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Book Review-The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

It was a conversation with John Gottman that led me to Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  (Gottman is known for his work on relationships, including The Science of Trust.)  Gottman was speaking about “away behaviors” and signaling how we’re not interested in the conversation.  Having previously read Goffman’s Stigma, I decided to pick up this work in the hopes of discovering more about how to identify away behaviors and coach people not to send these signals.  While I didn’t find much I could use in understanding away behaviors, I did find a fascinating exploration of how we portray one view while we’re “on life’s stage” and another when we’re “backstage” with our buddies.

Acceptance and Status

One of the challenges for me in this work is that I’m particularly low on two of the motivators in the Reiss Motivational Profile that would lead to the desire to focus on impression management.  (See Who Am I?)  I explain in my blog post, How to Be Yourself, how challenging it can be to project an image that isn’t the real you.  I deeply value the chance to know the real person – to move past the posturing and impression management to the real person.  (See Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy, Revisited.)  The result is that, in some cases, the idea of presenting an image to people all the time feels strange and alien.

Many years ago, I was speaking with a friend who was working for me and talking about the reaction of some people to me when we met.  In some cases, the people would inexplicably back away and disappear.   She explained that I was too real for them.  That they saw the authenticity that I engaged with and were scared by it.  I’d never really given much thought to the degree of intimacy that people bring to non-partner interactions.

In partnered or closer relationships, there is sometimes a dynamic that emerges when one person is anxiously attached, and the other is avoidantly attached.  (See Attached for attachment styles.)  Depending upon the degree of insecurity in the attachment, these reactions can be triggered by securely attached individuals.  I’d never considered how it might be causing people to detect too much intimacy (or realness) in everyday interactions and how they might instinctively seek to create distance via avoidance.

Suspension of Disbelief

We go to the movies and watch fantastic things.  We see last-minute saves, impossible coincidences, and things that we know are too good to be true.  Despite this, few of us shout out at the screen about how impossible things are.  It’s called suspension of disbelief.  It’s also active in the television shows that we watch – and sometimes it’s more tragic.

In relationships, we see this as blind trust.  The other person is giving us reason to pause, but we unconsciously overlook it.  We want so badly to trust that we’re willing to overlook the evidence that we shouldn’t – and that can lead to unsalvageable relationships once the deception is discovered.

Another place where we see disbelief is cults.  The trust and belief in the leader blinds people to other potential realities.  (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing.)  Even in our world today, we see the kind of polarization where we believe only what is consistent with our prior information.  (See Going to Extremes.)  Thomas Gilovich in How We Know What Isn’t So explains that when information contradicts what we believe, we ask if we must believe the new information – and that’s a high standard.

When it comes to the appearances that we give off – the performances on the world stage – once people are sufficiently indoctrinated to a particular view of a person, it will take substantial work to change those beliefs.  There are professional actors who have explained that they were typecast.  They played a villain in a popular show, and now they can only get parts as villains.  Once a person (or organization) has sufficiently anchored their role into the collective consciousness, they may be able to get away with harm and no one will bat an eye.

Keeping the Dreams Quiet

It’s easier to play your part when you know the parts that others will play.  It’s more predictable and safer.  It’s easier to be the buyer when you know the seller will want to continue to sell to you.  That’s why there are aspects that are often hidden or obscured.  No one wants to buy from the person who is only there until his “real” thing happens.  Dreamers are dangerous to the way that roles interact with each other.

While it’s more common these days for workers to have side-hustles that bring in extra money, employers rarely care until those side-hustles threaten to take over an employee’s main attention.  They suddenly become a threat to the employer, because they risk the employee’s departure.  Ironically, employers often create the very conditions they don’t want by trying to reign in side-hustles.

Anonymity

Guaranteeing anonymity has a huge impact on how honest people will be.  Human resources has started implementing 360 degree feedback – meaning that you get feedback from everyone that works with an employee.  Subordinates provide feedback on their manager’s performance – and if you want honest feedback, you’ve got to believe that you won’t be retaliated against.  It takes courage – but the promise of anonymity lowers the bar.  (See Find Your Courage.)

The desire for anonymity signals the need for it.  You don’t ask the hotel clerk to not acknowledge you’re staying there unless you don’t want to be found by admiring fans, a spouse, or a stalker.  Anonymity is needed most when people feel they have the most to lose.

Hidden Signals

Sometimes, the appearance transmitted to the world is designed to intentionally hide other aspects.  In productions of any sort, there are people in the back and people in the front, and they often signal each other in ways that aren’t apparent to the audience.  Maybe it’s a hand left on a guitar indicating a song is being added.  It might be looking up at the sound engineer to indicate that there’s an audio problem.  Done well, these signals are so subtle that the audience misses them while the performers communicate silently to one another.

Sometimes, these subtle signals are subliminal persuasion.  (See The Hidden Persuaders.)  Sometimes, they help frame the way people think.  An instructor of mine in standup comedy had a joke he liked – but it only worked if he rubbed his stomach when he did it.  He couldn’t explain it, but somehow that small signal was enough to turn a bomb of a joke into something that blew the roof off with laughter.

Interdependence

While some still hail independence as a pinnacle to be sought, others recognize that we’re designed for relationships.  Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People explains it in a business context, and others like Jonathan Haidt have explained it in evolutionary terms.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  The challenge is how to move to interdependence from dependence or co-dependence.  Goffman calls it “justifiable reliance.”  It’s a non-manipulative relationship that allows us to be dependent on each other.

Goffman proposes that we need these relationships where the walls fall down, and we don’t need to manage The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Book Review-I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships

It’s a short book, but it makes an important point.  I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships echoes the guidance from several others and then adds something critical to the mix to make your results better when you’re communicating with others.

Understanding and Agreement

One of the key points made by many is that we need to start by focusing on our understanding and separating whether we agree or not.  (See Effective Apology and Solve Employee Problems Before They Start for more.)  Too often, we get wrapped up in the need to defend our position and perspective, and this hampers our ability to fully listen to the other person to try to understand their perspective and values in the situation.  (See Who Am I? for basic motivators – or values.)

Acceptance

To be able to get to a place of just understanding, we need to focus on acceptance.  That is, we need to accept that people can perceive things differently, and that those perceptions are valid – even if incorrect.  By accepting the other person’s reality as their own, which may be more valid than our reality, can be difficult.  (For more on acceptance, see How to Be an Adult in Relationships and Why Are We Yelling?)

John Gottman uses the word “attunement” in The Science of Trust to describe the degree to which one person is sensitive to another.  We get to this attunement by first seeking to understand, and then ensuring that we actively accept the other person’s point of view – even if we don’t agree.

Disagree and Dialogue

Once there appears to be good understanding of the other person’s perspective, it’s time to consider whether you do or don’t agree with them – in whole or in part.  Disagreement isn’t bad, it’s an opportunity to learn.

Collaborating with the Enemy encourages us to disagree and move towards dialogue.  (See Dialogue for more.)  Said differently, the encouragement is that you continue to learn and seek understanding even after the belief that you do understand – because you’ll never understand completely.

The key is creating the kind of psychological safety that Amy Edmondson calls for in The Fearless Organization.  This safety allows for differences to be explored without premature judgement or defensiveness.  One of the benefits of the Dialogue Mapping approach is the instant confirmation that someone is being heard and understood.

