B.A.B.
My management team was bickering. Two managers in particular: Leo and Vincent. Both of their projects were fine. Both of their teams were producing, but in any meeting where they were both representing their teams, they just started pushing each other’s buttons. Every meeting on some trivial topic:
Leo: “Vincent, are you on track to ship the tool on Wednesday?”
Vincent: “We’re on schedule.”
Leo: “For Wednesday?”
Vincent: “We’ll hit our schedule.”
Leo: “Wednesday?”
Endless passive aggressive verbal warfare. Two type A personalities who absolutely hated to be told what to do. My 1:1s with each of them were productive meetings and when I brought up the last Leo’n’Vincent battle of the wills, they immediately started pointing at their counterpart: “I really don’t know what his problem is.”
I do. They didn’t trust each other.
On the Topic of Trust
There’s a question out there regarding how close you want to get with you co-workers in your job. There’s a camp out there that employs a policy of “professional distance”. This camp believes it is appropriate to keep those they work with at arm’s length.
The managerial reason here is more concrete than the individual reasoning. Managers are representatives or officers of the company and, as such, may be asked to do randomly enforce the will of the business. Who gets laid off? Why doesn’t this person get a raise? How much more does this person get? Profession distance or not, these responsibilities will always give managers an air of otherness.
Here’s my question: do you or do you not want be the person someone trusts when they need help? Manager or not, do you see the act of someone trusting you as fitting with who you are?
Yes, there’s a line that needs to be drawn between you and your co-workers, but artificially distancing yourself from the people you spend all day every day with seems like a good way to put artificial barriers between yourself the people you need to get your job done.
Is that who you are or who you want to work for?
The topic of trust is where I draw a line in both my personal and management philosophy. My belief is that a team built on trust and respect is vastly more productive and efficient than the one where managers are distant supervisors and co-workers are 9-to-5 people you occasionally see in meetings. You’re not striving to be everyone’s pal; that’s not the goal. The goal is a set of relationships where there is a mutual belief in each other’s the reliability, truth, ability, and strengths.
It’s awesome.
And it’s something you can build with a card game.
BAB
It’s pronounced how you think. Rhymes with crab. It’s an acronym for a game which, with practice, will knit your team together in unexpected ways. It’s Back Alley Bridge. Here are the rules, but before I explain why this game is a great team building exercise, you need to understand a few of the rules.
BAB isn’t bridge. The game does have a few important similarities. First, it’s a game for four players, involving two teams — the folks facing each other are on the same team and share their score. Second, it’s a trick-based game where the goal is for each team to get as many tricks as possible. A trick is won when each player turns up a card and the highest wins, unless someone plays a trump suit, which, in the case of BAB, is always spades.
Bidding. Also like bridge, BAB has bidding, meaning each team bids how many tricks they think they’re going to get after the cards have been dealt. Scoring is optimized to reward teams who get the number of tricks they bid and heavily punishes those who don’t get their bid. Bidding is a blind team effort — you have no idea what your teammate has in their hand other than what you can infer from their bid.
Decreasing hand count. Unlike bridge, the number of cards each player gets decreases with each hand. Each player gets 13 cards in the first hand, 12 in the second, and so on. Play continues down to a single card and then heads back up to 13. A work-friendly modification I’ve made is to only play every other hand (13-11-9, etc.) This number of hands fits nicely into a lunch hour.
Hail Mary. There are two special bids: Board and Boston. A bid of Board indicates the team is going to take every single bid. A board of Boston indicates the team intends to take the first six. Achieving a Board or Boston can be an impressive feat and is rewarded handsomely from a scoring perspective. Failure results in a scoring beat-down. Both of these special bids allow for wild variances in the score, which can be handy for teams who are falling behind.
Scoring, game play, and other information are in the complete rules. Now, let me explain why I picked this game as a recurring weekly lunch meeting.
In BAB, you talk shit. I’ve landed BAB in three different teams now and in each case, the amount of trash talking that showed up once players became comfortable with the game was impressive. This is a function of my personality, but it’s also a byproduct of any healthy competition amongst bright people. It’s also a sign of a healthy team. I’ll explain.
Trash talking is improvisational critical thinking — it’s the art of building comedy in the moment with only the immediate materials provided. As I’m looking for candidates for my next BAB game, I’m looking for two things: who will be able to talk trash and who needs to receive it?
