“Organizations are afraid of connecting. They are afraid of losing control, of handing over power, of walking into a territory where they don’t always get to decide what’s going to happen next. When your customers like each other more than they like you, things can become challenging.
Of course, connecting is where the real emotions and change and impact happen.” —Seth Godin, ‘Connect to’ vs. ‘Connect’
The importance of connection
A survey I conducted of attendees while writing Conferences That Work confirmed (as do many other meeting surveys) that the two most important reasons people go to meetings are to connect (80%) and learn (75%).
Nevertheless, many conferences are structured like this.
No one’s connecting here, except, maybe, a single speaker to his audience. The audience members aren’t connecting with each other at all.
To create connection, conferences need to be structured like this.
Employs hierarchical meetings and events, controlling what happens by using a predetermined agenda of broadcast-style lecture sessions.
Creates a fundamental disconnect between the wants and needs of the staff and/or members and the structure of its meetings and conferences. Events that provide connection-rich sessions, allowing participants to discover their tribe and determine what they discuss, are anathema.
“An organization might seek to ‘connect to’ its customers or constituents…That’s different, though, than ‘connect'”
Some organizations try to obscure their control-based culture by asserting their goal is to “connect to/with” their clients. There’s plenty of plausible-seeming advice available along these lines; e.g., “How to Connect With Customers” or “5 Ways to Connect With Your Client“.
However, this goal attempts to disguise a desire for control. The leadership wants to control how the organization will “connect with” customers. Such a goal is a one-way street. It ignores the reality that, for healthy relationships, connection is a two-way process.
In contrast, a functional organization makes it easy for customers to connect about their wants and needs.
Connection is no longer a goal (noun). A functional organization connects (verb). In the same way that change is a verb, not a noun.
Creating exceptional connection—and organizations
Exceptional organizations take connection to an even higher level. They facilitate connection between their constituency members, supporting the creation of tribes.
Seth, once more:
“When you connect your customers or your audience or your students, you’re the matchmaker, building horizontal relationships, person to person. This is what makes a tribe.”
Tribes—self-organizing groups bound by a common passion—are the most powerful spontaneous human groups. Tribe members pour energy into connecting around their purpose, which leads to meaningful, powerful action. Having them associated with and supported by your organization reaps substantial rewards for everyone involved.
Seek out and create organizations that don’t fear connecting.
You’ll make your world and the world a better place.
Technology is one of the areas where culturally embedded designs impact society. My 2013 Meeting Professional column described how existing meeting technology becomes invisible. This induces stakeholders to ignore its stultifying influence on meeting process. Similarly, Benjamin explains how “technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era”.
Here’s the video:
If you prefer to read her remarks, there’s an introduction and a complete transcript here.
Here are three illustrative fragments:
“In fact, we should acknowledge that most people are forced to live inside someone else’s imagination and one of the things we have to come to grips with is how the nightmares that many people are forced to endure are the underside of elite fantasies about efficiency, profit, and social control. Racism among other axes of domination helps produce this fragmented imagination, misery for some, monopoly for others.”
“To paraphrase Claudia Rankine, the most dangerous place for black people is in white people’s imagination.”
“…technology inherits its creators’ biases”
Living in someone else’s imagination is a societal problem that impacts all of us, especially marginalized groups. Let’s strive to live in our own imagination.
Connect the dots, not collect the dots. How can we maximize the real value of a meeting? By maximizing how participants “connect the dots”—what they actually learn from their experiences at the meeting—rather than documenting what we or they think they should have learned.
Seth Godin makes the same point when talking about the future of education and what we can do about it in his 2012 TEDxYouth@BFS talk. Watch this 30-second clip.
Video clip transcript: “Are we asking our kids to collect dots or connect dots? Because we’re really good at measuring how many dots they collect, how many facts they have memorized, how many boxes they have filled in, but we teach nothing about how to connect those dots. You cannot teach connecting dots in a Dummies manual. You can only do it by putting kids into a situation where they can fail.” —Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS in the Youtube video STOP STEALING DREAMS
Stop collecting dots
Too many meetings continue to use short-term superficial evaluations as evidence for the efficacy of the event. We know that these kinds of meeting evaluations are unreliable (1, 2, 3). Luckily there are better ways to find out whether participants have learned to better connect the dots. Here are four of them:
“Hardy came home from school and proudly showed his mom the cheap plastic trinkets he had earned that day. ‘I stood quietly on the dot and so I got some tickets. And if I stand on the dot quietly tomorrow, I can get some more prizes!'” … “Is standing on a dot the thing we need to train kids to do? Has each of us spent too much time standing on dots already?” —On the dot, Seth Godin
Since 2004, social listening—the practice of monitoring and analyzing online conversations and social media mentions related to brands, products, services, events, or industries—has evolved significantly and grown in popularity.
Popularity for the search term “social listening” over time, via Google Trends.
