PILOTed

An Opportunity to Reimagine Learning

We have a onetime opportunity to remake education; not just to modify aspects of what we already do, but to start at zero and imagine a system that supports humankind – from the report

Last June, the Augmented Society Network started examining the long term effects of the Pandemic. The Augmented Society Network is a Fellow Network of the RSA, and international organization focused on social impact with 260 years of history and over 30,000 problem-solvers.

Education is faced with a huge opportunity wrapped up as a monumental problem.

Together, 30 collaborators from 15 different countries representing five continents created a 100-page document to address both the problem and the opportunity. This report has eight themes. Here is a summary and intro for each theme. The report is free and can be downloaded here.

Theme 1: Basics for Fourth Industrial Age Human Success

We are entering into the fourth industrial revolution, where machines augment human mental and social activities. There is one lesson we can learn from the previous three industrial revolutions:

In the long run, each revolution has advantaged more people than it has disadvantaged, but there were severe disruptions that disproportionately negatively impacted the underprivileged. Many of them could have been avoided.

In the information economy, there is now an opportunity to give every human being access to high quality learning content, in any topic and field, and at any time they need it. However, the vast majority of individuals, schools, communities, and educators are not prepared for distance learning.

Theme 2: Foundational or Transversal Skills

Advancements in our knowledge of foundational skills, or skills that transverse all aspects of life, have exploded, and yet we are not scaling those skills.

Traditional methods such as planning, data analysis, goal setting, and expertise also lock us into ways of perceiving the world that end up limiting our ability to adapt to change or thrive during chaos. We cannot rely on the way we frame the past to prepare us for the future.

We need to develop the skill of creating alternative frames to make productive sense of threats and opportunities. This is the skill of unknowing, and it means embracing the unknown.

Let's embark on keeping the joy of learning, the excitement of trying something new, ignited in all people.

Theme 3: Solving Complex Problems and Design Thinking

The pandemic illuminated deficiencies that were always there if we had been looking for them.

Rigid educational systems are ill-suited to unleash creative thinking and problem solving.

The wicked problems we face tend to lend themselves to iterative design thinking, and the paper explores a five-step process of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

Design thinking can both be used as a tool to rethink education (and an array of societal issues) and as a skill to be learned in educational settings.

Theme 4: Access, Diversity, and Inclusion

Today’s societies, and the paths toward success, have been structured  as much through exclusion as for advancement; we have been striving for the advancement of the included. But when progress is framed as progress for all, all progress. The pandemic has again illuminated the inequalities, but they were always there for people who experienced them or looked for them.

Diversity builds stronger futures for all: gender diversity, biodiversity, ethnic diversity, financial diversity, all diversity. Learning is the best way to advance, both for individuals and for society.

Through education, we can change our language to promote inclusion and progress for all. To do this, we have to learn about the ways we have structured inequality, and one place this learning can take place is in schools. The language we use, and often the language we use without even thinking about it, often reinforces inequality.

Too often schools today assume and reinforce the dominant culture, gender, and skin color. We have to change schools to value and explore differences, using that diversity to build a stronger future.

Theme 5: Purpose and Context of Education

Education is the main driver for human talents and societal skills. Access to high quality education, whenever it is needed, needs to be regarded as a universal human right.

Many areas of the world have already seen improvements in academic knowledge because of the educational systems they have implemented, but in this Fourth Industrial Age, we need to think of learning beyond the education of the population under the age of 18, and beyond the transmission of academic knowledge and skills.

Education is shaped by society, but society is also shaped by education, and we need education to lead society to success, resilience, and adaptability. For example: globally, people need to learn the modes and means of sustainable development.

Rather than any one solution, local trust between the broad community and the learning institutions create dynamic effective systems. There is no one right way, there will and should always be a diversity in curricula, technology, and structure.

There are many new technologies that are having a huge impact when deployed in support of societal learning goals and to overcome gaps in equity, access, knowledge, and skills.

The article looks at cases where education has and has not prompted beneficial change for a society, and what we can learn from each one.

Theme 6: Success, Failure, and Evaluation

We need a radical reappraisal of what we understand as success in education.

Measurement of academic proficiency based on narrow learning goals, tying rewards and punishments to results of measurement, and accreditation of competence often distort education away from society’s needs for learning. They can move the focus from competence and mastery to one concentrated on achieving positive results on the assessments themselves.

This calls for a shift of emphasis from attainment to inclusion. Instead of rewarding those who have attained, the practice of education can address the needs of those who have not yet secured success.

Assessment would move from a screening mechanism, on which redirects human beings out of the paths of success, to a way of furthering learning. There would be no failure, just measurement for the aim of determining the next best possible steps to increase knowledge, skills, and capabilities.

It’s easy to test the things we don’t particularly care about. Technology can be part of the answer to assess the things that are actually important. Technologies such as AI, voice recognition, and Augmented and Virtual Reality can be, and are being, deployed to assess learning, to address learning gaps, and to certify competence.

We can hope that we make progress humanely by being inclusive in our implementation, evaluation, and iteration.

Theme 7: Empowering the Educators

We need to recognize that we all educate. And as people who educate, we all need to improve in our ability to coach, train, and inspire.

There are those who educate as a profession. We need to provide those people with the knowledge, resources, tools, and support to be effective.