Active Listening

Many people think that any parrot can do active listening.  All you need to do is repeat back what the person said.  This is, obviously, something that some parrots can do.  However, the truth about active listening comes in what Motivational Interviewing calls “reflection.”  It’s more than just repeating back the words.  It’s an effort to make sense of what you’re hearing and to share back the meaning you find in it.  One way that I teach it is to speak about walking up Chris Argyris’ Ladder of Interference.  (I cover this in more detail in my review of Choice Theory.)

Validation

The key word that Michael Sorensen uses is “validation.”  It’s the statement that you understand and accept the person and their experience – still separate from your agreement.  Validation is the thing that people experience when they feel the acceptance of someone trying to make sense of their perspective.  Validated is what people get when you can reflect some portion of their experience.  Validation, Sorensen asserts, is the best way to say, and really mean, I Hear You.

Book Review-How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

It’s odd that a few centuries ago it would have been unheard of to be unaffiliated with a church.  Today, nearly the opposite is true.  How (Not) to be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor isn’t a book that explains this transition from scratch.  Instead, it’s a summary of the much larger Charles Taylor book, A Secular Age.  Taylor’s tome weighs in at just short of 900 pages, while James Smith’s How (Not) to Be Secular is a much more manageable 161 pages.  My friend, Tom Kapostasy, posted his review back in August of 2024.  My review takes a different approach but is, obviously, a summary of the same work – itself a summary.

Taylor’s Secular Types

Taylor explains that he sees not just one kind of secularism but, instead, three:

  • Secular1 – Distinguishes between scared and non-sacred (secular) vocations.
  • Secular2 – No religions affiliation and no religious beliefs.
  • Secular3 – Belief in God is only one possible belief, others are possible and therefore beliefs in God are contestable and contested.

We’ve had secular1 for a long time.  Most major religious beliefs hold some things to be sacred.  That isn’t to say that everyone believes in separation.  Jesuits, for instance, insisted on living their lives in their mission fields.  (See Heroic Leadership.)  For Buddhist monks, there is a saying, “After enlightenment, draw water, chop wood.”  (See Collaborating with the Enemy, Advice Not Given, and Altered Traits for more.)  It’s a reminder that we all share the same work.

Secular2 is the space and prediction where it is proposed that, as societies advance, there will be no need to believe in God any longer.  Marx famously said that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  That is, he believed some people would block out the negative of the world with opiates, but the masses, not having money for such things, used religion in the same way – to numb the pain of existence.  Secular2 is a space of apathy, where God has little place in the day to day lives of people.

Secular3 is a further move where society believes that God is just one option among others and thus is contestable and is contested.  The hidden statement here is that there is no foundational truth upon which things are built.  We are like a ship without an anchor trying to survive the storms of life.  This is the world that Taylor fears that we inhabit today.

Societal Trends

Before digging into details, it’s important to expose the societal trends that have shaped America.  Robert Putnam wrote the best seller, Bowling Alone, about the decline of social capital in America.  Our Kids follows up to explain why some children do better than others due to their support systems.  The Upswing broadens this from the decades of statistics to support Putnam’s claim about the decline in society; in doing so, it exposes both some limitations to Bowling Alone and some new insights.  The results show that we were a more individualistic society in the 1920s and moved to a more community focus that peaked in the 1960s.  Since then, the pendulum has been swinging back towards more individualism.

Putnam’s Bowling Alone used, as a measure of social capital, the number of people who were considered members and those who attend church.  Both measures showed moderate declines.  Unfortunately, there’s a hidden problem in these numbers, as The Great Evangelical Recession explains.  The biggest churches were growing, while smaller churches were losing membership, attendance, and tithing.  The number of churches was declining as churches were dying.

Taylor’s view is much longer, into several centuries, and with less precision and clarity than Putnam manages, yet he exposes the shifting sands that have led us to where we are.  Some of the changes are driven by our relative affluence compared to our grandparents and parents.  All but the absolute poorest today enjoy conveniences that our great-grandparents couldn’t have dreamed of in their day.  The broad-brush strokes are that we’ve developed the technologies and tools that allow us to need each other less for our physical survival.

These drive us to have less need for any external party – community, God, superstition, or luck – to survive.

Significance without Transcendence

Who needs God anyway?  If we’re able to harness rivers, heat our homes, and heal diseases, why do we need God?  These questions are at the heart of a sense of significance without transcendence.  If we can feel significant and important without God, do we need Him?  Humanism, existentialism, and other frameworks offer a chance to find meaning apart from God.

While some of what is encapsulated inside of significance without transcendence is good and valuable, one must ask how far is too far?  Reportedly, Dr. Spock, who wrote the runaway best seller, Baby and Child Care, was concerned about how far things had gone.  (See The Coddling of the American Mind.)  Certainly, the concept of intrinsic value is a good thing – but not when taken to the logical extreme of narcissism.  (See Compassion and Self-Hate for more of this continuum.)

Another core concept, ethical living, doesn’t diverge much from the concept of universalism.  That is, the relationship with God isn’t important.  What’s important is that you’re a “good” person.  Here, the water is murkier, because in the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ came to save all.  But does “all” really mean all?

Doubt

Smith’s summary of Taylor’s work doesn’t focus on the arguments against God – perhaps because there is no need.  The argument isn’t that there is a reason to not believe in God as much as it is that we no longer depend on our belief in God to sustain us.  In my review of Doubt, I summarized the key arguments against the existence of God – one of which, “God is irrelevant,” is what Smith focuses on in Taylor’s work.

When considering why more people don’t believe in God today, we may be asking the wrong question.  Perhaps the question is better asked, “What do you believe about God?”  Even today, people are often willing to answer that they’re spiritual if not religious.  What that means isn’t always clear.

Pascal’s Wager

One of the curious things about the discussion are the number of people who are unclear whether God exists or not.  They’re unable to reach a clear answer.  Even Steve Jobs, famous for his leadership at Apple, is reported by his biographer Walter Isaacson as saying, “I’m about fifty-fifty on believing in God.  For most of my life, I’ve felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.”  Of course, when we say we’re fifty-fifty, it means we don’t have any idea.  (See Superforecasting.)

Blaise Pascal worked out his belief in God logically.  Placing four quadrants, he described four conditions: God doesn’t exist, I don’t believe; God does exist, I don’t believe; God doesn’t exist, I believe; God does exist, I believe.  Ultimately, he decided that believing did him little harm, but there was a big downside if God did exist and he didn’t believe.

Not all of us are as logical as Pascal, and today, fewer people believe the odds are 50-50.  In response to the suffering, struggle, pain, and anguish, people find it hard to believe that God does exist.  As a result, they believe more strongly – though not completely – that God doesn’t exist, and that changes the odds on Pascal’s wager.

Behavioral Differences

It was Churchless that elevated the truth that the behavior separating Christians and non-Christians is vanishingly small.  Sure, on the whole, Christians are more generous, but in their day-to-day (secular) lives, it’s hard to tell those who believe and those who do not.

