Making Errors by Design

Due to an unfortunate series of events, my local school district has had to close a few days over the last month or so.  One of the consequences of this is that students go without school lunch. For a good portion of the district, school lunch was the most reliable meal they received on a  daily basis.  One of the things that's popped up in response to this is a community refrigerator.  People contribute food and meals to the community fridge so that others can grab what they need without cost.  This is a form of mutual aid where the community takes when they need and provides when they are able.   The thing about mutual aid is that it is often set up without strict guidelines so it is easy to access. 

On the Facebook group that helps manage this community fridge, someone mentioned that they saw a person come in and take "a huge box of nearly everything"  that seemed way more than one person could need. The poster asked the group "How can we prevent this?"  This caused a really interesting discussion in the group about that highlights a challenge we run into in our organizations and our culture. 

Two factions evolved in the discussion: the first agreed with the sentiment of the poster and wanted to devise a way to make sure that no one took more than they needed.  The second faction urged people to not make assumption about the people need and suggested that the goal of the community fridge was that people leave it not wanting for more, even if as observers we thing they took too much. 

As I read this I started seeing the conversation through the lens of research.  One of the things I still remember from my research methods courses in grad school is the challenge of Type 1 and Type 2 errors.  When doing research, there is a chance that we are wrong about our hypothesis.  Heck, when you are a grad student there is a BIG chance you are wrong about your hypothesis.  But in social sciences, how you are wrong is worth looking at.

Errors in research are not "I thought X and the answer is Y".  That's just a failure to find an effect.  An error is "I thought X, and the research told me a different answer than the true answer".  There are two ways that you can be wrong:  either your work found X true when X was false, or your work found X false when X was true.  The first is a false positive - a type 1 error.  The second is a false negative - a type 2 error.

In my experience, each of us, and each of our organizations, have a preference for one type of error over another.  And these kind of binary situations aren't just in hypothesis testing.  We can find ourselves putting in effort for something we could never get (working for a false positive) or not doing enough because we thought it was an impossible outcome (earning that false negative). 

The case with the mutual aid refrigerator is another choice where we can't know what's right - finding out if each person taking something needs precisely that amount would be a huge burden on the community.  I think it is valuable for those involved to know if they are okay with someone who doesn't need the food taking it ( A type 1 error) or if they are okay with someone in need being denied access (A type 2 error). 

I want to say that I don't think that working towards eliminating all false positives or eliminating all false negatives is universally a good thing.  I firmly believe that each problem is different and calls for its own approach. 

What I confidently think is that we will make errors.  The best way to handle that is to understand which type of error we want to avoid the most and deign to minimize those errors. Because then when inevitably mess up it will be in a direction that, while it isn't ideal, at least we can live with it.

Supreme Collaboration

Freestyle Love Supreme is an improvisational hip hop group, co-founded by Anthony Veneziale and Lynn Manuel Miranda. Starting as a improve hip-hop performance troupe, it has gone all the way to Broadway, Las Vegas and a television series.

Freestyle Love Supreme now has an educational offshoot, Freestyle+ which  trains people on how to open themselves up, sharpen their minds, and improve their creativity through the principles of freestyle rap. Freestyle+. Does amazing work and has even developed technology to help focus cognitive skill building in adults. While that is very interesting, I'm more interested in how the performance unfolds and rather than the impact it has on the individual, the impact it has on the group and collaboration.

Typically five people take the stage when Freestyle Love Supreme performs. One person is the beat box. They lay down a rhythm with their mouths, creating a pattern that the rest of the group responds to and interacts with. Like other improvisational performances, the troupe take acknowledgements and suggestions from the audience and they weave those words and those ideas into a freestyle rap anchored by the beatbox’s rhythm. 

One of the amazing things that happens here is that they do this together. This is not just one person rapping. They tell stories in a rap that connects and extends each other’s verses.  They reach back into previous moments in the performance and resurface ideas into the current moment. Through all of this, there is a magical collaboration going on, and I say magical because it's different than anything I have seen or heard discussed about collaboration.

Freestyle Love Supreme creates a collaborative product the spotlight shifts from person to person. The focus is not on the group, but on the individuals. Conversations about collaboration often miss what Freestyle Love Supreme gets: collaboration is not just everyone putting a unified goal ahead of their own goals. Collaboration best is when we take our individual goals, bring them together and work towards them and a collective goal.  We take our individual performances and weave with each other to create something greater that accomplishes more than we can accomplish by ourselves, but also doesn't ignore what we want to accomplish for ourselves.

Creating success through spotlighting one another is a strategy that has academic support as well.  Researchers examined strategies to win at an economic game and found that when the players were in teams, the highest score was achieved when the team worked together to elevate one member. 