Areas for support and training include

1. knowledge and skills about teaching in an educational setting,
2. technical knowledge (which includes knowledge about a subject or domain as well as technology), and
3. critical reflection (models of reflections, ethics, and culture).

Educators tend to be most effective when they have access to high quality, differentiated educational materials and work collaboratively and supportively with diverse stakeholders toward common goals. Professional educators need the power, knowledge, and skills to make autonomous decisions about what happens with their students and within their classes. The report goes into some details as to what these are.

Theme 8: Lifelong Learning and the Social Fabric

We propose that a purpose of learning is enabling individuals and society to flourish multidimensionally, but that our current systems seem designed to produce “normal” people primed to follow social norms.

Education can address issues of equality, inclusiveness, and diversity, and it can be a factor in creating more equitable distribution of wealth, developing humans to their potential, and promoting multiculturalism.

A good start is to develop listening skills, to be able to listen and understand what we initially disagree with or dismiss.

Education should explore the differences between a society whose focus is financial to one where members define and develop their driving essence, purpose, and meaning in life. Learning should enable people to have work that matters, to embrace love unconditionally, and to be courageous and authentically vulnerable even in the face of difficulty.

Let’s start thinking of learning as unleashing each person to be successfully different in their own way.

How Does Technology Fit In?

Use of technology to further learning is a dominant theme of the report, and has the potential to

• Facilitate exploration of concepts, problems, and alternatives
• Augment the way people experience the world
• Provide for what-if scenarios
• Promote collaboration
• Be a communication media
• Improve technology skills, as 3D thinking and manipulation will be increasingly important
• Be a critical component in the design process, leading to design thinking and computational thinking
• Overcome obstacle of time, distance, and cost
• Expand practice opportunities
• Diagnose knowledge and skill gaps

During the pandemic, we have seen instances where technology has accelerated learning and development, and we have also seen how underprepared we all were to deploy technology at scale. If we are to level up, we are all going to have to become vigilant forces for progress.

What’s next?

The Augmented Society Network and the RSA are going to be planning a series of events for us to resolve how we are going to move forward. Contact [email protected] to stay informed.

Thank you Samaya Borom, Dr Tony Breslin, Zoe Camper, Nishan Chelvachandran, Jenna Fuentes, Gary Handforth, Nitzan Herman, Carlos Largacha-Martinez, Dr Lynda Leavitt, Rachida Merbough, Anna Morrison, Amy Moser, Julie Samuels, Jessica Slayback, Jenny Seelman Stiven, Tim Stiven, Benjamin Strawbridge, Ruth Travers, Jonathan Tavssberger, and Cyrill Wiget.

What a great beginning.

Highly Functioning Collegial Learning Organizations

Do you want your school or district (or any organization) to be a highly functioning collegial learning organization?

According to authors Rosie and Robert Vojted, , authors of Motivate! Inspire! Lead! from Corwin press, you need to meet these ten criteria, with these implications if they are not met.

1. quality of life: If you are not providing the necessities for people to be able to live (salary, benefits, etc.) your organization will have low morale.
2. a mission: If you do not have a compelling sense of purpose, your organization will be marked by indifference.
3. adequate communications: If you to not share common vocabulary, build rapport, and exchange meaning, you will foster distrust.
4. accountability: If people do not feel ownership for their results and achieving their goals, you'll be hearing a lot of blame.
5. empowerment: If people do not have the responsibility and authority to hit their goals, they will be constrained.
6. autonomy: If people don't have freedom within will defined boundaries, you will either have dependence or chaos.
7. competencies or capacity: If people don't have the skills to do what they need to, and the group doesn't have the collective skills, you will feel that the individuals and/or organization is inept.
8. relationships: If there aren't connections between people, individuals will feel isolate, lonely, and disconnected.
9. interdependence: If everyone's results and work aren't mutually to each other's, then you will not get cooperation and mutual support.
10. results: If you haven't defined success and aren't measuring progress, you will find ambivalence and conflicting methodologies.

One way to move toward these is to learn the techniques of Mindshifting. Check out the next course starting October 22.

Serious Play 2024

The Serious Play conference brings together changemakers from around the world, with a chance to mingle and learn from each other.

I’d like to talk about two gems that most attendees missed, and that I doubt any of you are aware of.

How to debrief and reflect on practically anything

Julian Kea has crafted debriefing questions that allow a team to reflect, learn from, and debrief after practically any experience, a class, a meeting, a project, whatever. Each one appears on a card in his debriefing deck. Team debriefs after learning experiences are incredibly useful. Here is a sample card:

A PDF of the cards, which includes instructions, can be downloaded at TheDebriefingCube.com and there is also an app at https://thedebriefing.app/en/about.

Making a difference for women and children in Kenya

In public schools in Kenya, class sizes are 60 and above, there usually aren’t enough chairs, and there is often no electricity or running water. The cost of private school is beyond what 90% of Kenyan’s can afford.

The last session of the last day featured Sana Alimohamed of Duara Education in Nairobi, Kenya. Boy am I glad I stayed for this one.

Duara is helping women create micro-schools. A micro-school has up to 30 children, the cost is just over the cost of public school, and the curriculum is play and experiential based and meets international learning standards. The cost of creating a new micro-school is under $1,000 and sets up a sustainable business for each woman who runs one. Talk about win-win-win-win (proprietor, child, parent, and society)!