Heroic Leadership describes a different approach to behavior.  It describes the Jesuits’ decision to behave in a way that is different as an attractor to get people to want to know about Christ.  It was their way of being Christ to the world – whether or not they ever said the name Jesus.  However, their approach was and is different than most religious people.  They’ve settled into at least what Taylor would call secular1.  They’ve decided that they can party on Saturday night and show up to a Sunday service hung over.

Social Capital

Essential to Robert Putnam’s work is the concept of social capital.  Effectively, it means the degree to which our lives are woven together such that when one person suffers, the community intervenes to support them.  Are we a loose federation of pirate ships who happen to be sailing in the same direction, or are we an armada of ships who belong to the same navy?  Are we aligned to the universal cause of moving forward humanity or are we opportunists seeking profit?  The difference matters.  Francis Fukuyama approaches the concept from the direction of Trust.  He speaks of how our trust both shapes and drives societies.

Both are describing relationships.  They’re describing how the way we value our relationships with others forms and shapes our behaviors – and how their relationships with us shapes theirs.  Belief in God – and an ultimate instruction manual on behavior – moves the fulcrum so that you are more likely to support someone that you’re even in a weak relationship with.

Government vs. Philanthropic

It sounds like a good thing on the surface.  Replace the patchwork of community organizations, religious institutions, and generous people with a more reliable government program of catchment.  That is, ensure the same minimum standards for people when they’re unemployed, homeless, or struggling.  Programs in the United States started in earnest in the 1930s with the New Deal and the Social Security Act.  Suddenly, the government would step in to support the elderly rather than leaving the burden on their offspring or the communities in which they lived.

Certainly, there’s a massive amount of good that have been done by government programs to support the most needy, but the question that is often not asked is “At what cost?”  It’s easy to measure the dollars and cents that have been spent on the programs and even to calculate a return on investment, but the kind of cost that is missed is what the presence of the government program prevents.

Governments aren’t known for efficiency.  They’re known for consistency – or at least striving for consistency.  Government programs often consume so many resources – financial and otherwise – that they leave little space for others to come in, operate, and innovate.  The charities that were previously focused on food and shelter could move on to other needs – or could they?

The problem of government consistency is like the problem of characteristics of restaurants.  The government can achieve repeatability only by setting the standard low.  McDonalds has a relatively consistent experience across locations.  They don’t serve gourmet items.  The items that they do serve match the standard.

One of the challenges with the governments of the world meeting the basic needs of people is they no longer feel the need to seek a religious community to share struggles with.

Eliminating Stress

In our journey to the modern world, we’ve removed many of the stressors from the world.  That isn’t to say there are none, but there are fewer.  As Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers explains, we need some stress.  We, like all animals, need to have certain forms of stress at the right times.  Antifragile makes the same point.  We need stress – but we’ve been systematically reducing or eliminating it for hundreds of years.  Government programs have reduced the stress of finding a group to support you when you’re down.

Inadvertently, we’ve removed stress to the point that we’re not creating the growth moments that we need as a society to grow.

Consequences

If we accept that we’re living in a world where most people are secular (secular2 or secular3), what are the consequences?  Why should we care if we’re living in a secular world if the behavior of those who believe is not fundamentally different?

Here, any attempt to relate the reasoning to material things breaks down.  It slips back into the question of whether we must live only in the world if there is something transcendent.  It relies on the awareness that “there must be something more.”  It relies on an awareness of our connected nature and how we deny this at our own peril.  (See Alone Together.)  We live in a time of intense anxiety, depression, and mental disorders.  Does a belief that God is and will be in everything change that?  Do we believe that God is there watching all that we do, guiding with a gentle hand like a beloved grandparent?

The consequences of where we are seems to be that too many live empty lives.

Who am I to Judge?

A final challenge to encounter when living in the secular world is addressing the degree to which we should and should not judge others.  The Bible says, “Judge not, that ye not be judged” (Matt. 7:1 King James Version), but is the admonishment an absolute?  The unanswered question is whether you can live as a non-secular individual in a world of secularism, when everything is allowed and the only sin is to fail to accept.

Figuring our answer to this question may just be the secret of How (Not) to be Secular.

Book Review-Games People Play

It’s a book to describe the patterns that exist in human interactions – it’s the Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.  Described as one of the first “pop psychology” (popular psychology) books, it’s criticized for a lack of research support and for the way that it trivialized psychoanalysis.  Despite these criticisms, the book was wildly popular and brought to the cocktail party a language for describing how various people were interacting.

The Parent, the Adult, and the Child

In Berne’s transactional analysis of interactions, he proposes three states that a person can be in while acknowledging multiple levels of interaction.  Berne uses the labels parent, adult, and child rather than the more technical labels exteropsychic, neopsychic, and archaeopsychic.  Simply, the parent state is concerned with external world judgement and the values, ideas, emotions, and behaviors of others.  The adult is concerned with the interpretation and processing of information.  The child is characterized by behaviors and attitudes from early childhood.

The parent’s judgement often triggers a child response from others.  The child’s response often comes from a place of perceived weakness and the need to defend oneself.  This often sets up a series of attacks between the two parties.  (See Dialogue – Defensive Routines.)  The child’s response includes a judgement (parent) response, which sets the other person into their child state, and the cycle has begun.  Some more contemporary work has sought to describe how to avoid these harmful interactions including Marshal Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and John Gottman’s The Science of Trust.

Relationships between the adult and either the child or the parent state are generally less harmful, but there are times when it’s not one level that a transaction is operating at but several levels at the same time.  When this happens, it’s possible that the transaction is still somewhat harmful.  Consider a harmless social interaction where one person is triggered and feels defensive.  The social level of adult-to-adult communication is happening, but at a psychological level, the second person may be feeling from a child perspective.  (See The Fearless Organization for more on triggering.)

Intent

With the understanding of states and the capacity to trigger others, we must realize that intent isn’t the only thing that matters.  In many of the games that are enumerated, the intentions are positive or neutral.  A few of the games covered do have selfish motives as a part of the story – but not malicious.  In most cases, the people who are involved in one of the archetypical responses that the game involves are unaware that the game is being played and their role in it.

The Payoff

Each person is in the game, because they get – or hope to get – some sort of payoff.  For the alcoholic, it might be the chance to punish themselves for some real or imagined problem.  (See Compassion and Self-Hate for more.)  There are many other things that the people playing the game are seeking, including a chance to feel good about how they’re helping.

It’s important – in any interaction – to understand what the expected results, the likely results, and the potential worst results are.  The expected results are often more positive than the situation calls for.

The Games

I won’t catalog the games here, because I couldn’t do them justice.  There are roles, aims, and types that only make sense in their context.  However, as Berne acknowledges, there are many different kinds of games beyond the list cataloged 80 years ago.  What is stunning about the list, however, is the degree to which people continue to play the same games generation after generation.  Ultimately, it may be difficult to eradicate or even fully understand the Games People Play.

Book Review-Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

Sometimes, it takes a quarter century.  Such is the case of Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote his first book, The Tipping Point, just over 25 years ago, and many suggested that he come back and do a revision or update.  However, he recognized that the world has changed, and a more substantial look at the same dynamics would require different stories and different perspectives.  That’s what Revenge of the Tipping Point is.  To provide some context, I didn’t just read The Tipping Point.  I’ve also read Blink and Outliers.  I’m familiar with his style of writing and with its strengths and limitations.

