Book Review-You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health

Robert Bogue February 20, 2023 No Comments

Loneliness is a problem for the social creature called human. The shame and secrecy of mental illness has created a Gordian knot of spiraling issues and reinforcement, the only solution to which is for us to end the silence about mental health in the same way that we no longer shun those who have cancer. You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health seeks to bring mental illness out of the shadows and into the light. The idea is that we cut through the shame and secrecy to begin to work on the real issues facing too many people across the globe.

What is NAMI?

Before diving into the book, it’s important to set context. Part of that is explaining what NAMI is. The acronym expands to National Alliance on Mental Illness. Started in 1979 and going through many transformations, NAMI is an organization focused on developing mental health through accepting and addressing mental health issues and facilitating wellness. (These are my words, not theirs.) It’s important to recognize that mental illness impacts more than the person with the illness – it impacts their families and friends, and NAMI’s wholistic approach provides resources to support the entire system around the person struggling with mental illness.

Recovery

There’s a difficult spot in mental health. It’s between those who believe you can eliminate mental illness in a person – they can be cured – and those who believe you can only manage the symptoms of mental illness – and therefore anyone with a mental health diagnosis will retain their struggle until their death. My personal belief is that the answer is both. In some cases, the underlying causes for mental illness are biological. It’s some imbalance or deficit for which there is only maintenance. In other cases, mental illness may be a lack of sufficient coping skills, and as such, it may be possible to recover.

Let me expand for a moment into the world of physical health and diabetes with an analogy. There are two basic types. Type 1 diabetes patients don’t produce insulin – or produce it in insufficient quantities. Type 2 diabetes patients have production of insulin, but the cells don’t readily absorb it – they have resistance. For Type 1 diabetes, there is no “cure.” They’ll supplement their body’s insulin production (if any) for the rest of their life. For Type 2 diabetes, there are several management strategies. Diet and exercise are a start, but this is often layered with various pharmacological tools to reduce the resistance cells have. For many, but not all, patients with diabetes, losing weight will reduce cellular resistance to insulin and may allow them to regain balance without medications.

So, the same disease can have either a management strategy or a recovery strategy. Ultimately, of course, even those who have recovered must keep their weight off, or else they’re likely to see the return of the disease and its long-term implications. One of the interesting quotes from You Are Not Alone is that “recovery was perishable like food in the produce section.” It points to the varying rate at which one needs to reconsider and tend to the factors that led to mental illness – and mental health. Whether or not there is a final “recovery” for mental illness, everyone deserves appropriate treatment.

Blame to Shame

When someone struggles with mental health, it’s seen as a weakness. It’s seen as a problem inherited from parents, either genetically or environmentally. While we know that the degree to which parents can influence their children is limited, we’re often willing to blame them if their children don’t “turn out well.” (See No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption for more on the limits of parental influence both genetically and environmentally.) Instinctively, we look to blame others for the problems that we encounter in the world. This serves two purposes.

First, if you blame someone else, then you can quickly and cleanly absolve yourself from blame. (See Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) for more.) Second, it eliminates the need to confront the probabilistic nature of our world. That is, there are few certainties, and the uncertainty is disconcerting for us. (See The Halo Effect for more.) The real problem is that the probabilistic nature of our world means that our predictions have more error in them than we believe they do. (See How We Know What Isn’t So for more on our overconfidence.) Mindreading asserts that our primary reason for consciousness is prediction. It’s no wonder that our inability to predict what happens next is so uncomfortable for us.

The problem for the recipient of blame around mental illness is that they may need to navigate the waters of acceptance, guilt, and shame. The first option is for the person who is being blamed to reject the blame. If they do, there’s no need to accept and process the blame. However, arguments centered around one person blaming the second person and the second person rejecting that blame are often difficult to navigate.

Presuming acceptance, the next challenge is to decide whether the thing you’re being blamed for means that you did bad – or that you are bad. It’s the gap between guilt and shame – and for too many people, the hammer comes down on the side of shame. When it comes to our loved ones, we can’t accept that what we might have done has harmed them. (See I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) for more on guilt and shame.)

Talk to Me

Strange things happen when people talk to each other. Problems seem lighter. “You’re only as sick as your secrets” is a common refrain from 12-step meetings. (See Why and How 12-Step Groups Work for more.) However, the blame and shame around the topic of mental health keeps too many people from speaking openly about their challenges – whether they’re normal or not.

Amy Edmondson in The Fearless Organization suggests that organizations can make safe environments where employees are able to speak about anything. In my review, I explain why that’s a utopian idea – and a fallacy. There are certainly things that we can do to make organizations safer, like some of those shared in Nonviolent Communication, but they’re not enough when you’re faced with the stigma that mental health faces today. Some books, like How to Be an Adult in Relationships, encourage each of us to become healthy in our relationships with others – but that’s hard to do when others aren’t on board. Henry Cloud and John Townsend in Safe People and Cloud in The Power of the Other make clear the many things that can go wrong in relationships and what we’ve got to do to protect ourselves.

Sometimes, it’s simply skills that are missing. It could be that we need to learn some emotional intelligence. (See Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence 2.0.) Sometimes it’s an inability to understand the person we’re talking to. We might categorize them via Reiss’ 16 factors, as explained in Who Am I?, or the Enneagram, as explained in Personality Types, for the purposes of understanding their perspectives better. We might need skills developed in Reading the Room, so that we can quickly surmise the other person’s perspective. We might even need to look for a more specific answer when it comes to the mental health of our children. (See How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk.)

The goal should always be to find ways to better understand the people you are with so it’s easier to communicate. However, that’s sometimes easier said than done. Sometimes, it’s hard to even understand what others believe.

Rational, If You Believe What They Believe

In Going to Extremes, Cass Sunstein explains what causes groups to develop progressively more extreme views. However, it doesn’t take a group to develop extreme views. Extreme views are disconnected from reality, and sometimes that disconnect can be the mental illness itself. If you pretend that you’re watching a movie and suspend your disbelief, you may be able to see the world like they do – at least to an extent. When we watch the latest science fiction or action movie, we accept that what we’re seeing is real. We don’t question the levitating heroes or everyone’s flawless execution. Instead, we suspend our disbelief to experience the story – sometimes that’s necessary when coming alongside people with mental illness.

Often, we can find rationality in seemingly irrational behaviors. We find that, if you believe what they believe, their behaviors and responses make sense. That doesn’t make them objectively right or that their responses are okay, but it does make it easier to predict their next behavior – making our world just a bit easier.

Meaning

Nietzsche said, “He who has a Why can endure any How.” Too many of those with mental health issues don’t have a purpose – or have their purpose stolen from them by their illness. With no meaning – no why – they succumb to the tragedy of their circumstances. (See Start with Why for more about finding meaning.) In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande reviewed the research that shows that even meaning as little as tending for a plant is sufficient to change mortality of the elderly. They can’t go if they’re here to tend for something or someone else.

As we seek to serve and be served by those who struggle with mental illness, we can’t forget the sense of burdensomeness that they may feel that will lead them to thoughts of suicide. (See Why People Die by Suicide for more on burdensomeness.) Similarly, we should consider how serving others pushes back loneliness. (See Loneliness for more.) The other side is the sense of burden that care givers can feel and their tendency to experience compassion fatigue or burnout. (See Is It Compassion Fatigue or Burnout? for more.) Sometimes the solution to caring for mental health is to realize that You Are Not Alone.

Theory X, Theory Y, and the Hybrid

Robert Bogue February 14, 2023 No Comments

Douglas McGregor proposed two different approaches to management. Theory X presumes that people are basically disengaged and lazy, desiring to fill only their most basic needs, while Theory Y managers are focused on empowering and enlightening their employees. While it’s widely believed that Theory Y is a better approach for productivity, it’s also believed that many executives don’t perceive others as being “driven” or motivated.

Baseball

What does baseball have to do with organizational management? Perhaps nothing, but people began to notice what the Oakland A’s did in the early 2000s. In Moneyball, Michael Lewis explains that Bille Beane and his team replaced hunches and instincts with statistics – and it paid off big time. If we go back a bit further, we learn of Jackie Robinson’s career and his relationship with Al Campanis. Robinson was the first black Major League Baseball player, and Al was a fellow player who often defended him when it was uncomfortable to do so. (See Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) for more on the story.)

The story looks like a classic story of Theory Y and the belief in the capabilities of others. However, there’s a darker side to the story. Campanis didn’t extend his belief to all black people, nor did he extend his belief of Robinson’s capabilities to baseball team management. It’s fine, from Campanis view, for Robinson to be a great baseball player – but not a great baseball team manager. It’s equally normal for Robinson to be a good human and to not change his perception about all black people.

It’s in this that we begin to realize that Theory X and Theory Y are overly simplified perspectives on the dynamic interactions that happen between people and others’ beliefs about their capabilities.

Altruism and Selfishness

Adam Grant in Give and Take describes curious findings. People who were “givers” ended up at the bottom of the stack – and at the top. But why? The answers may lie in the multiple levels of competition. While Richard Dawkins argued for The Selfish Gene, he was a bit fuzzy about what would constitute a gene. He simply described it as a unit that replicates, but he didn’t confine it to biology, having coined the word “meme” in the same book.