You can find Sana on LinkedIn and also learn more and learn how you can help at https://duara.education/

This is an exciting initiative.

The Moloch Trap

We live in a world filled with Moloch traps. That’s why so many aspects of our lives seem to be getting worse.

A Moloch trap is a situation where individual self-interested behavior at scale leads to terrible outcomes for everyone.

Here is a simple example.

Let’s say that fishermen living around a lake earn a fee for every fish they catch. It makes sense for each fisherman to maximize their income by catching as many fish as they can. But if all fishermen catch as many as they can, the fish population gets decimated, and eventually nobody can catch any fish. As an individual fisherman, I might see that and decide I will only catch a few fish a day, since that is all I need, but the other fishermen will catch more than I do, and will live much better than I do, and the fish population will still be decimated. I might talk to the other fishermen and convince a few that we should stop fishing for a while to let the fish stock replenish, but all the fishermen who don’t stop will be thriving, and the end result will still be the same; eventually no fish left in the lake. Until then, those other fishermen will thrive and my followers and their families will be worse off. The Moloch trap is that everyone tries to catch as many fish as they can, until there are no fish, and so the situation gets worse for everyone.

In the short term, a Moloch trap is characterized by a mindset: every one else is doing this, and if I don’t I am only hurting myself.

Moloch was a god of the Canaanites about 4,500 years ago. To be successful, you needed to burn or boil alive one of your children to Moloch. There is some evidence that people thought that the more children they sacrificed, the more Moloch would be appeased. Moloch is mentioned in Leviticus, “Do not allow any of your children to be offered to Moloch.”

Game theory borrowed the name Moloch to refer to a Moloch trap as a game where multiple self-interested parties are compelled to act against their collective interest, which results in negative outcomes or perhaps even destruction. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is often sited as an example. Tragedy of the commons, Multi-polar traps, unhealthy competition, inadequate equilibria, or inadequate Nash equilibria are other terms for these phenomena.

We see Moloch traps in healthcare, education, elections, income inequality, wars, taxes, pollution, labor markets, investment, materialism, basically everywhere we look.

Moloch traps stem from poorly designed incentives, generally with short term benefits that result in long term harm.

Many times, the people who make day to day decisions in these traps have little to gain, and in fact may lose out personally if they do what is better in the long term, or if they do what is necessary to help others. Imagine a service situation where the service providers are evaluated or paid based on the number of people they service per hour.

Often the people who act or make decisions do not have a way to get and validate information that is needed to make a good decision. Perhaps they are reliant on faulty information, and even if they had access to good information, they would have no way to determine if that information was better than the information sources they were using, or where they were encouraged to use some sources and discouraged from using others. Depending on which side of the political spectrum you choose, you probably regard followers of either Fox News or the New York Times as examples (or both).

Generally the system is self-protecting, so when an individual actor tries to resist or change, they become worse off. For example, a teacher who does not teach to the test will sometimes get penalized by the system.

There are very often power imbalances in these systems, where the power dynamics create a short term benefit for those with power and resources, helplessness for those without power, and eventually long term negative outcomes for all. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, will fight tooth and nail against all efforts to reign in drug prices.

The race for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) involves all of these. The parties view the establishment of AGI as a race. If they slow down to take into account ethical practices, hhey are going to be beaten by those who are not encumbered. Financial incentives award first to market with the most powerful systems. The public and potential governing bodies do not have access to the information they need to make reasonable trade-offs and decisions. The largest players have the most power and control. And the potential consequences for “bad” decisions could seriously effect nations, companies, individuals, and the entire species.

As Donella Meadows pointed out, if you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.

Although it is tempting to blame neoliberalism and Western civilization, capitalism is not the root of Moloch traps. . All systems and all organizations set up and build unhealthy incentives. Systems and organizations that arise to overcome some challenge become self-perpetuating, creating their own impediments to equity and change. It’s easy to point to all the traps that exist in Western nations today and argue that they persist because of capitalism, but that would be false.

What can we do?

There is no straightforward predictable way to nudge systems out of Moloch traps. The path to new, adequate equilibria is complex, and often involves periods of chaos and pain. Generally, there are four phases, and each phase is an iterative process of trial, error, and learning.

The first phase, though, is to recognize that the Moloch trap exists. Reaching this realization is often uncomfortable, since it involves challenging biases and assumptions.

A second phase is define aspirations, goals, and stories about possible desired new states along with methods to reach it. One method for exploring, generating, formulating, and communicating future states is Episodic Future Thinking (EFT).

Activism and intervention aiming to increase visibility and disrupt the status quo are phase three. These might include organizing activities such as protesting, lobbying, boycotts, or strikes. This work generally begins on the fringes. The goals are to bring in new actors, shift the power balance, deploy new technologies which can empower those previously unempowered.

The fourth state is to actually make long term changes: changing rules, structures, and incentives despite continued resistance by the existing organizations, systems, communications mechanisms, and power structures.

We are a world of almost 8 billion people. As individuals, we are generally focused on achieving our short-term goals.  Through Moloch traps, the aggregation of these efforts seems to be leading to consequences that are harmful to humanity’s long-term welfare, prosperity, or existence.

In the fishing example, the fourth phase would be achieved only if the entire community of fishermen collaborate to establish and follow ceilings. This would create a sustainable eco-system.