Broken Windows

Before I start with the new, it’s appropriate to review the old.  One of the theories from The Tipping Point was that the crime rate in New York decreased due to a focus on smaller crimes.  The theory goes that broken windows send a signal that crime is accepted, which ultimately leads to more violent crime.  Gladwell credits a focus on cleanup and smaller infractions for turning the tide on violent crime.

The problem is that there are alternate theories that are even more probable.  On his blog, he acknowledged the work of Freakonomics authors and their alternate proposal that the decrease in crime corresponded to the 18 years following Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion.  The theory is that the reduction of unwanted or under-supported children led to fewer criminals and less crime.

This starts my review, because in much of The Revenge of the Tipping Point, I was left concerned that there were alternative theories that were left out – and a richness of the story that was left out.

Gay Marriage

With regard to gay marriage, Gladwell oversimplifies the change to a single television show, Will & Grace, that features the relationship of a gay man and a heterosexual woman.  There’s no doubt that the show made an impact on attitudes towards gays.  However, simplifying it in this way dismisses the hard work that led to that point.  It ignores the groundwork laid down by After the Ball and the work of advocates to push for normalization and acceptance.

Opioid Epidemic

Gladwell’s story is that the Sadler family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals are exclusively to blame for the opioid epidemic.  It ignores the reality that people turn to pharmaceuticals when there is pain or suffering in their life.  (See The Globalization of Addiction, Chasing the Scream, and Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.)  He explains how the reformulation that solved the crushability problem with OxyContin made things worse as people transitioned to heroin.  It ignores the fact that the heroin supply lines had been perfected by the time this was accomplished.  (See Dreamland.)

He does share the challenges with some physicians who are willing to prescribe indiscriminately.  He identifies a great public policy that requires state notification of narcotics prescriptions as a way of causing physicians to think about opioids differently than any other kind of prescription.  That’s a good recognition of how there were other factors besides a money hungry family and organization.

Suicide Clusters

Perhaps my gravest concern about simplification is his discussion of suicide clusters.  He bases his information on the work shared in Life Under Pressure, the research of the authors, and some personal conversations.  I was concerned about the body of work failing to represent the situation in a way that led to solutions.

Gladwell’s coverage was worse.  He explained away the suicide cluster in “Poplar Grove” as being caused by a monoculture – that is, a lack of variation in the city.  That is just wrong.  It’s wrong, because there are monocultures with protective factors against suicide that will show lower rates.  It ignores the central thesis of Life Under Pressure, which argues that it’s pressure that causes the problems.

Perhaps the best way to understand monoculture is the work of Nassim Taleb in Antifragile.  In it, Taleb explains that we’ve optimized all the resiliency out of our systems – but those systems are very effective at the one thing that they do.  It’s not specifically that the monoculture is the problem.  The problem is that the monoculture didn’t include any protective factors any longer.

A monoculture can have cultural components that inhibit suicide just as well as it can have components that encourage it.  In the monoculture of a commune (now called “intentional communities” according to Dr. Ruth’s book, The Joy of Connections), the nature of the community would naturally reject the factors that tend to drive people towards suicide.

In a bit of crazy irony, Gladwell uses the work of Rosabeth Moss Kanter to make the point about magic ratios – seemingly ignoring her earliest work.  Commitment & Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective explains how the internal characteristics can lead to success or failure.  In other words, how the characteristics of the group lead to outcomes – even inside a monoculture.

Ratios

Kanter’s work evolved and spoke to the problem of “token” members of groups.  That is what happens when there are too few of any category of people such that the one person must become the representative for their entire group.  The answer is that they’re not effective, because they’re too connected to the group identity to make a difference.  Gladwell calls it the “Magic Third,” implying that the ratio needs to be roughly 1/3 of the overall population.  While some of his supporting examples hold this ratio, others note the tipping point is as low as about 25%.

Certainly, there’s a minimum threshold where members of a category of people do feel on edge, because they’re representing their groups.  I can speak from personal experience when I was the “old white guy” added to a diversity panel at the last moment.  However, the conclusion about the ratio needed to not feel like a representative for the category seems murkier.

Social Engineering

Gladwell has a different definition from the one I most commonly experience for social engineering.  I think of it from the perspective of hacking, as in the book Social Engineering.  However, Gladwell is talking about how people manipulate systems to create the outcomes they want.  It moves us towards the territory of Nudge and the choice architects who create structures that lead to the outcomes that someone else wants.

He explains how he believes Ivy League colleges maintain their ratios of students.  They sort athletes, legacies, Dean’s interest list, and children of faculty differently.  In short, there’s a pathway that leads to greater acceptance.  You can be a good athlete, a child of an alumni, someone the Dean is recruiting for future donations, or children of faculty.

Of these, athletes seem the oddest until you realize that, natural ability aside, it takes a great deal of money to be the best at almost any sport.  (See Peak for the required coaches and training.)  What selecting for the very top athletes does is filter the list to those families with money quite effectively.

Gladwell makes a bold claim, “If you don’t think that social engineering has quietly become one of the central activities of the American establishment, you haven’t been paying attention.”  It’s bold in part because of the proposed reach and in part because of the jab that you don’t believe him.

At the time I’m writing this, there are conspiracy theorists that say that the government has a weather machine that has been creating hurricanes to devastate the southeastern United States.  This is ludicrous on its face partially because it makes no sense to do.  In addition, if it were ever proven, there would be serious repercussions.  People have died in the hurricanes’ aftermath, and it’s unlikely that families will just say, “Oh well.”  It’s much more likely they’d organize to dethrone whomever unleashed a hurricane on their families.

My point isn’t that there isn’t some degree of manipulation in the establishment.  The Years that Matter Most explains what it is about college attendance that matters – and the answer is connections to others.  It’s not that I don’t believe that there is manipulation happening – I’m sure there is.

My point is that the degree of control implied by this is far in excess of what’s possible with what we know about influence, power structures, and nudges.  In short, does it happen – yes.  However, like many things, we find that the real power is somewhat limited.

The Overstory

Gladwell’s perspective is that there’s an overstory that colors how we see everything.  He speaks about how the Holocaust wasn’t discussed until the miniseries on NBC.  He speaks of both the power of the overstory and the degree to which it’s possible to change the overstory with seemingly little force.  I’m not convinced it’s as easy as it can sometimes appear.  While acknowledging the power of framing on the way that people think, I’m not sure that there’s the capacity to control the masses.  I’ve seen too many change initiatives at every level fail.

In the end, perhaps the answer is that tipping points are impossible to find.  Maybe that’s the Revenge of the Tipping Point.

Book Review-Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy

Positivity isn’t a bad thing.  However, there’s a point where it becomes toxic.  Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy explores how positivity can go too far.  Two other books, Bright-sided and Happier?, have addressed the topic, but there is still room for Whitman Goodman’s work.  She explains that, as a licensed psychotherapist, many of her clients just want to be heard and supported.  That’s at the very heart of the problem with our obsession with being happy.

Only Happiness

On the surface, it makes sense.  No one likes a Negative Nelly.  It’s better to be Suzie Sunshine.  However, in doing this, we necessarily deny a part of who we are.  We can’t be happy all the time, but there is constant pressure to only express our happiness.  The tension has us denying parts of ourselves that will necessarily come back to create problems for us.  (See No Bad Parts for more.)