Initially confined to sentiment analysis, social listening tools can now identify trends, analyze competitors, track influencers, identify crises and potential issues, and monitor reputations.
A wider perspective on social listening
With this recent emphasis on thinking of social listening as something done on social media, it’s easy to forget what it was for all of human history prior to 2004. Just because we now have tools that quantify awareness and sentiment doesn’t mean that we should discard older methods of finding out what audiences think and feel.
Last week, I facilitated the second BizBash Leadership Summit, an unconference I designed for “30 executives across experiential, event tech, and other corporate verticals”. During one of the sessions, BizBash’s founder, David Adler, asked “What does social listening mean in the context of understanding the impact of an event?”
And then, during my closing session, he answered his own question.
I typically close unconferences with a simple process,plus/delta. Participants first publicly share their positive experiences. After they’ve aired them, they also suggest changes that they think might make the event better in the future. The beauty of plus/delta is that it rapidly builds a collective experience of the conference. This widens individual perspectives of what happened and builds community around the shared collective experience.
The Leadership Summit was clearly successful, with many participants wanting to meet again, even going so far as to make suggestions about how we could do so. We also heard great feedback on how the event could be further improved (making it longer was a popular suggestion), giving the conveners valuable ideas for future gatherings.
It was then that David said, “Isn’t this, what we’re doing right now, the ultimate in social listening?”
I think he was right. We weren’t quantifying sentiment. There were no ten-point-scale smile sheets. Rather, we’d been having intimate conversations for three days, got to know each other, and built community around our shared experiences. And now we were listening to each other in important ways and making plans for our group’s future.
We had been changed by our experience together and would be making changes in our lives, both individually and collectively. I think that’s the ultimate goal of social listening. Creating change that matters.
At edACCESS 2008 I gave a 90-minute presentation entitled “Learning from the biggest consulting mistake I’ve made — and that you probably have too”.
OK, the formal title was “The Systematic Development of Informed Consent“, which sounds much fancier but requires explanation.
17 years have passed, yet I think the blunders I made while working with a client during one of my past careers—IT consulting—are still relevant and instructive. So, I’m going to ‘fess up to the world. And as a bonus, I’ll introduce you to the people who taught me the biggest reason worthy projects don’t get implemented, and what you can do about it.
The story begins
The story begins in November 2007, when I was invited to a two-day training given by Hans and Annemarie Bleiker. There were about forty of us. Here is a photo of our merry group.
While teaching at MIT in the 1960s, Hans and Annemarie noticed the dismaying reality that many public projects never get implemented or even started. They decided to research to find out why, and if there was anything people could do to improve their chances of success. She’s an anthropologist, he’s an engineer. Since then, they have presented their findings and unique methods for improving matters to more than forty thousand professionals around the U.S. Here are some of their clients…
[Click on the image for the current list.]…and their mission.
Mid-morning on the first day of the workshop I had a major aha! moment. I understood a core mistake I’d made eighteen years earlier. That mistake led to my failure to successfully implement an organization-wide IT system for a major client.
During the workshop, I discovered that the mistake is so common that the Bleikers have spent decades teaching people how to avoid it.
So, I want to share what I learned with you because you have probably already made the same mistake.
My Harrowing Story
The following story is mostly true, though I’ve changed all names to confuse the innocent.
In July 1989, I was hired by a client I’ll call Seagull School. The school had two campuses, North and South, that were three miles apart and housed slightly different academic programs. The key personnel I worked with were Mr. Head, Mr. South (head of the main campus), Mr. North, and the Tech Director.
From 1989 – 1998, I wrote custom software or adapted commercial software for Seagull’s administrative needs. It was all hosted at South. South’s computer labs included both PCs and Macs; North decided to only use Macs. At the time, I didn’t think much about it.
In 1999, I was asked to develop an integrated administrative system that would eventually be used at both campuses. It took about a year to develop. During the development, North was asked repeatedly to define what system functionality they would like, but they didn’t want to talk about specific data elements. Over the next couple of years, it slowly became clear that they wanted something that could be changed on a whim. North wouldn’t consider the ramifications for the whole school. For example, North wanted the school registrar, based at South, to create transcripts, but wouldn’t specify what might be on them for North’s programs.
Finally!
In 2001, Mr. Head decreed at a meeting with all the administrators that the system I’d developed should be used at both campuses. Yay!
But…no.
A few days later, Mr. Head called me into his office. He had just met with Mr. North who had presented him with a large packet of documents expressing his view of the current state of affairs. Mr. North claimed that the integrated system solution had been developed without talking to people at North. So, he had just purchased another system from a neighboring school (without talking to anyone at South). He told Mr. Head that he thought Seagull School should use North’s system for both campuses and have the existing integrated system be an archive of past data.
Everyone at South whom I talked to thought this was ridiculous.
However, for some reason that I was never made privy to, Mr. Head left that meeting feeling it would be impossible to make my integrated system a viable solution for Seagull School right now. So, Mr. Head told me to keep the folks at South campus happy and leave North to its own devices for the present.