The art in talking trash is the careful exploration of the edges of truth. When someone effectively lays it down, they say something honest and slightly uncomfortable. The ever-present risk with trash talking is when that line is crossed. It’s that one thing that is said that goes too far and offends, but it’s the presence of that line which makes talking trash so much fun.
It’s these honest and dangerous observations that form the basis of trust. When a co-worker makes a big observation about you and shares it with the other players, you take note - someone is watching. It sounds problematic, but remember, we’re just sitting here playing cards. It’s safe.
In a new BAB game, it takes players time to get used to the trash talking, especially in a situation like Leo and Vincent’s. Adversarial co-workers playing on the same team need to learn to ditch the business for the game. They need to understand there is a relationship outside of the daily work and there’s nothing like a comedic verbal beat-down to remind them to lighten up.
In BAB, you learn things unintentionally. Once you’ve got an established game with regular players who all know the rules, you’ll learn two things: people get better at trash talking with practice, and information travels in unpredictable ways in groups of people.
It goes like this:
- Player #1: “I bid 3.”
- Player #2: “I bid 1.”
- Player #3: “Pass.”
- Player #4: “Kevin’s quitting. I’m sure of it.”
- Player #1: “Yeah, I know.”
- Player #2: “Sucks to be you.”
Out of nowhere, in the middle of the game, you’re suddenly assessing the departure of a co-worker. I see this as a sign of a thriving, healthy BAB game because the team has begun to trust each other more. In the safety of the game, they’re letting the worries of the moment spill onto the table for all to see, which is impressive, since everyone knows that anything on the table at BAB is fair game for talking shit.
In BAB, you’re having work experiences without the work. Relationships need time to bake. Trust doesn’t magically appear; it’s cautiously built over time via shared experience. The majority of these experiences are created during the regular work day and I’m certain there are a great many healthy professional relationships that are defined and maintained in this manner, but I want my teams closer. I’m not suggesting group hugs and voices united singing Kumbaya. I’m looking for each team member to have the opportunity to understand each other slightly more than what they see when they’re at work.
The more you understand how your co-workers tick, the better you’re able to work with them. You’ll stop seeing them as the role, the title, or the keeper of a particular political agenda. They are just… Phillip. And you know what I know about Phillip? He’s the manager who used to wait too long to speak in a meeting. He had plenty to say that mattered, but he used to be too shy to say it.
Two months of trash talking over BAB showed me his reservations, so I learned to pull Phillip into the meeting conversations as quickly as possible. After a few pulls, he started to do it himself. After a few weeks, you couldn’t get him to shut up.
The Second Staff Meeting
The inspiration for the game came from a regularly scheduled bridge game at Netscape, and there’s nothing special about BAB that makes it the perfect lunchtime game. I chose BAB because a team-based game that fits nicely in a lunch hour.
You bet I maneuvered Leo and Vincent onto the same team for weeks on end. There was no magical moment during one game where they suddenly understood each other. Leo and Vincent continued to bicker in meetings, but over time the tone changed from the passive aggressive to the playful talking of trash. They turned competition into something healthy and fun.
In the safe competition that is BAB, you learn not only how to work better together by understanding that winning doesn’t always mean hitting your dates, getting paid, or receiving a promotion. Winning can be a simple, playful thing, “We were awesome as we kicked your ass.”
More importantly, BAB is a regular forum for experiencing that relationships are not defined just by the work we do together, but who we become with each other when we aren’t looking.
Knee Jerks
There was a fight on the roller hockey rink this morning. Anaheim bumped into Philadelphia at speed and Philly didn’t like that so he elbowed Anaheim in the chest — hard. Anaheim pushed back, shoving Philly into the goal where he tripped and fell. Swearing, more shoving, and then we spent the next five minutes keeping them separated.
This hockey rink is a remnant of first Internet bubble. Built by Netscape, the rink has held a game every Saturday since 1998. A majority of the folks who show up know each other, so the game is mellow. Finesse, not fighting. A fight is an unusual once a year thing.
When Philly, who I believed was at fault for this whole situation, got the bench, someone asked him what happened. His answer, “Anaheim ran into me and I protected myself.”
One Eighth of a Second
I want you to think of the last time you were surprised. Good, bad, I don’t care. When was the last time you were really surprised? Got it? Ok, now think about the very first thing that you thought about the surprise. I don’t want to know how you eventually handled it; I want you to think about your instantaneous first reaction.