It’s not that positivity is bad – it’s bad when that’s all that’s allowed.  When we’re not talking about being more positive than negative and instead berate ourselves for the parts of us that aren’t happy, we’ve moved into toxic positivity land.  Part of the problem is other people’s discomfort with our reality.

Others Distress Tolerance

Animals and humans move to reduce their distress.  This makes inherent sense.  However, there are times when we may need to accept distress for the greater good.  We accept the distress of achy muscles after exercise for a healthier – and stronger – future.  Often, when we see the responses from others to our distress, we can see how they’re trying to relieve the distress that our lack of happiness causes them.

The problem isn’t directly that we’re not happy.  The problem for them is that our lack of happiness creates discomfort and distress in them.  The result is a response that is less about us and more about their distress in being aware of our less happy thoughts.  I mentioned in my review of Life Under Pressure how the researchers justified their decision to not attend memorial services, and how I believed these were movements away from their discomfort, not that it was necessarily best for the community.

Limits of Positive Thinking

The problem with most good myths is the kernel of truth that lives at their core.  Sure, people would rather work with those who are generally positive and happy.  However, the broader benefits of positive thinking are hard to confirm with research.  While we find research supporting various forms of positivity – such as gratitude – the performance of this as an intervention doesn’t always exceed the performance of a distraction technique.  Let me pause for a second and say it’s like saying that the children in Mishel’s famous Marshmallow Test would have been better off giving themselves a pep talk rather than distracting themselves.  It sounds odd on its face.

Complaints

Complaints can serve two purposes.  First, they can be an effort to change someone else’s behavior.  Second, they can be an attempt to make ourselves feel better.

Persuading others to change their behavior isn’t easy, as numerous books like Influence, Pre-suasion, and Influencer make apparent.  Other books like Change or Die and Immunity to Change make it clear that even when someone wants to make the change, it can still be hard.  So why do we try so hard?

The answer may come in the form of the same benefits that allowed us to become the dominant biomass on the planet.  In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains that our ability to work together is something that separates us even from our closest primate cousins.  When we start working together, it’s possible for some of us to try to take advantage of others, and it seems this is why we have a strong aversion to cheating.  If we think that something isn’t fair, we will often try to teach the cheater a lesson – even at great cost to ourselves.  Books like The Evolution of Cooperation, SuperCooperators, and Does Altruism Exist? explain how this process works to allow for greater, sustained, beneficial cooperation.

Perhaps our desire to get someone to change their behavior is based in part on the mechanisms of fairness.  So even though we may not be successful often, we keep trying.

The other side of complaining, to make ourselves feel better, rarely works out as well as we’d hope.  We cry out about the injustices done to us and wait for someone to validate that we are, in fact, being treated unfairly.  Sometimes this happens, and we move from seeking validation to feel better into a mode of wanting to change people’s behavior – often with very little effect.

Value Driven Life

Happiness isn’t bad, it’s just the road to get to happiness isn’t clear – and it’s not constant.  As Daniel Gilbert explains in Stumbling on Happiness, we’re actually quite bad at predicting our future happiness.  We believe that what we want will lead to happiness – but that only really happens when we figure out our values and live in alignment with them.  (See also Start with Why and The Normal Personality.)

There’s a kind of positivity that’s real, raw, and unfiltered.  It’s the kind that accepts the need for sadness, fear, worry, and a rainbow of other emotions.  It’s only when we deny that other feelings deserve equal footing that we arrive at Toxic Positivity.

Book Review-The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry

Every once in a while, it’s good to read the work of people with whom you expect to disagree.  Such is The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry by Rupert Sheldrake.  Sheldrake’s world is not that of mainstream science.  He prefers places of untested theories and paranormal experiences to what traditional science has to offer.  He uses his perch outside of traditional science to criticize it – sometimes appropriately and sometimes less so.  With an introduction like this, one might appropriately wonder why they want to know more about what Sheldrake has to say, either translated through this review or directly.  However, if you ever enter discussions with people who have radically different views, learning to see into these views is helpful towards improving overall understanding and getting along with others.  For that reason, it’s appropriate to get curious and skeptical about science and what Sheldrake shares.

All Reality is Material or Physical

Sheldrake asserts, “Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical.”  This is an incorrectly narrow view of science.  Science seeks to understand and explain to the limits of what it can measure.  It’s the sense of measurement that challenges Sheldrake.  Certainly, today science acknowledges quantum entanglement.  It’s something that has been and continues to be measured.  It’s what Einstein famously called “spooky at a distance.”  Science acknowledges that there must be a mechanism for this behavior and is working to understand it.

Similarly, we’ve started to crack the code on how gravity works.  We’re a long way from answers, but science acknowledges a boson particle in a Higgs field.  It acknowledges the transmission of energy, light, vibrations, and the like.

The underlying assertion Sheldrake is making is that the current state of scientific knowledge isn’t complete.  He’s claiming that there are things are outside of knowledge today.  I don’t think any scientist could disagree.  However, he goes beyond this to imply there are things that science will never know.  Most scientists would struggle here.

The initial impetus for reading Sheldrake’s work was a confluence of things, not the last of which was a class on the relationship between science and religion.  I can’t say with certainty that science won’t ever be able to explain religion – but I also can’t rule it out.

Unconscious

Sheldrake says that science believes, “All matter is unconscious.”  He proposes that this belief is taken for granted.  However, consciousness is a funny and fickle thing.  The Mind Club explores how we ascribe consciousness to others and other things.  Others call into question the conception of consciousness that we have.  Jonathan Haidt explains how it might have evolved to provide a capacity for prediction, which had a survival advantage.  SuperCooperators, Does Altruism Exist?, and The Evolution of Cooperation share how complex patterns develop that have an impact on the seemingly simple premises, like Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene.

More recently, others have questioned whether free-will is real and if consciousness is just a delusion. Jonathan Haidt proposes that consciousness is a press secretary explaining our behaviors after we’ve already decided to do it.  (See The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind for more.)  Charles Duhigg in The Power of Habit exposes some of the research that implies that Haidt may be right.  The tools we have today seem to imply we’ve made too much of consciousness and its power.

All of this is to say that the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness may lie on a degree of complexity – and that’s a weak argument for one side or the other.  How do you decide whether the color blue-green belongs in the categories of blue or green?  This is a class information architecture problem without a solution.  (See How to Make Sense of Any Mess.)

Probabilities

Sheldrake correctly points out that the more we learn, the more we realize that life is not about certainties but instead about probabilities.  As Lorenz pointed out with his work on weather predictions, many things are non-linear and inherently difficult to predict with precision.  A butterfly flapping wings in Brazil can – but isn’t likely to – set off a tornado in Texas.

This is an appropriate acknowledgement.  Humans want certainty, and science often offers answers that imply certainty when the truth is only probability should be stated.

Open Minded Seekers of Truth

In an ideal world – one we don’t live in – scientists would be open minded seekers of truth.  They’d be objective.  They’d not get wrapped up in the cycle of “publish or perish,” and they wouldn’t constantly be worried about whether their grant dollars would run out.  However, the evidence says that all these things are true.  We know that scientists are humans just like us who are affected by the same pressures.

