Ben Sywulka

An Innovation Journey

Reflections

 

Reflections

Blessing #41

Yesterday, I turned 41.  I started a new tradition last year, to give myself a blessing for the year.  It’s a blessing that brings together what I have learned about life in the previous year.  Here is my blessing for this year:

May you have perspective:

That little moments have a big impact, and end up being our most treasured memories. 

That “no” to what we think we want ends up being a “yes” to something better. 

That what we eat and drink has smell and taste and texture. That it tells an amazing story of where it came from, and ends up being a prophecy of where we will go. 

That what is in front of us (lift your eyes from your screen… what is in front of you?) is precious and extraordinary, even if it seems normal and ordinary.  And that because of that it deserves our full attention and admiration. 

That we CAN move mountains.  But we can’t just talk about moving them, we have to physically pick up rocks and carry them.  And we can’t carry too many rocks at the same time, no matter how talented we are, because we will get tired and give up.  And we can’t carry all the rocks by ourselves, because some boulders require a team.

And that no matter how high the ambition, how overwhelming the challenge, how busy the routine, the only question that matters is:  What is the best way for me to use my energy, my talents, my time and my attention in this moment that I am in?  And life has a mysterious way of giving us the answer.

What to do if my great idea doesn’t work

I learned a great lesson from my two-year-old daughter the other day. We were putting a puzzle together, and she was frustrated because the piece she had in her hand didn’t work.

I started thinking that this happens to us a lot in our innovation efforts. We have a great idea and we really want it to be successful. But often it is not. The experience with my daughter taught me two things:

1. Is this the right puzzle piece for the moment and context I am in?

So many times we have a great puzzle piece, but the other pieces needed to connect it to the puzzle aren’t there yet. We often don’t take the time to think through the scaffolding that needs to be around us in order for our idea to work. We may have a really valuable puzzle piece in our hand, but if you don’t have the other pieces that it needs to connect to, it is not valuable YET. We will first need to find the other pieces of the puzzle, the scaffolding, It could be that that scaffolding already exists in a different industry, or a different market, which will make it easier to connect our valuable puzzle piece.

2. Is this the right combination to make it work?

So many times we do have the right pieces of the puzzle, but we don’t rotate them around to make them fit correctly. We often don’t make an effort to tweak the combination to make our idea work. Maybe it’s a different positioning, or a different pricing, or a different customer, or even a different look and feel for the same product, but those things make a big difference.

Why are we so polarized politically?

I’ve been living political polarization for a long time, but have always managed to bridge between opposing sides. In the past decade, this has become increasingly more difficult. As I’ve wrestled with why this is happening, I’ve found it helpful to visualize the role of political communication in this process.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the structure of how we communicate has shifted considerably with the advent of digital transformation. It used to be that if you wanted to communicate something, you would find the right medium for the audience you were targeting, and that medium would do a good job of transferring your message.

What’s happened with digital transformation is that the structure has changed. Now the receivers of messages are also the senders and the medium of communication of messages to others. They become micro-communicators, leading to a distributed communication structure.

There are new mediums that enable this model, particularly platforms like Facebook and Twitter. When you distribute these micro-communicators along the political spectrum, you will see a dynamic that looks like this:

As you can see, different traditional mediums tend to send political messages from whether they are on the spectrum, but the heavy lifting of the communication is actually the micro-communicators sharing their messages through Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. To make matters worse these mediums tend to be homogenous networks, where people only communicate with relatively like-minded people, so the communication structure ends up being “bubbled” around the political spectrum, with few bridges between bubbles.

The second challenge is that because of the nature of these platforms, communicating complexity has become difficult, since you only have a certain amount of characters or attention span to work with. This leads to simplistic language on the left side of the complexity curve, using the concept by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

What this means that our political conversation has become simplistic, and people limit their communication to short, simplistic and judgmental phrases that do not reflect the true complexity of whatever it is they are communicating about. In this context, it is difficult to remain neutral, because neutrality requires finding value on both sides of the spectrum, and finding value on both sides of the spectrum requires understanding the complexity of the issue. The effect of this micro-communicators in bubbles sharing simplistic messages, is that slowly but surely those who were in the center move toward the extremes, creating a void in the middle.

Once the structure of political communication looks like this, it is very difficult to restore micro-communicators to the center, because few bridges are left to communicate the bubbles on either side of the spectrum. If we want to reduce our polarization, we have to make a proactive effort to bridge toward the other, understand why they think the way they do before we judge them for thinking that way, and be open to co-creating solutions that take into account the best of what each bubble has to offer. And that, of course, requires humility, which is hard for all of us find.