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Moving from How to What: Website Relaunch

Robert Bogue January 19, 2023 No Comments

Thor Projects is entering into its 18th 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.

Book Review-Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

Robert Bogue January 16, 2023 No Comments

Recovery is more than the abatement of symptoms.  Recovery from mental illness returns us to a place where we can have a full and meaningful life.  That’s what Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health is about.  It’s changing our definitions of what is – and isn’t – okay, and what it does and doesn’t mean to have mental fitness.  It’s going to take a lot of work to change our way of thinking of mental health.  Robert Pearl shares in Uncaring and Mistreated how messed up our medical healthcare system is.  Mental health in America is generally regarded as worse – substantially worse.

Two Kinds of Families

There are, they say, two kinds of families in America.  There are families who have already experienced mental illness, and those who will.  There’s no escaping mental illness more than one degree of separation from you.  It’s too prevalent.  There is too much suffering to go around.

The truth is that most of our medical problems are actually the outcomes of poor mental health – as was shared in Change or Die.  If we just modify a few behaviors, we get much better health outcomes.  Less smoking, drinking, eating, and stress coupled with more exercise might stop 80% of our healthcare costs.  Not that we know how to do these things – but they draw the connection between our mental health and our medical tragedies.

We may not diagnose the mental health issues any more than we diagnose not enough exercise, but that doesn’t make the reality change.  The fact of the matter is that mental health issues are the largest category of disability recognized for disability support in the US – and yet we’re doing very little to resolve it.

Said differently, about 5% of adults meet criteria for a serious mental illness – as do about 6% of youth.  Sitting in a room with 20 people, one is likely to have a mental health concern that could be diagnosed as a mental health illness.  It’s everywhere, and we pretend that it’s not.

Murder and Suicide

There are a lot of deaths related to serious mental illness.  Many people are concerned that the people who are struggling with mental illness may become harmful to others or even commit murder.  While this does happen, a much greater concern is the elevated risk of suicide for those with a diagnosed mental illness.  It has been said that as much as 90% of suicides could have been diagnosed with a mental illness.  I disagree with this – unless you include non-serious mental illnesses.  The number of people who have been prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) is startling – and scary.

Blame Where There Should Be None

It used to be that we blamed mental illness on poor families either from the experiences that they inflict on their children or genetics.  (See No Two Alike for more.)  Today, we recognize that mental illness doesn’t have a cause in bad people.  It’s a tragic but somewhat random outcome of life.  There are some things that we know will lead to complications, tracing all the way back to prenatal stress (fetal onset of adult disease, or FOAD) and adverse childhood experiences (ACE).  (See Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers for more on FOAD and How Children Succeed for ACE.)  These complications aren’t caused by the person themselves or even their families.  They’re just a tragedy of life.

Rose Kennedy

One could easily believe that Rose Kennedy’s deepest heartbreak would be the assassination of two of her sons.  However, she said, “deeply hurt by what happened to my boys, but I feel more heartbroken by what happened to Rosemary.”  Rosemary was mentally challenged from birth, but it was a botched lobotomy that sent her to a care facility.  Before then, Rose Kennedy supported Rosemary in their home.  It’s no wonder that John F. Kennedy was concerned about mental illness and mental health.  His 1963 special message to Congress was the last time a U.S. President focused so extensively and exclusively on mental health care.  The Community Mental Health Act that it spawned was the last bill that he signed before his assassination.

The act had the effect of breaking up state-run hospitals with the intention of redirecting those with mental illness towards community mental health centers.  However, by and large, these community-based resources never materialized, and many with serious mental illness found themselves thrown out on the streets.

Save Me, San Francisco

The band Train released an album and title song, Save Me, San Francisco, in 2009.  The band, from San Francisco, recounts their journeys and desire to return to their home.  However, not everything in San Francisco is so rosy.  During my many visits to San Francisco, I realized that whatever I thought I knew about a homeless problem paled in comparison to the challenges the city was facing.  The truth is that homelessness as a problem didn’t really exist prior to the 1970s – as the state-run mental health institutions were being dismantled.

People who had adapted to a life of institutionalization were thrown on the streets – unemployed, destitute, and homeless.  They were completely unskilled for the world that they would have to navigate, and the resulting homelessness showed it.

Step Back

While Carter tried to resolve the problems by signing the Mental Health Systems Act in 1980, it was too little, too late.  He’d be out of office soon, and Ronald Reagan immediately slashed federal spending – starting with the framework established by Carter.  More than that, he removed the first mental health team at the White House – the team that Carter had built.

The disaster inflicted on mental health wasn’t just contained to Ronald.  Nancy Reagan’s disastrous public campaign, “Just Say No to Drugs,” had laughable and negative outcomes.  (See The Globalization of Addiction and Dreamland for more.)  What’s the connection, you might ask?  The answer lies in the fact that substance use disorder – drug addiction – is a solution as well as a problem.  It’s a solution to numb some sort of emotional pain.  That emotional pain is the lack of mental wellness.

Growing up in the era of Regan and listening to his impassioned speeches, I can still respect him and accept that both Ronald and Nancy completely missed it on this one.  (See Great Speeches for Better Speaking for an example of Reagan’s address after the Challenger Disaster as an example.)

A Stitch in Time…

…saves nine.  The problem is that the mental health care system we have – if you’re willing to be generous and call it a “system” – isn’t geared towards prevention or health.  It’s a system for dealing with crisis.  It’s a catch system designed to contain the mess after the train is already off the rails.  In most cases, the system can’t restore a person to health.  The best it can do is keep the person from escalating.  That’s in part why we have an epidemic of prescription psychoactive drugs.  In Warning: Psychiatry Can Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health, there’s solid push-back on deploying medications – including SSRIs – like they’re from a PEZ dispenser.  Please don’t misunderstand.  SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs are a necessary part of the care continuum – but they’re overused, and the related work to remove their necessity is rarely done.  We leave people on medications that have long-term implications, and no one seems to be noticing.

We’re starting to see the emergence of proactive programs for socio-emotional learning (SEL) – but the programs are challenging at best.  As they’re new, there’s no research supporting their efficacy.  However, more critically, many of these programs don’t use best practices for teaching.  (See Efficiency in Learning for some hints.)

Involuntary Commitment

Many people who seek help find themselves caught in a system that doesn’t work.  They voluntarily go to seek help and find that the providers they contact are too afraid for their safety – or the safety of others – and they involuntarily put in an evaluation hold.  They start with their freedom – and they can’t leave, because they can’t have it.  It’s a part of a problem that we’re facing where those with mental health issues are held in a hospital emergency room – and the people are sometimes placed in jail to spare them the painful mental health process.

What most people don’t realize is that many mental health situations require that a person be mentally cleared before they get their care.  This places them first in an emergency room.  After that, they can be moved to a mental health facility for an inpatient stay – except, in many situations, a place isn’t available for them.  So, they’ve been deemed a hazard to themselves or others, and they’ve been medically cleared, but there is no place for them to go, so they’re detained in an emergency room.

When they’re finally cleared to go to mental health services because space is available, they are deprived of many things.  Some of which make sense.  Nothing that could be used to hang oneself – no matter how remote the chance.  However, they’re also deprived of most of their contact to the world.  Mostly, in today’s world, it’s their cellular phone.  The reasoning is to control external stimulation with the idea that this stimulation is creating part of the problem – as it often is.  However, it has the secondary effect of making people feel hopeless and out-of-touch.  Neither are good for mental health.

Exit from these involuntary situations seems to be based in part on the degree to which someone can act or lie their way out of it.  Research seems to show that many people have neither more nor less psychic disturbance than when they entered – they just get better at hiding it from the clinicians so they can go home.

The problem this sets up is that it breaks down the very foundation of the therapist-patient relationship by forcing the patient to lie to get the freedom they need.  It’s no wonder that one of the highest risk of suicides is immediately after a discharge.

No Room at the Inn

Sometimes, the process of holding a person fails.  The order to hold someone expires before they can even get to treatment.  The result is that friends, siblings, and parents are sent home with mentally ill and potentially suicidal loved ones.  Instead of the relative immediacy of the inpatient commitment, they’re placed into the queue of outpatients that spans months.  Finding a mental health professional at any quality takes months – and finding a provider that uses evidence-based practices in a skillful way takes longer.

The result is a gap between the time that a patient is identified with a problem and the moment when they first start to receive treatment.  That gap is a critical period where far too many people suffer and die.

What’s Wrong?

To fix what’s wrong with the mental health system, we must first diagnose what’s wrong, and then come up with solutions to fix those things.  The list of problems is long.  Some are addressed plainly in Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.  Others are addressed in The Heart and Soul of Change.  What neither book addresses are the larger issues like payment that drive the system.