When we read a journal article, we need to treat it with a fair amount of skepticism.  We have to recognize that the conflicts of interest section doesn’t fully explain all the ways that their work may be biased.

Whole Atoms

In many places, Sheldrake points out the misperceptions of the past.  He points out, for instance, that it was once thought that atoms were solid.  We, of course, know this isn’t the case, and that an atom is more space than solid.  More importantly, we now understand protons, neutrons, and electrons.  We further can see into the subatomic particles that we didn’t believe could exist.

Remnants of old thinking prevail in our language.  Database technology uses the language of atomic transactions to mean irreducible.  It must either be completed or fail.  There is no partial commit of the transaction.

Machines or Organisms

Sheldrake also rails against the prevailing mechanistic approach to describing phenomena, instead urging us to use a more organic model.  Images of the Organization points out there are many different ways to see an organization with different benefits and weaknesses.  So, too, would applying organic models to science.  Mechanistic approaches are simple.  They remove the details and odd cases.  They’re easier to work with than organic models of growth and enabling conditions.

So, like many things that Sheldrake says, there’s an element of truth, but it’s surrounded by overreach.

Perpetual Motion Machines

Sheldrake ponders why we shoot down perpetual motion machines.  He says, “But perhaps some of these devices really do work, and really can tap into new sources of energy.”  I’ll acknowledge the possibility without accepting any degree of probability.  The idea of being able to harness other kinds of energy is a very intriguing one, but it has fallen flat.

One intriguing thing, which he doesn’t cover, is the application of a Stirling Engine at nanoscopic scale.  A Stirling Engine isn’t magic, but it does convert differentials in temperature into motion (or electricity).  Recent developments still don’t violate the laws of thermodynamics but may be a way that we can take advantage of the extra heat we’ve been experiencing.

Epigenetics and Generations

While we were fascinated with the great work done on genetics and increased understanding of the genetic code, it falls flat in the face of the evidence that not everything is as fixed as we’d expect.  Thus epigenetics – which is the way that genes and gene sequences are enabled or disabled as a result of environment – is a richer concept.

This creates the possibility for generics making us susceptible to environmental triggers and allowing for the idea that they may never come.  This creates the richness of experience between genetics and the environment.

What’s interesting, and yet unexplained, is some of the research that seems to indicate that exposure to a toxin by a parent can have impacts through several generations.  Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers explains FOAD – fetal onset of adult disease.  We’ve also seen that the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) study showed long term health implications from events that happened in childhood.

Meeting Richard Dawkins

Sheldrake describes a meeting he had with Richard Dawkins.  “Dawkins began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things. ‘But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs.’”

That’s the heart of my concern.  Sheldrake seems to have no skepticism whatsoever for any idea that might be interesting.  I think we must stay vigilant and look for new ideas, discoveries, and opportunities, but also consider what may make the discoveries questionable.  It’s not “either-or,” it’s “and.”  It’s knowing that we must remain open to the possibilities and be willing to investigate the realities.

In the end, I decided that there were more delusions than The Science Delusion.

Book Review-Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World

It was during a conversation with a friend that Margaret Wheatley’s work first came up.  In speaking of the non-linear and chaotic effects of change, he pointed specifically to Wheatley’s work in Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World.  The heart of the work is the deepening understanding of science that relies on probabilities and chaos to create the predictability that we expect.  The work was published in 2006, and since its publication, we’ve learned more about the world we live in and how our belief in formulaic certainty remains a pervasive illusion.

Managing Change

I built the Confident Change Management course with a keen awareness that 70% of change projects fail.  In fact, 70% of all large projects fail.  They fail to complete their work on time or on budget, or they don’t accomplish the results that were hoped for.  Wheatley expressed her confusion that we’d speak of change management – but that change seemed to be overwhelming us, making us feel less capable and more confused.

The answer seems to be found in the realization that change is more complicated and nuanced than we’d like to believe.  The good news in the discovery of the chaos that underlies our beliefs of certainty is that the chaos itself has a certain order to it.

The Relationship to Leadership

As we move into deeper understanding, we recognize that everything is about relationships.  Leadership is, as Burns and Rost said, about these relationships.  (See Leadership and Leadership for the Twenty-First Century respectively.)  These relationships hold electrons around the nucleus of an atom and the planets in orbit around the Sun.  Even through subatomic particles, we find that relationships rule.  Instead of individual parts with their own functions, we find that different parts operate as a part of the whole through their relationships.

These relationships weave together at higher levels of organization, as Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene.  Others’ work, like that in The Evolution of Cooperation, SuperCooperators, and Does Altruism Exist?, explains how cooperation is a better strategy for ingroups and competition is a better strategy for outgroups.  Collectively, these strategies lead to greater success.  However, the dynamics of these benefits change based on relationships.  The more cooperative the relationship, the greater the results.

Change Happens when Necessary

There’s a venture capitalist way of thinking about opportunities as either vitamins or antibiotics.  The point is that people buy antibiotics because they must – because there’s an immediate and critical motivating factor that causes them to take immediate action.  Vitamins are, of course, a good idea, but they’re only a good idea when people have the resources for them and when they remember.  The former are better candidates for investment (though this is only one dimension), because the demand system is built into the model.

In organizational leadership, organizations only change when they need to change to preserve at least some of themselves.  Organizations have come and gone because they didn’t change fast enough.  Organizations that did change may have changed so much that they’re very different organizations than when they started – but at least they’re still alive.  Success stories for radical organizational transformation are less prevalent, but it happens.

When we look at the successes and failures for organizational transformation, we can hone in on timing.  Organizations like Kodak had everything they needed to be successful.  They invented digital photography, but they failed to see the need because their core photochemical business was so profitable.  Organizations like IBM made it because of leadership that recognized the end was coming before it arrived.

Thus, even in the “necessity” category, some organizations won’t recognize the necessity quick enough and won’t pivot fast enough (because of capability or willpower).  As a result, the organization may die.  Resilient organizations are those that can detect when a change is necessary sooner – and can react quicker.

Probabilities Not Predictions

Jonathan Haidt proposes that the reason for consciousness is the ability to predict.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  The ability to predict future dangers justifies the massive cost that cognition requires.  Our brains consume 20-30% of our glucose (energy) while accounting for only 2-3% of our body mass.  They’re very expensive to operate even when they’re designed for energy savings.  (See Thinking, Fast and Slow.)  It’s easy to see how our evolutionary history would lead us to crave the ability to predict in every area of our life.

However, as we reach a subatomic (quantum) level, we see the language shift from prediction to probability.  Instead of A+B=C, we get A+B will yield C 37.6% of the time.  Gone are the assurances of certainty, replaced by the bookie’s statistics and probabilities.

Some would argue that we can achieve certainty.  After all, we were taught that combining chemicals in a beaker would result in a new thing.  Despite the inexperience of the high school class doing the work, the results largely came out as expected.  The real difference between our high school chemistry and the lives we lead is scale.  When you’re scaled to billions and billions of atoms, the result may not be what’s expected in every case – but the number of cases where it didn’t are rounding errors, undetectable, incomplete reactions.  The other variable is time to completion.  Normally, these reactions are complete in seconds or minutes – not the months or seasons that most leadership challenges take.