Well, what about…this?
A year went by and I had a bright idea. Why not develop a web-based system that would be platform-independent? I gave the Tech Director a quote, but the school decided it was too expensive.
North decided to hire its own consultant to develop a custom system. As I expected, the consultant didn’t do much because he was incapable of pinning North down to say what they wanted.
By 2003, Seagull administrative staff at South were complaining that they couldn’t do the work that North wanted them to do because North’s data was still in a separate system.
So, Mr. Head hired two more consultants to advise on what Seagull School should do. Eventually, the second consultant concluded that the “strongly recommended” scenario was to use my system, with North accessing it via remote control software. The next best option was to develop the web-based system I’d recommended. The third option “difficult to justify”: was to keep using two systems.
For another year, Mr. North ignored the report, and Mr. Head did nothing.
Finally, in July 2004, Seagull asked me to create a web-based system.
I told them, “No, I’m retiring from IT consulting in a couple of years, and I don’t want to start a new project for you now.” <Muttering under my breath: “You should have said ‘yes’ two years ago when I suggested it – I would have done it then.”>
More dramatic twists and turns ensued, which I will spare you because they aren’t germane to the topic of this post. I’ll just add that Seagull School kept using my system for another five years.
So, what went right?
As a fan of Appreciative Inquiry, I think it’s important to spend a moment summarizing what I did well for Seagull School.
I successfully devised, created, updated, and supported easy-to-use custom software that handled the core administrative needs of Seagull School for almost twenty years.
The core Seagull School staff, based at South, appreciated my work and were strongly supportive during this time.
The investigations of several other independent consultants upheld my recommendations.
So, what went wrong?
I was unable to get Seagull School to adopt a single integrated administrative system for both North and South.
You might ask: “Why did I fail?” But “Why” questions are not especially useful in cases like this.
A better question is: “What could I have done differently?”
I’ll answer this question after telling a fairy tale…
The Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, there was a baby princess, born into wealth and privilege. Everyone who’s anyone was invited to her christening.
Unfortunately, the invitation email sent to a wicked fairy with an AOL account bounced back to the palace mail server, and the bounce never made it through the palace spam filter.
You know what happened next. Although guarded carefully, the princess, grown to a young woman was one day accidentally tased by a palace security guard.
Nothing would wake her.
She had to sleep for a hundred years with her crown on until tech support finally showed up and rebooted her.
The Wisdom of The Bleikers
So now we arrive at The Wisdom of The Bleikers. Here’s their answer to the question “What could I have done differently?” It was the following explanation that provided my aha! moment halfway through the first day of the Bleiker workshop.
Setting the stage
You’re trying to implement a Good Thing for a constituency. It could be a new water treatment plant for a town, a program to reduce the number of unhoused, or—dare I say—the adoption of a single organization-wide administrative information system.
When we do this, invariably some folks are against our Good Thing. Our constituency is divided.
[An important caveat: The Wisdom of the Bleikers is not a panacea for developing consent for a poorly thought-out plan or proposal.]
The Bleikers’ research found that just about everyone thinks of a divided constituency they’re working with like this:
The Bleikers reframe this common view in the context of a scale of agreement, like this: The key Bleiker addition that the above diagram omits.
Almost every major constituency faced with a significant change includes NIMBYs (“Not In My Backyard” aka “Over My Dead Body”) who, even if they are a small minority, have a great deal of power to torpedo implementation of the Good Thing.
Mr. North was my NIMBY. And, as I’ve related, he succeeded in preventing the implementation of a single administrative IT system during my entire consulting gig at Seagull School. The Bleikers have found that the single most effective way to improve the chance of implementing the Good Thing is to focus on the NIMBYs. And the heart of the Bleiker strategy is to move NIMBYs to 0+%.
The Bleikers have found that this strategy works. Though it’s not 100% guaranteed, they have successfully helped hundreds of organizations to implement complex projects despite the existence of considerable NIMBY opposition.
Why don’t people follow the Bleiker strategy?
Why didn’t I talk to Mr. North as soon as I started to realize that not all was well?
Fear.
Remember that everyone at South who worked with me was very happy with my work. It was easy for me to hang out with the folks at South and join them in complaining about how unreasonable the folks at North were. It would have been scary to go and listen to Mr. North. I felt scared to hear what they might have to say. So, I played it safe. For years.
It’s really easy to hang out with the folks that agree with you. It’s hard to go into the lions’ den and talk with people who are highly opposed to what you, and perhaps a majority of a constituency, think should happen.
My mistake was to focus on developing support at South for a single administrative system at both campuses, rather than developing what the Bleikers call Informed Consent at North. I never really thought about who might be affected by my work. If I had, I might have realized that I needed to spend a lot more time listening to Mr. North. If I had successfully implemented what the Bleikers eventually taught me, Seagull School might have had a single administrative system by 1999, instead of nine years of countless meetings, expensive outside consultants, and school-wide frustration.
