Reflections on Politics at Work

A brief note to Eric Meyerson https://twitter.com/EricMeyersonSF/status/1387085296638971908

I admit to having mixed feelings on this, Eric. And I credit you for shifting my thinking. I’ll start by acknowledging that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are not renowned for winning hearts. They are a couple of characters who I have followed over the last two decades despite my deep desire not to. Frankly, and judge me as you will, I don’t like them. More often than not I disagree with their views. And, for that matter, their motives. That said, I have learned a lot from them. I admire their commitment to first principles. I admire their consistency. And I always know where they stand. Their original 1,000 True Fans were (and remain) diehard. Lastly, I admire that they are willing to publicly change their mind and acknowledge their mistakes. They unapologetically and unflinchingly execute course corrections. In forming my opinion on their recent stance about politics at work, I started with the primary source content. It is worth reading in good faith:

https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5

https://world.hey.com/dhh/basecamp-s-new-etiquette-regarding-societal-politics-at-work-b44bef69

You’re critique is absolutely fair: 6 “NOs” decrying bad behavior isn’t an inspirational force of gravity from the future to rally an organization forward. And there is no question that these guys are unabashedly of the mindset “my way or the highway.” Which may help explain why their company size has never risen above double digits. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to work for them.

Reflecting on Turntide, I feel spoiled. I’ve had a lot of deep, spirited discussions characterized by highly-charged disagreements. But the focus has always been on our mission: to replace the world’s electric motors with optimal systems. We are committed to the same, positive direction. My friends who work at other companies often commiserate that political debate overwhelms all else. We live in polarized times and an externality of exponential tech is algorithm-fueled information warfare. For the moment, at least, Turntide seems to be immune from this and I feel quite grateful for it. Returning to Basecamp, I don’t have the impression they have enjoyed this luxury.

One way of looking at the recent drama is this: Jason and David buried the lead. Had they listened to their sage, they might have framed this as: “We are in the pursuit of greatness which requires uncompromising focus…”

“…and here is what we DO”
“…and this is how we avoid being distracted from WHAT WE NEED TO DO.”

Thanks, Eric, for reminding me of the importance of staying focused on positive direction.

p.s. my thinking about group behavior is heavily influenced by a guy named John Robb. Something that he drew my attention to is how tribal networks form, function, and fail. Hint: networked tribes emerge around “NOs.” i.e. what are we aligned in *opposition* to? Choose you’re completion:
anti-…
* racism
* colonialism
* woke-ism
* censorship
* …

Jason and David were reacting to such dynamics, but regrettably they responded in kind. Tideturners: shoot me a slack DM if you’re interested in taking 30 mins to discuss further over zoom. 🙂

Reflection on Values and Agreements

One of the five core agreements at Turntide is that “we talk to people, not about people.” Another is that “we create psychological safety for others.” The wording may have evolved a bit, but the fundamentals remain the same. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on these two agreements while relaying my most recent bout of cognitive dissonance.

The first of these two has instilled in me a keystone practice that I hadn’t previously habituated in full. Namely, whenever I catch myself talking about someone who isn’t present, I hold myself to the standard of speaking as-if they were. Or, as my parents often asked me: “would you say that to his face?” I am proud of my commitment to this practice at Turntide and any colleague reading this should hold me accountable to it. If you catch me transgressing, call me out.

Which leads me to the second agreement and my experience of tension. The psychological safety agreement is grounded in Carol Dweck’s seminal ‘growth mindset’ frame coupled with a commitment to the non-egoic pursuit of truth. One of the key tenets is the provision of space for people to grow. This will often entail an agreement to keep what is discussed in confidence. When we struggle with issues — be they dilemmas, problems, or interpersonal conflicts — finding the best path forward is a difficult, messy process. Getting through to the other side will involve fits and starts and plenty of mistakes. Having a trusted confidante around to help us navigate this is immensely valuable. The friend who assumes this role doesn’t have our biases, is less emotionally invested, and has the advantage of third-person perspective. The space that they provide is devoid of judgment. For the confider, processing negative emotion is inherently necessary. This includes airing frustration, exploring anger, and vulnerably acknowledging fear. People will say things they don’t mean and explore false leads. In complement to this, the confider also will need to suffer through the acknowledgement of their own contribution to the conflicts and problems. One shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty, and importance, of this last practice.