We don’t want to know what the average result is for a set of circumstances like ours.  We want to know what will happen to our change, our initiative, our pet project.  We’re stuck with probabilities, and that’s not satisfying.

It Feels

Some things are hard to measure.  Some things that are measurable don’t have a measurement framework that make them useful.  Gary Klein explains in Sources of Power about the fire captains that knew how fires work and how to direct firefighters safely into battle a blaze, but they couldn’t describe how they knew these things.  Klein called it recognition-primed decisions (RPD).  More broadly, in the field of knowledge management, it’s called tacit knowledge, and some of it is difficult, if not impossible, to articulate.  (See Lost Knowledge.)

There’s a lot of interest, and some promising results, for artificial intelligence in the detection of medical diseases.  (More specifically, it’s the machine learning branch of artificial intelligence.)  The computer can consistently evaluate more criteria than a human can.  They’re getting better detection rates.  The problem – and one that we’re likely to wrestle with for a while – is that we can’t exactly explain what the models are looking for.  There’s no clear set of articulatable criteria that the system is using.  Even when we build systems to solve some problems, we can’t articulate why it works the way it does.  Sometimes, intuition and “feel” is all we have.

However, the work on prediction tells us that our “feelings” are notoriously biased.  They say that they’re too easy to lead us astray.  So, while we must consider how we feel about something, we must simultaneously be suspicious.  (For more, see The Signal and the Noise, Superforecasting, and Noise.)

Information as Nourishment

The Information Diet calls for conscious consumption of information.  It uses a new metaphor.  Instead of information being power, it’s nourishment.  (Although it doesn’t express this quite as clearly as Wheatley.)  Instead of looking at the collection of information to consolidate power, it’s a way to nourish and grow.  The model exposes the downside of information.  It’s possible to become overwhelmed by information.  Like overeating, too much information can make it harder for us to do anything.  The Age of Overwhelm focuses on the impacts of being overwhelmed and the need for better strategies for managing information.

Information managers, information architects, and librarians have long known that our current strategies for information management are failing us under the weight of an overwhelming amount of information.  They’ve been working to improve the tools we have – but the rate isn’t keeping up.  (See also The Organized Mind.)

I Crave Companions

Wheatley closes with a comment that is worthy of quoting: “I crave companions, not competitors.”  We need more people who are willing to support us and to journey with us through Leadership and the New Science.

Book Review-Changing the World: A Framework for the Study of Creativity

What does it take to change the world?  Depending on who you ask, you may hear different answers.  Perhaps diligence, ingenuity, or innovation make the list.  For the authors of Changing the World: A Framework for the Study of Creativity, the answer is creativity.  It’s important to note that the authors are David Feldman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (see Flow), and Howard Gardner (see Changing Minds) – so, well-respected authors who have made substantial contributions and have demonstrated considerable creativity themselves.

Novel Insights

The sense is that if we want to get to originality and productiveness that can drive economies and nations forward, we need novel insights.  We elevate them to a sense that they’re rare, special, and exalted.  However, what Howard Gruber found while reviewing Darwin’s writings is that they were quite common and generally don’t stand out from the flow experience.

This is important, because it means that these insights won’t necessarily jump out as something profound.  It can be that they’re just the refinement of something people already knew.  Consider the fire captains that Gary Klein interviewed who couldn’t explain how they guided firefighters safely.  It was just “obvious” to them.  (See Sources of Power for more.)

The Individual, Field, and Domain

It’s good to consider the factors that influence creativity.  First, there is a field which encompasses the social and cultural aspects of a profession, job, or craft.  Second, the domain is the structure and organization around a body of knowledge.  Finally, it’s the individual person who is the site of the acquisition, organization, and transformation of knowledge that can change the field and the domain.

Howard Gardner dedicated his Extraordinary Minds to looking at individuals that transformed both the field and domains with their work.

Conscious and Unconscious

In most conceptions of the human brain, there’s a hard line between consciousness and what happens underneath.  However, these lines are probably not as clear as they might at first appear.  While models like Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant-Rider-Path create a separation between conscious processing (the rational rider) and emotions (the emotional elephant), these distinctions are only useful as a model.  (See The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch for more on the model.)  As Lisa Feldman Barrett explains in How Emotions Are Made, they’re not a completely unconscious process.  Elements of our conscious processing seep into our emotions and vice versa.

There’s a parallel in knowledge management to conscious and unconscious processing.  It’s the difference between explicit knowledge that can be decontextualized, written, recalled, and repeated – and tacit knowledge, which exists outside of these concepts.  In Lost Knowledge, we see a continuum of types of knowledge, including knowledge that is currently tacit but, with work, could become explicit, and tacit knowledge that may be impervious to conversion into explicit form.  Similarly, we may find that some things are more or less conscious – rather than being conscious or unconscious.

An interesting observation is how information flows between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind and vice versa.  Experiments have shown that we’ll make up conscious explanations for our behavior – even if they’re fiction.  (See The Righteous Mind.)  We know there’s a conversation going on between our consciousness and our unconscious brain.  However, it’s almost as if we’re listening to it from another room.  We can occasionally hear parts of the conversation punch through the noise, but most of the time, the conversation happens unnoticed.

One of the things that sometimes rises to conscious awareness is lucid dreaming.  That is the ability to recognize that you’re in a dream – in the moment – and to take control of it.  We recognize when we wake and can recall the dream that there is some interaction – even if it’s rarely discovered.

Creativity = Novelty + Acceptance

To understand something, to study it, we need to be able to define it, even if the definition isn’t perfect.  In studying creativity, the authors settled on creativity as the combination of novelty – it’s something new – and acceptance – others accept it as a part of the broader field and domain.  In change circles, we’re clear that anyone can advocate change.  The challenge is to advocate for the right change at the right time.  Anyone can be novel – but to have that novelty accepted at some level yields creativity.

Of course, this definition isn’t precise, but it provides a framework for exploration.  It allows for others’ perspectives on creativity to be accepted.  Consider Tom and David Kelley’s work in Creative Confidence, where they believe that creativity is an inherent part of our humanness, and it’s only through our socialization and schooling that we refuse to try to be creative any longer.  Connecting the views, we try novelty, and it’s not accepted, so we stop trying to be novel.

The Cruelty of Genius

When we think about extraordinary people, we think about people who made great contributions to society, but rarely do we stop to think about the price that these men paid – and the pain they inflicted on those that were closest to them.  (See Extraordinary Minds for examples of the people.)  Being different isn’t easy in a world where we need acceptance, and we like people who are like us.  While extraordinary people are often capable of connections with others – even quite deep connections – they are often arbitrary in their willingness to discard relationships.  Their relationships to others are, perhaps inherently, unstable.

The same kind of focus that creates results can have disastrous consequences – even if the relationships aren’t severed.  In The Assault on Truth, Freud’s decision to look past sexual assault is discussed – including how it severed several of his relationships.  Jung’s intimate relationship with Toni Wolff (a former patient who was 13 years younger) was known and at least tolerated by his wife.  (See Translate this Darkness and Love’s Story Told.)

At the time of the creators’ greatest breakthroughs, they were in at least one sense very much alone.  While they required secure, strong support from other individuals, they were either literally or figuratively alone.  (See Attached for more on the importance of secure, strong support.)  Loneliness is a dangerous place with serious health implications – but one that the creators embraced.  (See Loneliness for more.)  Ultimately, the focus that the creators embodied may have been a Faustian bargain.  They may have sold their soul for their desire to create.

