PILOTed

Some Thoughts on the Pandemic

Every day, I check the data for Covid New Cases and Covid Deaths comparing New York and Texas.

Why these two states? I live in New York, and, since March of 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott has taken a diametrically opposed approach to New York's. New York has taken a very health conscious approach, with closings, required or encouragement of mask wearing and social distancing, and highly encouraging vaccines, Abbott and Texas have consciously tried to minimize any inconvenience encouraging business as usual, with no requirements for social distancing, no closures, prohibitions against mask requirements, and no strong incentives or encouragement for vaccinations.

Did it make a difference?

New Cases

Deaths

Understand that Texas has about 30% more people than New York does, and also that the scales for the graphs that I’ve been able to obtain are different, so while the graphs show total cases, in this discussion, we will compare cases based on comparable populations.

Interestingly, in March and April, Texas actually showed about 20-30% fewer new cases and deaths than New York did. You can see in the New cases charts below that New York had a third peak in April.

In May and June, New York and Texas were comparable.

In July and August, Texas has been 2 to 5 times higher than New York. July and August are when the new Delta variant became dominant in the US. Currently the 7-day average for deaths in Texas is 108, which would be the equivalent of about 75 deaths in New York; but New York's average is 19. While 108 deaths may not seem much for a state with 29 million people, that’s over 39,000 deaths a year, while heart disease kills 45,000 people a year, cancer 41,000, and strokes are third with 11,000. On average, 168,000 Texans die a year, so 39,000 is a pretty significant number.

If Texas adopted NY-style policies, then, instead of 39,000 deaths due to Covid, there would be about 10,000.

So, it looks like Texas’s policies should result in roughly 29,000 preventable Covid deaths. If I were Governor Abbott, I’d switch to requiring masks indoors in public places (like schools), encouraging vaccinations and frequent testing, and maintaining social distancing.

Good job New York.

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.

Mutual Learning and Conflict Resolution

I have been blogging here since 2006. The very first post at this location was an interview with behavioral advisor Jim Oher on Mutual Learning.

Jim summarized Mutual Learning as a powerful set of techniques to avoid and resolve conflicts. It is based on four key values to an interaction:

1. Valid information: you resolve and signal that you will reveal all relevant information you have on a subject, whether it supports your position or not.
2. Free informed choice: no party is coercing any other party toward a particular path. You seek to create an environment for people to agree to do things because the information flow was transparent, not because they feel manipulated or coerced.
3. Internal commitment to the decision: once a decision is made, people commit themselves to do whatever is necessary to implement it, and they hold themselves and each other accountable.
4. Compassion: you, and as the process proceeds, all involved, temporarily suspend judgment in order to understand other people’s perspectives from a mindset of curiosity and letting go of judgmental reactions.

If you were to locate Mutual Learning on Thomas Kilmann’s five different styles for managing conflict (competing, avoiding, compromising, accommodating, and collaborating), it would align with collaborating, setting up for all parties to win.

We all encounter situations where other people oppose us, resist our ideas, block us, or compete with us. For example, educators are interested in the ultimate success of their students, and isn’t it ironic that the students often resist their efforts? And look at all the conflicts raging in the world and society today, where our whole social fabric is being rent apart by divisiveness and conflict.

And yet, it seems naïve to suppose we can just resolve to share information, provide all parties with informed choice, expect everyone will be internally committed to the ultimate decision, and show each other compassion and these conflicts will resolve and disappear. In fact, one of the insights from the five styles is that when one party is utilizing the Compete style and another party is using Collaborate, the collaborate manifests as a weakness to the compete style and that party will double down on demands.

On the other hand, using iterative Mutual Learning, Motivational Interviewing, and Nonviolent Communications techniques, it can be possible shift the conversation in many cases. It takes practice, listening with a sense of curiosity, detachment from specific results, patience, and a willingness to try different communication styles.

Doesn't it make sense to become versed in these methods? Could we start making some progress?

If you’re interested in learning about a variety of techniques to overcome and avoid conflict, take a look at the online course Mindshifting to Overcome and Avoid Conflict. The next offering will start January 16, and here is the registration page.

Unlearning

The power of learning to unlearn, a recent article by Rachel Botsman, caused me to think about some of the material in the Mindshifting classes.

One of the observations in Mindshifting 1 is that we can’t remove a habit (or belief, or value, or methodology, or skill) we replace it.

There is a tried and true 4 step model towards building fluency:

1. Unconscious incompetence: when we don’t even realize that something is wrong.
2. Conscious incompetence: this actually has three components.
   1. Realization that there is a gap between what we are doing (or thinking, or saying) and the results we desire.
   2. Observation that there are other actions which do lead to the results we desire.
   3. Selection of some action, but, because we are not skilled in it, the desire to learn those skills.
3. Conscious competence: improvement in the skills, probably through a combination of research, instruction, practice, and feedback with the understanding that we can perform them but only if we consciously and actively perform them.
4. Unconscious competence: fluidity in using the skills, so that we do not have to think about them and that they become our new habits.

Botsman emphasized that our own minds will often fight like the dickens to defend what is already known and familiar. This is one of the reasons that organizations and people who yearn for a growth mindset or learning culture find it much harder that expected; getting to that third part of Conscious incompetence is really really hard, and progressing to unconscious competence is equally fraught.

Our minds have a lot of weapons to resist change, to fight unlearning, using fear and anxiety to unleash cognitive biases and collective illusions. The deceptively simple answer is to act with a sense of curiosity and exploration, especially when success seems inaccessible.

