The Answer to How Is Yes

Highlights

• By invoking a How? question, we define the debate about the changes we have in mind and thereby create a set of boundaries on how we approach the task. This, in turn, influences how we approach the future and determines the kind of institutions we create and inhabit.
• The most important effect of the How long? question is that it drives us to answers that meet the criteria of speed. It runs the risk of precluding slower, more powerful strategies that are more in line with what we know about learning and development. We treat urgency like a performance-enhancing drug, as if calling for speed will hasten change, despite the evidence that authentic transformation requires more time than we ever imagined.
• There is no such thing as cheap grace. When we consider cost too early or make it the overriding concern, we dictate how our values will be acted upon because the high-cost choices are eliminated before we start.
• We need to know where we stand. But the question of measurement ceases to serve us when we think that measurement is so essential to being that we only undertake ventures that can be measured.
• The question “Where else is this working?” leads us down a spiraling trap: If what is being recommended or contemplated is, in fact, working elsewhere, then the next question is whether someone else’s experience is relevant to our situation—which, upon closer scrutiny, it is not.
• Refusal becomes a realistic option when we realize that saying no is the beginning of a conversation, not the end.
• How long does it take to raise a child, change a culture, create a new direction, shift a strategy? We can shout urgency, set tight schedules, define monster goals, and the world will still proceed at the pace it chooses. We are too prone to understate the time required as a means of convincing ourselves or others to go ahead. Change comes from care and commitment, so let that be the more important discussion.
• This does not mean that we cannot learn from others. It is just that asking how is a poor method of learning. We learn by bearing witness to how others live their lives. We learn from the questions others have the courage to ask. We are more likely to be transformed from dialogue about what is real and what is illusion. These conversations are qualitatively different from seeking methods and answers.
• The belief that the power lies “up there” is a way of ensuring our own helplessness, all for the relief of an imagined moment of safety.
• We have been willing to yield sovereignty to our bosses or institutions in return for their promise to take care of us. This bargain is disappearing through no action of our own, but the disappearance of safety is hard to live with.
• We are as together as we are ever going to be and it may not be enough. My body is not in the shape I want it to be; I am getting older and a flat stomach won’t change that; the quality of my meal will not satisfy the hunger in my heart; no amount of shopping will cure my loneliness. To live our lives fully, to work wholeheartedly, to refuse directly what we cannot swallow, to accept the mystery in all matters of meaning—this is the ultimate adventure.
• Freedom is the prize, safety is the price, what is required is faith more than fact and will more than skill.
• When we lose idealism, intimacy, and depth, we function at a cosmetic level, pushed along by fashion, out of touch with our center, and we react as if we are the effect of the culture, rather than its cause.
• We shrink the human spirit when we define needs, because it has us acting out of our deficiencies rather than from our capacities.
• To freely choose barter as the basis for work is to commercialize our relationships and ourselves. I treat myself as a transaction in the making. I value myself according to what I can get for myself. My market value becomes my only value. I am now worth what the market will bear. So why wouldn’t I get the highest price possible?
• In the eyes of commerce, a calling is a luxury and the artist is seen as either a fool or a terrorist—they do not live by the rules of commerce or within the bonds of loyalty. They are loyal only to their own art, their own values, their own idealism.
• The point to focusing on idealism is that it is part of what can sustain us when we act on our values. Our idealism gives us the conviction to bring the models of effective organizations into the world in a way that affirms our deepest values, regardless of whether the world reinforces our efforts.
• Institutions are based on consistency and predictability, while intimacy relies on variation and surprise.
• We stay home at night, the porch has moved to the back of the house, and we are too busy or too exhausted to join in activist, collective endeavors. We only show up in numbers for sports and entertainment. Instead of contact sports, we want spectator sports.
• And commerce is now co-opting for its own use the language of relationship. We now hear the term customer intimacy. A large technology company proudly advertises that it is “in the relationship-building business” and offers the latest ways to develop customer intimacy. What they mean by “relationship building” is knowing enough about me to have the right product at the right place at the right price at the right time. This is their version of a relationship: detailed customer data ready to be monetized into a sale. Where intimacy once meant a close encounter, it is now a marketing strategy. Companies know everything there is to know about me, the customer: my income level, whether I am a high-or low-maintenance customer, what my buying patterns are, the other kinds of products people like me tend to buy. They know more about my buying patterns than I do. Some day I expect them to know me well enough to send me new clothes that I never ordered.