The example of Freestyle Love Supreme was part of my inspiration for Authentic Collaboration (so much so my first idea was "Supreme Collaboration").  Their performances serve as an example of celebrating and elevating individuals in the group while achieving the shared goal.  How can you do this yourself?  It takes some specific actions:

Knowing the shared goal and your own

Being willing to take the spotlight and share your ambitions with the group

Being ready to support your team in their individual goals. 

Dunbar's Number, But Networked

This is an excerpt from an early chapter in my book talking about a key reality of social network analysis: people are not the interesting part, connections are the interesting part.  I hope you enjoy. 

When I first met one of my wife's college friends, Jay, he said he hoped he could remember my name and if he did store my name in his memory, he wondered who's name would drop out of his brain.  He said that it was science that he could only remember 150 people, and jokingly apologized if I dropped out of that 150 person list before we saw each other again.

What Jay was referring to was Dunbar's number, a constant that has gained a lot of interest over the last 20 years.  Robin Dunbar was an anthropologist from Oxford University who examined the neocortex size of primates and found that the size of the neocortex correlated with social group sizes.  Primates with smaller neocortex tended to have social groups of smaller sizes.  This relationship was examined and found to accurately predict the social group size of other primates as well.  When you placed the human neocortex on the graph of social group size, you ended up with an average group size of 147.8.  For ease of memory, we've rounded this up to 'about 150'.

It turns out that  a rough  'rule of 150' can be found in many pre-industrial groups.  Records of neolithic cultures in multiple continents suggest 150 as a common village size.  Roman armies had a unit of 150 soldiers.   W.L. Gore limited their work groups to 150 on a site.   The idea behind this is that with 150 people, we can know everyone in the group and have an actual relationship with them. 

This does not play out exactly this way in our modern society.  Check your linkedin - how many connections do you have there? How about your Facebook?  These are two symmetrical social networks, so they all 'know' you as well.  But think about Instagram or Xtwitter - your followers and who you follow are likely numbers above 150.  These are asymmetric connections, but still connections.  And all that social media consideration excludes the people you see and interact with regularly who are not internet friends with you: the people who are casual acquaintances you run into in daily life.

So how do those numbers comport with Dunbar's Number?  One way to think of it is that those numbers are accurate- those people aren't all really your friends or colleagues.  Social media is just an illusion. 

I don’t think that is right.  I think we need to think of Dunbar's number differently.

Dunbar's number is the ideal maximum size of a community, not the maximum size of your network.  Your network can be much larger than that and still be in accordance with Dunbar's model of brain size and social group.  How? Social networks are not measured by number of people in a group, but by the number of relationships in the group. 

Social network analysis is the technique used to understand the dynamics within and between groups.  When a researcher uses social network analysis they examine the connection between people in the network, not the people themselves.  So Dunbar's number suggests a cap for the number of people we can comfortably keep track of when they are all in connection with each other somehow.  Primate groups are all collocated, unless someone seeded the Congo with cellphones.  Our networks in the modern world allow us to be connected with people that we are physically distant from and who may not be connected to few if any other people we know. 

What this means is that the Linkedin and Facebook lists of hundreds of connections is valid.  We have the capacity to track that many people if they are not all interconnected.  In fact, with Dunbar's number of 148 people, we have a theoretical limit of keeping track of over 10,000 connections. 

Instead of taking up 1 of 150 people in Jay's mental database, I was taking up 2 of his 10,000 connections he could track.  And the next time I saw him it turned out that he did remember me.  Because he had many more connections he could follow. 

So what does this mean day-to-day? When we think of our network as a list of freinds, or a rolodex if you are old school, we are not understanding it clearly.

Your network isn’t who you know. It’s how you know people.

You can grow your network through meeting more people - thousands, even. Or you can grow your network through growing the connections you have with people. Improve the quality of connections; add new dimensions to the connection. This strategy deepens relationships and can have much better results than just adding to the collection of names.

Learning, AI and George Carlin

As I was writing a different newsletter, a report about an AI comedy special based on George Carlin came across my feed and it inspired me to pivot to a new topic.  George Carlin passed away in 2008 and this week a comedy Youtube channel ran old media of him through AI to recreate his voice and create new jokes with an LLM built on his words.

I am not going to talk about the ins and outs ethics and legality of the special.  I'll point you to tech journalist Tom Merritt if you want to explore those ideas a little more.  What I want to talk about was the reaction of Carlin's daughter and the implications for organizational learning. 

Kelly Carlin, George's daughter, did not appreciate this 'impression' and expressed that on Twitter (X).  Among her comments about it was a thought that caught my attention because it brings up a concern I have about AI roll out in organizations. 

At the end of her comments, Carlin suggested that instead of watching a retread of what her dad might have sounded like, that "how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to?"