At the most basic level, when a unit is selfish, it will be more successful almost by definition: to be non-selfish or altruistic means that you’re giving up some of your resources for the benefit of others. However, odd things happen when you encounter groups of more altruistic replicators vs. those that are selfish. When altruistic behavior results in a net positive for the group, the individuals that are altruistic within the group are at a disadvantage, but the group itself is at an advantage over other more selfish groups.

The dynamic interplay of the intra- and inter-group forces could account for very good results and relatively poor results. More than that, the work of Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation and others demonstrates that varying approaches to solving the classic Prisoners Dilemma problem could result in sustained oscillations, where more selfish strategies were dominated by more altruistic or forgiving approaches, until the tide turned and the situation reversed itself.

From the Board Room to Bored in the Room

Executives spend countless hours in meetings being briefed, sharing perspectives, and working with teams. Whether the executive team at the organization is a cohesive, collaborative group, or it’s relatively cutthroat and conniving, it’s unlikely that an executive will see their peers as being passive or content, like Theory X would presume. Clearly, at the senior management level, Theory Y should prevail.

Even with the pressures of drive and ambition knocking at their door, most executives have built some personal life, and that personal life often involves children. While, doubtlessly, executives love their children, it doesn’t always mean that they believe their children have the same drive that they had. Numbers are hard to find, but college enrollment is falling. (See Collect Enrollment Statistics.) At the same time, dropout rates for colleges are climbing. If executives viewed their college career as their ticket to success, they see their children – or the children of others they know – failing to take advantage of it.

There’s another big factor that is often blamed on millennials. Job hopping is seen as a problem by many employers, who believe that millennials are changing jobs more frequently than Baby Boomers or Generation X. However, the data doesn’t seem to support that. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data implies that average job tenure is one-third of the available working years. That holds relatively true across age groupings and time. There are differences – but they tend to be small. So, the perception is that people are job hopping – trying to find a better or easier job – more than their parents, but this is just how it feels.

The net effect is that, in some places, executives see people who are driven – and other places, including their own families, they see people who seem to need to be motivated to do even the basic things.

What About Ralph

In Work Redesign, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham speak about how to redesign work so that you’re able to get the most out of employees – and they feel the best about their work. However, in the midst of their work, they speak of the worker they call “Ralph.” Ralph’s ambitions and beliefs in his ability had long ago been crushed and abandoned. He was quite content with his role, because he couldn’t withstand the frustration of the gap between his desires and what he was being asked for in the organization.

However, when confronted with challenges to become more engaged – to be more Theory Y – what happened confused Hackman and Oldham. Ralph resisted the additional responsibilities and freedom, preferring instead to remain in the role as things had been. They concluded that, had he expanded his horizons now, it would be tacit admission that he shouldn’t have given up in the past and resigned himself to the limited corporate life he had.

So it may be that there are both Theory X and Theory Y people. It may be that one is treated like the other until they decide to become it, and once they’ve made the decision, it may be hard to get them to change. It’s not as simple as waving a wand and getting people to step up to greater responsibility – sometimes, it takes helping them accept that previous decisions they’ve made may not be appropriate any longer.

The Training Bellwether

It’s easy to point to training as a bellwether for how management sees the organization. The question is whether they’re encouraging the continued learning and growth of their employees or whether they’re trying to extract every ounce of short-term productivity that they can.

Henry Ford said, “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.” For all the perceptions of Henry Ford as a Theory X kind of person, his statement sends a clear message that training is an important part of the development process of employees. If you’re not training, then you’re trying to extract everything you can.

If you want to see how an organization feels about their employees in general, look to how they train them.

Book Review-Helping the Suicidal Person: Tips and Techniques for Professionals

Robert Bogue February 13, 2023 No Comments

They want to help; they just don’t know what to do. It’s a tragic fact that most psychology and sociology programs don’t have a single class regarding suicide in their entire academic career. So therapists and social workers encounter a suicidal person and they feel – as they are – completely unprepared for what to do next. Helping the Suicidal Person: Tips and Techniques for Professionals is a way of addressing the gap in knowledge –and coming to a better place of nurturing and support to help people move away from suicide as the only option.

Note: Throughout this post, I’ll be using “client” as shorthand so as not to distract from the readability. I don’t intend to imply that everyone with whom you’ll encounter is a client, nor that you can’t use these techniques if you’re not a therapist.

Research Power

While the tips are research-informed, they are often offered with limited support in research. There’s a simple reason for this. The research is hard to come by. Sometimes, research can show a reduction in attempted suicides but not in completed ones. In fact, to show a 15% difference in suicide rates (with an appropriate confidence interval), researchers would need to enroll 13 million people. That’s a relatively impossible challenge. As a result, we have to accept the research that we do have and attempt to make the best of it.

Sometimes, the problem isn’t scale. Sometimes, the problem is the ethics of the situation. Consider that there is no randomly-controlled trial about the use of parachutes reducing death when jumping from an airplane. Obviously, they work. So obviously that no one would subject someone to the control condition of death to demonstrate that people without parachutes jumping from planes die.

This is a case where even though there is no research supporting the efficacy of the approach, it doesn’t mean the approach isn’t (or can’t be) effective. It just means that the research hasn’t been done for a myriad of reasons, including time, money, and ethics.

Disclosure of Suicidal Thoughts

In some ways, it’s as if clinicians are practicing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as an approach toward suicide prevention. Many clinicians don’t ask – and, particularly, don’t ask directly – if someone is considering suicide. There was a historic concern that this might “plant” the idea of suicide in the client’s mind, but research has proved this to be incorrect. Even without this defense, it’s still a hard thing for most clinicians to ask, so it’s frequently swept aside and forgotten about.

On the other side, the probability that a client will volunteer their thoughts of suicide are very low. Despite somewhere between 1:5 to 1:6 people having thought about death by suicide, it’s unlikely that they’ll bring it up. Instead, they’re more likely to believe that if the therapist doesn’t ask them, it’s not important – secretly knowing that it is.

The Loaded Question

Some questions cause people to become defensive, because they’re not sure how the person asking the question will respond. The underlying challenge is that the question is related to something you think is – or may be – related just to you. The Kinsey Institute found that asking the question “How old were you when you first started masturbating?” got a much better response than “Do you masturbate?” Embedded inside the first question is the assumption that it’s something everyone does, and therefore the question of “when” isn’t particularly disturbing. Of course, the small percentage of people who don’t – or won’t admit it – will respond that they can’t answer the question. In working with people who are thinking about suicide, questions like “What are some of the ways that you’ve thought about killing yourself?” gets better answers than “Have you thought of ways to kill yourself?” The presumption embedded into the question makes a difference to the way that people respond.

Similarly, you can intentionally stay ahead of where the person is likely to be by asking the question leading to an overly extreme – but not absurd – level. For instance, you could ask “Do you think of killing yourself 20 times a day?” The answer may be 15 – but the person will start by telling you “not that much” and giving you an answer that’s more likely to be accurate.

Fear of Commitment

One of the barriers that clinicians must overcome is the client’s fear that if they say the word “suicide” or admit to suicidal thoughts, they’ll be involuntarily committed. Involuntary commitment is a sometimes necessary but always troubling challenge. People who are involuntarily committed experience a loss of freedom and control that can further exacerbate their reasons for wanting to die and simultaneously can destroy and therapeutic alliance and trust that might have been created. (See The Heart and Soul of Change for more about the importance of therapeutic alliance.)

One of the challenges is that the client’s goals and the professional’s goals may be different. The professional wants the person to stay alive, and the client wants the pain to stop. As a result, there can be a gap through which clients become concerned about how their therapist will react. They’ve likely heard stories about an involuntary hold – and they don’t want to experience it themselves.

Neither Lecture nor Pep Talk

Motivational Interviewing calls it the “righting reflex.” It’s the tendency to directly correct a person’s perspective by telling them how they’re wrong – and it’s powerful. It was Carl Rogers who insisted that client was the expert – in their lives. We may, from a few minutes of conversation and some notes provided by others, believe their pain is manageable and their problems are all solvable, but from their perspective, they’re not. Until they believe you truly understand, they won’t listen to suggestions; even after they believe you understand, they’ll not listen unless you tread gently by asking careful, somewhat leading, questions.

Lectures about how someone’s behavior, feelings, or perspective isn’t right has never worked – even when you were a child. It induces guilt, shame, and invalidation, which further pushes them away. It also causes them to become more entrenched in their positions. They start looking for ways to defend their position and they find them. They ultimately have invested more in their perspective and become less likely to change it. (See Influence for more on these effects.)

Pep talks don’t work because they’re hollow. Letting people experience joy and happiness is a good strategy to fight depression that seeks to convince them they can’t find joy or happiness. However, these must be experiences they want. One useful technique that I’ve used is to intentionally set a positive event out several weeks out so that anticipation can build. The actual amount of time that you set the event in the future is dependent upon the client, but the point is to build an idea in the future. Do be prepared that depression will try to convince them they won’t have fun. The response is “Didn’t you have fun in the past?”

Rank and File

One strategy for assessing the importance of various reasons for dying is to ask the client to list them, and then rank them in order of importance. This has a focusing effect that allows you to focus your energies on the most important items. Sometimes, it’s possible to carefully walk them through strategies that break down the barriers preventing them from overcoming their reasons for dying.