General Creativity

Much like Howard Gardner’s beliefs in multiple intelligences, it is believed that creativity doesn’t exist generally.  (See Extraordinary Minds.)  Creativity can only exist inside of a domain.  The creativity itself may represent the importation of ideas, concepts, and models from other domains.  However, even the polymaths had a limited number of domains that they could operate in.  In these domains, they may be creative, but there is no guarantee that they would be creative in another domain.

To some extent this is because the creator needs to be accepted in the field to get to the acceptance component of creativity – and that isn’t possible across every field.

Measuring Creativity

Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”  In this, he focuses our attention on the need to well understand and define the problem – before trying to solve it.  This is a problem, because the typical way that we measure creativity is by assessing the creativity of the solutions.

That makes sense.  To find a way to get to a structured evaluation, you must have some structure.  You define the scenario and the problem to determine how people will respond.  Drive mentions research that included supporting a candle without dripping with only a box of tacks.  Creativity is expressed in realizing the box for the tacks is a part of the solution: it can be tacked to the wall as a shelf.  This necessarily defines the problem as supporting a candle without dripping – no alternative approaches to the larger problem are acceptable.

If you’ve spent much time on a farm, you learn how to adapt with what you have on hand.  Going to town for a part isn’t a practical option because of the distance to town and the reality that they are often likely to not have the part when you get there.  The result is a sort of see-saw between trying to solve the problem with what you have on hand and trying to redefine the problem in a way that it’s solvable.

We may never get to a good way of testing creativity because of the intersection of the domain-specific nature and the need to accept that problem definition is an important part of creative problem solving.

For Love or Money

What matters most in terms of professional success and creativity?  Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak explain that purposeful practice results in long term success.  We get to purposeful practice by having an initial and sustained interest.  (See also No Two Alike.)  Repeatedly, we find that those who have the greatest probability of success are those that do it for the love of it – rather than for the money.  That isn’t to say that we don’t all need to support ourselves, but rather the greater the focus on the activities rather than the outcomes, the better off we’ll be – and the more creative we’ll be.

Maybe if we’re interested in what we’re doing and are creative, we can start Changing the World.

Book Review-The Quest for Identity

What is it like for an entire country to lose its identity?  That’s what The Quest for Identity is about.  It speaks of the identity of America in the middle of the 20th century.  The book documents a shift from one of personal responsibility and accountability to something else.  It makes sense, as Tom Brokaw wrote about The Greatest Generation – the one that Chuck Underwood called the G.I. Generation in America’s Generations.  Somehow, their focus made it easier for them to find themselves.  That is to say that they had the same struggles in identity formation – but it didn’t seem as severe or last for as long.  (See Childhood and Society for identity formation.)

Progress Democratizes

The first radio broadcast in the US was on November 2, 1920; in 1931, a majority of homes had a radio; and in 1937, 75% of homes had one.  Not even 20 years, and it radically changed music in the United States.  Prior to the introduction of radio, few people could hear an orchestra play – because they had to be physically present.  After the introduction of the radio, people anywhere within the reach of the station could hear the best that the United States had to offer.

Radio made good music available to everyone, just as the internet has democratized access to information.  Technological innovations necessarily democratize what used to be luxury items in the past.  The How of Happiness makes the argument that your current material comfort would have been the comfort of the top 5% of people just fifty years ago.

Changing Morality

Wheelis makes a few arguments about how morality works.  He believes that morality is derived from social mores.  This is slightly inconsistent with the view of Chris Lowney in Heroic Leadership and the approach taken by the Jesuits.  They, he explains, are aware of core beliefs and values as being nonnegotiable.  However, everything else was subject to the mores of the societies they were in.

Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind explains his belief that morality is based on six pillars.  These aren’t about mores but are written into our very being.  Certainly, the research starting with Darwin and continued by Robert Dawkins in The Selfish Gene point to a set of traits or drivers that reinforce survival of the species.  Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation demonstrated computationally that these advanced capabilities would have survived.  Does Altruism Exist? continues this work towards an understanding of how what we call “morals” may have been mechanisms of our survival.

Ignoring the Facts

Not liking a fact doesn’t stop it from being a fact.  When we ignore facts – or fail to look for them – we end up trapped in cults (see Terror, Love, and Brainwashing) or take extreme positions (see Going to Extremes).  We cannot ignore the changes to culture except at our own peril.

More Diverse but Less Variety

If you were to travel back to the early 1900s, you’d find a great deal more diversity, but less variety.  You wouldn’t find the consistency of large organizations and franchises that are indistinguishable from other franchises in other cities, states, and countries.  Each city would have family-run stores.  There would be diversity.

In 1924, a few hardware store owners in Chicago pooled their buying power into what would eventually become ACE hardware stores.  It wouldn’t be until 1926 that the Independent Grocers Alliance brought together the family-owned grocery stores in small cities and linked them in a way that gave them better buying power and better distribution.  These moves (and many others) reduced the diversity in the American landscape while increasing the efficiency.

This efficiency and the demands of the American public ultimately led to an explosion of options.  According to Daniel Levitin in The Organized Mind, the average grocery store in 1976 stocked 9,000 items.  By 2013, the average store had 40,000 different options.

The landscape changed to conformity while allowing for individuals to maintain or increase their individuality.

Protecting Memories

One of the first things that professionals do when they encounter someone who is suffering from trauma is to assess whether they’re alert and oriented.  Alert more or less means that they’re responsive.  Oriented is a bit more complicated; it involves their understanding of who they are, where they are, when they are (year), and some degree of awareness of current events.

Being connected to people, places, and time is a fundamental part of our psyche.  Our feelings of nostalgia invoke the desire to remain connected to people, places, and times.  Sometimes, this desire for connectedness shows up as a desire for mementos from our experiences.

No matter what tourist destination you go to, there will be some objects that have the name of the destination on it.  From keychains to kayaks, are things that you can use to remember where you were.  With clothing, you can even encourage others to comment on your travels and perhaps share stories if they’ve been there, too.

The mementos that we keep need not have the name on them as long as we can still remember where we got them from.  Some things that I have aren’t important because of what they are, they’re important because of what they remind me of.  Almost everyone has this tendency to some degree.

Public Health and Personal Approaches Differ

One of the real challenges in trying to understand how to make an impact is understanding the difference between public policy approaches and individual efficacy.  There are factors that are associated with the increased risk of suicide.  We know that from a mathematical point of view.  However, this information does little to help you when you’re speaking with an individual who is struggling and suffering and looking at suicide as an option.

It’s the core behind the myth that we can predict who will and won’t attempt suicide in the near term.  The factors that operate in aggregate don’t operate at the individual.  Consider the example that Craig Bryan used in Rethinking Suicide.  We know what risk factors cause automobile accidents.  However, we can’t say which people will be in accidents.

Follow Through

I picked up this book because Roy Baumeister in Willpower spoke of Wheelis’ claim for greater insights during therapy but less follow through work on resolving the issues.  I didn’t see these statements play out in any major way through the work, but I developed an understanding of how societal shifts shape The Quest for Identity.