That would start with awareness. And maybe Mindshifting.

Note: image generated by ChatGPT

5 mindsets to usher in 2024

Here are 5 mindsets for 2024 from 21 social entrepreneurs who are changing lives in their communities and beyond. I extracted this list from the book, America’s Path Forward Edited by Konstanze Frischen and Michael Zakaras of the Ashoka Organization. The book is a series of 21 interviews with social entrepreneurs.

1. Frame the goal, not the problem
2. Listening works better than dictating
3. Fight for real change, don’t fiddle with what’s not working
4. Personal accountability works better than rewards and punishments
5. Be fluid, dynamic situations evolve

While each item on the list could be a post in itself, I’ve expanded a little on each one below.

To learn about shifting mindsets, for yourself and others, consider the Mindshifting 3 course starting on January 16 or the Mindshifting 1 course starting February 20.

Frame the goal, not the problem

Our assumptions are often, “Let’s do something to fix this problem.”. That mindset often leads to actions that don’t fix the issues but merely allow us to survive in bad situations, that stigmatize people, that lead to measures that exert control instead of making things better, and that impose metrics that focus on deficits that might not even be there in the first place. It operates around the power of “No”;” you can’t do this”, or “don’t do that.”

Our gut reactions view other people as the problem, and so we try to fix them. But more often the system is what’s causing harm, not the actors. We have these stories in our heads about who we are and who other people are, and we live into that narrative, whatever it is. That identity has an outsize influence on our behavior.

Both the Right and Left find plenty of people to blame. For example, if we are on the left, we vilify those who fear changing demographics, and if we are on the right we often use immigration, wokeism, or government as universal weapons.

David Lubell says, “Fear is a very human phenomenon. And ignoring it or vilifying it will not stop it from growing. It becomes counterproductive, which is what we were experiencing.” Casey Woods amplifies that it’s very powerful, important, and productive to focus on the motivation for the fear.

As Trabian Shorters says, “you can’t lift people by putting them down.”

First, we need to work on changing our own attitude. It’s so much easier to “improve” someone else.

Instead of looking at the problem, or looking at others as the problem, begin with our aspirations, what do we want? Second, explore why it is so hard to get there and what is obstructing our way. And third, starting mapping what do we have to do to change those systems.

Listening works better than dictating

During a crisis and in times of transition, process and participation really matter. Solutions can’t just be imposed; democracy matters more during these times.

Will Jackson talked about this issue with charities that “know” what’s best for the people they are supposed to serve, and the same goes for government and even the ways most of think about solutions: “It is repugnant that philanthropy has designated whole funding initiatives and invested millions and millions of dollars without ever talking to the people who’ve actually experienced the problem, without asking for their input or ideas.”

Bren Smith talked about the intelligence that exists in communities: “when you’re working-class, you’re having to invent every day to find a way to make it through this complex society because you don’t have the resources.”

Just as David Lubell talked about the effects of our tendency to make fun of or minimize other people’s fears above, Casey Woods observed, “it’s hard to be successful when you go to people and say, ‘I’ve got this all figured out. We want to do X, Y, and Z. Can you come in and be part of this piece?’ People don’t feel like they are part of the process. Instead, we say and mean it: ‘This is wide open. Come participate in this process. You can own it. And you are the experts.’”

Tim Lampkin recommended: “What I try to do is that I don’t jump in explaining myself first. I try to start from a place of listening, of curiosity about why people believe the things they do, what has shaped their viewpoint. I ask—and I’m sincere, too—' Oh, you feel that way? Tell me more about that.’ I listen, then I try to help by adding new information, a new angle. And for me, it’s a worthwhile conversation even when someone says, ‘I may not agree with you, but now I understand where you are coming from and why you are doing this work.’”

Look for opportunities for people to interact with each other, to get to know each other. By our interaction, we they will find areas of commonality, including common values. As social entrepreneur Sarah Hemminger says. “Sustained change requires us to understand our own knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs, and learn to bridge and bond across lines of difference. Why? Because it is individuals who control institutions, make up communities, and write policies that have the potential to create a more just world.”

Fight for real change, don’t settle for charity

As a consequence of focusing on problems and not goals, we resort to creating methods to “help” people instead of implementing real change. Charity may allow someone to survive but doesn’t set them on a path to independence or self-sufficiency.

Democrats sometimes ask why certain people don’t vote Democratic when the Democrats are giving them so much. Using Appalachians as an example, Brandon Dennison explains, “The answer is that people don’t want to have to depend on government subsidies to survive. They do it because they need to feed families, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to be happy about it. A lot of government programs take away a person’s sense of agency and pride in a way that can be quite damaging.”

Mauricio Lim Miller notes that Democrats want to “give” workers a minimum wage. But, “On $15 an hour you may be able to survive, but you won’t be able to save for your child’s college education.”

Sarah Hemminger tells us that we should flip the story; from “I am here to help you” to “I am here because I need you.” This mindset moves us to understand that we are all inextricably linked, acknowledging the humanity of each of us.

It’s our existing approaches that are holding the problems in place. What we need is narratives on what a newer, better society and economy would look like. It gets back to that first mindset, focus on the aspiration, not the problem.

Personal accountability works better than rewards and punishments

Daniel Sered talks about our propensity to punish, to put people in prison. In the short term, there is some benefit in that it takes people who do wrongs or commit crimes and for a time removes them from the possibility of committing more.