For instance, if they’re struggling because they can’t find a job, you can work with them on ideas to get a job. Care must be exercised here, because you’re likely going to move quicker than the client. You’ve seen these problems and solutions before and so you know the landscape and you’re likely to rush ahead. However, helping people work through problems is directly addressing the problem-solving challenge and cognitive constriction that seems to be found with most suicidal people. It’s worth the time.

Reasons for Living

It’s an awkward conversation to ask people why they want to be alive. It’s awkward when suicide isn’t a consideration and can be even more awkward when it is. Often, you’ll need to start with the reasons why people want to die before getting to their reasons for living. It’s important to recognize that people who are struggling with thoughts of wanting to die may have trouble enumerating their reasons for living.

You may need to prompt them to explain who would miss them when they’re gone or what they do to support others. You might suggest they go through their recent calls and texts and make a list of those people who would miss them or their support.

They Can Move On

A somewhat typical response to reasons for dying may be that so their loved ones can “move on with their lives.” This is the quintessential comment of burdensomeness. (See Myths About Suicide for more on burdensomeness and its relationship to suicide.) In many cases, however, the others that the client believes will “move on with their lives” are the recipient of the pain that the client is trying to displace. Suicide and Its Aftermath says it plainly. Suicide transfers the pain from the person who dies to those who survive.

Certainly, there are some situations where a person’s health is such that they are, in some sense, a burden to others. However, one of the things that all people tend to misunderstand is that burdensomeness should be measured by the person who is (perceivably) burdened. It’s possible that the other person doesn’t perceive it as a burden and may even believe it’s an opportunity to replay the kindness and support they’ve received. Encouraging a more realistic perspective of the degree of burden is a good idea.

No Warning Sign Is Particularly Meaningful

One of the problems that exists in suicidology is that we believe things that aren’t true. Thomas Joiner wrote a whole book about Myths About Suicide. Craig Bryan in Rethinking Suicide challenges us to realize that the screening tools that we use don’t work. Some still insist that most (or all) people who die by suicide sent warning signs. Joiner addressed this directly and Bryan indirectly, but the myth persists.

The simple fact of the matter is that we have no way of knowing who will die by suicide or not. We know statistics and probabilities – but not people. There are lists of warning signs that cause concern, but it takes judgement to decide who is at the most risk of immediate harm to themselves and who isn’t. It’s recommended that clinicians record the reasons for their assessments in their notes so, if there is any question in the future, there’s a record of why they assessed the risk the way that they did.

All that to say that while there are key indicators – like directly stating that they want to die – none of those indicators in isolation is a direct prediction of short-term risk. It’s only by looking at all the factors in the situation that someone could assess risk.

The Tips and Techniques

The listing of tips and techniques are:

Reflect on Your Biases about Suicide
Take Stock of Your Experiences with Suicide (or Lack Thereof)
Confront “Suicide Anxiety”
Be Alert to Negative Feelings Toward the Suicidal Person
Reject the Savior Role
Maintain Hope
Face Your Fears
Directly Ask about Suicidal Thoughts
Turn to Techniques for Eliciting Sensitive Information
Embrace a Narrative Approach: “Suicidal Storytelling”
Ask about Suicidal Imagery, Too
Uncover Fears of Hospitalization and Other Obstacles to Disclosure
Recognize that, for Some People, You are an Enemy
Avoid Coercion and Control Whenever Possible
Resist the Urge to Persuade or Offer Advice
Understand the Person’s Reasons for Dying
Validate the Wish to Die
Acknowledge that Suicide is an Option
Gather Remaining Essentials about Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior
Learn about Prior Suicidal Crises: The CASE Approach
Cautiously Use Standardized Questionnaires
Privilege Warning Signs Over Risk Factors
Screen for Access to Firearms
Inquire about Internet Use
Probe for Homicidal Ideation
Collect Information from Family, Professionals, and Others
Examine Reasons for Living
Identify Other Protective Factors
Pay Attention to Culture
Investigate Religious and Spiritual Views of Suicide
Solicit the Person’s Own Assessment of Suicide Risk
Estimate Acute Risk for Suicide
Estimate Chronic Risk for Suicide
Document Generously
Know When and Why to Pursue Hospitalization
Know When and Why Not to Pursue Hospitalization
Do Not Use a No-Suicide Contract
Collaboratively Develop a Safety Plan
Encourage Delay
Problem-Solve Around Access to Firearms
Discuss Access to Other Means for Suicide, Too
In Case of Terminal Illness, Proceed Differently (Perhaps)
Seek Consultation
Make Suicidality the Focus
As Needed, Increase Frequency of Contact
Treat Chronic Suicidality Differently
Involve Loved Ones
Suggest a Physical Exam
Recommend an Evaluation for Medication
Continue to Monitor Suicidal Ideation
After Safety, Address Suffering
Look for Unmet Needs
Target Social Isolation
Use Grounding Exercises
Assume Nothing: Does the Person Want to Give Up Suicide?
Tap into Ambivalence
Compare Reasons for Living and Dying
Invite the Person to Look for the “Catch”
Search for Exceptions
Frame Suicide as a Problem-Solving Behavior
Help Brainstorm an “Options List”
Teach the Problem-Solving Method
Nourish Future Plans and Goals
Incorporate a Hope Kit
Highlight Strengths
Connect Suicidal Thoughts to Other Thinking
Educate about Cognitive Distortions
Help Challenge Negative Thoughts
Elicit Coping Statements
Rescript Suicidal Imagery
Discourage Thought Suppression
Foster Acceptance of Suicidal Thoughts
Enhance Coping Skills
Cultivate Mindfulness
“Broaden and Build” Positive Emotions
Pair Behavioral Activation with Values
Differentiate Between Suicidal and Non-Suicidal Self-Injury
Determine the Person’s Reaction to Having Survived
Conduct a Chain Analysis
Evaluate Where the Safety Plan Fell Short
Take Advantage of the “Teachable Moment”
Attend to the Therapeutic Relationship
Address the Trauma of the Suicide Attempt
Explore Shame and Stigma
Warn about the Possibility of Relapse
Review Lessons Learned
Complete a Relapse Prevention Protocol
Propose a Letter to the Suicidal Self
Follow Up

Maybe it’s time for you to learn the tips and techniques that you can use to start Helping the Suicidal Person.

Small Group Safety Rules – Before, During, and After

Robert Bogue February 7, 2023 No Comments

There are many cases where groups can be powerful tools for healing. Whether these groups are in a religious context, a mental-health recovery context, or simply a community context, they need to remain psychologically safe for everyone. This guide is designed to address what should be done before you meet, while you meet, and after you meet to ensure the psychological safety of everyone involved.

Before

Before anyone gets together, they need to understand what the rules will be and what is expected of them. Setting expectations prevents people from arriving at an event unprepared for the rules of the event. Here are some suggestions for rules that every group should have:

Confidentiality – Except as expressed in the organization of our group or explicitly agreed to by the participants of the group, everything shared in the group will remain in the group. No one will disclose what was discussed except through the rules the group has agreed to.
Privacy – If you are participating virtually, we ask that you take steps to ensure that the others in the group will not be heard to protect their rights to control who hears what they’re sharing.
Safety – This group will respect both the physical safety and the psychological safety of every individual. No overtly threatening physical activities or verbal attacks will be tolerated.
Power Dynamics – In every group, there are a set of power dynamics that are unavoidable. Our goal is to minimize them so that everyone feels free to share.
Inclusivity – Everyone will be given the opportunity to speak and share. We will not dismiss or interrupt others when they’re sharing.
Focus – Everyone in the group is present for a reason. We ask that you remove distractions that may prevent you from fully participating, including silencing phones and removing other potential distractions.
Curiosity – Stay curious about what the other person is sharing, including their values and the perspectives that led to their beliefs.
Judgement Free – This group will remain judgement free. Everyone is entitled to their own values and experiences. We don’t have to agree with them. Our goal is to understand them.

Further, for groups that are intended to create space for hurting individuals to share, it’s recommended that you add:

No Commentary – Participants should not directly address other participants’ comments unless specifically requested and approved by the person who’s being responded to. Even positive comments may be interpreted negatively or reinforce the perception that they’re being judged.

In addition to the rules, it’s recommended that participants receive invitations to the behaviors that are desired. Some desired behaviors are:

Titles – Please introduce yourself without unnecessary titles, certifications, and credentials. Consistent with our stance on power dynamics, we don’t want to imply that anyone else’s perspective is less valuable.
Preferred Pronouns – We encourage you to signal to other participants your preferred pronouns, if you desire. It’s expected that others will honor your preferences, though they may forget or stumble. If other participants don’t use your preferred pronouns, we suggest that you model the pronouns you would like to have used.

These invitations and rules help participants prepare for their experience with the group. However, in some cases, there may need to be a broader understanding of why the group is gathering and the expectations of behavior. An introductory statement can set the tone for the gathering even when the tone can’t be translated into specific, defined behaviors. For example, an introduction might look like:

We’re looking forward to everyone joining us for this event. Our goal is to create a safe and inviting space for everyone to feel heard and listened to. We expect to demonstrate our caring and compassion for one another. To do that, we’ve established a set of expected ground rules, which are:

During

When the group meets, there are two big goals. First is setting the tone for the group, and second is maintaining the integrity of the group.

