how to save the world

Our professional ‘value’ really is a function of the extent of, and our ability to integrate, our knowledge, our thinking competencies, and our communication competencies. Insight depends on our ability to apply critical thinking to what we know. Reportage is the application of our communication skills to what we know. Rhetoric is the articulation of our thinking. And the ability to do all of these things in an integral way is what Chris calls ‘information fluency’.

I think this is brilliant, and it got me thinking about how this model could be broadened to represent our social fluency — our ability to function socially in the modern complex world, to be of use socially to others in our communities. The chart below is what I came up with.

What this chart says is that:

• Our social value to others is a function of (a) the extent of our knowledge, our thinking competency (critical, creative and imaginative), and our communication skills (conversation, presentation and demonstration), and (b) our ability to integrate these three things.
• This ability to integrate these three things gives rise to insight, ideas and new perspectives (application of thinking competency to knowledge), reportage and stories (application of communication skills to knowledge), rhetoric and provocation (articulation of our thinking competency), and art (the expression of thinking competency applied to knowledge). Chris and I love the addition of art, in its broadest sense (the representation of reality), to the model.
• This ability to integrate is social fluency. If we represented individuals’ different social fluency graphically, those with high levels of fluency would have larger circles (more knowledge, greater thinking competency and communication skills) with greater overlap (better integration of these three things).

In thinking about this further and reading Nancy White’s blog, I realized that what was missing from the model was learning. I realized that the model was from the perspective of the actor (presenter, demonstrator, creator, artist) and not the perspective of the reactor (audience, listener, student, learner).

It occurred to me that since social activity is like a dance, there should be a ‘mirror’ set of attributes for effective response-ability (responsibility). My first cut at these is in red brackets above:

• Our ability to derive social value from others (to learn) is a function of (a) our openness to others’ knowledge and ideas, our learning competency (ability to learn) and our attention skills, and (b) our ability to integrate these three things.
• This ability to integrate these three things gives rise to understanding (openness to new ideas and knowledge, and the learning competency to process it), appreciation (openness to new ideas and knowledge, and the attention skills to be aware of them), and self-change (attention skills to be aware of change opportunities, and the learning competency to be able to apply them).
• The reactive counterpart to art is improvisation. Social fluency requires not only the ability to integrate knowledge, thinking competency and communication skills as an ‘actor’, but the ability to integrate openness, learning competency and attention skills as a ‘reactor’, a learner. That’s precisely what improvisation is about.

What’s interesting to me about this is that some people are terrific ‘artists’ (they re-present reality well, as teachers, painters, presenters etc.) but not very good ‘improvisers’ (they are closed-minded and not open to new ideas and new learning). This is a terrible shame — such people are underskilled for a peer-to-peer world where social exchange is two-way. Likewise, there are some great ‘improvisers’ (people who have learned a great deal) who are unskilled at expressing that learning, ‘passing it on’.

It would be interesting to see a social network map that depicted individuals not just as dots (nodes) but with their six circles. This could show what people value in others in their networks/communities, and what they offer, and how that effects both their ‘popularity’ and the strength of the community as a whole.

So what can we do, as individuals, to improve our social fluency — to become better artists and improvisers? I think the first step is self-knowledge — to know what our strengths and weaknesses are in each of the six circles. Andthe second step is practice, with others who are both better and worse than we are at each.

What do you think of this model? Have I overloaded it? Is it useful? Is it missing something? Where does presence fit into it? Where does love fit?.

I confess to still being an insensitive guy (though some people would say “insensitive guy” is a redundant expression).

I’ve been trying to get better at this, but I think it’s in my nature to be selfish and self-preoccupied and not spend enough time thinking about other people or their feelings.  I suspect it’s in most people’s nature. I know what to do (spend more time listening to people, pay attention with your whole body, respond promptly to requests and comments, don’t procrastinate, say ‘thank you’ a lot) — but I just don’t do it.

Lately I’ve been spending more time with people who are sensitive, partly in the hopes that they’ll be a positive influence on me. I was really surprised, then, when one of those people, Nancy White, confided that she was really distressed because she’d unintentionally hurt someone — a participant at her presentation at Northern Voice. I would normally not blog about such a personal and painful occurrence, but since it’s all been put in the public record by the participants, I figure it’s OK to talk further about it. It’s actually causing me as much distress as it’s causing Nancy.

Here’s what happened:

• Nancy encouraged everyone at her session to “be fearless” and draw on craft paper and post on the walls of the meeting room something about a subject (the subject happened to be Ice Cream) that meant something to them, and to post on their blog their drawing, instead of just writing about it. The purpose of the exercise was to understand how visualizations add meaning and value to information, and to open ourselves to the additional personal understanding that comes from expressing oneself in pictures instead of just words.
• One of the participants, the actress Meg Tilly, found the exercise personally devastating, and wrote about it on her blog. Here is a photo of her drawing, just to give you a bit of context.
• Nancy was really distraught to have caused Meg such pain, and she wrote an apology on her blog.