Mental health beds are reimbursed at a lower rate in hospitals than other kinds of beds – making them less profitable.  Mental health services are reimbursed at a lower rate than other hospital and ambulatory (walk-in) services.  Despite the laws regarding parity of mental health coverage, too many people find their mental health coverage allows for only a few visits – not enough to support even the quickest and most effective therapy.  Complicating this is that many providers, frustrated by the low rates from insurance providers, have moved to a private-pay only model.  If you can’t pay the provider directly, you can’t see them.

The ripple effect is that providers have no requirement nor incentive to record their outcomes and measure their success – or failure.  They’re free to operate without oversight and in ways that may not help patients –and, in some cases, may even harm their patients.

If we want a system that encourages the best people to work in the field, they need to know they can earn enough to pay off their student loans.  We also need to bring mental health the same quality outcomes measurement that is starting to take hold in traditional medicine.

Mental Health Killers

Amy Edmondson in The Fearless Organization lays out her views on psychological safety.  It’s the idea that you can feel safe expressing who you are, including your beliefs and thoughts.  That ability to feel safe is predicated on our ability to predict the future.  As I explained in my review of Mindreading, it’s not the science-fiction, deepest-and-innermost-thoughts mind-reading, but rather our ability to have a theory of mind for what’s going on inside someone else at the level of allowing us to predict their actions.  Certainly, we’ll be surprised as we unintentionally step on or run into a competing value that we’ve never seen before, but for the most part, we can expect how someone will respond.  (See Who Am I? for competing values.)

This leads us to our fear of people with mental illness.  We expect that we can’t model the thought patterns of those with mental illness, and therefore their behavior is – to us – unpredictable.  (See Sources of Power for more on our need and ability to create models.)  Without prediction, we experience fear and anxiety.  We are afraid that the mentally ill person is homicidal.

The truth is that, across the population, suicide is substantially more probable than homicide.  It’s also true that people with serious mental illness more are often the recipients of violence than the purveyors of it.  This doesn’t help us when we’re face-to-face with someone we don’t know who is shouting at people who don’t exist – and they don’t have a wireless headset on.

A Rope of Three Cords

The more that we lean into complexity and recognize that simple, one-dimensional fixes aren’t going to cut it, the more we realize that we need to approach people from a wholistic perspective.  We can’t rely on any one form of treatment alone in every case.  The best approaches are layered.  Medication, though research on efficacy is weak, can be helpful to bring people to the table to do the hard work that talk therapy requires – talk therapy being any of the proven techniques for improving mental health outcomes.  Other medical therapies, like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), are added when appropriate.  Ruling out any of these three paths – or cords – of treatment isn’t helpful.

To echo the warning from above, medications shouldn’t be used as the long-term approach to mental health.  They have long-term complications.

Long-Term Care

For some, there’s no short-term cure.  Neither inpatient nor outpatient can address what decades of trauma and emptiness has wrought on a person.  Long term institutionalization is out – but residency programs and halfway houses may be that critical bridge between short-term crisis care and being integrated into the community.

These approaches often gather a small number of leaders who may or may not be clinicians to provide support for several transitioning patients – almost universally fewer than 16.  The patients live together in a single house that has rules.  A curfew, interpersonal interactions, and other rules are necessary to maintain order but far fewer in number than an inpatient facility.

These facilities are often incredibly successful at helping people avoid the service cliff that happens when people run out of money or primary coverage.  These halfway houses are often low-cost, subsidized by communities or community organizations to make it possible for people to work and stay in the house.  (Work is often an important component of long-term stabilization.)

Another aspect of these houses that is often under-acknowledged is the small communities of people that form and how these small communities combat loneliness – or, said differently, build social connections.  (See Loneliness for more on the impact of loneliness.)

They’ve Done Nothing Wrong

It was 1841 when Abraham Lincoln counseled that melancholia, what we’d today call depression, “is a misfortune, not a fault.”  Despite Lincoln’s admonishment not to treat those with mental illness as the victim, it’s hard to shake the centuries of the Christian church’s insistence on demons or sin having caused mental health issues.

The historic Christian burial for someone who died by suicide was at a crossroads under a cart load of stones or stakes.  By law, suicides were criminals, and the state could seize any property belonging to the person.  The result is that the victim – of mental illness or otherwise – was further victimized.  Caring individuals often failed to report accidents as suicides to prevent the consequences and the stigma associated with suicide for the families.  The result has made it very difficult to get accurate data.

Hopelessness

Don Berwick, one of the nation’s experts on quality healthcare, explains how hopelessness can kill more than leukemia.  His patient, Isiah, survived leukemia treatment only to die because of the helplessness he felt.  We need more than physical healing.  We need mental Healing.

Practical Complexity

Robert Bogue January 10, 2023 No Comments

It was a great, spirited conversation about the concept of complexity that led me to wonder what we really know.  Specifically, the conversation was about the idea that we love linear problem solving.  Proverbially, it’s the simplicity of A+B=C.  It’s a simple math equation that anyone who has learned algebra gets.  However, it’s a simplification of the world around us – and one that sometimes gets us into trouble.

Chemical Reactions and Probabilities

Given perfect understanding and infinite time, A+B does, in fact, equal C.  However, the problem is that we rarely understand things perfectly – and we rarely have enough time to allow all of the A+B to happen.  Let’s take a chemistry example in an attempt to make this clear.

We now know that different kinds of atoms have different kinds of properties and propensities to cluster together.  For instance, water is H2O: two hydrogen atoms with one oxygen atom.  If we placed twice as much hydrogen as oxygen in a sealed container, we’d end up with water.  The reaction time is dependent on many things, principally temperature and pressure.

Both of these factors lead to the probability that the correct combination of atoms will collide into one another in a range that causes them to enter the relatively stable relationship we call water.  Too slow, and they’ll bounce off; too fast and they’ll plow through each other without enough magnetic pull to stay together.  Temperature and pressure increase the overall motion of the atoms and their proximity to one another and therefore make the conditions more likely to occur where the factors are just right.

There are a few important aspects here.  First, the reaction isn’t immediate.  It may appear immediate, but it’s not.  Second, we simplify the billions of individual molecule formations of a much larger quantity – say, a cup of water – into a single reaction when it’s not.  Finally, the introduction of other factors may increase or inhibit the reaction.  We call items that accelerate a reaction, but are not consumed by it, “catalysts.”

Reinforcing Loops

Einstein called compounding interest the 8th Wonder of the World.  Even small changes over time create big results.  Consider, for a moment, the idea that you get better by 1% each month.  It’s a tiny change – barely noticeable.  After 10 years of this, how much better would you expect to be?  Mathematically, you’d be 3.3 times as good as when you started.  This is because even at very low rates of increase, these increases compound over time.  The previous result – the increase – is fed back in for the next cycle, so the second month you’re better from the first by not just two percent but slightly more than that (2.01%).

Extended out over long periods of time, this makes some sense.  However, the problem becomes that we rarely think about short periods of time.  Returning to the world of chemistry for a moment, an explosion is a rapid increase in a chemical reaction.  Fire results from heat (energy), oxygen, and fuel.  In an explosion, the cycle time from one set of molecules to the next is very, very quick.  There’s enough heat in the presence of oxygen and fuel that the reaction expands quite quickly.  The output of the prior reaction – fire or explosion – is available for the next cycle.  The result can be catastrophic very quickly.

Balancing Loops

Most of the time, we don’t find explosions, because there are balancing loops that reduce or dampen the impact of the forces that tend to reinforce themselves.  In the case of explosions, the consumption of the fuel eventually depletes it and deprives the reinforcing loop of the conditions of its action.  In the simple example, the results are relatively predictable.  The explosion continues until the conditions of heat, fuel, and oxygen are somehow removed.  Often, the fuel component is exhausted, but sometimes the expansion created by the explosion occurs more rapidly, and the heat (energy) dissipates too quickly.

In many cases, the reinforcing loops are stopped automatically because they reach some limit.

Initial Conditions

Imagine that you’re standing at the Continental Divide in the United States.  On one side of a spot, water rolls down into the Pacific Ocean; on the other side, water will roll down into the Atlantic Ocean.  At the very top of a peak, a very tiny difference in position leads to a very large difference in the water’s final resting place.  (If you’re a teenage boy, you’ll stand at the top and urinate in a sweeping motion to pee in both oceans at the same time.)

A very small difference in initial conditions leads to a very radical difference in the outcomes.  While it’s easy to determine that when we’re at the Continental Divide, it’s much more challenging to determine the places in life where a very small change in initial conditions can have a large impact.  Whether we identify them or not, they’re present everywhere in our everyday life.