There are thousands of comedians getting on stage in night clubs, going to open mic nights and developing their craft every week.  Some of them get a break and get on television.  A few of those get a bigger break and get a spotlight show - them, alone on stage for an hour recorded and broadcast.  If this AI comedy special becomes a common phenomenon, it will dry up the pipeline for comedy by clogging media with simulations of classically funny performers creating jokes that are kinda-sorta like their old ones, but maybe with a jab at Elon Musk. 

AI destroying the pipeline of talent is a problem that I have been worried about since learning about Chat-GPT.  In organizations, AI can eliminate a lot of the opportunity to learn how to perform the complex knowledge work that we expect of managers and executives.  Most of the rollout of AI that I have seen so far has been focused on taking away the work no one wants to do; speeding up the drudge work that doesn't directly lead to generating revenue and replacing work that would be done be interns and early-career workers. 

The benefit of using AI for this kind of work is clear: increased productivity, faster turn-around, potentially lower costs.  The challenge is that this work serves a purpose other than just getting things done.  While working at the Institute for Research of Learning, Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger researched how learning happened through work.  They described the activities essential to developing expertise in a given practice.  The earliest activities that someone does as they progress are fall into a category they call legitimate peripheral participation(LPP).  LPP is work that is of low risk but important.  It is essential and the worker is engaged in and around the product and more advanced workers. It is work that allows you to be engaged with a practice, but does not require you to know it well already.  It is the grunt work, the small things.

In the coming years, I am concerned about companies that eliminate a majority of their legitimate peripheral activities by pushing them off to AI.  Not just for what they do to the labor force, but for what they do to themselves.  There is a chance that organizations will work to streamline and declutter workflow so much that new professionals won't have a chance to start their learning process on the ground floor. And if companies don't foster talent deliberately, they may well end up with a development pipeline that is near empty when it comes time find new managers and executives. 

Sadly, I don't have an answer for how to prevent this. I wish I did, because answering the question of how companies develop talent in the age of AI is going to be a lucrative business in the next 5 years. 

If you'd like to read more on legitimate peripheral participation, Lave and Wenger wrote a book titled Situated Learning: legitimate peripheral participation.  It is more a philosophy and anthropology book than a guidebook, but if you like to geek out about learning like I do, it is an intriguing read. 

A Community Built from a Game

CC Share Alike-Attribution image Cyclonebiskit

In the summer of 2016, a viral infection hit the mobile phones of the world.  Like all things viral, it spread without warning and most adults probably were infected by their kids.  This particular viral event was the game Pokemon GO.  Pokemon GO is a location-based video game that you play with your cellphone based on the classic kids' collectable card game.  In the game, you wander around with your GPS on and collect little creatures called Pokemon and then make your way to specific spots where there are  arenas to have them battle one another. 

This game was a such a trend last summer that bars were publicizing the pokemon attractiveness of their locations, people were hopping fences to get to special spots in the game and political candidates were referencing it on the campaign trail.  But for at least one family, it was more than just a trend. 

I saw this story on twitter, with the names redacted.  A mother with a son on the autism spectrum tells how she introduced her son to Pokemon GO.  Her son reacted as excitedly as most kids did to the game.  But more than that, he became engaged. 

A little boy saw him and recognized what he was doing. They immediately had something in common. He asked Ralphie how many he had caught. Ralph didn't really answer him, other than to shriek "POKEMON!!!!" and jump up and down with excitement while flapping his arms. Then the little boy showed him how many HE had caught (over 100!) and Ralph said "WOWWWW!" and they high-fived.

The mother went on to tell how other people interacted with her son, giving advice, cheering him on and comparing catches.  Because of autism, Ralph was not often approached by other kids looking to connect, and when that did happen, he often didn’t react in ways that were positive.  The connection this day was rare and amazing for her family; a wonderful outcome of a silly game. 

It really wasn't the game that brought out the socializing in Ralphie and the strangers he encountered.  The game made it possible, yes, but the community that evolved around the game made the interaction possible.  In the academic world, this is called a community of practice, and it’s a powerful connector.

Communities of practice were conceptualized by Etienne Wenger in the 1990s.   He describes them as the collection of people who share a set of goals, practices and identities.  Communities of practice aren't a work team - they don't have the same goal.  They are trying to get similar things done in their own space.  Unlike the story of Robbers Cave, communities of practice share identity not through achieving something together, but by achieving similar things independently.  This dynamic plays out through having shared engagement, shared context and a common experience.

1.    Shared engagement - Shared engagement is knowing the process of someone's work because you see it or do it yourself. Shared engagement isn’t working together but doing the same or similar work.  Pokemon GO players weren’t trying to collect digital animals for the same team, they each had their own.  But they did have the same rules and processes for how to go about getting them all.  