Setting the Tone

The process of setting the tone has two parts. First, participants should be reminded that they’ve seen the rules governing the meeting, and that their presence is a tacit agreement to those rules. They’re further reminded of critical rules in summary. For instance, a tone-setting statement might look something like:

You’ve all received the set of rules that we’ll be following here, and by your presence here, we accept that you agree to abide by them. As stated, confidentiality about what we discuss here is paramount, and we remind you that what is said here will only be shared in the ways that we’ve all explicitly agreed to.

Second, the first person to share should model the behavior that’s expected from the group. The facilitator or convener should call on someone to start the conversation who can demonstrate the expected approach. This can be someone with whom the facilitator has prior conversation or someone who has experience with the group process and knows what behavior should be modeled.

Maintaining Integrity

Facilitators should be on the constant lookout for boundary-pushing or boundary-crossing of the rules that are established for the group. Boundary pushing is when a participant makes a comment that’s inside the rules – but just barely. It’s important for facilitators address participants who are intentionally or unintentionally boundary-pushing, because not every participant will see these as boundary-pushing – some will interpret the response as a boundary-crossing. Boundary crossings refer to those cases when someone feels as if the rules of the group have been violated.

In all cases, the facilitator should start with gentle shaping remarks designed to steer the participant(s) back inside the boundaries for the group. If this isn’t effective, the facilitator should directly remind the participant(s) of the rules that were agreed to. In extreme cases, it may become necessary to provide a single warning that further boundary crossings will result in expulsion from the group. Finally, if a warning is given, and the participant breaches the boundary again, they should be expelled immediately.

In our experience, almost never does the situation require the warning – and in decades of experience, we have only seen someone expelled from a group once. While these are exceedingly rare events, everyone should believe that these measures can and will be enacted if necessary.

After

After the event, the need to protect the safety of the group isn’t over. A follow up message should be sent, which includes a reminder of rules that persist beyond the meeting and is a summary (without details) of what was experienced.

Typically, the rule that is most necessary for post-meeting is confidentiality. The communication should indicate whom information is authorized to be disclosed to – including restrictions on those not in the group – and, if appropriate, when disclosures will be made. In some cases, the group will have agreed to share notes with those beyond the group. In cases like this, it’s ideal to provide the notes to the members and invite them to review the notes for a short period of time prior to being shared more broadly using the terms and conditions previously agreed to.

In cases where no disclosure is authorized, the follow-up message should state this and provide a generic appreciation and summary of the event. For instance:

Thank you for your participation. We feel that it was enriching experience for everyone and hope that you feel the same way. As you know, none of us will be sharing the details of what was discussed during the meeting, but we’re deeply appreciative of the stories and perspectives shared during our time together. We respect the vulnerability and courage everyone displayed in creating the space of learning and caring.

Book Review-The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs

Robert Bogue February 6, 2023 No Comments

“Reheated in a microwave oven” is the best way to describe The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs. It’s a rehash of Maslach and Leiter’s previous book, The Truth About Burnout. I disagreed with their approach in 2018 when I read it, which was originally released in 2000. I had hoped that their update would address the problems with the previous edition – and in some ways, it did. However, it also doubled down on some of the problems of the previous work. I’ll start with the criticisms and then move to finding some value in the work.

I do need to acknowledge that, because we’ve written a book, Extinguish Burnout, and have the corresponding website, we’ve got a competing interest of sorts. Also, Maslach attempted to discredit an article that we wrote about the origins of burnout as a construct – for which we were able to quote page and paragraph from Freudenberger’s original work, Burn-Out. In so much as it is possible, I’ve tried to not allow this to color this review of the book; but at some level, I’m sure it’s unavoidable.

In most situations when I read a book that I so strongly disagree with, I simply don’t write a review. It’s not worth the effort just to dissuade people from reading the book – however, due to the degree to which the book leads people astray and the positive bias that people might have towards reading it because of Maslach’s name, I felt that it was important that I post this review. My hope is that I can illuminate common misconceptions and pitfalls that exist in the burnout space as well as to clarify some of the difficult parts to understand.

Connecting the Research

My biggest disappointment is that the revision didn’t connect to the research that has been done since the previous work. There weren’t internal research citations for burnout work; instead, there were vague references to “research supports” – which isn’t satisfying if you want to see what was really said. Often, what people say research results mean aren’t what they do mean or are even in conflict with the research author’s own interpretation of the results.

It also didn’t connect to work outside of the direct burnout space. Instead, in many cases, the statements in the book contradicted what research in adjacent areas has shown. Let me provide some clear examples:

Stress – Some of the best work on stress comes from Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. (I wrote three posts to review it.) It explains how stress functions and how it’s a short-term/long-term balance that results in long-term inefficacy, but this is totally missed. Also missed is the work that Lazarus covers in Emotion and Adaptation and Barrett’s work in How Emotions Are Made about the importance of the person’s interpretation. These would have, of course, undermined the premise of the book. If we acknowledge the way people respond to stressors in the environment, we can’t completely blame the environment. Of course, the work on behavior being a function of both person and environment goes all the way back to Lewin’s early work. (See A Dynamic Theory of Personality for more.)
Psychological Safety – In the space of creating psychological safety, Amy Edmondson’s book, The Fearless Organization, is the landmark. Edmondson and her work on creating psychologically safe workplaces doesn’t get a mention – even though the argument is that workplaces are the problem and that improving safety is at least part of the answer.
Incompetent Leadership – In numerous places, the book blames incompetent leadership despite having never defined what leadership is in the first place. Of course, many have tried to address this topic, including Burns in Leadership and Rost in Leadership for the Twenty-First Century. The book further sidesteps the skills that would make leadership competent – like those described in The Leadership Machine. Ignored was the work indicating that every layer of organizational hierarchies will struggle with the others, as explained in Seeing Systems. It’s easy to blame the leadership when they’re in the “them” group.
Intrinsic Motivation – The idea of people’s motivations coming from themselves gets a single reference. Deci’s work in Why We Do What We Do received only cursory attention despite being an important mediating factor to the need for direct organizational/structural motivation. Daniel Pink’s extension to this work in Drive was similarly ignored.
Teams – While The Burnout Challenge addresses the need for collaboration, there’s no mention of Hackman’s work (e.g., Collaborative Intelligence), Hansen’s work (e.g., Collaboration), or works like Group Genius that would operationalize the concept of collaboration.
One View of Organizations – The Burnout Challenge views organizations as machines, but that’s only one way to conceptualize them. Also ignored was the work in Images of Organization, which describes how our views of organizations can help us – and hurt us – in understanding and changing them. Other works, like Reinventing Organizations, use the mechanical lens to show how the motivations of organizations and their operation can be different. This allows greater clarity about the kinds of structures that seem to lead to better employee engagement – and therefore less burnout. (Research demonstrates that engagement and burnout are largely overlapping concepts.)

The Errors

In addition to the omissions, there are some direct errors in the work. For instance:

Equating Moral Injury and Compassion Fatigue – The former is the result of asking someone to do something that violates their moral/ethical standards, and the latter is the result of prolonged exposure to others’ negative emotions. Frameworks would have exposed this. Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind covers the foundations of morality – and the conflicts that can and do arise. Likewise, teaching how to manage moral injury would be useful, as Kidder does in How Good People Make Tough Choices. In Moral Disengagement, Bandura explains how systems are structured to disable our morality – which could address or mitigate moral injury. (Admittedly, this is probably a bad thing.)
Extensive Research on Burnout – Here, the problem is they assert that the research supports the three-component model of burnout that Maslach uses – exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. While there is research that supports this formulation, it’s also what people were looking for, so the results can be explained by many reasons. As we learned with the Hawthorne effect, things aren’t always as they seem. (See Management and the Worker.) Second, the statements ignore the research that refutes not only the construction that Maslach uses but also that burnout is a separate concept from depression. I do believe there are nuances that separate burnout from depression – but they’re very small.

There are, of course, other errors, but fundamental errors like these are harder to excuse.

Understanding the Criteria

As stated above, Maslach has proposed there are three categories that should be used as the defining characteristics of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. However, it’s relatively simple to deconstruct this and realize why the formulation isn’t right. (There are research articles that point to limitations as well, but a simple logical progression will be quicker.) We’ve all been exhausted without being in burnout. Cynicism is what happens when we don’t feel effective any longer – thus leaving us only with inefficacy at the core.

Understanding the relationship between these factors at a deeper level requires an understanding of systems. Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems explains the basic stocks and flows that drive all the work around systems. In short, we have a reserve of willpower that we consume when we feel ineffective. (See Baumeister’s excellent work, Willpower, for more on willpower.) When that willpower is exhausted, we feel hopeless. The work of Seligman and others on hopelessness indicates that hope is a powerful force. (See The Hope Circuit.) This hopelessness – our feelings of permanent inefficacy — triggers cynicism.