Perfect Understanding

Of course, it would be great to have perfect understanding.  If we knew all the places where initial conditions mattered, we could adapt, adjust, and engage in ways that allow us to take advantage of the situation – but we don’t.  In fact, we simplify our world to pretend as if we have a perfect understanding when we often do not.  Let’s come back to water.

You get a glass of water from your faucet and wonder, is it 100% pure water, or are there other things in there as well?  There are, of course, other things in trace amounts.  There’s some chlorine that was used in the treatment process that hasn’t fully broken down yet.  There’s a bit of limestone that was dissolved in the water.  There are probably very tiny amounts of all sorts of things.

You dump the water, turn around, and get some from the refrigerator, thinking that it will be colder anyway.  The filter in the refrigerator has removed some more of the impurities from the water – but it’s still not 100% H2O molecules.  Trace amounts of other stuff still hitch a ride.

Even in our examples here, we’re intentionally ignored the impurities that don’t make much of a difference – at least most of the time.

Applying Probabilities, Time, and Loops

Now, combine these concepts and recognize that there’s a probability of something happening in a given time, that loops drive the continued expansion until a point of collapse or stability, and that our initial conditions that we can’t fully understand can make a big difference in outcomes, and we’ve arrived at complexity.  It’s a place where we can’t predict the outcomes with high degrees of certainty, because there are too many variables and too many components of the situation that we cannot know.  This is what led Lorenz to realize that a butterfly flapping its wings could create a tornado in Texas.  This doesn’t occur in the linear cause-and-effect type way.  Rather, given loops, time, and initial conditions, it’s possible that a small change can lead to a very, very large outcome.

Some would describe this as a non-linear model or a non-proportional result, but I do not.  Ultimately, it is a set of equations and reactions that are all quite linear in nature.  The results of a linear equation need not be proportional – exponents are allowed.  Further, the emergence of the perception of non-linearity is because we fail to recognize both the simplification of many to one – and we fail to recognize the challenges of multiple iterations and the impact of initial conditions.

Perception

What we perceive as complexity is often just something complicated that we’ve over-simplified and failed to take into account the components and speed at which the system loops and therefore feeds back on itself.

Book Review-Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others

Robert Bogue January 9, 2023 No Comments

It’s an honor and gift to be trusted by people in their most challenging moments.  The moments when they’re in the greatest distress and vulnerability are a sacred space.  They’re a space where we have the opportunity to be the best of what it is to be human.  It’s also a burden to bear.  In Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others, we learn how to accept the honor of supporting others without becoming overwhelmed ourselves.

The Privilege

Bronnie Ware cataloged The Top Five Regrets of the Dying and expressed her reverence at being able to be with people at these times.  Viktor Frankl expressed a similar sentiment about his time in the concentration camps through Man’s Search for Meaning.  Kubler-Ross, too, expressed her sense of privilege in her experiences in On Death and Dying.

I start here, because it’s easy, under the weight of supporting others’ emotions, to feel the burden more than the honor.  It’s easy to become worn down by continuous trauma dumping and difficult situations.  If we want to take care of ourselves, we must first recognize that it’s our decision to be a part of these situations – and that we both have the opportunity to say no as well as the benefit of being able to share these intimate moments.

Keeping the Chaos on the Outside

The real problem for the care worker – in whatever form – is that the chaos and insanity of the world they’re serving begins to creep into their thinking and shifts their perceptions in unhealthy ways.  Whether it’s the constant question about how people might use a place or tool to attempt suicide or it’s the belief that every parent does bad things to their children, the biased external reality becomes the cynical and negative view from which care workers see things.

Our family has a disproportionate degree of caregivers, with nurses, a physical therapist, and a paramedic firefighter.  The stories that we trade around the dinner table – without violating HIPAA – are about some of the worst things that happen in life.  We can be present for one another and listen to these stories, but not everyone could – or should.  We create this space to minimize the chance that one of us will feel as if the chaos that we see in the world is all there is in the world.

We need to recognize that for every moment that we see the depravity, there is an equal moment of awe at the love that we can see in our fellow man.

Enough

In I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough”, Brené Brown tackles the tough issue of the doubt that causes us to wonder if we’re enough.  Care workers often are faced with overwhelming demand.  You may have helped the last person, and you may help the current person, but how long is the queue of people outside your door who’ve not yet come in?  How can you feel like you’ve accomplished something, if despite your best efforts, the problem remains – or gets worse?

Recognizing our own limitations, what we can and cannot do, and accepting that, in our world, there will continue to be suffering despite everyone’s best efforts isn’t easy.  We sometimes fall into the habit of thinking that the gap between the problem and the resolution is us – and that we must fill that gap.  There are several truths here.  First, we may never have been designed or able to fill that gap.  While we’re judging ourselves for not being able to span that chasm, it may never have been appropriate to consider it that way.  Just as we can’t take a car to the Moon, we shouldn’t assume that we should be able to fill every gap – but we do.

Second, we feel shame because we’re bad.  If we were better – or what we should be – we’d fill the gap and those we’re caring for would be better.  This is, of course, not logically correct if we know that the problem may not have been solvable by a single person, but that may be insufficient to stop those who help from believing they’re not enough.

We’ve become a world of human doings instead of human beings.  We’ve lost the ability to balance acceptance with where we are with the drive to make ourselves and others better.

Control and Faith

A wise person in a twelve-step group commented on step 3, turning over our will and our lives to a higher power.  They said, “I’m an expert on turning over control.  I do it, and then when I take back control, I have to do it again.  I’ve done it thousands of times.”  The difficulty, they seem to be saying, is in releasing control over time.  Our belief that we’re in control of our lives may be an illusion, but it’s an illusion that people like.  The idea that you’ll completely trust another person or being to look out for you isn’t easy.

As we dance through the path of maintaining our balance while caring for others who are struggling, we must constantly wrestle with our desire to control our own destiny and accepting the world as it is – in having faith that things will work out okay.  We never know they’ll work out the way we want or not.  However, there’s a peace in knowing things will be okay.

Blame

In our attempt to believe in a world of causalities, where one thing causes another, we often find ourselves looking for people to blame.  If there’s a fatal car accident, who was the cause?  Was it the driver behind the wheel?  Perhaps the auto dealer or auto manufacturer did something wrong in the repair, maintenance, assembly, or design processes that we can point to.  Maybe it was the company that built the road or who is repairing the road.  Another possibility might be the company that made the signage.  These attempts to find the cause are endless and often pointless.  Unless the factor that led to the death can be reduced or eliminated, finding fault serves no purpose.

But we want to know.  Even if we can’t or won’t do anything about it.  We want to know, so we feel as if we have the power.

Sometimes, we must look past the “enough” and the “blame” to find a place where we accept.  That acceptance, coupled with recognition of how the trauma is changing us, may be what it means to practice Trauma Stewardship.

Book Review-Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide

Robert Bogue January 2, 2023 No Comments

For a long time, I’ve thought about the ability to learn as a master skill – the one that unlocks all the other possible skills.  Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide echoes that same sentiment.  It acknowledges that, today, the world we live in requires greater degrees of learning than ever before and recognizes that much of the way we try to support and encourage learning isn’t best practice and doesn’t work.

The Adult Learner

A foundation of adult learning is Malcolm Knowles et al.’s work in The Adult Learner.  It separates how we need to support learning in adults compared to how we typically teach children.  Instead of a content dump that we expect the person-receptacles to accept, we must find ways to connect their need to learn and recognize that the content dump isn’t always the right way to reach the learner.

Learning in Adulthood expresses the concern that self-concept of the learner (Knowles; first point) is a desired outcome rather than a preexisting condition.  Here, I’m on the fence, as I recognize that we’ve had to become more self-directed and self-aware in our learning as the world has become more complex.  However, I concur that, at some level, the idea that a learner will have self-concept and therefore self-directed learning is a bit aspirational.  Later in Learning in Adulthood, it is acknowledged that “the existence of independent pursuit of learning in adulthood has been well established.”  I’m not sure I can draw the distinction between these two.

There’s concern that readiness to learn (Knowles’ third point) and orientation to learning (Knowles’ fourth point) can lead to a reductionist view of learning – that is, learning is only about formulaic behaviors and algorithmic task proficiency.  I disagree and instead place this in another category: we know we’ll forget if we don’t have a way to apply this learning soon given the constant state of being overwhelmed that we all find ourselves in.  (See The Information Diet for more on being overwhelmed.)

Finally, there’s a concern about the learner’s need to know (Knowles’ sixth point) with the argument being that some learners just like learning.  I place myself firmly in this category – yet I’ll say that it’s a continuum of connection.  Everything I learn is connected to something else and therefore has utility to me in terms of better understanding the things it’s connected to.  So, for me, the need is internally driven but still driven.  See Why We Do What We Do for Edward Deci’s take on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

MOOC Learning

Some years ago, the idea of an MOOC (massive open online course) became popular.  The thinking was that if you could deliver a course through video recordings and automated testing, you could open it up for the world to take.  The money would be made in selling certificates that certified you took the course.  It was built on the premise of self-directed learning.  It has a humanitarian feel, like the open-source software development movement, and it promised to be the hottest new thing.