2.    Shared context - for Ralphie, the new shared context was the game.  For professionals, the shared context is the realities of working in firms or corporations, the type of clients they serve, the way work shapes their personal lives.  This context can be the same without being exactly the same:  accountants share a context, even if they don't work for the same big accounting firm.  

3.    Common experience - When people have shared engagement and contexts, they generate and are exposed to shared stories, similar people, and similar adventures and misadventures.  The common experience is the connective tissue of a community of practice when people change contexts or work:  the common experience still remains to keep people from being completely disconnected.

One of the effects of a community of practice, according to Wenger, is a shared identity centered on the practice. I've already covered the positive effect of shared identity and how to find small clues we are in the same groups.  The community of practice is another link that we share with people.  Communities of practice don't require that we share the same goal or work side-by-side regularly.  In fact, communities of practice can include people we compete against and people we have never worked side-by-side with.  The connection in a community of practice is anchored on the context and processes of our work.  There is commonality in our experience even when we don't have common experiences. 

So what can knowledge of the community of practice do for The Networked Leader? First, it helps to know that you are a part of a community, whether you are aware of it or not. Even if you have only ever practiced banjo by yourself on your front porch, you are in the banjo Community of Practice.  You share the experience of fingernail ripping and the context of Deliverance jokes.  You belong.  Turning this knowledge into action may involve finding an active group to participate in or just connecting around your practice.  In either case, knowing that you are a legitimate member of a community is powerful. 

Second, communities of practice are great places to learn.  While the practice is similar, and the context often similar, the members of a community of practice have different experiences which provide potentially huge insights.  When we see someone as being like us, the differences are magnified <<<link>>>, and similar-but-different is a great place to find innovative answers to problems.

Finally, formal communities of practice such as associations, guilds or conferences are great sources of weak ties - those connections that provide the avenue for new information, resources and opportunities to come into our world. 

Young Ralphie found a community of practice that accepted and embraced him for his joy in a new game.  Communities of practice can be great opportunities for all of us to connect, belong and learn. Just remember these keys:

1.    If you practice, you belong.  No matter how novice or expert you are. 

2.    Communities of practice are places of learning.  They provide a wellspring of experience and insight at your fingertips

3.    Shared practices anchor connections.  Coming together with a community of practice is an opportunity to expand your networks and reach out beyond your company or school.

Your Brain, networking and rejection

One of the reoccurring challenges for people is engaging their network - first connections at conferences and cocktail hours;  seeking aid to get something done or learn something.  We have a hard time reaching out.  This hard time is difficult to describe, and often leaves us afraid.

Why are we scared?

To explore the aversion to connecting with someone, we need to play a game called Cyberball.  Or, rather, look at an adventure in Cyberball.  Cyberball is a game developed by Christopher Cheung, Wilma Choi and Kip Williams in order to examine social ostracism, exclusion and rejection.   It is a video game that simulates an old-fashioned game of catch, with a twist.  The experimental participant plays on a screen with two other people, tossing the virtual ball around.   The twist is that the other two people are actually computer programs and at a certain time, they start playing with each other and ignore the participant.  Kip Williams has used this for over 15 years to uncover our reactions to being left out both online and in the real world. 

Cyberball's relation to the concern people have when engaging in rejection is intuitive: we all dislike rejection and being left out.  But more than intuitive, there is hardwired evidence for this aversion.  Williams partnered up with neuroscientists to examine participants' reactions to cyberball while inside an fMRI machine.  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines take images of blood flow in the brain to see what parts are more active during different cognitive tasks. 

In this case, the researchers knew that ostracism in person and on screen would lower people's sense of belonging, control, self-esteem and having a meaningful existence.  They wanted to see how the brain reacted during those events to increase our understanding of the social brain. 

fMRI research is done in hospitals, because that is where the MRI machines are.  This location lead to a coincidence that helped Eisnberg, Lieberman and Williams understand how we feel social rejection.  One day while examiningthe images in the fMRI lab, a researcher working on a physical pain study was working next to them.  They commented on the similarities between the two images: both subjects had the same areas of the brain lit up in their images.  It turns out, we feel the social pain of rejection in the same place we feel actual, physical pain. 

Writing about it later, Lieberman suggests:

The mammalian need to recognize social threats appears to have hijacked the physical pain system to do what the pain system does - remind us when there is a threat to one of our basic needs.

Lieberman discusses much more about the brain in his book, and I will be referring to it frequently.  For now, I am stopping here with the question that always causes me to pause with brain research:  So what?  While it's interesting to know what your brain is doing, what can you actually do about it? 

In this case, you can take some measures to reduce the likelihood of rejection.  And that's a lesson we can learn from first-graders. 