Just to add a bit more to the story (since I was in the room at the time), when Nancy left Meg’s drawing to move on to one of the many others up on the wall, Meg (I didn’t know who she was at the time) cried out in protest (something like “but wait…”) in a voice that sent shivers up my spine. After that I forgot about it — there just wasn’t enough time to dwell on a single drawing, and the time for Nancy’s presentation was quickly running out.

No one was to blame. No one was really blaming anyone. But there was pain anyway, and it’s clear (from the blog posts and communications since, and from the comments to the blog posts) that the pain was deep, and isn’t going away easily.

There is a line in the movie Peaceful Warrior in which a young athlete, trying to impress his mentor with what he’s learned from quiet contemplation, from “gathering information from the inside”, says “The ones who are hardest to love are usually those who need it the most.” Nancy pointed me to a post by Chris Lott, another participant at Northern Voice, in which he says something similar:

In a conversation earlier today about all this, I said to Nancy: “I suspect this kind of unintentional hurt occurs all the time without us ever being aware of it — it’s hideous to think about, but even those of us full of love and sensitivity probably inflict pain and hurt on others by what we do (and what we fail to do) every day. And the more social we are, the more we probably do it…I’m just thinking about how much I’ve hurt people I know and care about by what I’ve done and not done in the past few weeks…ouch…Responsibility is scary…no wonder so many refuse to take any.”

Nancy replied, and I agree, that (a) we can’t help unintentionally hurting other people, though we can probably learn to spot, and help others show us, cues that we’ve done so, and (b) the more people we know and spend time with, and the more open we are with them, the more pain we are likely to cause. I also think the actor in Peaceful Warrior and Chris are right that (c) as much as most of us want attention and appreciation, most of us don’t really want to be loved.

All of these truths are about Responsibility and its burden. When we stand up in front of a group as an ‘authority’, or talk to an individual one-to-one, or just communicate wordlessly with someone, we are being asked to take some responsibility for their feelings, their understanding, and even their love. When a member of the audience asks us a question and we answer in a way that is unsatisfactory to them (for whatever reason) they are hurt. When we say something to someone that makes them flinch or frown or leads to a ‘pregnant pause’, they are hurt. When someone looks at us, perhaps in invitation to some further communication and we turn away, they are hurt. It is not intentional. No one is to blame. But there has been a Failure of Responsibility. The word ‘responsibility’ comes from the Latin words meaning to promise back. All of this pain is the result of unintended broken promises.

Perhaps this is why so many people wall themselves away physically and emotionally, physically so they never have to accept this dreadful and unintentional responsibility, and emotionally so they won’t be hurt by others’ unintended failures of responsibility. In this sense, to be a social being, a teacher, a lover, a conversant, a member of community, is an act of great courage. It is the acceptance of enormous responsibility not to hurt or let down those with whom we dance in love, conversation and community. To do our best, not to “do no harm” (for that is impossible if we are social creatures at all), but rather to be responsible, to live up to the promise back to all with whom we engage. To respond.

There is another, safer form of social discourse — performance (from the Latin meaning supply what is needed). It is substantially one way, from performer to audience, and although there is a social contract in performance, and the performer has a ‘responsibility’ to inform or entertain, s/he is not required to ‘respond’. That is the role of the audience. If the audience fails to respond, it is the performer who suffers the pain. The performer need only ‘supply what is needed’; s/he is not ‘responsible’ for the audience’s reaction, response. That is up to them.

At one time, most education was performance. The instructor spoke and left the podium. The learning, the response, was the student’s job. At one time, most business was performance. The supplier produced and delivered, and the contract was done. The buyer (caveat emptor) was responsible for the actual use of the product. For some people, sex, and perhaps even ‘giving’ love, is and can only be a performance, an act, a supplying of what is needed. No responsibility. Take it or leave it. It is the recipient who must ‘respond’, take the responsibility. She the respondent (for it is mostly men who are the performers) is expected to appreciate, pay attention, and respond appropriately (with devotion, obedience, and perhaps multiple orgasms). No wonder we all want to love (and be adored by those we love) but we don’t really want to be loved (with the responsibility that places on us).

Today art, education, commerce, and love are, for the most part, no longer one-way performance activities. They are participatory, two-way, conversational, collaborative. We all have equal responsibility for their success, and the roles are blurring and disappearing. We all have to respond to each other, live up to the promise back to others we engage with. We all have the responsibility to be sensitive to others, and to know how our response (and even our lack of response) can cause anguish to them.

No one is to blame. We just have to learn the newest and most important social skill — improvisation. In my recent post on improvisation I defined its essential elements as follows:

If we were all good at improvisation, the way wild animals play with each other, energetically but somehow harmlessly, perhaps no one would be hurt. What do you think?