As we gained experience with MOOCs, we began to realize that the dropout rates were enormous.  Courses might enroll a thousand people and lose 900 of them in the first few weeks.  The idea of free training was good enough to sign up for, but the people willing to do the work was much smaller.  In truth, the problem was probably multi-layered, like nearly all problems.  The courses were experiments and as such not well funded.  Having taken a few courses – and a few of them to completion – I can say that the experience of the MOOC was often poor.

An instructor would set up a camera at the back of the room while they did a lecture.  They failed to realize that this was even less engaging than them doing it live and that the key thing about video isn’t actually video.  It’s getting the audio right – and few people ever did.  Instead, the video would be off-color – seeming too orange – and it would be difficult to decipher the words the instructor spoke.

But there’s something more, too.  The fundamental model from which most instructors approached the course was the content-dumping metaphor.  In a college classroom, where you know you or your parents are pouring out a lifetime of savings, you’ve got a strong secondary motivator to make it work.  In a MOOC, this motivation was gone – and so were many of the students.

Educational strategies that support multiple modalities of instruction aren’t easy – and they’re not skills that the average college professor has.  Learning how to develop a course that can be done asynchronously, online, and self-directed is hard enough.  Doing it in a way that allows for virtual or live instructor-led delivery was – and is – more than most college professors can do.  As a result, MOOCs are present in the overall educational landscape, but few learners are willing to climb the hurdles that are placed in front of them to reach the educational goals they started with.

Informal Learning

College classes and adult learning courses are formalized.  They have a structure, approach, and outcome.  However, much of how we learn isn’t that way.  Marcia Bates suggested that 80% of our learning happens in ways that are neither active nor directed.  Things like blogging are learning, as the writing process causes people to sort out their thoughts and develop greater clarity.  (See Opening Up for more on how this works.)  Blogging, by most accounts isn’t, considered learning but instead sharing or teaching.  However, the process is generative and encourages learning.

We also learn as we participate in communities.  Communities of Practice (CoP) have long been a part of the knowledge manager’s toolkit.  (See Lost Knowledge for more on the relationship between knowledge management and communities of practice, and Digital Habitats for more on how to create them.)  CoPs lead to learning that isn’t easily seen as needed.  It’s situational and networks the people who have the knowledge to create a framework for learning what is needed when the need arrives.  It also creates the relationships that allow people to “phone a friend” when they’re looking for information that they don’t have.

The Make Up of Adult Learning

We speak about different kinds of learning, but what kinds of learning are in use?  In 2005, The United States Department of Education did a survey asking adults what kind of learning they had engaged in within the preceding 12 months.  The answers had 44% of those surveyed in any formal adult education, 27% in work related courses, 21% in personal interest learning, and drop down to 4% in part-time college degree programs.  That means that most (but not all) people are continuing their learning journey.  It also means that many people still see education as formal adult education.  It’s not exactly surprising given the focus on the concept of Human Capital, popularized by Gary Becker.

Conceptually, it means that investing in learning is an 8% return on investment forever.  That makes it a solid investment.  Becker’s work centered on formal education as it looked at the value of college degrees, but it extends to other forms of learning as well.

Structural Barriers to Learning

Andrew Carnegie may have been a “robber baron” in his time, but his contribution to America can’t be missed.  In thousands of small towns, the libraries that were built by his vision of public access stand as reminders.  While most libraries have long since outgrown their humble beginnings, they were started as a way to equalize access to resources – and many continue to do this today.  (See The Public Library for more.)

In the distant past, no one could afford to own books.  The Gutenberg printing press made it so that the wealthy could own books, and folks like Benjamin Franklin began to read by borrowing books from his colleagues.  Thus, the elite could gain access to information – but for the “common” man, books and the knowledge they could impart was beyond their reach.  One of the important issues in adult learning is how we level the playing field so that everyone has an opportunity to learn.  MOOCs do that.  The commoditization of learning does that – but it does so at the expense of the educators.  Course creators find their potential revenues reduced by a factor of ten or more.  Professors struggle to remain professionally viable as higher education enrollment shrinks and budgets follow.

Marginalization

McClusky proposed a model for learning that is based on our capacity and the margin of capacity we have.  This may be measured in time, resources, or capacity for effort.  We have a balance.  On one side, we have what it takes to live, both in our external commitments and our internal expectations.  On the other side, we have our resources in terms of our physical prowess, sociability, mental resources, economic resources, and, finally, skills.  We learn only when we have more resources than we have demands.  McClusky uses the language of “power” for resources and “load” for demands.

In the context of an investment rate, this makes sense.  You can only invest what you don’t need to live.  If you’re going to make progress on saving or investing, you must create a gap between your income and your expenses.  This is notoriously hard for people to do.  We tend to have demands that slightly exceed our capacities.

Learning Lenses

Lenses, in life, change the way that we see things.  They can magnify the tiny.  They can allow us to see far away objects.  They also necessarily restrict our view in ways.  In Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan explores lenses used to view organizations as well as their relative strengths and weakness.  There are two proposed components of the lenses that we use.

The first is a point of view.  These are both the perspectives that we have and the mental schemas that we have developed about how the world works.  (See Efficiency in Learning for more.)  These are, relatively speaking, easy to address in terms of broadening the view than the second part of our lenses.

The second is habits of mind.  These are what Daniel Kahneman would call system 1 in Thinking, Fast and Slow and what Charles Duhigg is talking about in The Power of Habit.  It’s the biases that we have in operation and the things that we don’t think about.  That’s why changing habits of mind is hard.  Consider Jonathan Haidt’s work in The Happiness Hypothesis and Dan and Chip Heath’s exploration of his Elephant-Rider-Path model in their book, Switch.  In this context, they speak of the relative ease of convincing the rational rider that losing weight is a good idea and the relative irrelevance of it, as the emotional elephant eats their way through a bad day.  We recognize that there are parts of our mind that are not easily placed under cognitive control.

Disorienting Dilemma

Step 1 of the 12-step process in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is admitting you have a problem.  (See Why and How 12-Step Groups Work for more on this.)  Many in AA will tell you that, for some, it takes a lot to get to the first step.  It’s destroyed relationships, lost jobs, and homes.  Often, people come at a low point in their lives when they recognize that what they believe and the way they’ve been operating isn’t working.

Not everyone needs to encounter the conditions that bring people to someone to a 12-step group.  However, to learn, we need to have a reason to believe that what we know is insufficient, imprecise, or just wrong.  It’s that knowledge that sparks the effort that is the learning process.  Sometimes the impetus is simply that we can’t comprehend the current conditions.

Dialectical Genius

It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said, “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”  Today, we call that dialectical thinking.  It’s the heart of a treatment for suicidal ideation, and it’s an orientation to life that leads to continuous learning.  In my post Fractal Along the Edges, I called out the nature of life as contradictions – and how we often mistake the real drivers for the ones that are more apparent.

Sometimes, the learning that we need to do isn’t in a new space or area but is instead around the roughness that composes the line between two different thoughts.

Effective is Reflective

One of the challenges with training is the measurement of efficacy.  As Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation explains, most people spend their time evaluating efficacy at a trivial, reactionary level.  The result of this is that we focus on how the people feel about the training experience.  Certainly, we need to consider whether people will recommend the training to others because of the impact on the word of mouth for the course.  (See Diffusion of Innovations for more on this impact.)  However, this invariably means that, when we need to do activities to get to application of the learning and results that are uncomfortable, they’ll often get removed because they’re uncomfortable.  Reflection and application of what is being learned is often unpleasant, because it forces us to confront our bad practices and to engage in the struggle to change them.

The kind of learning that we’re most interested in isn’t the kind of learning that can be replaced with a checklist or productivity aid.  In fact, we shouldn’t want to teach something that we can use a productivity aid for.  (See Job Aids and Performance Support for more.)  The kind of learning that we’re most interested in changes behavior when there are no clear rules.  It’s the application of the knowledge to the problems for which it’s relevant.

Power, Patterns, and Guidance

Power is contextual.  People who have large amounts of power in one way have little in another.  It’s a common problem for leaders of organizations who come home and must navigate a completely different power dynamic at home.  The patterns of behavior that they use at work just don’t work at home.

Sometimes these patterns of behavior create ruts into which people fall unexpectedly.  It’s not uncommon for new graduates to look to others for guidance rather than trying to experiment or find the answers on their own.  They’ve learned with their traditional educational experience that the right answer is the one the instructor wants – not necessarily what is objectively right.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to find our own “right.”  The answer lies in Learning in Adulthood.