This was my biggest consulting mistake. (That I’m aware of.)
Informed Consent, and an introduction to what you need to do to move NIMBYs to 0+%
The Bleikers identify three kinds of consent:
Informed
Uninformed; and
Misinformed
And they define Informed Consent as the grudging willingness of opponents to go along with a course of action they are opposed to…”
So, if you can develop Informed Consent, you can get your proposal implemented!
You can become what the Bleikers call an “Implementation Genius”!
Implementation Geniuses:
Don’t concentrate on developing support for their proposals
Focus their efforts primarily on the bottom of the Agreement scale
Aim to develop their fiercest opponents Informed Consent
The Bleikers spend most of their workshops teaching how to develop the Informed Consent of NIMBYs. I’m not going to try here to reiterate or summarize what they teach. I recommend you go to their workshops for that! But I want to end with five Bleiker “pearls” that give you a taste of what to expect.
Pearl 1. Why versus What
Telling your constituency:
WHY you exist…
WHY you do what you do…
…is ten times more important than just telling them WHAT you do.
Pearl 2. The mission is not the mission statement
Your mission is a bunch of responsibilities. It resides in people’s guts.
Your mission statement is a bunch of words, a verbal sketch of the mission, but just a sketch.
You need many different mission statements, some long, some short, some technical, some non-technical – but many, many…
Pearl 3. The Bleiker “Life-Preserver”
Repeat often!
“There really is a problem.”
“We are the right entity to be addressing this problem; in fact, given our responsibility, it would be irresponsible for us not to address it.”
“Our approach is reasonable, sensible, and responsible.”
“We do listen, we do care.”
Don’t say “we want to” or “we would like to”.
Say “we need to do this!” or “we owe it to you”.
Pearl 4. The Null-Alternative
The Null-Alternative is the sequence of events that, most likely, will come to pass if you don’t implement a workable solution.
It is the consequence of your failure to implement a workable solution.
I titled this post “Learning from my biggest consulting mistake”. There aren’t really any dumb mistakes. Mistakes are integral to learning. They only become dumb if you don’t learn from them and consequently repeat them over and over again.
Have you ever avoided people who have the potential to torpedo important work because you feel scared of what might happen if you do?
I have, and I believe such behavior is understandable and, unfortunately, common.
I hope that by sharing my story and the Bleiker approach to developing Informed Consent with you, you learn how our natural unwillingness to listen to those who vehemently oppose something we think is a Good Thing can be overcome.
To your and your constituency’s benefit.
Has something like this happened to you? Please share your stories, experiences, and thoughts about anything in this post in the comments below!
Image attribution: – Illustration of The Sleeping Beauty by Ruth Ives from Wonder Books’ “Sleeping Beauty” by Evelyn Andreas, Copyright 1956.
“…if you make a resolution, you should formulate it so that at every point in time it is absolutely clear whether you are sticking to it or not. The clear lines are arbitrary, but they help the truce between our competing interests hold.”
I explained how this shapes my design for a closing session that supports participants making changes in their lives, based on what they’ve learned and the connections they’ve made at an event.
In this post, I’ll share a couple of additional perspectives about making resolutions.
Seth Godin on resolutions
First, there’s the inimitable Seth Godin. In December 2020, Seth posted this:
Over the next few weeks, there may be fewer urgencies than usual. That’s the nature of coming back from a break.
What if we used the time to move system deficiencies from the “later” pile to the “it’s essential to do this right now” pile?…
…Resolutions don’t work. Habits and systems can. —Seth Godin, A different urgency
In his post, Seth suggests that one way to handle the “urgent” tasks that fill our lives is to create and fix systems that reduce our desire and need to make resolutions. We rarely do this because:
“Most of us are so stuck on the short-cycles of urgency that it’s difficult to even imagine changing our longer-term systems.”
But if we do…
“Amazingly, this simple non-hack (in which you spend the time to actually avoid the shortcuts that have been holding you back) might be the single most effective work you do all year.”
Deborah Elms on eliminating resolutions
My longtime friend Deborah Elms, has another take on resolutions—eliminate them altogether.
Thinking about resolutions for 2023?
Personally, I long ago replaced resolutions with intentions:
#Resolutions are based in our superego beating up on us for being “wrong” or deficient somehow. And we may try for a few days or weeks and then end up ignoring or fighting the resolutions.
#Intention, on the other hand, just recognizes and empowers a direction we’d like to take our life. No bullying!
“I resolve to never eat crap” (yeah right) vs “I intend to eat healthier” (ok, can do) —Deborah Elms, Mastodon post
I’ve written about my attempts to build good habits and described some of the ways I’ve been successful. But I haven’t said much about the frequently significant emotional cost of (sometimes years of) attempts to make such changes in one’s life.