My recent cognitive dissonance relates to perceiving a potential tension between these two values. I cherish the trust people place in me when they confide. I hold my commitment to confidentiality as an unbreakable covenant. So what to do when, virtually by definition, this entails relaxing the standard of “would we say it to the person’s face?” Houston, do we have a problem?

I have had quite a few of these experiences in recent weeks. The sense of contradiction has weighed on me sufficiently that I’ve invested quite a bit of quiet reflection time sitting with paradox. Here is how it ultimately opened up for me.

The expression “talk to people, not about them” is not the deepest first principle at work. It is a very profound heuristic that is almost always right. Way more than a rule of thumb. But, as I’ve learned here, it’s not 100%. The deeper fundamental that sits underneath this heuristic is akin to the Golden Rule: “behave in a manner that is in the best interest of all people and all relationships.”

What does this mean for the archetypal spiritual advisor that we are trying to emulate when we serve as a confidante? How do we practice the deeper fundamental? I don’t claim to have the complete or correct answer, but here are a few questions I ask myself:

How can I encourage this person to discuss directly with other people in question; without fear of repercussion?

How can I constructively represent the perspective of others who aren’t present?

I’m sure there are lots more. What do you think?

The Story Projection

There are two fundamentally different ways that you can frame reality, or the world. The world is either a place of things or it is a forum for action. The first framing, that the world is a place of things, I call the Science Lens. The second framing, that the world is a forum for action, I call the Story Lens.

The Science Lens describes the physical world. It is obsessively objective. Its fundamental elements are atoms and space and everything builds from there.* Right now my fingers are hitting keys which are making letters appear on a screen. The light from the screen is striking the rods and cones of my retina where it is converted to an electric signal that is relayed to the brain via the optic nerve. Blah, blah, blah. Sam Harris would be the spokesperson for the Science Lens movement, if such a thing were to exist.

The Story Lens, by contrast — or by complement — doesn’t describe the physical world. It describes the world of being. The Story Lens is subjective. Its fundamental components are desires and actions. Or, more technically, states and operators. These are the atoms and space of the Story Lens. Everything builds from them. Whereas the Science Lens concerns itself with nouns, the Story Lens rightly sees that the action is in the verbs.

Below is what I label The Story Projection to frame the fundamental components of the Story Lens. At its essence, a story is about transformation. A person — or people, or place(s), or thing(s) — begins in an initial state. There is always something undesirable about one’s present state. We’re always aiming up. It is this dissatisfaction that motivates the agent (perhaps the hero of the story) to pursue transformation. Stated differently, the unmet desire can be thought of as the problem that needs to be solved. The future, goal state, is the target. It is the solution state. The ideal that the story is aiming for. A series of operators (behaviors, or actions, in the case of people) are what cause this transformation. As they say in Hollywood: Lights… Camera… errr… Operator!

The Story Projection

The terms initial state, operator, and goal state are technical and abstract. This gives them the advantage of being universally applicable, but makes them scream out for further explanation and concrete examples. So I’ll follow with handful of these.

Expressed grammatically, we start out with a Noun. We then execute a series of Verbs. The end result is a Transformed Noun:

Let’s apply this to Harry Potter. At the beginning, he is famous despite the fact that he hasn’t done anything. He lives under a staircase with muggles. But following a sequence of transformative magical adventures, he becomes the acclaimed wizard he was destined to be:

Harry Potter represents a more general story structure, codified at least as early as Ancient Greece. More recently popularized by Joseph Campbell:

The Hero’s Journey is about rising from a fallen state to a higher state, like the proverbial phoenix that rises from the ashes. This journey can span everything from a moment, to a day, to a lifetime, to a generation, and so forth.