Book Review-Cognitive Therapy for Suicidal Patients: Scientific and Clinical Applications

Robert Bogue December 26, 2022 No Comments

As effective treatments go, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the big hitter.  Several people have applied it to suicide prevention; Cognitive Therapy for Suicidal Patients: Scientific and Clinical Applications discusses the opportunities for its application to suicide prevention directly.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

There is a seemingly endless supply of things that have been correlated to suicide.  Some of them are clearly not changeable, such as age.  Ethnicity is similarly unchangeable but correlated in various positive and negative ways with suicide.  Previous attempts are a persistent favorite predictor of suicide.  These are powerful predictors but also unchangeable.

More concerning are the statistical relationships that people don’t process correctly.  There’s a positive, non-trivial, correlation between suicide and depression.  Similarly, there’s one for alcohol consumption and any kind of substance use disorder.  (See Recovery to better understand substance use disorder.)  While you can predict that someone is at higher risk, it’s not possible to say that someone will die by suicide because of these factors.  (See Rethinking Suicide for more on application of statistics to individual cases.)  Just because someone drinks – or is even an alcoholic – doesn’t mean they’ll die by suicide.  The actual incidence rate is low.  Not everyone who dies has depression – or a diagnosable mental illness.  Some do, but some do not.

It’s important as we work with others to recognize that we need to be appropriately cognizant of risk factors and their potential to impact someone while at the same time recognizing that a statistical correlation – particularly at the low levels we’re talking about – aren’t predictive of an outcome for an individual.

Equally important is to remember that correlation is not causation.  The work to identify causation is substantially harder and rarely done.  We first identify there is a relationship and later we need to do the hard work of understanding that relationship.  (For more on correlation vs. causation, see Redirect.)

Perfectionism

A strange predictor of suicide – that we’ve got everyday evidence to support – is perfectionism.  The Paradox of Choice might call it maximization.  In other words, everything must be the best – including people themselves.  Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool in Peak talk about people who are at the pinnacle of their chosen profession, top performers and athletes, and how they do purposeful practice to get better.  However, for the most part, none of them believe they’re perfect.  Josh Waitzken in The Art of Learning shares times when his performance in chess was negatively impacted by his emotions and need for perfection.

The tragedy we all know too well involves the artists, performers, CEOs, and leaders who die by suicide – despite having what others would describe as idyllic lives.  The same thing that drives them forward and allows them to reach the top – or near top – of their worlds is the thing that robs them of the joy of achieving it.  They can’t be happy with their lives, because they’re always striving for more – and in the meantime judging themselves as unworthy.

Suicide occurs at the bottom of the socioeconomic status (SES) and at the top.  It’s just like Adam Grant explains in Give and Take: givers are both at the bottom and the top, and takers are in the middle.  We’ve got to be just as cautious about people who seem to have it all as those who seem to have nothing.

Is Suicide Preplanned?

One of the challenges in the suicide space is the ongoing discussion about the degree to which suicide is preplanned.  This has implications for whether we can predict a suicidal attempt or, said differently, detect that someone is at eminent risk for a suicide attempt.  If suicides are planned, then it’s possible.  If they’re unplanned, it’s likely we can’t detect them.

In Myths About Suicide, Thomas Joiner explains it’s a myth that we can tell if someone is suicidal based on their appearance.  Many studies seem to indicate that suicide attempt survivors didn’t seriously consider or plan for their suicide more than a few hours before the event – all the way down to 10 minutes before the event.  Some suicidologists divided suicidal patients into those who have pervasive hopelessness and an intent to die – and a separate grouping including people who have difficulties regulating their affect (feelings) and impulsively attempt suicide.

The deeper we go into the rabbit hole, the more confusing things get.  Some studies show no correlation between impulsivity and suicide, while others – particularly those in adolescents – find that there is a significant correlation.

It’s my own perspective that impulsivity in the research is often treated inconsistently between researchers and, more importantly, is treated as a constant across areas of one’s life.  However, we know that behavior isn’t consistent within different areas of our life or in different circumstances.  Kurt Lewin defined behavior as an opaque function of person and environment – thereby indicating that there is no way to fully disambiguate causes by either.  (See A Dynamic Theory of Personality for more.)  We can be entirely impulsive in the way we operate with our hobbies and be quite reserved about the way that we work with our investments.

Thomas Joiner’s Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (ITS) and most other models make it clear that it’s not one factor.  (See Why People Die By Suicide for more on ITS.)  It is equally likely that there’s an activation component that triggers impulsive people to act.  The fluid vulnerability theory of suicide separates baseline conditions from acute conditions.  Perhaps it’s an acute trigger that is needed to activate impulsive suicidal behaviors that are sufficiently rare that they’re not observed in every study.  (See Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention for more.)

When I discuss this with others, I use Phillip Tetlock’s 50/50 chance of planning to mean that I don’t know.  (See Superforecasting for more.)  It’s relatively clear to me that not all suicides are planned – and that some are.  Getting to a societally accurate percentage of which is which doesn’t seem to help us prevent suicides.

Hopelessness Time

One of the key challenges that we face with suicide prevention is the feeling of hopelessness.  That is, we believe things are never going to get better – they may stay the same or they may be getting worse.  Phillip Zimbardo in The Time Paradox explains that people view time differently.  They can view the past positively or negatively, they may focus on a hedonistic today, or a fatalistic point of view about their present circumstances – that they can’t do anything about it, it’s been preordained.  Finally, there are future-focused folks who are willing to accept short-term sacrifice for a better future.  These future-focused people could be considered the opposite of impulsive.

Combatting hopelessness requires two components.  The first is that change is possible – if not probable or certain.  Generally, combatting this is relatively easy, as we’ve all seen things change in our lifetime that we never expected to see change.  The second component is more challenging – that is that things are going to get better.

In some cases, people literally can’t imagine a happy thought.  They can’t imagine a positive future.  The starting point there is for them to remember a positive time in the past – and then project similar situations into the future.  Our ability to project ourselves mentally into the future and to imagine is one of our superpowers as humans.

The problem comes when someone remembers the positive event and decides that that positive event can never happen in the future – and they can’t identify other past positive events that they could project into the future.  Suddenly, they believe that things will change – for the worse.

The Psychology of Hope

In The Psychology of Hope, Rick Snyder explains that hope isn’t an emotion, it’s a cognitive process consisting of willpower and waypower.  Waypower is an understanding of how it will get better – either through steps we’ll take or external intervention.  Willpower, as Roy Baumeister explains in the book with the same name, is an exhaustible resource.  We often think of willpower as our agency (ability to get things done) or grit.  (For more on grit, see Grit.)

If we want to create hope, we should consider both the source of agency (internal or external) and how positive changes will come to be.  When someone goes to college at night, they’re creating hope in a better future through their willpower and the knowledge (waypower) that learning improves long-term success metrics.

Problem Solving

Problem solving deficits are strongly correlated to hopelessness.  Given Snyder’s explanation, it’s easy to see how an inability to solve problems results in a failure to identify the path forward (waypower).  One of the things that CBT does is to help make people aware that there are solutions to the challenges they face, whether they’re anxiety, depression, or suicidal ideation.

The problem with problem solving is multifaceted.  We know that many people facing suicide experience cognitive constriction.  They literally don’t see other options.  This isn’t surprising given the research reported in Drive, where, when stressed, people performed more poorly on simple tasks.  What Drive doesn’t say directly is that the degree of stress applied to make performance lower was almost trivial – we can expect that the greater the stress, the less likely it is that we’ll consider other options – thus cognitive constriction.  In Creative Confidence, Tom and David Kelley explain that we all have the capacity to be creative and to come up with creative options when we’re children.  But for some, our lives make us hesitant to use these “wild” options.  In training for problem solving, the first step may be to restore the missing confidence and sense of self-efficacy that those who have suicidal ideation may have lost.

There are options for rational decision making, like those shared in the book, Decision Making.  However, we know that humans don’t make rational decisions.  We make emotional decisions that we rationalize.  So, teaching direct problem-solving techniques hasn’t shown great promise in reducing suicide.  Instead, the awareness of Gary Klein’s recognition-primed decisions (RPD) as shared in Sources of Power leads us toward creating experiences that allow learning.  RPD is where solutions seem to emerge from nowhere, because the decision makers have internalized their experiences to develop a rough model of how things work, and they use that model to simulate possible solutions.

Dave Snowden’s work on Cynefin challenges the idea that all problems have clean, consistent, and repeatable solutions in the same way that Horst Rittel described wicked problems.  Some of the life challenges that people need to address are chaotic.  As a result, while we can acknowledge that there are problem-solving deficits, it may not be as simple as teaching a few simple skills.