Deborah’s suggestion probably won’t make it easier to create the change that a (rarely) successfully kept resolution might make. But it will reduce your beating up yourself emotionally during the struggle to make the change.
And improving your peace of mind in this way can be worth a lot.
Leonard Cohen wrote “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” One bright silver lining of the COVID pandemic is that it’s given me the opportunity to work on building good habits. Habits that I’ve struggled for years to create, because personal change isn’t easy. Though I’m in my 70’s, I’ve found that I can teach this old dog new tricks! In this post, I’ll share my specific challenges and, in detail, how I accomplished my successes.
Creating daily habits
It’s really hard for me to create a habit to do a daily task at some point during the day. I find it much easier to complete a daily task at the same time every day. For example, it wasn’t hard for me years ago to create and maintain the habit of washing my hands and brushing my teeth right when I get up and stagger sleepily into the bathroom. The habit is engrained in me, it’s automatic.
But for a long time, I struggled with reliably performing the following daily tasks:
Taking vitamins and meds;
Recording website statistics;
Posting on social media;
Avoiding sitting at my computer for long periods of time;
Exercising; and
Meditating.
Over the last two years, I successfully created daily habits to handle all of the above! Here’s how I did it.
Three habits built by changing my environment and chaining
A simple set of changes made it far easier for me to create a reliable daily habit for the first three tasks on the above list. I need to take vitamins and meds daily for my health. Because my website provider’s statistics page occasionally stops working, I wanted to record cumulative visits every day so I could contact support promptly and avoid losing data. And each day, I need to schedule a bunch of social media posts of my latest weekly blog.
One of the simplest ways to create good habits is to make them easy to do. Environmental design is about creating a personal environment where performing desired tasks is as easy as possible. This may sound obvious, but it usually requires a little creativity.
Vitamins and meds
For example, I’d always kept my vitamins and meds in the bathroom cabinet and would sometimes forget to take them daily. If it occurred to me I hadn’t taken them, I’d usually be in my home office downstairs. That meant I’d either have to stop what I was doing and go upstairs or try to remember to take them when I was next in the bathroom.
So I moved my vitamins and meds to a shelf in my office. It then became much easier for me to take them whenever I remembered.
So far so good. But how to ensure that I’d remember every day?
Once I decided to track daily website visits I needed to create a habit to remember to do so. In this case, creating a regular time to do it made it much more likely to reliably occur. But when?
It was my desire to build the third habit on my list—setting up a bunch of daily social media posts—that solved the “when?” portion for all three of these tasks. I invariably schedule my first social media post for 9 AM local time, so I had to get this task done before then. The obvious thing to do was to schedule all the day’s posts in one go.
And then I had a simple idea that has worked flawlessly since I implemented it nine months ago.
Chaining habits
I decided to chain these three desired habits into a single sequence.
Chaining habits (which James Clear [see the resources below] calls “habit stacking”) grafts new habits onto a single well-defined habit that you do every day. Choosing that existing, well-established habit was easy for me because I always start my office day with a cup of coffee.
Here’s how it works. When I walk into my office with my coffee, after the first sip I put it down and immediately go over to my vitamins and meds shelf. I get the pills I need and take them with a drink of water (new habit 1). Next, I sit down at my computer, click on the browser tab with my daily website stats and record the current visits (new habit 2). Finally, I copy the text for the social media posts I want to make that day and schedule them in another browser tab (new habit 3).
Bingo, all three desired tasks are done! No more remembering is required during the day!
At this point, the entire sequence from the cup of coffee through the last post has become automatic.
What’s been interesting to observe is what happens when I’m (occasionally) traveling and not in my office. I may not be able to start my day immediately with a cup of coffee, and my vitamins are in my suitcase. Even so, this set of chained habits is engrained enough that I have little difficulty in enacting it in an unfamiliar environment. I’ve created a single giant habit that satisfies several goals.
Designing my environment to make habitual tasks easy to perform and then chaining habits so that when I do one I do them all is an incredibly powerful way to build good habits that stick.
Moving regularly and getting enough exercise
What if you want to create good daily habits that can’t be scheduled at a regular time or chained with another habit? As I age, staying active and exercising every day has become especially important to me. I spend significant time at my computer each day, and it’s easy for me to lose track of time. When engrossed in work, I may not know whether 45 or 90 minutes have passed. Sitting for long periods is not good for my health.
Since I purchased it five years ago, my trusty Apple Watch Series 3 has become an invaluable tool for building habits to move regularly and exercise every day. As I write this, I have met my move, standing, and exercise goals every day for the last three years!
The Apple Watch has two separate tools that have helped me build these habits. A set of three colored rings, shown by a touch on the watch face, concisely display your desired daily levels of standing, movement, and exercise.