A child who becomes an adult. A technician who develops expertise and receives accreditation. A martial artist who reaches the next belt. A professor who achieves tenure. These are all manifestations of the same meta-journey or passage.

Finally, since I’m posting this on LinkedIn, I’d be remiss to exclude business examples. Generally stated, all business goal-setting and implementation is about acting out stories:

In Silicon Valley, OKRs are all the rage. The Objective is the Goal State and the Key Results are the metrics that reflect successful execution, or sequences of actions/operators:

The Story Projection is a very powerful complement to the OKR process. It provides a visualization that intuitively displays causality. Further, as I’ll explore in my next piece, the power of the frame really comes to life when it is chunked up or down to higher or lower levels of analysis. It shows the broader and narrower contexts to which the story in question belongs. For something like an OKR, it connects organizational goals up, down, and across hierarchies to demonstrate alignment of vision (or lack thereof…)

That’s it for now. See you in a week or so.

* For example, you might start with quarks, build up to atoms, then molecules, cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms, families, communities, cities, states, countries, planets, solar systems, universes, multiverses.

Mental Imagery, Meditation, and Bullshit

In my prior career as a consultant, an executive named Quinton was one of my favorite clients. In fact, he was a pivotal influence on me during a very transformative phase of my development. I considered him a mentor. One of his favorite expressions was “Show me. Don’t tell me.” I can’t tell you the number of times that I approached to Quinton with what I thought were great ideas or brilliant insights, only to have my bubble burst by his use of this phrase. “Telling” is talking. “Showing” is doing. Well, damned if he wasn’t right. The role of a consultant is to offer advice (“telling”) which frequently falls short of executing (“showing,” or “doing.”) As a consequence, it is understandably irritating for clients to be told what they should do. It’s like telling someone who is overweight that they should diet and exercise. Thanks, Einstein.

The hallmark of good advice is that it fundamentally changes your behavior after you receive it. To this day, the image of Quinton saying this regularly pops into my head when I find myself in abstraction-land, detached from reality on the ground. I decided that an initial step for actualizing “show me” was to “start with the why,” as my good friend Ryan is fond of saying. Now when I express ideas and insights to others, I ask myself what is the point? What is the deeper meaning and what should we do with it? While this initial step is important, I acknowledge it is still a lot closer to “telling” than “doing.” And yes, the irony of me expressing these thoughts through a largely unidirectional, written medium is not lost on me. But here we are.

I share this story to underscore the point that ‘how’ is more important than ‘what.’ At the core of my professional identity is the mindset of Student for Life. So when I learn something interesting from someone else that I never would have come up with on my own, I want to know how the person figured it out. Then I can put into practice the meta lesson. As the proverb goes, I don’t want to be fed a fish. I want to learn how to catch my own.

It was in this spirit that I approached my colleague Ladd a number of years ago for advice. Ladd has an elite-tier mind that he is very effective at channeling to action. He had just introduced a whole new approach to operational consulting that blew me away. It wasn’t sexy stuff, but it was very eye-opening. And forget the content (the “what,”) what was most powerful was a new problem-solving frame (the “how”) that it afforded. It opened my eyes to new approaches and methods. I wanted to know how he had come up with this. Ladd was constantly referring to “The Literature” — a word that I found mystifying in this context. When I pressed him on how I might immerse myself in this so-called Literature, he pointed me to a seminal reference textbook which I bought and read. It was long, dense, and tough-going to get through, but at the end of the day it was just a book. Given sufficient time and attention, I could read it. Having done so, I learned how Ladd had arrived at his conclusions. Though largely derivative, his thinking was a model for me to learn from. He was able to adapt the frames and methods from one domain for application to another. And having put myself through the same reading journey with a similar lens, I came to understand how he produced what he did. I was able to move beyond the ‘what’ of the content to the ‘how’ of insight generation. I carry this learning with me to this day. Thanks, Ladd!