Stigma and Mystique

The problem may lie deeper in the idea that there’s a stigma (stereotype) against mental health care.  While we don’t blame the patient if they develop cancer, we will tell someone in depression that it’s their fault.  We’ve failed to appreciate that people aren’t bad, broken, or wrong if they’re struggling with their mental health.  They’re in need of help and support.

There’s also a certain mystique associated with mental health.  The lack of the key indicators that we have for many health conditions today has led us to be skeptical about whether someone is really in need of help or if they’re faking.  We still hear sometimes that suicide attempts are really cries for help, and they won’t really kill themselves.  We know this is wrong.  However, it doesn’t stop it from being the perspective of many.

We need to continue to push back on the stigma and demystify mental health issues.  One way of doing this is for everyone to have a mental health safety plan that identifies warning signs for when they’re transitioning to struggles.  It should contain the coping skills that the person has for returning to health.  It should also contain the relational resources, whether friend or family, they can tap when they’re struggling.  It should contain the reminder of the reasons for living – what brings them joy – and how to get professional help should that be necessary.

Capture

We’re trying to give people the capacity to escape the spirals that sometimes consume them.  In Capture, we learned how people can become excessively focused on something to the point that it’s consuming and can be difficult to see other options or things – that cognitive constriction that we discussed earlier.  The difficult bit is creating skills that make it easier – or possible – to escape these loops before it’s too late.  Some of those are the early warning signs that we discussed in the idea of the safety plan.

The greater degree that we’re clear about the signs we should be looking for, the greater likelihood it is that we’ll be able to recognize we’re in a downward spiral and break free of it.  Something as simple as helping people recognize warning signs may be enough to help them break free.

Immunity to Change

As explained in Immunity to Change, sometimes people’s espoused beliefs (what they say they want) are different from their beliefs in action (what they’re really doing).  When working to shift people’s way of processing their world to allow them to see the world they live in differently, we find that there is a hidden resistance that we can’t explain.

To break through these barriers, we need to explore what it is about the current systems of behaviors that are supporting, nourishing, or reassuring in ways that require trust to step away from.  How do we help people see that they can create a different world successfully?

The Worst, Best, and Realistic Case Scenario Game

Most of us have played the worst case scenario game at some point.  Few of us have played the best case scenario game, the realistic case scenario game, and the worst case scenario game at the same time.  We’ll go down the negative rabbit hole and enter a spiral instead of trying to evaluate worst, best, and most realistic cases side-by-side.  This approach allows us to calibrate our probabilities between the multiple cases and limits our drift towards the negative.

We can, through shifting our thinking about the world, realize that it’s not so bad, so permanent, and hopeless.  We can begin to see that suicide isn’t the option, maybe through Cognitive Therapy for Suicidal Patients.

Book Review-How People Learn: Designing Education and Training that Works to Improve Performance

Robert Bogue December 19, 2022 No Comments

It wasn’t the first time I got into a discussion with someone who claimed to be an instructional designer.  It wasn’t even the first time I encountered someone with a PhD in instructional design.  It was also not the first time that I shuddered to think about the training industry.  It was a comment that pushed the project to more abstraction, greater complexity, and less emotional salience – and it was more than I could take.

I’ve made the development of educational and performance support materials one of my persistent professional homes – and I remain amazed at the lack of understanding about how and when people need to learn.  That’s why How People Learn: Designing Education and Training that Works to Improve Performance is so interesting.  It organizes research that underpins what we should be doing but too frequently are not.  It all starts with understanding how memory works – and what makes things stick.

Memory Is About Meaning

Ebbinghaus is famous for his studies of learning – and forgetting.  In fact, Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve remains an important part of the training and development lore.  It remains scientifically correct, but also not indicative of how we learn.  Ebbinghaus had people memorize nonsense and was surprised when they couldn’t recall it later.

We know now that we need things to make sense so that we can encode it, connect it, and make it possible to recall it later.  The process of memorization involves building links so that we can get back to it later.  Sometimes, the connections that we make to the information we’re learning are good – and sometimes less good.  The better the connections, the more likely we are to recall it.

All We Remember Is Not Gold (Or the Way it Was)

When we recall something, we have a mental image or movie of what we’re remembering.  It looks like something we would find in a scrap book or watch on television.  We think of it in these fixed terms, that the things we’re remembering are objectively real and could be replayed the same way next time – or even that someone else watching the same memories would see the same thing.

However, studies have continued to show that we can be nudged into remembering events that never happened, and we frequently remember things in a way that didn’t happen.  It’s because we don’t actually remember things precisely as they were, like a camera or video camera might.  We compress, adjust, and minimize to allow our brains to hold on to pieces.  Like a JPG photo that has been overly compressed, the details get blurry.  In our brains, we fill in the missing information with whatever is at hand.  Incognito has a great illustration of this where our brain fills in the hole where our optic nerve attaches to the retina.  Spooky stuff the first time you experience it.

Everything is Emotional

Descartes’ Error explains how Rene Descartes got it wrong when he said what has been translated to “I think, therefore I am.”  Lisa Feldman Barrett exposes the murky world that separates reason from emotional reaction in How Emotions Are Made, and Richard Lazarus takes a more structured approach to the same space in Emotion and Adaptation.  Collectively, this leads to the conclusion that emotion and reason are not as separated as we would like to believe.  Even Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow how “System 1” can lie or mislead “System 2” and thereby influence the results.  This means, then, that our emotions are silently placing their hand on the scale and changing the seemingly rational outcomes.

While we like to think of learning as a logical, rational process, the truth is there’s a lot of emotion embedded in it.  While I might stop short of Shackleton-Jones’ belief that everything we learn is emotionally based, he’s not that far off.  And that’s why most education and training fail to generate the learning and performance we’re looking for.  With the emotion removed, there’s no energy to drive the system and it falls flat.

Education and Learning Aren’t the Same

We make two big errors when it comes to learning.  First, we confuse the idea of education and learning.  Second, we forget that most people don’t actually want learning.

Education is an attempt to help (or force) others to learn.  It takes various forms to the near babysitting, cattle-like arrangement of our elementary (or primary) schools through the time-wasting approaches followed by most higher education.  Instead of being focused on the learning objectives (or, heaven forbid, the actual productivity), it’s focused on putting in your time and paying your dues.

Even if education is successful and can encourage the desired learning, it still often misses the mark.  It misses the mark, because the kinds of things that we educate and subsequently learn isn’t relevant.  With few college-educated children entering the field of their degree, we’ve got to acknowledge that sometimes what we educate people for – and what they may learn – isn’t what they need to know.  Estimates are that 90% of what people need to know they learn on the job.  That doesn’t include the recognition-primed decision (RPD) skills that Gary Klein wrote about in Sources of Power.  Those forms of tacit-based knowledge might drive the number even higher.

Whether learning at a personal level or for professional purposes, Malcolm Knowles, et al. lay out the needs of The Adult Learner.  These form the basis of being able to learn but also include a bit of the “why” – and that “why” is how the learning will help the person.  (See Start with Why for more on the importance of reason.)

The end of the 1980s movie WarGames ends with the computer learning “the only winning move is not to play.”  Sometimes, the path to productivity isn’t even learning.  Sometimes, the best answer is Job Aids and Performance Support rather than learning at all.  Consider, for a moment, the map work done by our parents or grandparents as they planned a trip by taking up the entire kitchen table with maps.  Today, we don’t plan: we get in our car, start up the navigation application on our phone, and go.  The best answer isn’t necessarily for us to learn map skills.

Similarly, many lament that we can’t remember phone numbers any longer – because we don’t need to.  We carry around our phones with more contacts than even the largest rolodex ever held.  We speak to our phones, and it instantly dials the person we wanted to talk to.  Aristotle was concerned about how books would destroy our memory, but what really happens is we shift our limited cognitive resources towards other endeavors.

Measuring Learning Effectiveness

I published a white paper in 2012 titled “Measuring Learning Effectiveness” to combat the frustration I had about finding ways for people to be more productive and the relatively constant pushback I was receiving for my approaches of helping others.  I was doing micro learning with The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide well before anyone knew what the term meant.  That’s not precisely true, because I didn’t care if they learned or not – I wanted them to be productive.  The paper outlines just a few of the persistent myths that live in the educational world – and why they’re myths.

What I didn’t cover are things like the insights of Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation.  It’s a hierarchy of evaluation for the efficacy of training – and most trainers fail to get off the bottom floor.  Most trainers are focused on what Kirkpatrick calls “smile sheets.”  That is a superficial perception of happiness with the training – well before efficacy could possibly be established.  Instead of measuring how well the training did at making someone more productive, it asks how they felt and misses the point.