In 1983, Martha Putallaz of Duke University did a study examining the entry behavior of young children in a lab and compare that to their social standing later in the school year.  She used confederates, much like the programs in Cyberball, to test how a child attempted to enter the social dynamic of a pair playing together.  After videotaping, she observed some consistent behavior:

Talking about themselves

Asking Informational Questions

Agreeing

Disagreeing

Besides these behavior, the research team also evaluated the relevance of the statements and questions the child made.  Each statement was given a score on a scale measuring how much it was connected with the existing conversation to how much it was completely unrelated. 

Three months after the experiment, Putallaz evaluated the social status of each child using a version of social network analysis and found that the behaviors each correlated with popularity or unpopularity.   She examined how each response behavior, along with his relevance score, correlated with popularity.  

If you look back at my post Be Interesting, you may guess that talking about yourself does not increase popularity, and you would be right.  Also, with the boys in question here, talking about themselves was also an avenue to change the subject.  It was very low in relevance to what was happening in the room. 

Another intuitive answer backed up: when given a score based on the number of agreeing statements minus disagreeing statements, high A-D equaled higher popularity three months later.  Again, relevance worked in the same direction: kids who agreed more than disagreed tended to read the room and talk about what was going on instead of other topics. 

Talking about other topics was the downfall of the informational question behavior.  Children who asked a lot of informational questions in the experiment were highly likely to ignore the context and ask about irrelevant things.  So while asking "what's going on?  What are you playing?" may seem like a sound engagement strategy, it wasn't the one pursued here.  Questions were more along the line of "Do you know how big a human brain weighs?" or " What's your favorite tree?" in this example. 

This research on kids joining behavior shows us that providing relevant information is very important, and that being agreeable is very important.  

So what do we take away from this?

• 1. Anxiety when joining in social situations is real.  Your brain feels the pain of rejection just as much as it feels physical injury. 

  2. When joining a conversation, fit yourself into the context.  Keep your questions and comments relevant to the subject at hand.  

  3. Be agreeable.  This doesn't mean you need to say 'Yes' to everything, but a high ratio of agreement to disagreement contributes to future relationship strength. 

The succesful asking strategy of a reknowned politician

When I talk to people about their networks, asking for help is the most common challenge listed.  There are a couple of reasons for this, and one is that people are unclear on good ways to ask for help.  Here is an allegory I share to help people hone their asking skills:   

Some time ago, a politician-in-exile ran from the despotic military of the illegal regime that replaced her democratically elected government.  Just before she was captured,  she managed to get a request for aid out to a sympathetic retired general, setting into motion a series of events the world has remembered since. 

Her message:  "Help me Obi-wan, you're my only hope."

This image belongs to Lucas Arts.  You probably already know that. 

While technically not history, Princess Leia's hologram is a great example of a 'good ask'.  The Princess was sending a request out into her network.  She had never met Obi-wan Kenobi, but new of him from her father.  Ultimately, her request resulted in the overthrow of the evil Empire and re-institution of the galactic government, so it can be called a success. (Episodes VII-IX pending)  But what was it about this message that made it so effective? 

Princess Leia used some key components in her ask that encouraged response.  Breaking down her request, we see this structure:

1. Framing the relationship

2. Asking specifically

3. Making it personal

Framing the relationship

Princess Leia frames her connection to Obiwan.  "You served my father in the Clone Wars".  This established the links - Obiwan to Bail Organna to Leia.  It also reminds Obiwan of the nature of the relationship - "You served my father."   When making a request of someone not directly linked this two-part process is invaluable.  When we describe the path from them to us,  we evoke the relationships in between and begin to recreate the connection that was in those relationships.  And when we remind people of the nature of the relationship, we help set the stage for the kind of connection we are hoping to recreate. 

Framing the relationship also helps with direct connections.  Here, reminding the nature of the relationship doesn’t require a reminder of the path as it is a direct connection, but the quality or history of the relationship may be useful context.  For example, let them know that you recall their expertise on the subject you need help on in order to set the frame.

Ask Specifically

After framing the connection, the process of asking requires specific information.  The easiest way to think of this is Why, What, How.

Let's look at Princess Leia again.  Her message contains the three key pieces:

Why

"I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in person, but my ship has fallen under attack and I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed."

What

"I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it."

How

"You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan." 

Why, what and how each have a different purpose.  Why give the motivation for your call and when done well, taps into their motivations. What reduces uncertainty.  A vague request can fill the recipient with anxiety, and the easiest way to deal with that is to just ignore it.  Finally, How reduces cognitive load.  The recipient doesn't need to work out possibilities and contemplate what to do.  You have given him a clear call to action.  