Data show that prison, though, is criminogenic, it increases the likelihood of future criminal behavior, just as data show that rewards and punishments in general tend not to have a positive long term benefit.

We often grant second chances to those we feel close to. And we should learn to extend that as a human to human reaction. For example, “Students of color are not given the same grace to make mistakes. For undocumented people, a mistake while driving can lead to either police brutality or deportation. We should all be given grace to make mistakes in our lives that don’t have life-or-death consequences.”

Daniel Sered points out the distinction between accountability and punishment, “Accountability is different. It’s active. It requires that I acknowledge what I’ve done. I acknowledge its impact. I express genuine remorse. I make things as right as possible, ideally in a way defined by those who were harmed. And I become someone who will never cause that harm again. Accountability is some of the hardest work any of us will ever do. And unlike punishment, it is actually transformative.”

Rather than diminish their dignity, allow people to step into their human dignity and from that place act as agents of repair of what it is they have broken. Where practiced, as shown by Laura Amiko Soltis, this can be transformative for communities because it works. People who previously caused harm stop causing harm. And every time that happens, a community, relationship, or organization becomes stronger.

Be fluid, dynamic situations evolve

Roanne Hagerty pointed out that meaningful progress happens “where people are trained to think in systems and improve how teams work; how to practice accountability for results; how to use data for learning, not judgment; how to make progress through small tests of change and see ‘failure’ as part of the learning process.”

We can’t just assume “leaders” have the magic solutions. Eric Liu noted, “I also recognize that most of the time, most of what we call elected leaders are not leaders. They are exquisitely attuned followers. They will listen for demand signals, and they will follow where they think the heat is. And so it’s up to us—we the people—to create more noise…”

We can’t just delegate solutions and walk away. Too often we just trust others will do the work or have the answers.

We often think that we have a solution, we implement it, and a problem will be solved. It’s rarely that simple, as David Lubell says, it’s not just planting a seed or watering it, “if you only focus on pouring water on the seed and not on keeping the soil around the seed fertile, then you won’t get very much growth.”

Sixto Cancel cautions that problems are complex, which means continued vigilance to “the six conditions that hold problems in place: mental models, prior dynamics, connections, resource flows, policy, and practice” during the change process. Or, as Angekou Ezeilo says, “It’s not just focusing on the fish; it’s focusing on the water too.”

Rosanne Haggerty relates this to efforts to reduce homelessness. ““the most extreme and least helpful narrative—and one that needs to be disrupted—is the one of “it’s just about spending more money on what we’re already doing.” In fact, it’s the existing approaches that are holding the problem in place. We have learned from disease eradication efforts that success is not a onetime achievement but requires a local system that is continuously preventing and quickly resolving new incidents of homelessness.”

And the authors themselves maintain that we can’t “get too enamored with a single approach. Be open to learning and pivoting as the world around you changes. The commitment needs to be toward making the problem go away, not to proselytizing one brilliant idea.”

All the social entrepreneurs mentioned in this post are doing remarkable work, which you should further explore in Frischen and Zakaras’s book,  America’s Path Forward.

And to dive deeper into how to recognize and change mindsets, consider the Mindshifting 3 course starting on January 16 or the Mindshifting 1 course starting February 20.

The photo is my son and me at the Ernie Els Winery in South Africa. Here are more photos of that trip. Here is the story behind that picture. My wife and I had bicycled about 60 KM and what was ahead of us was a 15 KM (mostly) climb from the valley to the Ernie Els Winery. With about 1KM to go, I was shot, but my wife continued while I walked. When I finally arrived, she had already finished her wine tasting, and at the same time our guide had driven there with our son who hates bicycling but loves tasting. She took the van back to the hotel while my son and I did a tasting and walked around the grounds until our guide returned with the van and took us back to the hotel. That's why this photo was just my son and me and not my wife. If you ever meet my son, ask him how much he enjoyed climbing Table Mountain.

Thoughts on Negotiating

Rachel Botsman’s post How to be more comfortable with negotiations opened up some questions in my own mind.

Botsman said that she struggles with negotiations because she is so concerned about how other people feel. As someone whose number one internal accomplice saboteur is The Pleaser, I definitely identify with that fear.

Even a pleaser, though, has needs, which sometimes leads one to leap, or step tentatively, into a negotiation.

Botsman makes a point that negotiations can sometimes strengthen relationship, especially when you focus on intentions and relationships and understanding the needs of the other party rather than some win/lose transaction. That certainly lowers my fear and increases my confidence in entering into negotiations and potential conflicts.

Which brings me to my thoughts and questions which the article triggered.

One question was, what have I already written about negotiations?

• In November, I’d posted on Mutual Learning and conflict resolution. Mutual learning is a framework for working through conflicts.
• Sometimes Episodic Future Thinking, which I wrote about in March, can be a technique that allows each party to envision the long term ramifications of different choices.
• And when we negotiate or interact with others, we can’t let anger cloud our abilities, and in July 2020 I wrote on anger and resourcefulness.

A second question was about negotiation styles.