I walked away from the experience determined to read more and impart what I learned to others. Which brings me back to Quinton’s advice. I decided that whenever I discovered insights worthy of sharing, I would make a concerted effort to include the primary sources that inspired them. To this end, I began communicating the names of the writers who had influenced my thinking. So you can imagine my surprise and disappointment when my colleague Ty pulled me aside one day with a critique. He indicated that my name-dropping of authors came across as putting on airs. In light of the motive I expressed above, my initial reaction was defensiveness. I was trying to be generous, for Pete’s sake. It can be unpleasant to receive such feedback, which makes it worthy of careful reflection. Reflect I did. I ultimately concluded that he was absolutely right. I wanted to look clever and prove how cool I was to have realized my insight. I was showing off. Don’t get me wrong, I also was trying to expose my meta lessons for the benefit of others. Paradoxically, both of these things were true. So what to do?

My efforts to resolve this dilemma required some iteration. I started by avoiding citation entirely and simply sharing my ideas. But, like I had done with Ladd, others would approach me with questions about my sources. So I had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. That said, pride can be both a virtue and a vice. This makes vanity not a problem to solve, but a perennial risk to mitigate. At this juncture, I should point out that Ty’s feedback wasn’t just limited to the name-dropping of authors, but also to my use of unfamiliar words. Companies hire consultants for their expertise. When you look smart, you sell more work. So I had developed the habit of trying to demonstrate how clever I was with fancy vocabulary. On the one hand, this is sometimes warranted. Using a non-everyday word can pack a lot of compressed information into a tight punch. But often, the use of an unnecessarily fancy word reflects an inauthentic effort to seek higher status. Ty has a very sensitive bullshit-detector and it manifests with a very noticeable wince. If someone puts on airs in Ty’s presence, he physically recoils. I have a very vivid image of this recoil which now frequently pops in to my head when I am speaking or writing. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

A brief detour to meditation. In most mindfulness* practices, you are supposed to focus on experiences in your body as they arise — your breath, physical sensations, and the like. These are often referred to as “objects of attention.” This sounds simple, but for the newbie proves to be infuriatingly hard. Your mind repeatedly gets distracted by thoughts which makes you feel frustrated and unsuccessful. As an aspiring meditator, I had a minor breakthrough while listening to a discussion between Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein (not showing off — just dropping names for those who might want to look up 😉.) Goldstein mentioned that objects of attention need not be limited to bodily sensations, but also can be these distracting thoughts themselves. Thoughts often take the form of mental imagery. If you are trying to focus on something particular like your breathing and a thought arises, you make note of it, let it go, and then return to the focus. Experienced meditators will encourage the uninitiated not to worry about the duration of breath focus intervals. In the early stages, your focus will last for a second or two at best. The power comes from noticing the distraction and then returning to the breath. For me, an unanticipated upside of exercising this muscle is that I now more consciously notice random, distracting thoughts arising when I am not meditating. I can see them in higher resolution and reflect on what they mean.

Which brings me back to Ty’s wince. I mentioned how I catch this image flashing in my head when I am writing or speaking. It happens whenever I use unnecessarily abstruse** language and I have to ask myself: is this the best word choice? Sometimes I decide that a fancier word can pack more punch. More often, I try to use something less pretentious. Thanks, Ty!

Let me try to tie this all together. It is said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. This applies not only to societies, but also to individuals. Learning things like “talking is easy; doing is hard” and “don’t be a bullshit artist” only matter if they translate into behavior change through cultivated practice. Meditation aids this habituation process through heightened awareness of internal triggers. I once read that the function of memory is to learn from the past. Imagistic memory fragments like Ty’s wince or Quinton’s reprimand are surfaced in conscious awareness through my meditation practice and are akin to my prior self projecting himself into the present for a brief moment to say “hey Dum-Dum, you’re about to make that same mistake again.”

* I was going to use the word Vipassana, but it made Ty wince in my mind’s eye so I changed it. Ty also isn’t fond of the word mindful, but it’s in my nature to poke people so that’s what I chose to replace it with. 🙂
** Joking