Make it Personal

The final piece of princess Leia's request is possibly the most important.   "Help me, Obiwan.  You're my only hope."  This makes the request personal by letting Obiwan know that she came to him for a reason, and not just because he is around or just to make the connection.  Obiwan is best person to help her here.  When you ask someone for help, let them know that you are looking for them personally, not just any warm body.  Point out to them why you chose to ask them in particular. Is it a skill they have, a trust you have in their judgment; some trait they excel in? In advice to request seekers, author Tim Ferris points out that if you can google it, you don't need to ask for help, and if you ask for help when you can google the answer, you frustrate busy people. 

So Princess Leaia lined up the four principles very well.  She framed the connection, she was specific with Why, What and How, and she made it personal.  Do that with your requests, and you increase your chances to overthrow the Evil Empire that is plaguing you. 

To finish, let me give an example:

Hello readers and listeners, thank you for following along these months with the newsletter and the newly launched podcast.  <<Framing the relationship>> One of my goals in putting this out is to build an audience in order to make my dream of a book a reality and I need help getting the word out.  << Specific: Why>> The number one way that audiences grow is by word-of-mouth. <<Specific: What>> So please, if you like the newsletter, tell a friend about it, forward it, or post a link on Facebook to the blog post. <<Specific: How>>   A trusted friend's recommendation is one hundred times more effective in getting a new subscriber than an ad or promotion.  <<Personal>> So please, share the newsletter, review the podcast on itunes, and let people know how much you enjoy The Networked Leader and Mandatory Cocktail Hour.

We're back!

Hey.

It's been a while.  You know how it is: summer happens, kids aren't in school and want more time, you spend a couple weeks at the beach, habits fade away. 

Well, I'm back.  It took some effort to roll out this letter, because I felt like I had broken a promise.  I said I would write regularly, and I missed a long period of time.  What's the right way to come back from that?

How about writing about just that?  I realized recently that I wrote about the benefits of reactivating dormant ties some time ago, but just hand-waved about the reality of reconnecting.  I gave the what, but not the how.  And the how matters. 

Part of what I spent my time away doing was reading.  One of the best books I read this summer was Brene Brown's Daring Greatly.  Brown is a PhD in Social Work who has done extensive research on shame and vulnerability.  You can see a TED talk of hers where she tells the story of her research here.  It's a great book, with amazing insights into universal experiences about how we treat ourselves and our relationships to others. 

Brown defines shame as different from guilt with a simple twist of phrase: guilt is feeling bad because we did something.  Shame is feeling bad because of how we define ourselves.  Shame is the internalization of guilt.  We feel guilty because we haven't called in a while.  We feel ashamed because we are a bad friend. 

This was the insight that struck me when reading the book: I felt guilty about violating the pattern of newsletters over the summer.  Then I felt shame because I was not a good newsletter-writing-person.   And we do the same thing with relationships that we let fade away.  At first, a twinge of guilt over our lack of connecting creeps in.  Then, we start defining ourselves through our guilt: we are ashamed of ourselves as friends, as colleagues, as sons/daughters/siblings.  When we feel shame, we define ourselves as not being good enough for whoever we faded away from. In fact, Brown describes shame at its root as an issue of connection:

Shame is the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal we’ve not lived up to, or a goal that we’ve not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection.

Ironically, when it comes to maintaining connections, shame leads to deeper disconnection.  When we are ashamed, we avoid the thing that inspires that shame.  In the case of faded connections, we put off reconnecting longer and longer.  At some point, our shame-filled mind tells us, "It's been so long, she will start the conversation with blaming you for not calling," or "How can you write him now? You don't have anything to share or give," or "You can't just call because you need something.  You haven't called in ages."  As time goes by, the situation recycles on itself and "you haven't chatted in days" slowly morphs into "you haven't chatted in a year", with an even deeper sense of shame.

So what can we do? Brown has a wide collection of tools for overcoming shame, but three that she uses herself stand out for getting beyond having not reached out:

1.    Own the story

2.    Talk to yourself the way you would someone else

3.    Be courageous and reach out

When you "own the story", you make yourself a protagonist instead of a bystander.  You become the actor who drives what happens instead of waiting for something to happen to you.  Owning the story includes taking responsibility for what has happened so far, which isn't fun.  But taking responsibility and making things happen are better choices than sitting on the sideline in your own life.

We are often hardest on ourselves.  In this case, imagine how you would react if someone you hadn't heard from in ages reached out.  Would you be annoyed at the months or years gone by, or would you be interested in what's happening in their life and how they are doing?  Echoing back to my previous post on dormant ties, people like hearing from old friends, they have been distant themselves and you taking the time to reach out means something.

That leads to the third point.  While "Do it anyway" (warning, music and Muppets) feels like hollow advice, your reaching out is a sign that you are engaging with the relationship.  Reaching out makes people feel good.  It takes some courage to get past the voices in your head, but reaching out begins the rebirth of the connection. 