While seeking to understand the other person and then looking for common ground is one style, maybe it’s not always the best one. Sometimes you are negotiating with someone who is only interested in getting the most they can, with no concern for your needs. Sometimes, isn’t it best to just accommodate and move on? Might it be a good strategy to sometimes avoid negotiation? And sometimes, can you just split the difference?  The US Institute for Peace has some great material on when and how to deploy these different strategies, and an instrument to test yourself to see what you generally use.

A third question was on preparing oneself for negotiation.

One can do research into the values, needs, strengths, and weaknesses of the other party. One can learn different negotiation strategies and game or simulate the negotiation. What I find helps is the internal preparation; asking my self what I really want and who I want to be. Human beings have mirror neurons which evoke a mimetic response. If I am angry, I trigger anger in others. If they are angry or negotiating hard, it triggers the same reaction in me. If I am calm and centered, even in the face of anger, hard negotiation, animosity, etc. and if I can maintain a sense of curiosity and play, eventually, those same traits will be triggered in the other party. My first post on mirror neurons was in September of 2006.

Learn more about negotiation and conflict resolution.

There is also a lot on negotiation, mirror neurons, and conflict resolution in the Mindshifting for collaboration, conflicts, and opposition course starting January 16.

The Incredible Advantages of Preparing to Fail

What if we went into situations with the viewpoint that

1. Whatever we try isn’t going to work the first time
2. What we decide to try will give us valuable feedback
3. We can learn from the feedback and eventually we will succeed
4. If we prepare to iterate rapidly, we can succeed even if others oppose us

This mindset is the basis of John Boyd’s OODA loops.

I first blogged about OODA Loops in 2018 with OODA: The Winning Paradigm which describes that OODA Loops is a methodology for effective and rapid iteration, especially when we anticipate that there will be unknown adversities and possible opponents to our plans.

Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. John Boyd’s O. O. D. A. (or OODA) is a deceptively simple model and is based on a wide set of readings, from Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Heisenberg, Kuhn, Einstein, Gödel, and others.

John Boyd was an air force fighter pilot, military tactician, and strategist, so his work was initially aimed at armed military conflict. Armed conflict is a very high stakes form of interaction, most of the situations we are involved with aren’t literally win or die. The principles behind OODA can be and are applied in more generalized form to any type of change, decision, or conflict. And, in fact, Boyd became a trusted advisor of political leaders and business leaders around the world.

I love in the second Top Gun movie, when Tom Cruise gets in front of the fighter pilots he’s supposed to train, shows them the manual, and asks them if they know it. And of course, these are all the top pilots and they’ve already mastered it and memorized it. And then Cruise takes the manual and dumps it in the garbage. He tells them that their opponents have mastered and memorized it, too. The winner is not going to be the one who knows the manual the best, the winner is going to be the one who can pull together what is happening and then react fastest. The manual isn’t going to help them, building their ability to react rapidly and effectively to adverse situations is what’s going to keep them alive.

That’s OODA.

The OODA loops diagram above was created by Chuck Feeney who worked with John Boyd for 20 years. A complete explanation is in his 2 ½ hour OODA Loop & Evolutionary Epistemology of John Boyd video.

Notice that there are three loops highlighted:

Loop 1 is the rapid OODA loop. You are in the heat of the moment, you are in the middle of executing, perhaps in an argument or confrontation. You don’t have time to do research, consult experts, or even revise plans. You need to act and react fast. The better you are able to observe what’s happening, and the more possible actions you have already internalized so you can orient, the faster and better you will decide and act.

Loop 2 is the dangerous loop. This is when we get caught up in what we think will happen and what we think we should be doing. We observe, we come up with what we should do, but we don’t actually modify based on the results of our actions, we double down on what we’ve already decided and then justify why we should continue that way.

Loop 3 is the slow OODA Loop. This is when we have time to reassess the results we’ve achieved and devise new possible actions. Boyd used slow OODA to train quick OODA. Between events, Boyd worked on:

1. 1. What potential obstacles hadn’t he seen before or prepared for?
   2. What should he focus on in next time?
   3. What techniques should he be able to deploy in next time?
   4. How could he train himself on those so that they became automatic?

Think about any challenges you face. How could you start preparing so that when you are in the heat of the moment you can observe your actions and their results, you have a wide variety of fluencies to draw on so that you can rapidly analyze and then synthesize possible actions, and you can decide and act in a way that gives you an opportunity to observe and reorient?

If you want to go into OODA loops and complicated and complex situations more deeply, look into the course Mindshifting 2: Flexible Mindsets for Long Term Success starting in March 2024.

The best of all possible worlds

Many of us, even though we are not in the top 0.1%, can count many blessings from capitalism and cheap energy:

• Longer lives and fewer childhood mortalities.
• More leisure time.
• Advancements in education, entertainment, health care and home life.
• Increased mobility and reduction of travel time.
• Modern housing amenities such as electricity and plumbing.
• Increased food production.

For our own good, we should still question the following interpretation:

The US has led an unprecedented time of progress and opportunity largely because we encourage innovation through competition and the free market. In order to continue, we need to prevent government interference, including excessive regulation and policies that redistribute income or wealth. Survival of the fittest ensures that the best win, and is the surest way for continued progress.

Two books that challenge that story are How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil, and Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow.

How the World Really Works explores the influence of cheap energy, and especially oil, in how we live and how nations interact. For example, for virtually the entire history of mankind, a farmer would produce enough food to feed about 1.3 people, and about 90% of the population was involved in farming. Today, 2 percent of the population work on farms. Similar transformations have taken place with transportation, communications, technology, and every other aspect of our lives.