• When I become accustomed to a virtual experience, when my private life becomes increasingly organized around my work life, when an electronic world, perfect as it might be, begins to replace my imperfect, decaying, but living and breathing world, I become like that tool.
• Technology increases our isolation while at the same time promising to overcome it. My mother used to keep the TV on all the time to try to overcome her loneliness. It didn’t. It only made enough noise so that she did not have to really make contact with others who might have offered some genuine relief.
• I know that when I am driving and I am lost, I always speed up. If I do not know where I am going, or if I am going to the wrong place, I want to get there more quickly. This would suggest that speed itself is an indication that we are lost.
• There is always time to do everything that really matters: If we do not have time to do something, it is a sign that it does not matter.
• The belief that top management is free, and the middle and bottom are not, is pure fantasy. The top may be rich and powerful, but they struggle as much as anyone with finding their own voice, their own purpose, and their own value.
• Deciding to act as citizens means we are the cause of our environment, not the effect of it. We are not consumers of the organization, waiting to see what management has in mind for us, or wants to sell us. We decide what this place will become. As citizens we have the capacity to act on ideals, to be intimate, and to go deeper, even if our institutions don’t reward it.
• Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing.
• Full citizenship in a high-control institution and culture will always be a radical act. Our challenge is to find a way of being radical that eliminates the violence and egoism that has come to be associated with the term.
• Growing up means seeing the world as it is. Really growing up means realizing that the world really may be as I see it.
• Positive thinking too easily becomes a form of medication. The more we have to remind ourselves to think positively, the more immersed we are in the business of denying our despair at the struggles we see around us.
• We need a self-designed course in the “humanities,” for we operate in human systems, regardless of how technical and automated they become.
• Study something, anything. It is the act of learning that is transforming.
• If your setting is a large organization, view it as a training laboratory, where people come for a while and leave when their experiment is over. View every job this way. Be curious about it all. It is a great classroom and you can learn even if the boss is not interested in teaching. This also gives purpose to an organization or business. The workplace is an incubator for economic and emotional self-sufficiency.
• When we say no to a parent, or a boss who serves as a surrogate parent, it liberates them from the confines of the parenting role and, whether acknowledged or not, gives them the satisfaction of playing a role in the recovery of our most precious of gifts, our freedom.
• the idea that we can receive hope for the price of listening to a leader describe the future is looking for a bargain that has no value.
• It is important to recognize that giving up ambition does not mean we are giving up desire, just the opposite. Ambition, again, means seeking recognition from our institutions, their leaders, and our profession. We trade ambition for choices about what matters, about how we choose to operate, and about what we choose to create. What is affirmed is our determination to do good work, with or without approval. When we choose this idealism, we negate the mindset that it is human nature to pursue self-interest, that people do mostly what they are rewarded for, and that if something does not get measured, it does not get done.
• As we have already seen, the whole idea that bosses should motivate their people ties us all in knots. Instead, bring your employees together and stimulate the right conversation. This is an important role for any boss—to support the communal pursuit of what matters.
• Whom are we here to serve? is the most profound institutional question of commitment. Conventional wisdom places our boundary at the property line. The city line is the boundary for local government, the national border is the limit for world leaders.
• I am responsible for the health of the institution and the community even though I do not control it. I can participate in creating something I do not control.
• The culture works on us and through us and even expresses us. In a literal sense, though, the culture does not really determine our actions or even explain why we do what we do. We are responsible for this. The culture is more like a presence in the shadows, ready to step in when we are not paying attention.
• In the absence of our clear intention, our willingness to consciously change the settings of the world we are creating, the default culture is decisive. This is hard to see clearly because the culture is able to absorb the rhetoric of our individuality and freedom.
• If we operate in a world where efficiency, methodology, and instrumentality are the primary goals, we pursue these at the expense of depth and intimacy, and this is who we become in a larger sense. We purchase progress at the expense of our own humanity and heartfelt desires.
• The engineer is the prototype of the pragmatic life. The heart and soul of an engineering strategy is to control, predict, automate, and measure the world. The engineer conceived, nurtured, and gave birth to the industrial age.
• To the rest of the world a problem is something to get beyond; to the engineer, a concrete, tangible mechanical, electronic, or design problem is heaven. The engineer solves problems as a form of relaxation.
• The engineering viewpoint transforms human beings into human assets and human resources. Managers manage many assets and resources—money, technology, animals, minerals, and vegetables—and now we include people as part of this inventory.