So this is me, ignoring the voices in my head that are saying that I blew it when I stopped sending newsletters over the summer.  Reaching out, sending letters.  I hope you continue to enjoy them. 

Keys to creating energy in your network

My wife has an old friend from college who would rally the gang together to go out to the bar on a regular basis.  He was a few years older than her, tireless in his pursuit of fun, and infectious in his enthusiasm.  "It's the 15th to last Tuesday of my college career!  You have to come out with me!" 

This made his call to arms every Tuesday until he graduated, and in the years followingprogressed from corporate high-riser to building his own marketing business.  After growing that business to over $40 million in revenue, he moved on to be the executive director of a theater company.   Through it all - college shenanigans, corporate life, entrepreneurship and the arts, he maintained that same infectious energy that made him the Pied Piper of Durham, NC. 

This kind of energy is something most of us have experienced.  A person comes along and you find yourself wanting to work with them, or just be around them while they do their magic.  It's an experience that feels good but  impossible to nail down in order to replicate.  Except someone has.

Rob Cross is a professor at The Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  His research expertise is in organizational network analysis - the application of social network analysis to improve organizational effectiveness.   Cross and some colleagues examined several organizations to find out more about energizing encounters at work, and they found that energizers have some common traits and some common experiences.

Along with Andrew Parker and Wayne Baker, Cross found that there are certain people in organizations that increase the feeling of energy for everyone they encounter.  When you engage with an energizer, you feelmore motivated, more valued and just generally better than before.   Along with the upside for everyone who interacts with him, there is a clear benefit to being an energizer.  Cross, Baker and Parker note that:

Energizers are more likely to have their ideas considered and put into action.

They motivate others to act.

People devote themselves more fully to interactions with an energizer.

Energizers also attract the commitment of other high performers.

People position themselves to work for these engaging colleagues.

The energizer doesn't reach out to cultivate a network.  People reach out to him - they want him as part of their developmental and operational networks.  The energizer cultivates his network by being attractive - not physically, but relationally.  So what makes these people a fountain of energy?  Cross, Baker and Parker found five things.

1.    Energizers focus on possibilities. 

When talking with an energizer, they focus on what can happen, rather than focusing on what is impossible.  More specifically, the energizer focuses on the possibilities that can make their goals and plans come to fruition, rather than fixating on problems and negative externalities.  This often shows up as having a vision and leading toward it.  It's a standard requirement for work leaders.  However, even outside of work, a vision has value.  Our Pied Piper had a vision in college of his buddies out enjoying a Tuesday night, celebrating their youth and friendship.  He focused on the possibilities instead of worrying about problems (homework) and a clear vision of what college should be. 

2.    Energizers create space for others to contribute in meaningful ways.

Sometimes a visionary can feel like a taskmaster.  They share the idea of a better future, but make it clear that you are merely an instrument in creating that future, instead of a participant.  Energizers create participation.  Cathy Salit, author of Performance Breakthrough, calls this building your ensemble:  bringing together people who will improve your performance while you improve theirs.  The ensemble is different from the team – in the ensemble, the audience applauds all the players, not just the stars. 

3.    Energizers are fully engaged when they connect with you. 

At any given restaurant, at this very minute, a table full of people are sitting together, each staring at their individual phone. This has become an epidemic in our culture to the point that 'texting neck' is now a condition doctors see.  Being with someone when their intention and attention are somewhere else is de-energizing.  Energizers engage fully when they are with people.  To connect with people, they use body language, eye contact, and a conversation style that that make you feel heard.  Whether they are the loud, central storyteller or the quiet, introverted listener, thisengagement makes people feel energized after communicating with them.

4.    Energizers engage and help people see progress. 

Through engaging their ensemble fully, the energizer moves towards their vision.  They may not progress the way that they expect or want, but they celebrate wins where they are and have the flexibility to see wins that they hadn't anticipated.  Finding 'wins', even small ones, is a key motivator according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and consultant Steven J. Kramer.  In their book The Progress Principle  they describe key ways to motivate employees.  It turns out that the biggest influence of creating a positive, motivated inner work life is making progress - even small, noticeable progress - towards meaningful goals.

5.    Energizers foster belief in the goal.

When you work with an energizer, you not only see the vision and feel like you contribute to it, but you believe that it is worthwhile and important.  Cross, Baker and Parker found that this belief was created by one key factor: integrity.

An energizer’s integrity has an impact on energy creation in two important ways.  First, energizers speak their minds rather than harbor hidden agendas…Second, integrity between words and action is critical.

Energizers avoid politics and are reliable contributors.  They demonstrate their belief in the goal through working on it and staying focused on the vision instead of politics. 

In reading this, you may recognize your own Pied Piper: someone you know who rallies people around a vision and ideal, who motivates and engages.  However, it may not be clear how to be that person yourself, or even if it's possible to be that person.  So what's the benefit of knowing about energizers? 