It wasn’t necessarily the US political system, or capitalism, that has brought about progress and wealth, it’s much more likely due to our extraction of energy resources. These were made possible by cheap petroleum. Those resources are not found in Western Europe, China, or Japan, and yet those nations’ economies need access to cheap energy.

Smil points out and describes quite a few ramifications:

• Until we understand the full effects of cheap energy on all aspects of our lives and economies, we cannot properly take actions to promote sustainability or the regeneration of natural resources. Once we do, we can start weighing the tradeoffs we will all have to make.
• Access to petroleum and control of energy resources can be traced to almost every international political battle and armed conflict over the last 100 years.
• Unfortunately, we can’t just stop our dependence on fossil energy sources in a 10, 20, or even 30-year timeframe and also support the existence of almost 8 billion people on the planet.

In Chokepoint Capitalism, Giblin and Doctorow refute the perception that the capitalism practiced in the US is based on competition, an ordered market, and limited government involvement. The contend that large organizations more often thrive because of government protected monopolies, and that the results is both a tilted playing field and that any benefits of growth or productivity accrue solely to the top 0.1%:

Concentrated industries generate big profits for their investors, who, seeing how well their anticompetitive flywheels work, go looking for other industries to which they can apply the same extractive tactics. Its primary beneficiaries are an infinitesimal coterie of the ultra-rich.

It’s supremely difficult to maintain the free conditions that are central to capitalism, since markets have such a strong natural tendency toward concentration, extraction, and rent-seeking.

Our exploration shows corporations have strategically achieved the conditions they need to take control of creative markets and use them to shake down creators: anticircumvention laws, vertical and horizontal integration, high costs of market entry, captured regulators, opaque accounting, and the power to aggregate copyrights on an industrial scale and wield them against the very people they are ostensibly meant to protect. Combined with antitrust’s blinkered focus on consumer welfare and the neoliberal economic dogma that a company’s only purpose is to increase profits and maximize shareholder value, the outcome is inevitable: ever bigger corporations squeezing out an ever bigger share. That’s why the choice between Big Tech and Big Content is no choice at all. Whomever creators throw their lot in with, they’ll get essentially the same deal: the least the industry can get away with, and the promise it will be ratcheted.

Before we accept any explanation of how extraordinary society has made our lives and why we need to support the status quo, or the opposite claims that we are on the verge of an apocalypse and global anomie, maybe we should take some time expanding our mindsets; maybe we should spend some time on books like these to educate ourselves, and then find others who are willing to help right our societies and organizations to better serve all of us.

The title of this post was borrowed from the Panglossian philosophy caricatured in Camus’s short story Candide. Perhaps that should also be required reading.

Cancel Culture and The Folly of Crowds

There are four blogs/newsletters that I pay for, and Rachel Botsman’s rethink is one. A few weeks ago I responded to her post on the Power of learning to unlearn, and her current post, Cancel culture through a trust lens is what inspired this post.

In cancel culture,

1. Someone says something
2. Somebody objects
3. The objection goes viral (I’d even say goes cancerous)
4. The results are “absurdly harsh consequences including getting shamed by digital mobs or fired from a job.”

We seem to have lost the ability to play with ideas with which we disagree, instead we often attack the person. As a result we a) are ourselves unwilling express our thoughts out of fear of the backlash, and b) we lose out on gleaning whatever we can from these ideas because we are locked into a limbic fight/flight mode and the playful and resourceful parts of our brain are shut down.

These issues are further compounded by our mirror neurons, which mushroom to collective illusions. We all know about the wisdom of crowds, but collective illusions are the folly of crowds. As Todd Rose wrote in his book Collective Illusions,

Collective illusions are social lies. They occur in situations where a majority of individuals in a group privately reject a particular opinion, but they go along with it because they (incorrectly) assume that most other people accept it. When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can end up doing what nobody wants.

My recommendations

1. Everyone should have the skill to recognize when they are in fight/flight mode, and so not thinking resourcefully, especially when those reactions are amplified by the folly of crowds
2. Everyone should learn the skills of intercepting their primal reactions and switching to their resourceful parts of their brains
3. Everyone should learn to become comfortable in liminal states, in those times when we don’t really know the answers and we are exploring, even when we are surrounded by people demanding we adhere to some group norm
4. Everyone needs to learn the techniques of connecting with others, especially people with whom we disagree; techniques like motivational interviewing and nonviolent communications.

These just happen to be the skills that the course, Mindshifting techniques for collaboration, conflicts, and opposition focuses on. That’s an online course that starts Tuesday, January 16, consisting of 6 90-minute sessions.

Hope to see you there.

What I learned from Congressman Jamaal Bowman

Today I attended Congressman Jamaal Bowman’s Healing Breakfast: Fighting Antisemitism & Hate. Here is first a little background and then what I learned.

Jamaal Bowman is my congressman, and the 16^th district includes parts of the Bronx and Westchester County, NY. Many Jews are angry at Congressman Bowman because he was one of the few Democrats voting against HR 340 and HR 798. HR 340 puts limits on funding sent to the Middle East and was a move to cut off funding of Hamas. HR 798 seeks to curtail pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist activities on university campuses. 