During the unconscious incompetence phase, it’s being curious about whether there might be other or better ways. When we start realizing our incompetence it means searching for alternatives, synthesizing what we are learning, and consciously choosing a path even when our own minds and others question our sanity for designing change. While we are experimenting, and often failing, to acquire competence, it means looking at how far we have traveled, what we are learning, and what we might practice.

Our minds and our colleagues might call on us to give up. Progress is through curiosity and exploration, to exemplify what Arianna Huffington said, “Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.”

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

What I learned about education while in Portugal

Here are the five big takeaways:

1. When there is joy in school, there is deep learning, and when the main focus is standards and tests imposed by “authorities” there is neither.
2. Companies that develop internship programs gain access to talented and loyal employees while also advancing the entire industry.
3. Joyful learning occurs when the entire school community integrates music, art, sports, problem solving, and collaboration into their daily schedules, and when academic subjects are covered as if they were detached from all the above, neither the students nor the educators are served.
4. Angela Maiers can motivate teachers in any location and in any country, her message resonates and inspires.
5. We all need to listen to the teachers; they are the ones who best know their students, and if we do, we can propel Education 5.0.

Last year, a group of us visited Finland and embedded ourselves in the Finnish education system for three days, and here was my post and video of  reflections from Tammie Schrader and me.

This year, Marco Bento, Celestino Magalhaes, and José Alberto Lencastre hosted Angela Maiers, Nancy Mangum, Tammie Schrader, Kristin Zeimke, a team from Brazil, and me for three days in Portugal. We participated in the SuperTabi education technology conference, and visited schools, a video game development company, the largest education publisher in Portugal, and interacted with Edtech providers to the Portuguese education system.

The two schools we visited were Colégio Santa Eulália (birth through high school plus a retirement community) and Colégio Alfacoop (PreK-12). How many schools do you know feature a Frank Zappa quote for their students and teachers?

Or have students who are so engrossed in their work that they don’t even know they are learning or that 10 adults just entered their classroom?

Imagine a school with abundant intelligently designed outside facilities so children of different ages can play, burn off steam, and integrate what they are learning.It’s no wonder that the students end up with great lives and when they themselves have children, send their own children to the school.

Here was a great example of the effect education can have on a young life. A 14 year old boy had developed disruptive and damaging habits. His uncle was a bus driver at Alphacoop. As the driver explained, “I was afraid we were going to lose him, he was on a path to prison, drugs, or worse.” Alphacoop gave that boy a chance and the respect and guidance to help him turn himself around and now he is attending university. Listen to this story.

Look at the energy and enthusiasm in these students’ faces. Isn’t that why we all went into education? These were all students who had taken robotics and coding from Celestino and insisted on having their picture taken with him.

Visiting these schools made us feel forever young (yes, even me, especially as I got a chance to participate in a gym dancing class, sing, and tell a dad joke and riddle) and wanting to come and experiment, just like the sign says.

We also visited two companies. Saber is a state of the art video game development studio. They develop their own games as well as develop for all the large game developers, especially scenes involving cars and racing. Porto Editora is one of the two largest print and digital education publishers in Portugal, and has been charged by the ministry of education with creating a full digital curriculum.

Saber stands at the leading edge of technology, and so like all tech, faces a challenge finding workers who can step in to produce to their specifications. When software, graphics, or sound engineers graduate from university, they are not equipped for the higher standards of quality work or schedules. 

Saber is overcoming the school to work gap by offering a free Saber Academy to recent graduates. A typical attendee spends three to six months producing the same types of projects as actual workers, but under the mentoring of top quality developers. At some point, generally in their 4th to 6th project, they create some module that matches industry expectations, and they are certified and immediately get snapped up by Saber or another game developer.

Porto Editora demonstrated how old line manufacturing companies can adapt to the threats and opportunities of new technology. In print publishing and distribution, we saw how manufacturing companies can streamline operations through mechanized equipment and artificial intelligence, and by walking through their rapidly growing digital publishing arm, we saw how established companies can be nimble and create highly effective teams to pounce on new opportunities, capitalizing on their experience and resources.

Our very first activity was watching Angela Maiers kindle the fire in the hearts of Portuguese educators.

We all need to be able to comprehend digital content, create digital content, and unite others around our digital messages. Every child today needs to feel that their message is needed, and that they have the capability to get their message across, and only teachers can give that to children. That’s one reason why our whole society needs teachers. Here is her session and here was our session.

There is a (hopefully) growing Portugues movement in education around Education 5.0:

1. Technology to understand, create, and communicate.
2. Space to encourage inquiry, curiosity, community, and learning.
3. Pedagogy based on meaningful projects, games, digital storytelling and cooperative and collaborative models.
4. Engagement that involves students in their own processes of learning interacting with teachers and families in a joyful environment.
5. Emotion which determines the way the mind and brain learn and builds empathetic, curious, and motivated students and adults.

We are already planning our summit for next year. It should be epic.

Increasing Student Test Scores

According to McKinsey study released just this month:

nationwide, an estimated 17 million students have more than half a year of pandemic-related learning delay, 16 million students who need mental-health support are not receiving it, and 15 million students are chronically absent.

There are about 54 million students in the US. Fifteen to 17 million is just under a third of all students.

How many more students are more than a half year behind having nothing to do with Covid?

Maybe we should learn how the brain operates and then act in schools and outside of schools in ways that strengthen our critical thinking, resourcefulness, and social-emotional abilities?

Focusing on student test scores (AKA student achievement) just seems wrong. How are we enabling kids to grow so that they can take on their adult roles?

Donella Meadows taught us the potential leverage points for systemic change. While we tend to focus on changing inputs (like funding), outputs (like test scores), measurement (like assessment), or rules and structures (like curriculum or classwork or homework), you only really change systems by changing the goals and mindsets of the participants.

Like, maybe, Mindshifting?