How do you react when you’re surprised? Is this how you always react when a surprise lands? My guess is yes.
On the hockey rink, Philadelphia puts up his shields when he’s surprised. It’s a natural reaction, protecting yourself, but what’s interesting isn’t Philly’s very sensible reaction to the perception of being attacked, it’s everyone else’s interpretation. We all saw him hold up his arms in defense of Anaheim’s unintentional attack and we all thought, “Man, Philly. What a goon.”
In any group of people larger than one, these instantaneous reactions to unexpected situations happen a lot, and understanding their range and impact is important to navigating awkward, tension-filled, and professionally tricky situations.
The Jerks
These are knee jerk reactions, and the first thing you need to know about them is that they should be first viewed without judgement. I’m not a psychologist and I don’t know why some people are aggressive knee jerkers and others are passive. I don’t know if these reactions are a function of upbringing or genetics, but I do know that we as a species have little control over these initial reactions and there are many of them.
In my head, the complete set of reactions fit on a spectrum that is labeled Fight or Flight. The first step in understanding a knee jerk reaction is first figuring out where on this spectrum the reaction lies. Is this a person who is going to take on the surprise or are they going to let it wash over them? Will they bolt? Will they wilt? If there is one thing you want to know quickly about those around you, it’s their penchant to fight the surprise or flee it.
Again, no judgement. A person who automatically has the fight instinct is not necessarily a jerk — it’s just the default instinct when the world unexpectedly and rapidly changes. I know who on my team will attack a surprise. They’ll leap on it. I also know the ones who will silently digest the surprise. I know who is going to come back three hours or three days later with a totally different attitude because they’ll have actually processed the surprise.
The base assessment of fight or flight gives you a starting point regarding what might first happen when a surprise lands, but there are other instantaneous reactions that occur and understanding them gives you an idea of what you need to do next, if anything.
For the sake of this article, my assumption is a surprise has landed and it’s bad news. These reactions apply regardless of the type of surprise, but let’s assume it’s professionally bad news with negative consequences and it’s being delivered in a group setting. Here’s whom you might see across the table:
Dr. No. Denial. That’s the reaction. Doesn’t matter if the surprise is reasonable, understandable, or well explained. Dr. No’s only reaction is a fighting “No”.
- “No, I’m not going let her go.”
- “No, I’m not moving organizations.”
- “No, we’re not shutting down this group.”
Remember, knee jerk reactions are not rational, they are not considered, and while they are tactically interesting, they are not strategically useful. Dr. No’s denial is not her actual thoughts on that topic, it’s her reptilian brain reaction to a surprise.
No.
If this is a group surprise and Dr. No is sitting in a conference room full of people throwing down the No, there’s a chance for everyone to go off the rails. Well, Dr. No said no and I agree, so NO AS WELL. The time immediately after the surprise goes down is not the time to take any action except to allow folks to react. There are going to be Nos as well as a bevy of other reactions and your job, if it’s your meeting, is to let folks talk — let them react. The goal with Dr. No and everyone else in the room is to get their reaction out so that we can figure out what to do next.
The follow-up: The good news is that Dr. No has got it out of her system. She’s expressed her displeasure, which is half of the game. The next time you chat, there will be residual No, but Dr. No knows that she’s been heard and will be willing to brainstorm what to do next about the surprise.
Raging Bull. Perhaps the most dangerous of the reactions, Raging Bull wants to fight. They’re taking the surprise personally, they’re going to say No, and they’re going to pick a fight. The Raging Bull is Dr. No with attitude.
The move with the Raging Bull is to know that it’s coming, to know that you’ve got a Raging Bull on your hands. If you have any control over the surprise, you want to put the Raging Bull in a safe situation where they can react to their heart’s content without afflicting psychological damage on others or sparking a mob mentality where they infect a mindless horde of mini-Raging Bulls. If it’s a pure surprise and it’s a group setting, my advice is to end the meeting as quickly as possible. Like Dr. No, Raging Bull is expressing his shock. Unlike Dr. No, the Raging Bull isn’t going to feel complete until they’ve got the emotional satisfaction of picking a fight with someone else.