No one was intentionally hurt in the making of this article.

In no particular order, here are the 10 most important things I learned this weekend:

1. Moving from collection to connection: Many young content providers and content architects are still trying to fight an uphill battle against security-obsessed IT departments and possessive content owners, and trying to make content sharing more effective in organizations. The real opportunity is to improve connectivity in these organizations: providing simple, ubiquitous, real-time tools (like IM, virtual presence/desktop video, and virtual learning tools) that help people find the people (not the stuff) they need to learn from and work with, and connect and collaborate with those people more effectively.
2. The end of e-mail: Generation Millennium is catching on to what our grandparents understood: most asynchronous messaging systems (notably voice-mail and e-mail) create more work and reduce productivity, and allow and encourage people to message instead of doing real work. If it’s important, the caller (if properly ‘trained’ not to expect replies to v/e-mail messages) will keep trying until they can arrange a real-time conversation. If we could develop an effective system for scheduling such conversations, one that callers could use to book recipients’ time in time periods alloted for that purpose by the recipients in advance, we could (a) engender more such conversations, (b) convey knowledge more effectively, and (c) possibly eliminate v-mail and e-mail messages (and rid ourselves of dreaded ‘in-boxes’) entirely.
3. Don’t try any of this alone: Too many people are still trying to develop too many social networking solutions independently. The best ideas and solutions come from collaborations of teams of diverse, passionate people with a shared purpose, experimenting together to hone in on qualified, innovative approaches to coping with real problems, and drawing on the Wisdom of Crowds.
4. We need more laboratories, exploratoriums. Places with the people, resources and collaboration tools to do experiments and share what works and what doesn’t. With no requirement for a tightly-focused short-term ROI. Play spaces where people who care about something can sketch, make stuff up, try it out.
5. Know yourself: We need to know our Gift, our Passion, our Purpose, and what we know and don’t know and need, in order to be effective collaborators, innovators and problem solvers. World Cafes & Open Space only work well if the groups know what they need, what they can offer, and bring some diversity of perspective but focus of passion — on a few shared problems.
6. Imagine that: We need more imagination of what’s possible. Too much of what passes for innovation in social networking (and everywhere else) is incremental change (usually adding more features and complexity) to existing tools which are themselves copies of poor designs. Before you have great design you need to have great inspiration, which stems from great imagination, something no one ever thought about, in a way no one ever thought about it before, applied to a real need.
7. Gravitational communities: My brother Alan coined this term as something less than an intentional community but more than an accidental one. It’s the perfect explanation of how people find and make community in complex environments. You can’t plan it — there are no reliable ways to systematically search for and find just the right people to build community with. But it’s not accidental either — finding the right people is not a random activity. It’s evolutionary. You send out signals, explicitly and tacitly, and so do others, and you pick up on them, sometimes consciously but often sub-consciously or unconsciously. You end up in community, not with random strangers or the ‘people you were meant to be with’, but something in between, a collective self-selection, in constant flux.
8. Support groups as intentional communities: Three times this weekend I got into discussions about support groups — people who are helping each other out, not with a shared passion or shared purpose, exactly, but more a shared personal problem. Something with a sense of urgency. The problem with most intentional communities is it’s too easy to walk away from them when something more urgent comes up, or minor obstacles arise. When you’re all suffering or dying from something in common, you’ll stick with a possible source of resolution, even it’s not easy or fun. Pollard’s Law again.
9. Hope for disaster: I’m not a neo-survivalist hoping for the end of the world, or the Rhapsody, but I am learning that personal crisis seems to be very helpful in getting individuals to realize their need to Let-Themselves-Change, to discover what they were meant to do with their lives, and with whom, and to shake them out of their complacency in useful ways that can change their worldview, their understanding of the world and of themselves, and what they need to do. If you’re restless and unhappy but not sure what to do, maybe the problem is that you’re not unhappy enough. Thanks to my friend Wendy Farmer-O’Neill for this insight.
10. Can somebody please translate this into language I can understand?: Last Thursday I was on a panel at a Social Networking workshop in Toronto for business executives. Once again I learned that most executives do not understand what social networking is or how it could be useful in business. On the weekend in Vancouver, I was surrounded by a much younger crowd who knew exactly what social networking is, and is becoming. But they had almost no experience or understanding of business (that was true even of the consultants there, who claimed to know something about business), so they had no idea how social networking could be useful in business either. Until (or perhaps unless) someone (other than Nancy White and I) can explain what’s possible (and useful) to those who can write cheques for it, social networking will remain a marginal discipline, a geek crusade.

Most interesting observations at the event? The full parity of women among the young cohort of attendees — this was the most gender-equal event of any kind I have ever attended. And I also noticed there were more cameras at the event than laptops — and some of the cameras were bigger than some of the laptops.

Thanks to the event organizers and all those who said such kind things about my ‘reading’ at the opening party.