These votes have been portrayed as antisemitic and promoting or condoning violence against Jews. Many felt that voting against the bills showcased a lack of sympathy for Jews, many of whom have been his biggest supporters.

What I learned at the breakfast

The session lasted about two hours and was attended by about 50 people. Here were my take-aways from the discussion

Congressman Bowman is pro-people, pro-equity, and pro-child.

• He is not antisemitic.
• He is passionate about making a change, for equitable opportunity of all people and especially children
• He has made many pronouncements after the Hamas attack against the atrocities, in support of Jews, and also has come out in favor of humanitarian actions, including a cease fire, in Gaza.

Jews are feeling as unsafe in the US and the world as at any time since the end of World War II.

The place of Jews in the US, and the world, is unique.

• To many, Jews are seen as white and thus privileged. To the many people with this worldview, Jews are not a suppressed minority, and their voices protesting that they are, in fact, at risk, is just trying to grab for more power, position, and/or money.
• Jews are also a group that has been discriminated against for over a thousand years, and this discrimination continues in many places in the world, and in the US today.
• Jews have been at the forefront of protecting the rights of other oppressed groups, someitmes risking their lives, dating back to the early days of the Civil Right Movement. Jews today are feeling abandoned by many of the groups that they have supported, as in, why aren't those groups also condemning violence against Jews.
• Many Jews have taken advantage of white privilege and become successful, and some wealthy Jews have abused that right to the detriment of people of color.

The two bills were both flawed.

• HR 340 had nothing about humanitarian aid, and HR 798 was worded in a way that would have allowed the arrest of people in what as a nation we (should) value as valid protests.
• As finally worded, they were the only resolutions that came to the floor and no efforts to make them better were allowed to be heard, even though Congressman Bowman tried.
• Some of those who voted against the resolutions probably are antisemitic.
• Even though they were both flawed, it could be interpreted that voting against them signal an acceptance of Hamas violence and antisemitism on US campuses.
• Even knowing that, Congressman Bowman felt strong enough about weaknesses in these bills that he would still vote against them.

Congressman Bowman has come out strong against hate and against the actions of Hamas, although some participants felt that those words were not as important as the actions of voting against the bills.

The general societal discourse about Hamas, Palestinians, Israel, and Jews has been binary, which is unfortunately the case in so many other issues:

• Either you are pro Judaism or you are pro-Hamas
• If you indicate criticism of the Israeli response to Hamas, you are labeled as anti-semitic.
• If you indicate support for the Palestinian civilians or children, you are labeled as anti-semitic.
• If you indicate condemnation of the Hamas attack, you are anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim.
• If you indicate support that there should be a Jewish state, you are anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim.
• If you indicate support for Gaza or Palestinians, you are also attacking and threatening Jews in the US.

We need to make Westchester and the NY area a place where Jews are and feel safe.

• And also that all minorities are and feel safe.
• While our goals can extend beyond our own area, we should begin at home, and, in fact, Congressman Bowman represents our district, not the rest of the US or the world.

It took a lot of guts to engage with 50 people, 45 of whom are vehemently opposed to who they think you stand for.

I hope I get a chance to talk further with Congressmand Bowman about mindsets, sensemaking, and how learning mindshifting concepts and techniques can make us all more collaborative and creative, allow us to be better critical thinkers and innovators, and help us see that most issues do not have to be binary or win/lose.

How to Make Sense of the World

Last week, I sat down with Nola Simon to discuss issues on the intersection of work and education and we ended up having a wider ranging discussion.

Here is what she wrote a that highlights:

Most of the time when I speak to Mitch it's as part of my futurist buddy group. We rarely spend time on titles - we are too busy talking ideas. Our conversations are far reaching, imaginative and often surprising.  Mitch actually made my jaw drop during this episode - on the topic of challenging the status quo.  I appreciate him precisely because he challenges my thinking.

Key takeaways:

• Mindset is the way we see ourselves and the world, and it influences our behavior and outcomes.
• Sensemaking is the process of creating meaning from information and experience, and it involves being aware of our biases, assumptions, emotions, and perspectives.
• Sensemaking can help us overcome cognitive traps, such as confirmation bias, availability bias, anchoring bias, and framing effects, that can lead us to make poor decisions or judgments.
• Sensemaking can also help us be more flexible, adaptable, creative, and resourceful in facing challenges and opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
• Sensemaking can enhance our communication and collaboration with others by helping us empathize, listen, ask questions, give feedback, and resolve conflicts.

Awesome quotes:

• “Education should be the way that we are preparing the next generation to assume their roles as adults.” - Mitch Weisburgh
• “I’ve always been interested in how our minds make sense of situations.” - Mitch Weisburgh
• “The brain has evolved to make decisions rapidly. How those rapid decisions very often lead us astray. How we can be aware when they lead us astray. How to prepare to be more flexible if we’re drawn off course. How to self correct. So that we’re more resourceful. How to deal with other people who are also making quick decisions and probably also being led astray.” - Mitch Weisburgh
• “Sense making is not something that you do once. It’s something that you do continuously.” - Mitch Weisburgh
• “The future is not something that happens to us. It’s something that we create.” - Nola Simon

And here is the recorded 35 minute discussion: https://thejanusoasis.libsyn.com/the-story-of-us-how-to-make-sense-of-the-world-with-mitch-weisberg