The follow-up: Everyone needs time to contemplate a surprise, but no one needs time more than Raging Bull. Each knee jerk reaction scratches a particular psychological itch and in the case of Raging Bull, they believe that getting someone else to participate in their mental and verbal freak-out is somehow going to help.
It’s not.
Of all the reactions, Raging Bull’s behavior is the one that I’ve found to likely to repeat itself after the fact. Raging Bull will often continue to pick fights days after the initial surprise, which is why it’s your move to get them thinking, as quickly as possible, about what’s next. What are we going to do about the surprise? What specific thought does Raging Bull have which is crucial to successfully navigating this surprise?
Still Water. This reaction reads like flight because they’re not fighting. In fact, they’re just sitting there, but Sill Water is taking it all in. They’re not missing a thing and in their complete silence, wearing their poker face, they are meticulously processing, they’re evaluating all possible permutations, best and worst case scenarios, and potential impact on their day to day.
This processing results in one of two very different Still Waters. There’s the true Still Water who is going to maintain the calm demeanor for the entire duration of the surprise. See, this Still Water’s processing has resulted in a comfortable plan. They believe they know what to do about the surprise and this realization has brought them peace.
The second Still Water is mentally losing their shit. Sure, externally they look calm, but internally their processing has resulted in increasingly loony nightmare scenarios regarding the surprise. Without quick action, Insane Still Water will find reason to become a Raging Bull.
The follow-up: You want to get to Still Water as quickly as possible in a safe location after the surprise because Still Water isn’t still. Unlike Dr. No and the Raging Bull who had their opportunities to weigh in, Still Water is still in their head and the longer they remain in the head, the higher the probability they’ll tell themselves a tale that will drive them insane.
You need Still Water to say out loud how they feel about the world suddenly changing. Like Raging Bull, you need to engage Still Water in the surprise and move the problem out of their heads and onto the table where everyone can take action.
Distiller. This is my favorite knee jerk reaction because the Distiller attacks the surprise with questions. Why did this happen? How come we didn’t see it coming? Ok, what’s the impact? Right, what are we going to do?
This is a fight reaction, but a constructive one. The Distiller is as uncomfortable as anyone with the surprise, but their coping mechanism is aggressive understanding. They’re not going to stop asking questions until they feel they’ve got a complete understanding of what actually happened.
In a group setting, I let the Distiller have free-reign during the landing of the surprise because their incessant questions are helping everyone in the room contemplate what actually happened. They focus the surprise on facts rather than feel.
The follow-up: You’re going to feel you’ve got a good idea where the Distiller is at because of their endless questions, but now’s a good time to explain that everyone comes down from a surprise in different ways, which is why everyone needs that personal follow-up. Yeah, a Distiller can turn into Raging Bull after a night’s sleep. Still Water might go Distiller. You just don’t know who is going to walk into the building 24 hours after the surprise. This is why most surprises are engineered to occur late in the week; there’s a belief that all the knee jerks are going to calm down over the weekend. Maybe. More on this in a bit.
The Handler. The first flight reaction sure doesn’t feel like flight. The Handler is not surprised. In fact, they’re fired up to handle whatever the surprise might be. They make it appear that they knew this surprise was going to occur. How’d they do that?
The Handler is a calm facade. Where the Distiller understands via questions, The Handler’s coping mechanism is the illusion they’ve got it all figured out — that they’re 10 steps ahead of everyone else. This is a convenient reaction when you’ve got the Raging Bull standing on the conference table challenging anyone to hand-to-hand combat, but The Handler needs help.
The follow-up: The Handler crumbles hardest. The Handler is actually Dr. No except without the denial. There will be a quiet moment in the middle of the night when The Handler realizes absolutely nothing has been handled and then you’ll see their actual reaction.
My Bad. This flight reaction is one of accountability. My Bad’s impression is that they’ve personally done something to incur this particular surprise. They believe that if only they had done just one thing different, no one would’ve had to deal with the surprise.
There’s hope inside of My Bad’s reaction. Their empathy regarding the surprise is constructive, as opposed to the destructive social tendencies of Dr. No or Raging Bull, but you don’t want them wallowing in their overdeveloped sense of accountability.
The follow-up: My Bad is not responsible for the surprise. While their sense of responsibility is admirable, My Bad needs to understand the actual cause behind the surprise. They didn’t cause it, so they shouldn’t feel it. They more they focus on feeling responsible, the less energy and focus they have for making progress.