• the engineering mind is key to our materialism. It does not create it, but reinforces it through valuing all that is practical and useful, and this is exactly what matters to an engineer.
• The economist believes that the people who rise to the top should get the lion’s share of the return. This is sometimes expressed as 20% of the people doing 80% of the work. The economist bets on the creative and entrepreneurial contribution of a small group of people who lead and direct the majority of the rest of us. The economic mindset places a premium on the act of risking capital. The major rewards go to those who put their money on the line (investors) while secondary rewards go to those who have no capital invested and who “only” do the work (wage earners). The result is to make shareholder return the number one goal.
• What is in demand, and the value assigned to it, is established by customers who vote with their money. This view leads us to be customer focused. It aims our efforts where there is demand and says that other-directedness is a sign of maturity and realism. It values an outside-in orientation. It questions actions that are undertaken for their own sake or investments in lost causes. It frames our actions, even our love, as a reciprocal exchange of value.
• Size matters. The larger the better. This is called progress. And it leads to the question, “How do you take it to scale?” If something cannot be replicated on a large scale, then we question whether it is worth doing at all. This places the burden of measurement on passion and desire.
• The final argument of the economist against pursuing meaning, freedom, and personally held values is that we should “get real.” They have cornered the market on defining what is real and have convinced us that reality is instrumental.
• Economists-as-managers have a great impact on human resources. Finding and retaining the best people is thought to be a financial transaction, a pricing problem. We use signing bonuses, incentive plans, and retention bonuses as our core human resources strategies.
• The impact of the economist-as-manager is that relationships between organizations and their members become increasingly commercialized. Employees become free agents as well as vendors, seeking the highest bidder. Employers become buyers, scanning the marketplace for independent suppliers, formerly called employees, to meet short-term requirements while offering as little commitment from the organization as possible.
• The artist is conceived to focus on matters of the heart and is brought into the world as ballast for the engineer and the economist.
• The artist not only refuses to seek order, but is afraid of it. Where the engineer becomes short of breath in the midst of chaos, the artist feels panic in the midst of order.
• The engineer needs the artist to bring choice, feeling, uniqueness, and passion into the process of introducing change into a living system.
• The specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in inner conflict. The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building, or a town-—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
• If we can bring Christopher Alexander’s philosophy of architecture into the design and creation of an organization, a social system, we can conceptualize the role of a social architect. This is someone who is equipped to act on the aesthetics, values, or intuition of a situation in the manner of the artist, and also to act on the material or concrete aspects of a situation in the manner of the economist-engineer.
• Instead of being so concerned with bricks, mortar, glass, and steel, the social architect is also concerned with how people are brought together to get their work done and build organizations they want to inhabit.
• The task of the social architect is to design and bring into being organizations that serve both the marketplace and the soul of the people who work within them. Where the architect designs physical space, the social architect designs social space.
• We might even say that the role of the social architect is to create service-oriented organizations, businesses, governments, and schools that meet their institutional objectives in a way that gives those involved the space to act on what matters to them.
• As stated earlier, when we think we have to argue about values, we are mistakenly converting those values into models or strategies. The social architect’s task is to create the space for people to act on what matters to them.
• It is the pure economist who believes people will act out of self-interest, the pure engineer who believes that there is only one path to the future, and the pure artist who thinks that joint effort and structure is life defeating.
• A social architect designs and arranges the room, cares about the intent, structures the interaction and dialogue, sees that doubts are made public, and focuses on capacities instead of needs.
• Many of our days are spent answering too narrow a question. The social architect keeps broadening the question, for this is what engages people and creates room for idealism and depth.
• When we focus on our strengths, we confront ourselves with our freedom and other people with theirs. This is so much more powerful than the usual deficiency-oriented view which only reminds us of our boundaries.
• Human systems require depth. The deeper the better. Philosophy rather than psychology, imagination rather than engineering, exploration rather than installation. There is nothing more practical in human matters than to postpone the urge to be immediately practical.
• For anything that matters, the answer is in the question. Get the question right, and the answer is self-evident in every case. All that is required is to meditate, turn, and face squarely the implications of this question.
• It is faith in dialogue that replaces belief in formulas.
• See the reality in the current situation. See the suffering and the costs of what exists now. Telling the truth is a major step in any restoration effort.
• Problems that count need to be respected before they will reveal themselves to us. The focus on tools, answers, and problem solving keeps them in hiding, because we will just revert to the solutions, which are more easily implemented.