However, there are other dynamics at play. Willpower is a consumable resource but one that recovers. So, we oscillate between hopelessness and the resulting cynicism, and feeling as if there may be hope – and we don’t need to be cynical. The exhaustion component of the equation has its cyclical nature, too. Some of this is rejuvenated when we sleep, even if we’re less tired and more exhausted – feeling like we have no energy. The Burnout Challenge is quick to point out that burnout requires being sustained – and exhausted requires that as well. However, the dynamics of cyclical progression are ignored.

The challenge is teasing out the causal nature of one of the components to the other and the relationships of these cycles. To my knowledge, no one has been able to show these relationships. I am, however, aware that screening high for burnout often leads to screening high for depression.

The Match

Another major consideration is the match between the employer and the employee. While the match itself isn’t explained, there are many dimensions on which one could base the degree of relatedness. Before we get to that, imagine a “surfer dude” in swim trunks, with a long-board at his side, on a southern California beach where the waves are “righteous.” Also consider the immaculate professional in a custom three piece suit, expensive shoes, an expensive briefcase, and a watch that costs more than some people’s homes walking into the board room of a financial services firm in London. Both are precisely fitted for the environments that I described. Reverse the scenarios, and they’re incredibly out of place. That’s the match problem.

It doesn’t mean that the circumstances or the people are wrong. It means that the match is wrong. One of the challenges in The Burnout Challenge is that, though the framing is that there’s a bad fit, the book returns to the good vs. bad dichotomy, which isn’t real. It speaks of six factors (explained shortly) that are about how the employers aren’t being good to their employees – regardless of the match.

It’s described as a match, when the reality is that it hides a negative view of employers, including both management and leadership.

The Six

The six mismatches are as follows:

Work Overload – Here, the focus is on overworked workers who can’t keep up with the demands being placed on them. See the section on measuring performance below for more on this topic.
Lack of Control – This is the autonomy that a person has to influence the work they do. (See Compelled to Control for why I hesitate to use the word “control” here.) This is where Deci’s work on intrinsic motivation is briefly raised.
Insufficient Rewards – Here, the word “rewards” is used as a proxy for both direct rewards and recognition. (For tips on this, check out 365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees with Little or No Money.)
Breakdown of Community – Community is the relationships with supervisors, peers, and the broader organization. See the section, “Social Capital,” for more.
Absence of Fairness – The perception (or lack thereof) that decisions are made fairly – that is, impartially. See the section, “Equitable,” for more.
Values Conflicts – When things that the individual finds important aren’t important to the organization, burnout is likely to arise, because they see no progress on the things that are important to them.

Measuring Performance

Let’s take a quick look at retail performance. It’s measured in inventory turns – that is, how fast merchandise is sold on average from the shelves. Here’s the official numbers from a retailer that we all know:

1994 – 3.45
1995 – 3.75 (8.7%)
1996 – 3.66 (-2.4%/6.1%)
1997 – 3.85 (5.2%/2.7%)
1998 – 3.98 (3.4%/8.7%)
1999 – 4.01 (0.8%/4.2%)
2000 – 4.22 (5.2%/6.0%)
2001 – 4.75 (12.6%/18.5%)
2002 – 4.56 (-4.0%/8.1%)

The first number is inventory turns, the second number is improvement, the third number is the two-year improvement. Any guess at the retailer? If you think that it’s Walmart, you’d be wrong. It’s the competitor that Walmart crushed: K-Mart. Home of the blue-light special improved its performance – but not enough. Walmart’s performance for the same period was:

1994 – 5.14
1995 – 4.88 (-5.1%)
1996 – 5.16 (5.7%/0.4%)
1997 – 5.67 (9.9%/16.2%)
1998 – 6.37 (12.4%/23.5%)
1999 – 6.91 (8.5%/21.9%)
2000 – 7.29 (5.5%/14.4%)
2001 – 7.79 (6.9%/12.7%)
2002 – 8.08 (3.7%/10.8%)

It wasn’t that K-Mart wasn’t improving – they were. Just not fast enough. The question of performance is always relative to some reference point, and in this case, the point of comparison is the competitor. K-Mart simply couldn’t keep up with these numbers.

In the context of burnout, we have two forces working on us. First is the force of the external expectations of the organization, and the second are our own expectations. The external expectations can be out of sync with reality. For all of the negatives of Fredrick Taylor’s Scientific Management, it did have the benefit of being able to identify standards and norms for individual activities – and thus set reasonable expectations.

The unfortunate reality of today is that most organizations have no idea what a normal level of performance should be for many of the tasks performed. They simply accept the results that their current employees are achieving. When employees are replaced, this can lead to massive disconnects, as the previous person may have had the temperament and skills that made them perform the task substantially better than average – or substantially poorer. When working with external expectations, it’s important to evaluate what they’re based on – and why those results may need to be adjusted. Dan Ariely explains in Predictably Irrational that we often fail to correct our initial assumptions sufficiently.

Internal expectations are often more challenging. They’re based on a desire for maximization (see The Paradox of Choice), perfectionism (see Multipliers), or simply previous conditions that no longer apply. They may be expectations that were once external by parents, coaches, or others that have become internalized and now feel like truth. When we’re facing internal expectations, we often need to find ways to develop better acceptance of ourselves. (see No Bad Parts and How to Be an Adult in Relationships for more on acceptance.) That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t maintain a desire to get better. Carol Dweck in Mindset explains how a growth mindset allows for growth while acknowledging the current conditions, and Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak explain how to take that to excellence.

It’s important to note that, clearly, internal expectations aren’t the responsibility of the organization; they’re something that each of us bring to the organizations we join.

Social Capital

Robert Putnam’s work in Bowling Alone is a classic as it relates to the concept of social capital – that is, our ability to get things done because of our relationships. In his follow up book, Our Kids, Putnam explains how this social capital impacts our children. In the organization, most HR professionals know that people join organizations, but they leave managers – and sometimes the group dysfunction that managers allow to continue.

As humans, we need relationships: to be expelled from our communities was a death sentence. We need to depend on others to share the work and make the load lighter. (See Healthy Dependency in Relationships for more.) In the context of work, relationships are with our manager and our peers. If they’re good, they’re a shield that will stop us from considering other offers or leaving when we’re upset. If these key relationships aren’t right, then nothing will be right.

For the most part, these relationships can’t be directly controlled because of the variation in perspectives, experiences, and values, but there is one way that organizations can ensure they get better outcomes. That is to insist on accountability. (See The Four Disciplines of Execution for more.) That’s no guarantee that there will be good relationships, but it makes it more likely.

Equitable

We need to understand why fairness is so important. To do that, we can look at a game that economists use. It involves two people and $10. The first person picks the split between the two people, and the second person decides if either of them get the money. From an economic point of view, any split between them should cause the second person to accept the deal, because they’re better off for it. (See Drive, Choosing Civility, The Marketing of Evil, and Positive Psychotherapy for coverage of the ultimatum game – it’s very popular.) However, the economist view isn’t the one that happens. When the balance between the two gets shifted away from the second person by about 60-40 or 70-30, they start saying no. By 80-20, it’s even more profound. But why?

It appears that our evolution has necessarily involved the addition of anti-cheating responses. Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene proposed that genes were exclusively selfish. However, Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation showed how collaboration could be adaptively evolved. Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind expressed a similar sentiment – with much less math. The evolution of cooperation requires a way to identify cheaters and punish them. Thus, when we detect people trying to cheat us – to not be fair – we have a natural reaction to try to punish the cheater. That means we have to detect the problem, and some of that relies on the way we view the situation.

At first, it appears as if equitable and equal should be the same. If two people receive the same amount, then it should be equitable. Fair enough. However, what happens when the amount is a percentage increase? Someone making $1,000,000 getting a 10% increase gets an extra $100,000 while the person making $50,000 gets an extra $5,000. Is that equitable? Maybe, but maybe not. It depends on your framing.

If you’re focused on the amount, then it appears unfair – even more unfair than in the ultimatum game. If you are focused on the percentage, you recognize it as “fair” because it’s equal. So, here, there’s an important message for organizations: make sure that what you’re doing appears as fair as you intend it to be. The Righteous Mind considers fairness (and not cheating) a foundation of morality, and certainly this rings true. It’s foundational to the way all people view things. There are competing possibilities for the ultimate moral decision, but largely we all believe we should be fair. Being effective at maintaining employee engagement (and thus avoiding burnout) includes emphasizing the ways in which the decisions are fair.

Collaborate Within, Complete with Outside

Morten Hansen in Collaboration makes the point the most clearly. You must keep competition on the outside and collaboration inside. He’s not alone: Group Genius, The Culture Puzzle, Bowling Alone, Collaborative Intelligence, and even The Hidden Brain express the same sentiment. Competition inside of groups is bad. However, the question becomes how large is the collaborative vs. competitive group? For the most part, organizations have abandoned the review approach of stacked ranking, where members of a group are sorted from best to worst, and typically the worst are let go. Clearly, this was bad, because it set up inherent competition in the group. However, what about different divisions in the same organization? Steve Balmer’s reign at Microsoft was filled with inter-group conflicts, which may have been part of the reason why the stock price was flat for such a long time.

The Burnout Challenge equates this competitive group aspect with a culture of fear. In the context of losing a competition, that’s fair – however, it’s in many ways too broad a characterization of the safety (or fear) that someone feels at an organization. This is just one aspect of the story. If the organization utilizes competition internally, but even the losing group retains their jobs and gets other interesting assignments, it’s possible and probable that they’ll feel safe.