A commercial pilot walks out of a simulator covered in sweat.  The air conditioning in the simulator was working fine, but the pilot was getting a workout.  After an hour of simulated flight with simulated failures, the pilot is exhausted.  If you stopped to ask them to describe how they felt about the training, they might say grueling.  They’re unlikely to start jumping for joy and explaining how much fun it was.  Evaluated on this metric – happiness – one would think the simulator training wasn’t that good.  However, from a performance perspective, nothing could be further from the truth.  If you don’t believe me, ask “Sully” Sullenberger, who landed US Airways 1549 on the Hudson River.

One of the things I know from decades of speaking at conferences is that the topics you pick will influence your speaking scores.  If you pick an upbeat, positive, future-utopia topic, you’ll get good scores.  If you instead deliver a reasoned, limited, and appropriately critical session, your scores will go down.  Not night and day – but it’s much harder to get the top scores when you’re telling people that things don’t work.  The reason is simple: the evaluations of speakers are about how people felt about the experience, not about whether they are more effective because of it.  When you tell them that their grand vision won’t work because of limitations in technology, people, or society, some of that frustration rubs off on you and in your scores.

Peers Understand Feelings

Everett Rogers’ work is known from his book, Diffusion of Innovations, where he shares a Knowledge-Attitudes-Practices model for change.  The transition point happens in attitudes, where people change the way they think.  When we teach others something, we’re asking them to change the way they think and view the world differently.  Rogers explained that we need a relationship with the person who is trying to change our attitudes.  We need to trust them.  Another way to think about this is that they need to be “like” us.  They need to have some commonality.

One way to get this commonality quickly is to have the person who is doing the teaching be someone who has legitimacy – in other words, they’ve done it, or they’ve had similar experiences.  This is why we learn better from our peers than someone we believe is nothing like us.  The fact that they’re a part of the “in” group means they’re someone who can – and should – be listened to.

Format This

Have you heard that the more engaging the materials used for education, the more people will learn – that a video should be better than a book?  Everyone has.  The problem is, it’s wrong.  As I explain in the “Measuring Learning Effectiveness” white paper, it comes from Edward Dale – except he never intended to be used as widely as it has, and he never approved of the fabricated percentages that became attached to his “cone of experience.”  Shackleton-Jones explains that his research found that people learned better with a simple, text-based solution – rather than the other elaborate teaching approaches he and the team designed and developed.

If you’ve spent your career in education, having something that you believed was so fundamental disproven can be disheartening.  It can also help you to understand why he may not have a high opinion of instructional designers, who even today are pushing new interactive teaching approaches that don’t have any research support – and may actually make it more difficult for students to learn.

Efficiency in Learning does go through the research and one of the fundamentals that is too often forgotten is the principle of cognitive load.  In short, the more difficult we make it for people to learn, the less they do.  It aligns well with the work in Demand, which explains that even small barriers make a big difference in marketing.

It’s important to reconcile that we need to inject enough emotional and story-based content to connect emotionally with the learner but not so much that it becomes distracting.  Speaking of story-based content, The Art of Explanation makes it clear that when we use stories, we need to make sure that we’re telling the learner what they should be taking from the story.  If we don’t, they may take the wrong things from the story.

Simulations that Cause Sweat

What makes complicated learning strategies work?  When they make you sweat.  Pilots use simulations to learn how to fly in extreme conditions, because it’s the only way to safely learn.  It’s more than the specific knowledge of recall from a textbook.  There’s a feel to it that you can only get when you have the experience.  Gary Klein, in Sources of Power, recounts his work with fire captains and their inability to explain how they knew how to direct firemen.  They learned through experience.

That’s why firemen train in controlled situations with real fire – so they can begin to instinctively know what is happening and how things may change.  Simulations may be expensive to create but done correctly they make people sweat and can teach them things that they can’t learn effectively any other way.

Care for Our Future Selves

In Human Capital, Gary Becker first explored the return on investment for education (and presumably learning).  His work showed a solid return on investment when an organization or an individual invested in learning.  The problem with this is that we all view investments – and time a bit differently.  Philip Zimbardo in The Time Paradox suggests that we have fundamentally different views of time – including past, present, and future focuses.  Some people will be hedonistic and insist on living for the moment while others will save and strive for a positive future.

Shackleton-Jones suggests that some people can’t care about their future selves, and as a result, they’re often unwilling to make investments in learning.  Some of this is undoubtedly a result of the attachment style that these individuals developed growing up.  (See Daring to Trust for more on Ainsworth and Bowlby’s work on attachment styles.)  Over time, there appears to be a greater willingness to invest in learning – even if that doesn’t come through traditional educational approaches.

Good at the Expense of Health

It’s not a secret that people who stress and obsess about their performance live shorter lives.  The Paradox of Choice explains that maximizers are less happy.  Their higher expectations (of perfection) lead them to be in a constant state of stress and frustration.  The impacts of stress on our body and our mind as well as the causes and cures for stress are covered in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers – and it’s not pretty.

So, in our learners, we want the driven desire to improve themselves but not so much that they stress and obsess.

Finding Feedback

Purposeful practice is the way Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool explain in Peak that people become the best in their fields.  They explain that peak performers often have coaches, who drive them towards better performance by providing the right kind of feedback to help them improve.  It turns out that finding the right kind of feedback is critical to improvement whether you’re seeking to improve yourself or just trying to improve the training that you develop.

Most people want to provide feedback that is positive, expecting that the other person wants congratulations about their great work.  However, praise-filled feedback doesn’t leave opportunity for improvement.  While critical feedback is harder to give, it’s substantially more valuable.

The Education Game

On the surface, it appears that the objective of our educational system is learning, that’s really not the point.  While elementary education is a lot of babysitting, higher education isn’t about ensuring that someone learns what they need to do their job – it’s a way for them to get a job.

We’ve transitioned to a place where the fact that you have a degree or an advanced degree means you’re willing to jump through the hoops necessary and have the persistence necessary to be successful.  (This might be called Grit.)  Universities are now issuing certificates in addition to degrees.  Certificates have a substantially lower threshold to be crossed, but they still are a signal to potential employers that you’re willing to learn, and that’s perceived to be a good thing.

Education can no longer be just about the learning; it has to be about the way that you can demonstrate your learning – or purported learning – with a marker that the employer can use to sort you into or out of the candidate pool.

For me, while this is important, it’s not as important as How People Learn.

Book Review-Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide

Robert Bogue December 12, 2022 No Comments

If you’ve ever wondered how a group of people might become so polarized and radical that they would do things that would normally be unthinkable?  What’s crazy is that what we often see as “crazy” levels of polarization is the normal reaction.  In Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, Cass Sunstein explores the ways that people radicalize.  (Cass also wrote Nudge and was an author on Noise.)

The Amplification Effect

One might surmise that when you put people in a group, the resulting attitudes and behaviors would become homogeneous around the median attitudes and behaviors.  What we’d expect to see, then, is everyone behaving the same.  They’d have the same Ford Model T car in the same color – black.  However, observationally and through the research, we find that this is decidedly not the case.  Instead of moving towards the middle, groups tend to move towards the extreme.  As The Tell-Tale Brain explains, art relies on exaggeration of proportions to draw us in.  We’re naturally drawn to the extreme, and it’s particularly apparent when it comes to the behavior of groups.

Richard Hackman, in Collaborative Intelligence, helps us to see that the most insular groups aren’t the best groups.  He encourages us to look for groups that have the right properties of boundedness.  They must have enough stability to know who they are but enough openness to allow new members of the group to introduce new ideas.

In extremist groups, Sunstein explains that the boundedness is at its extreme.  The greater the degree to which you isolate a group of any kind from the broader society, the greater the probability that they’ll go to an extreme.

Like and Trust

One of the pernicious problems that we face as a society is the polarization that we see around us, from the Flat Earth Society, who seem to believe that the Earth is flat and can’t understand why the rest of us can’t see it, to the politics invading every aspect of our lives, including public health.  It’s difficult to have an intelligent conversation with people who see the world differently than you do, because they don’t like you and they don’t trust you.

Sunstein explains that people like you just a bit more when you tell them something they already know – or that aligns with their existing beliefs.  We know the people who are more than willing to tell you what you want to hear.  They’re called “Yes men,” and in the language of Buy-In, they’re given the name “Bendi Wendi.”  While most of us naturally recoil from the idea, we frequently fall into their web and become entangled in their lies and desire to build affinity (like) and trust with us.  (Paul Eckman in Telling Lies would argue against my characterization here, because the people who are misleading us are often genuinely moved in the moment towards our point of view.)