Standing, movement, and exercise
You close the Stand ring by getting up and moving around for at least 1 minute during 12 (the default) different hours in the day. This is a perfect tool for avoiding becoming a couch or desk chair potato. If you’ve been sitting for a while, the Watch supplies a gentle reminder to get up at ten minutes before the hour. When I started using the Watch in this way, I frequently needed these reminders. Over time, the device made me more aware of how long I’d been sitting, and now I rarely need a nudge to get up and move around. Apple’s Stand’s default goal of having active periods in 12 or more different hours in the day works perfectly for me.
The two other rings, Move and Exercise, can be customized to any level you choose. I leave them at their defaults (320 calories and 30 minutes). I run almost every day, and when I do these levels are easy for me to achieve. But my desire to meet these goals means that I’ll check my Watch activity any day I’m not able to run and figure out some other form of exercise.
Without my Apple Watch or a similar fitness device, I doubt I would have ever built my now-engrained habits to stand and move regularly and get enough exercise to stay fit. It’s proved to be an invaluable wearable for me.
My biggest challenge: meditating every day
As I’ve previously chronicled, I’ve struggled to meditate daily for decades. Unlike the three habits above, there generally isn’t a fixed time for me to meditate each day. I’m too sleepy when I wake up, and too tired when I go to bed. My chosen challenge is to meditate for ten minutes or more at some point each day. And my life is too varied to pick a time that will work on any kind of regular basis.
The closest I’ve come to scheduling a regular time to meditate is a recent addition to our life, a Monday – Friday 8:45 – 9:00 AM Insight Meditation Zoom session led by Narayan Helen Liebenson. My wife, Celia, and I join whenever we’re free at this time. Often, one of us will remind the other of the session and see if we can both take part.
Having a buddy system like this is a great way to reinforce habits! In addition, my friend, Sue, also tries to meditate regularly. For over a year now, we’ll email each other after we’ve meditated. No pressure, but it supplies another reminder to practice.
These two support systems are really helpful, but I want to meditate every day. What I needed was an unobtrusive way to remind me that I hadn’t yet meditated so far that day.
Creating a trigger
Just over a year ago, I hit upon a simple method inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done. As I’m at my computer frequently, I made a card with the number “10” on it and placed it below my keyboard each morning. (It’s stored propped against one of my vitamin bottles so I don’t forget to move it.)
During the day, this card reminds me to meditate. Once I have, I email my meditation buddy Sue and return the card back to its vitamin bottle prop, ready for the next morning reminder.
This has worked! I have only missed four days of meditating in the last year, usually because I’ve been on the road and the card trigger wasn’t available. I’m OK with not being perfect, and very happy to have finally built this difficult (for me) habit.
Getting better at remembering to do stuff
If you’re young and reading this, you may be thinking, “What’s the big deal? I don’t have any problem remembering what to do.” Well, in my twenties and thirties, I never needed a written to-do list. I had a great memory and could easily keep track of everything I needed or wanted to do each day.
Today, an idea can flash through my mind, and I know that if I don’t capture it right away it will likely be forgotten in ten minutes. Yes, I might remember it later, but there’s no guarantee.
Unlike in my youth, if something comes up that I need to do but can’t get out of the way right there and then, there’s a real chance I may forget to do it later.
So for many years now, I’ve solved this problem using a written To Do list or software app, and/or timers.
Using timers
I’ve written about how I use To Do lists, but using a timer to remember to do stuff is worth a mention. As an example, my wife goes to bed earlier than me and I like to go and say goodnight to her before she goes to sleep. To remember to do this, I set a timer to ring when it’s her bedtime. I used to use a cheap countdown time to do this, but now I use the timer function on my Apple Watch. (I’ve found that my memory is still good enough so that when the timer goes off, I still remember what I set it for!)
Timers are great ways to keep me on track with tasks that need to be done later in the day. I also use the snooze function on my Apple Calendar to delay calendar reminders of daily tasks when it’s not a good time to do them immediately. Thinking about the duration of the timer or snooze also helps to reinforce my intention to actually do what I decided earlier.
Recommended resources
Here are two resources for creating good habits that I’ve found really helpful.
Have you used a seemingly unwelcome change in your life to create opportunities to facilitate personal change by building good habits? If so, feel free to share your experience in the comments below!
Sometimes, it’s only at the end that we realize we’re just scratching the surface.
Two meetings
Oregon 2009
16 years ago, I facilitated a four-day event “Fixing Food” for the state of Oregon. The participants were farmers, agricultural workers, food wholesalers, grocers, academics, and restaurant owners. Everyone was excited, confident that the collective expertise and experience would be able to explore and tackle the important issues and problems they were experiencing.
It was only during the last hour of the event, that everyone became aware of the sheer quantity and complexity of the concerns. Instead of springing into action to implement solutions, the participants realized they had just scratched the surface of what they had uncovered.
Puerto Rico 2022
In 2022, I designed and facilitated a leadership summit on the future of the meeting industry. Two years of the COVID19 pandemic had devastated the industry. Now it looked as though meetings were starting to rebound. What would they look like? Would new partnerships between stakeholders and suppliers develop? How would the dizzying number of new digital technologies change events? What could and would engagement become?