Self-Employed

One curious condition arises when one thinks that it’s the leadership’s fault that you’re burned out. What happens if you’re self-employed? Who do you blame for being overworked and under recognized? The answer is yourself, obviously – but what do you do about it? The challenge with the framework laid out in The Burnout Challenge is that there’s very little you can do. Because the model doesn’t account for perceptions or our ability to change our perspectives on the same objective facts, we’re left stuck.

Mind the Gap

For us, the issue is really in the gap between expectations and the results that you believe you’re getting. If you believe that you’re getting the results you expect, you will feel effective, and you’ll avoid burnout. These expectations can either be internally driven – that is, what you expect – or externally driven – what the organization or your manager expects.

It’s entirely possible to be in a situation where expectations are misaligned – but they’re your expectations of yourself, not the expectations foisted upon you by others. One of the key things we tell people is that most of the requirements for what we do aren’t the requirements of others but are instead the way that we believe we should behave. It’s not about the boss that expects that there won’t be any typos – it’s the expectation we have for ourselves.

This has two implications. First, it’s this gap that moves us towards burnout, and it takes a lot of support and self-care to avoid burnout. Second, it means that burnout can be entirely internally driven and doesn’t necessarily require the influence of the organization at all. (See The Paradox of Choice and Multipliers for the impacts of maximization and perfectionism.)

Band-Aids

One of the most useless things for burnout – in the long term – is a two-week vacation. Many of the popular solutions to burnout is to offer people massages at work or encourage them to take a two-week vacation, but the truth is that this is just an opportunity to recover. It doesn’t address any of the fundamentals of the situation that led to burnout in the first place. As the old saying goes, if nothing changes, then nothing changes. You can’t expect to stay out of burnout if you return to the same situation that led to burnout with the same tools. You either need to change yourself, change the situation, or get new skills.

Is This Thing On?

Are you listening to the feedback you ask for? If not, you’re contributing to the idea that their work and opinions don’t matter. It’s the harsh reality for too many organizations. They must execute an employee survey every year, because someone told them they had to. They might even say that the items identified in the survey will be addressed – but far too often, the survey is done, and no one has any idea how to convert the feedback into a set of actionable steps to change the outcomes.

The bigger problem with this behavior is that it breaks the trust that you will pay attention, the result of which is that people stop telling you the truth about the situation, making it nearly impossible to recover.

Where the Lever Breaks

I’m all for leverage and scalability. I love finding simple solutions that have great returns. It’s magical when you see it happen. One could easily accept The Burnout Challenge’s assertion, “Where major advances in workplace well-being occur, they come through better workplace design, not through supplying organizations with tougher employees,” if it were not for our knowledge that this rarely works. It’s the strategy fallacy. Sometimes, it’s called the “planning fallacy,” and it’s apparent in the way that we run projects differently today.

It used to be that we’d run waterfall-type projects with big, upfront planning of what we wanted and a large development cycle. It worked well for hundreds of years, as engineers built bridge after bridge and building after building. There were some notable failures, but they were always explained away as aberrations. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge failed, because new materials in use elevated aerodynamics to a point of concern. As long as the projects were the same, things worked relatively well, even if tragedy occurred when things did change.

Software development through the 1980s used this model with dismal results. Projects didn’t work, they were late, and more over budget than the Sydney Opera House. As a result, in the late 1980s, a shift started happening towards what is now called “agile development” or “agile approaches.” Unlike big, upfront planning, it recognized that there were things that had to be learned along the way, because every project was essentially unique.

Agile approaches are iterative, emphasizing making small changes, learning, adapting, and trying again. This allows teams to learn during the process and discover challenges that simply can’t be predicted. That’s where the great level of strategy breaks – where it encounters an unanticipated problem. When it comes to people and their perceptions, there are always unanticipated problems. Consider The Coddling of the American Mind, which explains how we’ve attempted to warn people that they may be triggered by content only to discover that students continue to be triggered by content – just not the content that the instructor expects.

To be clear, I’m not opposing strategy. We need a strategy. However, we need to accept that strategy isn’t the only solution to the problem. It’s not a case of whether we need better designed organizations or tougher employees. The simple fact of the matter is that we need both – or rather, we need to accept that strategy isn’t enough. We don’t need tougher employees – we need employees that are more equipped to handle the slings and arrows that life throws at them inside and outside the organization.

Match Matters

The major premise of The Burnout Challenge isn’t without merit. Match does matter. When you’re in an organization or a position that doesn’t match your skills or temperament, it can move you towards burnout. However, the key is understanding how that happens – so you can intervene and prevent it.

If burnout boils down to perceptions of efficacy, then how does a bad fit lead to less efficacy? Physics has the answer. When one object collides with another, and there’s no energy converted to friction, the entire energy is transferred to the second object. (In practical terms, there’s some deformation and therefore energy conversion to heat, but it doesn’t matter for this example.) Perfect alignment means almost perfect energy transfer.

Consider that we’re measuring efficacy based on how far to the North an object travels, but instead of being hit square, our object is hit at a 60 degree off-axis angle. The energy is still imparted to the second object, but the yield from that energy is literally half of what it would have been had it been an aligned transfer of energy.

If we’re still expecting our full efficacy – and we are – then we’ll feel like we’re coming up short, because we are. When we mismatch with an organization, we struggle, because there is so much effort spent adapting to the mismatch, and that friction and misdirection makes us feel less effective. That lack of efficacy, in turn, leads us to burnout.

So, while there are many things with The Burnout Challenge that are wrong, we can recognize that match between person and environment does matter.

The Grand Illusion

Robert Bogue January 31, 2023 No Comments

It’s the title of a Styx song, but it’s also the inability to see what should be so patently obvious that we could scarcely miss it. The movie, The Matrix, would say, “… the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Unlike the Matrix, where once we’ve seen it we can’t go back, we often fall into the lure of predictability and clarity.

Other People’s World

Pick your favorite social media platform and do a random scrolling or swiping through posts and stories. You’re likely to see two things. First, other people are doing stuff that seems cooler than the stuff you’re currently doing. (After all, you’re just scrolling.) Second, their lives seem more ordered and directed than your own. For the first, the important part is that one need only recognize that posts on social media are, for most people, a highlight reel. They post things that are positive. They don’t (often) post the picture of the coffee they spilled all over themselves, the dog vomit they had to clean up, or the million other small insults or frustrations that comes with daily life.

For the second, the perception of an ordered life is the grand illusion. While you may see a consistent or at least thematic element to their posts, you’re likely ignoring the time they did something slightly out of character. The social media view obscures the struggle that they had to figure out which way to go with their lives.

In fact, marketing people are quick to point out that people who are trying to generate a persona should not share these distractions from their core identity – even if they’re real. I violate these principles regularly and on principle. I’m a whole person, and I want people to see the random connections I make – even if the consequence is that people can’t really understand my identity and therefore my personal brand.

A Researcher in Another Field

When you’re reading, and you encounter piercing insights into humanity by another human author or researcher, it’s natural to assume that they’ve spent their entire career looking for that one insight, and once it came to them, they carefully wrote it down to be elevated to the status of essential wisdom. The truth is, however, much messier. In my own journey, I’ve wandered across topic areas. Burnout, conflict resolution, mental health, and suicide are a wide variety of topics. What has started happening without warning is that people whose work I admired in one area has surfaced in another. For instance, Roy Baumeister’s work on Willpower is great. But his work spans into the suicide prevention space as well. Carol Dweck’s work on Mindset is another classic. Her work in burnout is less well known.

These powerful researchers toiled in relative obscurity in fields before – or sometimes after – the ones they became known in. This is a place where the grand illusion starts to break down. When we encounter these great works, we can become pigeonholed into believing that the researcher is focused on that area. However, when we discover that they haven’t always focused on what they’re known for, we’ve got to ask, at some level, how that can be. One can’t have spent their whole life trying to solve one problem if we discover other, less successful, areas of their career.

We’re faced with the reality that they’re not as singularly focused and successful as we believed. We’ve heard stories about how the great artists weren’t “discovered” until after their death. They toiled in relative obscurity while they were with us. However, somehow that perception that people could not be known has been relegated to a memory of distant times in the past. After all, with the factors we have today, shouldn’t the great professionals in every industry be identified quickly and rewarded?

The One Stand to Rule Them All

People are fickle. Bell bottoms are in. Bell bottoms are out. Bell bottoms come back. In our world of rapidly changing desires and near ubiquitous availability of the internet, one might believe that people who have developed expertise or insight might naturally be elevated to the position of influencer, sage, or master. However, the same problems we had in a pre-internet era plague us today. Do a search for burnout on the internet and see how many hits you have to wade through. Too many people become “experts” because they spend an hour “researching” burnout on Google, then feel competent enough to write about it –whether they’re right or not. (The book review listing has 16 books that I’ve read specifically on burnout – and that doesn’t include related topics. We take research seriously.)