Going back to Salit's book Breakthrough Performance, the benefit of knowing this is that you can perform your way into being an energizer.

While it may seem a daunting performance, try these small steps first:

Focus on the positive and the possible -   Emphasizing aches, pains and problem points drains energy.  While problems need to be acknowledged, use them as stepping points to discuss possibilities and your future vision.

Put your phone down - Engage with the people who are with you, physically, right now.  Make eye contact, ignore the countless screens clamoring for your attention, and let people know they are important. 

Solicit input - the easiest way to make people feel like they are contributing meaningfully is to ask them for their contribution.  As Ben Franklin said, "Nothing makes someone think you are wise more than asking them for their opinion on a matter." 

Be reliable -  Doing what you say you will builds energy simply and effectively.

Celebrate wins, big or small - look for the progress towards your goals, and celebrate them with the people who have helped you achieve them.

Where we really learn at work

My interest in social networks and how we connect first developed through research I did on learning in organizations.  Over the last 10 years, researchers have been focusing on informal learning - learning outside the classroom.  Current popular models suggests that as little as 10% of what we learn about how to be effective in our jobs comes from formal, classroom learning.  I was interested in seeing how formal and informal were connected. For my doctoral research, I worked find the linkage between formal and informal learning.  Because it was thebroader category of the two, I had to analyze informal learning closely for my research.   What I found was that informal learning was ubiquitous and social.

The best piece of research I found was done by Scott Tannenbaum when we was at SUNY Albany.  He surveyed 500 people across seven organizations, asking them to assign a percentage of their work-related knowledge to sources gleaned from earlier research. 

The findings have some interesting gems:

• 10% of reported learning was from trial and error
• 10% of reportedlearning was self-directed study or reading 
• Like other research, about 20% of learning was attributed to formal classroom training, either in the organization or schooling, double the currently vogue benchmark. 
• About 10% of reported learning was due to on-the-job training. 

A quick study will see that this adds up to about 50%.   The other 50% of learning is where the importance of developmental networks comes into play.  In Tannenbaum's research, just under 50% of learning came directly from other people: current or former supervisors; current or former coworkers; colleagues from different companies; even family and friends. 

The common reaction to this research is to decry how little learning is attributed to the classroom.  For my money, that buries the lead.  The big story here is that we learn most from the people around us - coworkers, bosses, colleagues and family.  Learning is social, and it happens not in a special room, but all over the place. 

Your experience probably reflects this.  When you have a challenge at work, what do you do?  You ask someone you think knows the answer.  When you are learning a new process, you don't wait for a class.  You ask your boss how she does it.  You ask your colleague how he gets thing done.  Whatever you are learning at work, the people around you are the most likely source for knowledge. 

It's worthwhile to note that this research was done in 1997 - before Google was on everyone's desk, never mind in everyone's hands.  Google does mean that we go to people less now.  You don't need Jason's expertise on early 1990's sitcoms to remember the episode of Just Shoot Me when that guy wanted to climb a tree.  The great Google will provide.  However, our reliance on Google makes it even more important to know who knows the information not online, like the key steps in getting things done in the office, or how to manage the emotional state of a key stakeholder you need to work with.  These very context-specific pieces of knowledge are where the people around us are invaluable, and why we still go to people to learn. 

So what can you do with this knowledge?  Get better at going out into your network looking for information, and get better at being a resource to your network.    For both of these, research by Rob Cross, at Darden Business School of the University of Virginia, shows traits of relationships that make it easier to share information. 

Over the course of two studies, Cross went into multiple organizations and asked people what characteristics made them more likely to go to someone when they needed information.  The three he found were

• Knowing what information they knew
• Valueing their information as being expert, or at least more expert than your own
• Thinking the person was Accesible to you; that they would answer your question in a timeframe that was useful.

When it comes to going out to your network, make it a point to learn what people know.  Find out who has expertise in specific aspects of the organization, work processes and stakeholders.  It is important that you set out to learn what people know, rather than to learn who knows the things you want to know.  The first is flattering and taking an interest in people.  The second is manipulative and making people instrumental to your goals.

When it comes to being a resource to your network, being accessible is a great way to be valuable.  When people do not know what you know, it may take a while to help them discover that.  When people reach out to you not knowing how accessible you are, it is easy to show them how responsive you can be.  A general rule to follow is that if it takes less than five minutes, do it in the next few minutes.  If it takes longer, let the person looking for information know if you can respond and how long it will take for you.   

We learn from each other, and in the age of Google, the knowledge we get from people around us is more valuable because of its non-robot-indexed nature.  So go out and find out what people know and are expert in.  And be a willing teacher and resource for knowledge.  This will make you both quicker at finding information when you need it, but also cultivate a strong developmental network.