We had seven hours, spread over two mornings, to explore these and other lofty topics. The participants included some of the most experienced leaders in the meeting industry. Though we didn’t know what we might conclude, we had high hopes of finding some agreements and paths forward.
But, as you might suspect by now, the summit ended with many questions and fewer answers. We realized, for example, that we didn’t even share a common understanding of “engagement” — different sectors of the industry regarded and measured it in significantly different ways. Once again, we were just scratching the surface.
Complex problems
Why do we often underestimate the difficulties involved in solving problems? One human evolutionary advantage is our drive for sense-making. Our sense-making prowess allows us to build models of the present and make decisions about potential future behavior. This has led to our incredible ability to reshape the world.
But there are two dangers that arise from our drive to make sense. (Check out the link for more details.) One of them, retrospective coherence, makes us overestimate our ability to explain why things happen. The other, premature convergence, leads us to prematurely abandon uncovering relevant questions, information, perspectives, and ideas before we start formulating solutions.
Fixing Oregon’s food problems or forecasting the future of the meeting industry are examples of what are called complex problems in the Cynefin framework. Complex problems are those where we struggle to figure out what questions to ask and cannot accurately predict what the consequences of an action would be.
So should we stop trying to explore and solve complex problems when we meet together?
No.
For one thing, we often don’t know whether our problems are simple, complicated, complex, or chaotic until we explore them. Many participants’ questions uncovered during the events I design turn out to have simple or complicated answers that can be provided by the collective knowledge of the group.
Simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains in the Cynefin framework.
Secondly, regardless of big picture outcomes, well-designed participant-driven and participation-rich meetings create a rich variety of valuable experiences for participants. Important connections get made or strengthened, useful resources are uncovered and shared, and future collaboration and action are sparked.
And finally, there is tremendous value in the discovery of the magnitude of complex problems per se. Gaining a more realistic perspective, however daunting, is useful and important. As my mentor Jerry Weinberg used to say, “It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the end of an illusion.”
Scratching the surface
Hopefully, you’ll agree with me at this point that scratching the surface, though less satisfactory than going deep, is not a waste of time. But it may still be a frustrating experience. Can we make it less painful?
I think so. When we start to work on a new problem, we don’t know in advance whether we’ll be scratching the surface or going deep. What we can change are our habitual expectations. Practicing risky learning makes dealing with feelings of failure easier. And becoming accustomed and willing to “lower our standards” also helps.
To conclude, I encourage you to always, at least, scratch the surface. Because sometimes you’ll find the gold underneath. And even if you don’t go deeper right away, you’ll have invariably experienced and learned something useful.
Photograph of my green fluorite crystal from the William Wise Mine in Westmoreland, NH Image attribution: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) – [1], CC BY-SA 4.0
I belong to a couple of small groups that have been meeting regularly for decades. The men’s group meets biweekly, while the consultants’ group meets monthly. I have been exploring and writing about facilitating change since the earliest days of this blog. So in 2021, I developed and facilitated for each group a process for working together to explore what we want to change, and then change our lives.
Each group spent several meetings working through this exercise.
What happened was valuable, so I’m sharing the process for you to use if it fits.
The process design outline
It’s important for the group’s members to receive instructions for the entire exercise well in advance of the first meeting, so they have time to think about their answers before we get together.
Exploring our past experiences of working on change in our lives
We begin with a short, three-question review of our past experiences working on change in our lives.
These questions give everyone the opportunity to review:
the life changes they made or attempted to make in the past;
the strategies they used; and
what they learned in the process.
This supplies baseline information to the individuals and the group for what follows.
The questions cover what:
we worked on.
was tried that did and didn’t work.
we learned from these experiences.
We each share short answers to these questions before continuing to the next stage of the process.
For the rest of the exercise, each group member gets as much time as they need.
Sharing what we would currently like to change in our lives
Next, we ask each person to share anything they would currentlylike to change in their life. This includes issues they may or may not be working on. Group members can ask for help to clarify what they want to change.
Exploring and discussing what we are currently working on to change our lives
Next, each person shares in detail which of the above issues they are currently working on, or want to work on, to change in their life. This can include describing their struggles and what they are learning, and also asking the group for advice and support.
Post-process review
Exploring long-term learning is important. So, after some time has elapsed, perhaps a few months, we run a post-exercise review of the outcomes for each person. This helps to uncover successes as well as difficulties that surfaced, and can also lead to additional appropriate group support and encouragement.
Here’s an example — what I shared and did
Things I’ve tried in the past to make changes in my life that didn’t work
Trying to think my way into making changes w/o taking my feelings/body state into account e.g. trying to lose weight by going on a diet.
Denial—doing nothing and hoping the change will happen.
What I’ve learned about successful ways to change my life
Anything that improves my awareness of feeling or body state can be a precursor to change: e.g. mindful eating or emotional eating.
