organized the story. We want more and spoken words are our most believable medium.
Freshly-thought words spoken with spontaneous candor often achieve that end. Fresh words are a response to relationship and a response to the present moment. Which also explains why the CEO’s vetted and scripted remarks at the press conference reek of plywood and formaldehyde. We’re more likely to hear the real story from an employee down in the ranks.
Writing is a technology. Computers, smartphones, pen, ink: all technologies.
Words spoken are not a technology. They are made of breath. They are kind of alive, if only for a moment. But they can also live on in memory (for better or worse).
Which is not to say words are not tools. Words are possibly our closest tools. We use words to accomplish all sorts of things. Words may be our most important tool.
What relationships will you encounter today that will conjure conversations using words you never dreamed you’d say?
See also: Lorde & The Life of Privilege (Part I)
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
conversation is an engine 