Trust is a complicated topic that’s core to being human and our need to be social.  Rather than addressing the topic in full here, see Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy, Revisited for a comprehensive view on trust and The Righteous Mind for more on why we need to be social.  What’s important in the context of Going to Extremes is recognizing that we trust people we like.  If we simplify this, we trust people who agree with us.  In Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order, Francis Fukuyama, talks about how different cultures have different power bases for trust and how those power bases are changing.  Traditional centers of trust are breaking down, and social networks are becoming more powerful strongholds of trust.

One More Like and a Share

The idea that social media feeds us more of what we like makes sense.  The algorithms are designed to push to us more of what we like, so we will like the platform more, and they can sell advertisers on the need to advertise on their platform.  The algorithms, therefore, intentionally filter out views that may be contrary to ours.  The problem with this is that this is exactly the kind of isolation that Sunstein is explaining is a prerequisite to extreme behavior.  So, even if we’re still going to the grocery store and interacting with others, it can be that our electronic lives are intentionally being biased towards people with similar, or at least not objectionable, opinions.

This becomes evil when we recognize that it is the repeated portrayal of others as sub-human that is a part of every genocide.  Albert Bandura in Moral Disengagement and Phillip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect speak to what can happen when other people are considered sub-human.  However, this is exactly what we’re talking about when we’re talking about isolating groups together.  It allows for them to define the outside group as sub-human.

Exit Amplification

Another group polarization effect occurs as people elect to exit from the group rather than remain.  In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert Hirschman explains that when people exit, they have eliminated voice.  Their voice, which might have been a mediating factor, is removed from the group, pushing them further to the extreme.  He explains further that when exit is removed because the costs to exit are too high, the person may disengage and voluntarily remove their voice, because they’re resigned to the fact that their voice doesn’t matter.  This hopeless resignation may end in burnout, but that’s not generally a concern for the group.  (See Extinguish Burnout for more information about burnout and overcoming it.)

Drawing a Line at Asch

In Decision Making, Irving Janis and Leon Mann spoke of the research of Solomon Asch and how, in a simple experiment, he demonstrated that you could change people’s perceptions of line lengths simply by including confederates who answered with the wrong answer first.  This was a part of the research that followed the Second World War, when everyone was trying to figure out how genocide was possible.  Subsequent research has shown that the effect of others answering incorrectly doesn’t trigger conflict, but rather the person who is influenced by others consistently giving an incorrect answer is an altering of perception.

In the context of groups, when more people coalesce around an idea that may be objectively wrong, others are pulled along into the perception.  This is the heart of Janis’ concept of groupthink.  Groups will tend to think the same way because of the persuasive effect that it has on its own members.

Boomerang

Sometimes when you try to push people in one direction, they move in the opposite direction.  In Nudge and Decision Making, we find that sometimes a small push in one direction results in a larger response than necessary – and that moves towards extremism when we’re pushing towards the middle.  While overcorrection is at the heart of being Antifragile, that kind of overcorrection means we have to be careful to make sure we don’t make things worse.  Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology explains that many of the anti-drug-abuse programs from the 1980s made things worse.  DARE in particular was classified as a potentially harmful intervention.

Memes

Memes are more than just funny images with captions on the internet.  Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.  The fundamental concept is that ideas can replicate, mutate, and evolve – just like genes do.  Sunstein’s language is focused on the replication of ideas, particularly the rapid replication that he calls “social cascades.”  Think of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point – at some point, movements become self-sustaining.  Sunstein points out that these movements change folks: they go from holding beliefs and perspectives of their own to relying on the beliefs and perspectives that they believe others hold.

Said differently, your internal trust of another person climbs high enough that you’re willing to accept their beliefs and perspectives without question – and that can be tragic.  For instance, Jim Jones convinced his followers in The People’s Temple to drink poisoned Kool-Aid – and to serve it to their children.  Most believed Jones so blindly they didn’t question anything – even mass suicide.  (See The Hidden Brain, Influence, and Split-Second Persuasion for more on the tragedy.)

Can I, or Must I?

The real problem with extremists is that, in whatever form, the question a person asks themselves switches from “Can I accept this?” to “Must I accept this?”  This subtle shift has powerful ramifications as the burden climbs much higher to reach “Mount Must.”  When our minds close and we become fixated on our existing perceptions – because they’re supported by our peers – we filter information with such a high degree of “must” that we can safely exclude almost everything.  We cannot, of course, apply the same filter to the information that we believe.  We need to cling to it and accept the lower chasm of “can” – so that we can maintain our beliefs.

The best way to avoid others going to extremes is to read and understand Going to Extremes.

Probabilities to Near Certainties

Robert Bogue December 6, 2022 No Comments

Several days ago, I woke up this morning to a notification on my phone.  This one was from Facebook.  The fiancé of one of my son’s friends had posted.  His post was about the loss of my son’s friend, Caroline, one year ago.  It was this friend’s death that ultimately led to my son’s suicide.  It was the loss of the bright light that his friend exuded that so darkened his world that he didn’t know how there would be light again.

For me, it started a clock.  Its tick, tick, ticking remained with me for several days, as one life unfolds unto another.  It feels as if there’s a train that’s left the station and hasn’t arrived yet – but the tracks have only one destination.

The Last Turnoff

I’m struck by the inevitability of it all.  Certainly, I can’t change the outcome – no one can.  My son is dead, his friend is dead, and so is one other friend.  The question that looms is at what point could three lives – or even just one – have been saved?  When did we pass the railway switch that led to different outcomes, and instead became locked onto a single track – a near certainty?

Even today, I don’t know what I could have said or done to help my son, Alex, realize that life wasn’t hopeless, and that grief would eventually change (but never go away).  Having spoken with him twice the day he died, and knowing that he was similarly connected to his mom and siblings, I just don’t know what should or could have been done.

As I move backwards through the chain of seemingly causal events, I wonder what if his friend, Caroline, hadn’t interrupted the car robbery.  What if she had slept in?  Maybe she could have been sick that day.  Certainly, I didn’t wish harm on her; in my brief time with her, she was an amazing person.  However, what if she hadn’t confronted the robber?  What if she hadn’t become who she was – someone of high honor and integrity – who felt like she had to stop injustice in the world?

I feel for her fiancé, whom I’ve never met.  The questions swimming in his mind must be deafening.  What if he had been the one to confront the robber?  What if he had held her back?  (I’m not sure that would have been possible – but presuming it was.)  It always feels as if there must be something that could be done.  We believe in our personal agency, our ability to influence things, so strongly that certainly there must be something we could do.

However, at some point, our chance for personal agency has stopped.  We can no longer stop or change the events that are going to happen.

After the Bullet is Fired

We can accept this at some level.  No one believes they’re going to stop a bullet from hitting its target once it’s been fired from the gun.  There’s not enough time.  There’s not enough influence.  Yet we wonder where the edge of our influence is.  In the moments before the bullet was fired, what could we have done?

The question is specific, but the problem is not.  When does our ability to influence – or, more importantly, to change – the outcome stop and inevitability begin?  The answer seems to be that we cannot know.  We can’t know when the outcomes are so probable that they reach near certainty.

It’s About the Outcome

When near certainties are towards positive outcomes, we’re thrilled.  We aim for retirement savings that will provide for our golden years with near certainty.  However, when the outcomes are negative, like the need to declare bankruptcy or the death of a loved one, we want to prevent the outcome, the event, and the near certainty.

As I roll further back, I wonder what could have been done to stop the robber from going out that day, to that parking lot, to Caroline’s car.  I realize that this is a zero-sum game.  If it wasn’t her car, it would be someone else’s; another family would lose their precious daughter, fiancée, and friend.  So further back, I go wondering if the robber’s father’s own prison sentence and his crimes didn’t lead his son down a path.  What if someone had paid attention to him, gave him a job, shown concern for him, or a million other ways that might have redirected his life?

Certainly, then, the change could have been made.  If he didn’t feel trapped and that stealing was the only way to make things work, then Caroline’s life would have been saved – and the two more lives that followed hers could have been saved as well.

The Law of Unintended Outcomes

The problem, as I move further and further back, is I know that the outcomes are subject to the law of unintended outcomes.  The further back we go, the less likely it is that we can predict the outcome.  As more and more variables are added in, we become less and less likely to predict the outcomes.  As we go further and further back, we have no idea what the outcomes may be.

The robber’s second grade teacher has no way of knowing that offering him a second chance at a failed paper may one day make the difference in four lives – including his.  There’s no way to know what single act of kindness, mercy, or support may have changed the future in a positive way.

So, then, we can’t go too far back, because to do so makes it as impossible to predict as it seems impossible to stop.  We’re caught between predictability and certainty.  We have no way of knowing – and we have no way of changing.  We’re left with the tragedy of acceptance.

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