Creating habits: e.g. brushing my teeth first thing in the morning; setting triggers (calendar reminders, timers for meditation or breaks).
The habit of daily exercise and regular yoga improves awareness of my body state.
Three issues I worked on
Tidying up and documenting my complicated life before I die.
Living more in gratitude; developing a daily practice.
My post-exercise three-month review
I’m happy with the way I continue to work on the long-term project of tidying up my office, getting caught up on reading, and documenting my household and estate tasks. To help ensure that I work on it every day, I created a simple spreadsheet with columns for various short tasks that advanced my goals. Checking off time spent on one of these tasks each day shows me I’m making progress, and this feels good.
I created a buddy system with another group member who wanted to meditate more. We send each other an email when we’ve meditated. This has greatly improved the likelihood I’ll meditate every day.
After trying a simple daily gratitude practice, I decided to let it go for the time being until my daily meditation became a fully reliable habit. Sometimes, small steps are the best strategy!
Detailed instructions
Interested? OK! Here’s how to run this exercise.
First, explain the process and see if you get buy-in from the group about doing this work. It’s helpful to explain that each person can choose what personal change they want to work on. There are no “right” or “wrong”, or “small” or “large” personal change issues. Any issue that someone wants to work on is valuable to that person, and that’s all that counts.
I think it’s helpful for everyone present to participate, rather than some people being observers, but ultimately, that’s up to the group to decide.
Well before the first meeting, share the following, adapted to your needs, with group members.
Working together to change our lives – the first meeting
“We’ve decided to work together on what we are currently trying to change in our lives. As we will have about an hour for this work at each session, we’ll need two or more meetings for everyone to have their turn.
For the exercise to be fruitful, we will all need to do some preparatory work before the meetings.
Our eventual focus will be on what we are currently trying to change in our lives, and how we are going about it.
We’ll start with questions 1) and 2) below, which are about the past. Please come with short (maximum 2½ minutes total per person) answers to them. Please answer question 3) in 90 seconds or less. At subsequent meetings, we will spend much more time on questions 4) & 5).
Please come to the first meeting prepared to answer the following three questions:
==> 1) What have you tried to make changes in your life that didn’t work? What have you learned over the last 20 years?
==> 2) What have you learned about successful ways to change your life over the last 20 years?
Don’t include childhood/teen lessons learned, unless you really think they’re still relevant to today’s work.
Remember: a maximum of 2½ minutes for questions 1) and 2) combined!
==> 3) What would you currently like to change about how you live your life? (You might not be working on it. You can ask for advice if you want.)
Be as specific as possible in your answer to question 3). Your answer should take 90 seconds or less! (But we’ll provide more time if you want or need help clarifying your goals.)
Working together to change our lives – subsequent meetings
At subsequent meetings, we’ll each take turns to answer questions 4) and 5) below. You’ll have as much time as you need to answer these questions and partake in the subsequent discussion.
==> 4) What are you currently working on to change in your life?
==> 5) How are you going about making the changes you shared in your answer to question 4)? What are the struggles and what are you learning? What advice would you like?”
Running the meetings
At the first meeting, you’ll typically have time for everyone to share their answers to the first three questions. Keep track of the time, be flexible, but don’t let participants ramble. It’s very helpful for the facilitator to take brief notes on what people share. If there’s still time available, I suggest you/the facilitator model the process by sharing their answers to questions 4) and 5) and holding an appropriate discussion. Use subsequent meetings as needed for every group member in turn to answer and discuss these two final questions, and write notes on these discussions too.
The post-exercise review
When this exercise has been completed for everyone, I suggest the group schedule a follow-up review in a few months. If your group starts with check-ins, it can be useful to regularly remind everyone about the review and ask if anything’s come up that someone would like to discuss before the review meeting.
Before the post-exercise review, let group members know that the facilitator will share their notes for each person in turn, and ask them to comment on what’s happened since.
At the start of the post-exercise review, explain that this is an opportunity to share information — discoveries, roadblocks, successes, etc. — without judgment. It’s also a time when group members can ask for ideas, advice, and support from each other.
Finally, you may decide to return to this exercise at a later date. After all, there’s much to be said for working on change throughout our lives. The above process may be the same, but the answers the next time may be quite different!
Have you tried this exercise? How did it work for you? Did you change/improve it in some way? I’d love to hear about your experience with it — please share in the comments below!
Strive to live in your own imagination, not someone else’s.
Since 2004, social listening—the practice of monitoring and analyzing online conversations and social media mentions related to brands, products, services, events, or industries—has evolved significantly and grown in popularity.
At 
Sadly, resolutions rarely work. In 2016
During the day, this card reminds me to meditate. Once I have, I email my meditation buddy Sue and return the card back to its vitamin bottle prop, ready for the next morning reminder.
I hope that one day soon we will hold the party after the war.
How to work with others to change our lives