This creates a sea of noise that both content creators and content consumers must contend with when they try to connect, to transmit the true insight to the world. For the most part, people settle for the more mundane. Minor influencers admit that they’re not being fairly compensated, as individuals who are paying for the services wonder where have the good guys and gals gone. AI-based content creation tools, like ChatGPT, have all the markings of making this problem worse and not better.

It’s far more common for me to find people who have changed their focus than it is for me to find folks who have had a consistent connection to a single topic for the course of their career. The truth is that they didn’t know – and couldn’t know – what aspect of their interest and works might be picked up and identified as interesting to others. It’s a constant stab in the dark that all sorts of artists face every day. They don’t know when they’ll be discovered – or for what. As a specific reference, look at the work of Joan Borysenko, who wrote the book Fried. The last blog post on her site related to burnout was 2018. Her work has focused more recently on spirituality.

Best Work

Sometimes, people leave an area for decades. In my own work, I wrote about burnout first in 2003 – and it took until 2019 to write the Extinguish Burnout book with my wife. For about 15 of those years, I didn’t give burnout much thought. It took the gap of 16 years to come back to it and spend time with it again. However, it’s not held my focus for the last four years. It’s another thing we do – but not the only thing we do.

The illusion created is that other people lock on to their best work, and it’s what they become known for. However, the truth seems to be that people work on something, leave it, come back to it, and leave it again. There’s not one topic to take a stand on that they’ll never leave.

Creating the Illusion

Two decades ago, I got to see Siegfried and Roy at The Mirage. Their tiger show was amazing. However, I was literally sitting inside the stage, where you could see how some of the illusions were performed. They forced the audience’s perspective, which hid black cages and paths the tigers would use to get themselves off stage. The illusion was great for most of the audience.

It’s that forced perspective that transforms the winding pathway of life into the perception of a linear projection from the start of life to the end. When we only see those messages aligned with what people have done in their area of recognition, we see the illusion that they choose to create – and that we choose to accept.

If you want to create the illusion of consistency, the brand marketers would say that you only communicate on your primary point and silence all the rest. It means that your true gift to the world may be stifled or never recognized – but it will create the illusion that your world has been exclusively focused around one thing. If you’re going to do this, I encourage you to try to choose wisely. Too many have had to retool after years of sending the wrong message to the world.

Book Review-The Selfish Gene

Robert Bogue January 30, 2023 No Comments

It all started with memes. I wanted to know the origin. I wanted to understand how they start, how they function, and how to generate them. I discovered that the root was The Selfish Gene – and memes were conceived as the ideological counterpart to genes. The book is long in the tooth yet as important to understanding evolution today as it ever was. It explains not just the simplicity of selfishness but also how altruism can appear as a complex solution to the simple replication problem.

The Replicators

The most basic start of life, it is presumed, began with molecules that could convert raw materials into copies of themselves. Ultimately, they’d consume all of the molecules that existed in their environment, and they’d have to evolve to more and more complexity to continue to replicate themselves. In the process of competing to be able to replicate themselves, these mini-factories developed into the sequences that we today call genes.

The language throughout most of The Selfish Gene is intentionally open. Dawkins is clear that his perspective is that a gene is a minimally sufficient unit to replicate. It ignores the number of molecular sequences necessary to constitute a gene and instead focuses on the replication behavior. This is convenient, since it allows for combinations of molecules in ways that say a gene can be of arbitrary length if it’s capable of replication.

Selfishness

Those that win in the replication game are those that can replicate the most – and beat out competitors of the raw materials. There’s not intent or complexity, it’s just whatever can make the most copies wins. The complexity only arrives when we discover the methods that the genes use to ensure their success – particularly in competition with others.

The Evolution of Cooperation

In The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod explains the results of the game theory simulation work that he did. He pitted programs against one another in a game of “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” The short of the game is that two robbers are caught by the police. If both stay silent, they’ll each get three years. If one defects, they’ll get only one year, while the other person gets five. If they both defect and sell out the other, then they’ll both get five years. The best selfish strategy is to always defect – if the other person doesn’t. The best strategy for both parties is to not defect. This simple setup allows for several strategies for determining whether the other person will defect and therefore what your best strategy should be.

This is the rise of complexity: predicting what others will do – or, more simply, adapting to the environment in which you find yourself. The better you can detect what your competitor replicators are doing, the greater your probability of beating them out for precious resources.

Sexual Reproduction

Our sexual reproduction is just one of many strategies that have evolved by the genes that are cheating by offering a little less to the combination than they should. Sexual reproduction involves the shuffling of genes through two parents. Each provides half of the genes, and this constant shuffling leads to a lot of variation of gene combinations, so that genes can work together to ensure their replication. Research on bees has shown that genes do, in fact, work together for their replication, with two separate genes being required to uncap and throw out infected grubs which collectively benefits the hive.

While it seems like there would be disadvantages to mixing genes through sexual reproduction, the benefits of being able to work with other genes quite obviously has some advantages too.

The Cheats

When it comes to sexual reproduction, there are cheaters – and they’re called males. In my review of Anatomy of Love, I explained that men chase and women choose. Dawkins lays out why that may have happened. Assume that that the replication started with two replicators contributing equally to the offspring using sexual cells – gametes. It would be beneficial for one to skimp a bit on resources while seeking out other gametes that were slightly larger, thus allowing the other parent to invest more in the reproductive process. This could progress to the point where one produced many small gametes – sperm – and the other to produce fewer, larger, gametes that we’d call eggs.

From the moment of conception, then, females have invested more in the reproductive process than the males, and therefore they need to be choosier about with whom they mate. It’s wise for a female to pick a male who she believes will be supportive through raising an offspring even if they didn’t invest as much initially.

Cheating evolves at a second level, when females pair with dependable males, making them believe that the offspring are theirs while secretly copulating with other males, who may have other desirable characteristics. Similarly, males who can convince females that they’ll support the offspring but instead abandon them for another will have an evolutionary advantage. For every action, there’s a counter action.

The Ultimatum Game

Perhaps that’s why we’ve evolved to detect and punish cheaters. One of the classic tests that sociologists have used to test this is called the Ultimatum Game. In it, there are two people. The first gets to decide how a prize – typically $10 – is split. The second person gets to decide whether either person gets the split. In other words, if the second person doesn’t like the split neither person gets anything.

From an economic standpoint, the second person should never say no. After all, even if the split is 9:1, the second person is a dollar richer for the experience. However, that’s not what happens. What happens in most tests is that when the split exceeds about 7:3, the second person starts disproportionately saying no. They’ve decided that the first person isn’t fair, and they will punish them even at their own expense.

It’s an odd response until you realize that it would be necessary to prevent cheaters from taking over the replication game.

The Value of Groups

The Righteous Mind suggested that we became the dominant biomass on the planet due to our ability to have a theory of mind for other humans. (See also Mindreading.) This allowed us to work together and conveyed an advantage over animals that had to work on their own – or at least those with less ability to anticipate or predict the other animals’ movements. Humans as a race are relatively frail. However, our ability to cooperate conveyed more advantage than fur or tooth. We live in groups because it is better for us to depend upon one another.

Social insects are a bit different in their composition. They essentially divide into the bearers (of genes) and the carriers (of those who transmit the genes). In other words, very few of the insects replicate genes, with most of the population running the factory that cranks out copies of these genes. In effect, they’ve got their own slave labor built in, with workers blindly working towards the goal of replicating the genes of the queen. This group arrangement serves all in the context of replicating their genes.

Imitation

Memes are a thought or idea that replicates. They replicate from one brain to another through imitation. Memes survive in the same way that genes do: competing against rivals, their longevity, the ability to replicate, and the fidelity with which they are imitated. Much like the early proteins that replicated in the primordial soup, there’s little indication of which ideas will replicate and which ones will not – and even more than that, which ones will remain over the course of years or decades. Repetition and other factors increase the chances of a meme remaining. (See The Hidden Persuaders for more.)

Many boomers and Gen-X remember the jingles and tag lines from the commercials of their youth. Simple sayings like, “When it rains it pours,” (Morton Salt) and “Where’s the beef?” (Wendy’s) are stuck in our minds and periodically find themselves being reused and adapted.

In our social media world, we find memes that quickly come and go. Very few memes have staying power, though some resurface from time to time.

Immortality Through Genes and Memes

Let’s face it. Our bodies will die. No one will live forever. What we leave behind in this world are our genes – through our offspring – and our memes – that is, our ideas. While genes have been the dominant replicators on the planet, they eventually seem to die out. They may die out faster than ideas. After four generations, someone has only 1/32^nd of the genes from one of their ancestors (on average). After a few more generations, the genes will be diluted even further, eventually potentially extinguishing all the genes from a particular ancestor.

Conversely, some ideas seem to persist. Consider Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato from Greece. What about Shakespeare and Yeats from England? Some ideas greatly outlive the people who create them – and that’s why memes may ultimately become the dominant replicator on the planet.

Parasitic Replication

We tend to think that our genes are pure representations of one animal – even the human animal. What we rarely consider is how virus may be a separation of a gene or that a virus might integrate new genetic material into our genes. We tend to think in terms of purity, but what if the actual combinations include parasites and viruses as a part of the evolutionary process? If a parasite replicates as a part of the normal reproductive cycle of the host, how long will it be before the parasitic genes eventually become incorporated into the host? There’s no definitive answer to this question, but it seems like eventually the two will become one.

Maybe one day our memes will be able to regenerate our genes, and it will come full circle. Maybe we’ll realize the true power of The Selfish Gene.

Book Review-Guns and Suicide

Robert Bogue January 23, 2023 No Comments

Very few things could have a greater immediate and visceral impact on people than talking about Guns and Suicide. Few topics are more sensitized in America than guns. Few topics are more emotional than suicide. No matter where you fall on guns, you likely have a strong opinion. Some are heavily for, and some are heavily against. Suicide is something that will likely impact each of us indirectly through our network of friends and their friends, and once it has, the world is different.

In Guns and Suicide, Michael Anestis walks through the issues and the opportunities to save lives – not by removing guns but rather by helping people store them more safely.

Number 2

Yes, the right to bear arms is the Second Amendment, but I relate the position on gun ownership based on my home state of Indiana. I believe we have some of the least restrictive gun laws in the US – second only after Texas. We’ve been for a long time an “open carry” state, which means that your side arm, if you choose to wear one, can be openly visible. We recently moved to what the NRA calls a “constitutional carry” state – that is a permit is no longer required to carry a handgun.

I personally own several guns and keep guns in both my office and home for protection – despite knowing that the odds I’ll need them are heavily against me. The guns that are for home protection are all stored safely – they’re in a box or they have a trigger lock on them.

I make these points not because I want to convince you guns are good but rather to share that I don’t have any problems with guns – either for hunting or home protection.

Lost Two

I’ve lost two beloved members of my family to suicide – both completed with a firearm. Several years ago, now my grandfather chose to end his life rather than face declining health. While I disagree with his decision, I respect his right to make it. In August of 2021, we lost our son, Alex, to suicide. This more tragic, because Alex had his life in front of him, and his decision was not well-considered.

Two men in my life and two different situations both using firearms – and neither the same. Both impactful.

Safe Storage

Before getting to the impact of safe storage, it’s important to define what it means. The answer is somewhat situationally dependent. The short answer is that there’s some barrier to being able to use the weapon. This could be that the ammunition is stored separately from the guns, or it could mean the use of a locking device. Locking devices come in three major categories:

Cable Locks – A cable is placed through the gun in a way that prohibits it from being loaded. These locks are the most common kind of lock available, largely because they come with every gun when purchased new.
Trigger Locks – These locks go around the trigger and prevent the trigger from being pulled. These locks can be used while the gun is loaded.
Vault Storage – Vaults or safes are used to store the gun. This prevents immediate access to the gun.

The Impact of Safe Storage

Research varies, as it always does, but some studies place the risk of suicide death from a gun that is stored loaded and easily accessible at nine times the rate of a gun that’s stored safely. Pause for a second and ponder how a simple lock or vault can be enough to change an outcome so powerfully. While the answer to the question of “how” the mechanisms work to create an impact, there’s no doubt that having guns stored safely has an impact.

It’s important to say that safe gun storage also impacts unintended discharge by a child as well as theft. Certainly, the numbers are about suicide, but children discharging guns they find is a different kind of tragedy that also needs prevented.

Home Protection

One of the key barriers to people wanting to store guns safely is the concern that they’ll not be available during a home intrusion. The truth is that guns are used to defend homes in just 0.9% of all home intrusions (data is from 2007-2011) – so, an incredibly small percentage. The data showed that there was injury in 4.2% of the intrusion cases overall, and 4.1% when a gun was used for self-defense. The net of all this is that gun use for self defense seems to make a negligible – if any – difference in the likelihood of injury from an attack. (The data comes from the journal article, “The epidemiology of self-defense gun use: Evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007–2011,” not from this book.)

There’s no statistical evidence for safe storage vs. unsafe storage, which isn’t surprising given the incredibly low incidence rate. It’s hard to study things when the overall rate is so low. They’re so low, that it’s difficult to believe that it will be an event that will impact most people.

Gun Purchases

Statistics can show you odd relationships – sometimes that make little sense. There’s pretty good research that says if you add a barrier to a chosen form of suicide, people rarely will switch to a different method. If they want to jump from a bridge, and you add a fence, they’re likely to not die by suicide. That’s why, when you read that a gun purchase is an indicator of higher rates – even excluding suicides that involve a gun – it makes you tilt your head.

Reporting the Thought

Admitting you have a problem is hard for all of us. Trying to explain to someone that you’re feeling trauma because of something that you’ve seen or been through is difficult – particularly if the situation wasn’t traumatizing to them or is perceived as “normal.” Soldiers underreporting of suicidal thoughts should not be surprising. The culture of macho-toughness and the general need to not be seen as weak don’t make it easy to admit you’re struggling.

The problem is that you can’t help someone that you don’t know is struggling – and the very act of sharing your suicidal thoughts with someone makes them less intense and painful. (For the mechanics of this, see White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts.)

Background Checks

Background checks have been a part of gun purchases for some time. Initially installed with a waiting period, this waiting period has all but been resolved thanks to technology. However, not all background checks are the same. Some operate solely at a federal level, some at a state level, and others operate all the way down to the local level. It turns out the level at which the background check is done matters to the outcomes. Federal level checks were associated with an 11.64 per 100,000 suicide rate, and local level checks with a 5.74 per 100,000 rate. Clearly, the more locally you evaluate gun ownership, the more probable it is that you’ll catch concerns.

You don’t need a background check to check out the background in Guns and Suicide.

Moving from How to What: Website Relaunch

Robert Bogue January 19, 2023 No Comments

Thor Projects is entering into its 18^th year of business. Throughout our history, we’ve focused on communicating “how” we get things done. We’ve focused on our software development, courseware development, and other specific things that we’d do. However, over time, we’ve realized that the executives that we were working with didn’t really care. They care about the results that we can deliver for them.

We just recently rebuilt the entire website. Instead of focusing on industries we serve or the “how,” we shifted to communicating the outcomes. Businesses today are having trouble retaining employees and, importantly, engaging employees. We’ve been addressing this issue for years by fixing burnout, improving conflict resolution, and, more recently, enabling empathetic conversations. Organizations want to achieve better outcomes. Most don’t know what’s wrong and need someone to evaluate their programs, get support for their success, and plan for performance. It’s not just that there’s not enough time, there’s a need to better understand what has worked for other organizations.

We live in a world of constant change and that demands organizations be agile and to continuously transform themselves. We’ve been helping organizations be more confident in their changes, modernize their technology infrastructure and operationalize change throughout the organization.

What’s rather intentionally missing is the power of the Microsoft 365 platform, including Viva, Teams, and SharePoint, as well as the most widely-used client applications on the planet. We don’t cover the ability to develop custom software, leverage the Power Platform, or help manage multi-cloud solutions. These are the “how” of “what” we do. They’re the details we can discuss when customers are ready to engage.

You’ll also notice that we’re not enumerating the industries that we’ve served. There’s not a mention of the powerful solutions that we’ve implemented in healthcare, financial services, government, and manufacturing – to name a few. Every industry is different, and we know that through the work we’ve done. If we can’t communicate that we can help you and your organization get the “what” they want, then the industry doesn’t matter.

The Connection

One of the challenges of our previous messaging is it was too complex. People didn’t understand what we stood for. They could see all of the activity, but a clear picture wasn’t emerging. There’s a reason. We were talking about the various “hows” but the message isn’t clear until you look at what we were doing. We have and will continue to help organizations be successful. Sometimes, that leads us down paths that seem odd, but the destination is always the same.

We’re proud of the results our clients have seen. One client reduced their rework from 92% to less than 20% in a single year. That’s about changing the process – and implementing the technology to support it. Clients have processed millions of documents through the document pipelines we’ve engineered. The results are more reliable delivery of responses and faster answers. Dozens of clients have seen how we can take a languishing division or product line and revitalize it. Finally, we have a website that starts to explain how we help organizations be better.

The Complex Made Simple

The new website features an explosion of a watch in the header. It’s a subtle message. If you look at the inner workings of a watch, it seems chaotic. However, it’s not. It’s just complicated. Someone needs to understand how to put it together and how the pieces fit. However, for most people, using a watch is simple – you simply need to know how to read the time. This is an analog for what we do. (Pun intended.) We take apart the back end, the internal components, so that we can make things work simply enough that our customers can tell time by looking at the face. No one must know “how” we make it work – they only need to know that we will make it work.

We’d love your feedback about the new site – and the focus on what we can do for you rather than how we do things. If you still want to know the how, we frequently publish white papers that explain this.

WingingIT Launch

Robert Bogue January 17, 2023 No Comments

The first person I ever co-led a workshop with was Eric Shupps. We have so many memories, including the time that I got told that I was hard to listen to. We both thought that Eric would be the one that got flagged for difficult to listen to first. (I took out a $20 and told him that he won.) Over a decade ago, Eric was one of my co-conspirators on the Microsoft ECM Implementers Course that was available for partners.

We’ve started a new video podcast where we talk about some of the things that we’ve encountered along the way. We’re starting with the state of enterprise content management in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 – as well as why we call it “content services” occasionally.

It’s a fun time and a great way to understand the real story about Microsoft technology – along with some interesting stories about how we ended up here.

Check it out the second Thursday of every month.

Public Speaking