We’re Doomed. The most common flight reaction is also the reaction that, I believe, everyone is going to experience as they digest the surprise. Despair.
In a room full of geeks hearing a surprise for the first time, one of their first thoughts is, “How does this surprise fit into my mental system of how things work?” Failure to map the surprise into the mental model results in an uncomfortable realization: “The world does not work as I expected. Therefore, other surprises are guaranteed to happen randomly. QED. I have no control whatsoever. Shit.”
The follow-up: A perceived lack of control or understanding of our world is a confidence shattering experience for the geek, and the best way to attack this despair is with a project. Doesn’t matter if the project is surprise-related or not, the geek needs something to do. They need the blissful distraction of building something. It’s during this constructive distraction that they’ll actually figure out how they feel about the surprise.
I Quit. The last knee jerk is our strongest flight reaction. An extreme version of We’re Doomed, I Quit does exactly what you’d expect: they threaten to quit on the spot.
They’re not quitting. Well, they might, but not right now. You need to translate “I quit” into what they’re actually saying: “I am very surprised and I don’t like being this surprised.” It’s unfortunate that this is their reaction, especially in a group setting, because I Quit’s attitude can create mass professional hysteria, which means this needs to be handled immediately. You can’t wait until after the weekend to explain to I Quit that their reaction at this moment might be vastly different after a night’s sleep. You need to hold up a mirror in front of them and ask, “No matter the surprise, why in the world would you eliminate so many options by quitting on the spot?”
The follow-up: I Quit will calm down and land on another opinion, but their knee jerk reaction is a sign of a larger problem. I don’t know what your surprise is, but I know if someone wants to quit that, first, it’s a big surprise, and second, they value their job second to their peace of mind.
Stages of Jerk
With people, it’s never as easy as just a name. These labels for the knee jerk reactions are deliberately simple, but people are conspicuously complex.
As I hinted earlier, I’ve found it commonplace that you’re going to see multiple knee jerk reactions as a corporate surprise is comprehended. These reactions, like grief, have stages, and your job as a manager or a concerned co-worker is actually not comparably complex. Your job is to listen.
The reason there’s a knee jerk reaction is because the unexpected occurred. It kicks off the process of assimilation and that’s what we care about — the understanding of the surprise, not the reaction to it. While everyone has a different reaction, they’re all going to end up trying to figure out what just happened, and part of that process is having someone they trust sit there and listen to their assessment. Verbally walking through our thoughts is one of the ways we organize and understand them and begin the process of finding a comfortable constructive conclusion.
I’m just as uncomfortable with a Raging Bull as anyone, but I know this knee jerk reaction is not who they are, this is just how they react. Understanding these varied potential reactions is just the first part of digesting a surprise - it helps you understand what to expect so you can begin to figure out what to do next.
A Story Culture
The Editor and I don’t argue, we discuss.
We’re arguing… discussing over a glass of red wine my concern over our collective attention spans. Not just she and I, but everyone. The whole damned planet.
I say, “Information just keeps getting smaller. We’re sharing our bright ideas in 140 characters now and no one is taking the time to construct a strategic thought. All these micro-ideas are free and everyone is taking them for granted. We’re just tactically stumbling through a day full of intellectual sound bites stuffed with shortened URLs. There’s no deep now. Just shallow passing seconds.”
“No one is learning. There’s no work involved in knowing a thing, so we’re becoming mentally flabby. I want people to read more.”
To which the Editor retorts: “I don’t think you know what information is.”
Hmmmm.
Information has a Hierarchy
So I looked it up. According to Ray R. Larson at Berkeley, information has a hierarchy that looks like this:
- Data - The raw material of information
- Information — Data organized and presented by someone
- Knowledge — Information read, heard or seen and understood
- Wisdom — Distilled and integrated knowledge and understanding.
If you ignore the fact that the word information is used to define a hierarchy about information, this hierarchy makes sense, but it dances around a key point.
Another version of this hierarchy describes the same categories as above but focuses more on what happens to information once we get a hold of it. Not just consumption, but synthesis.
- Data — Raw material. Facts. Got it.
- Information - Organized data. See what happens here? Someone showed up and organized the data into something else. Why’d they do this? How’d they know it was the right thing to do? Let’s keep moving.
- Knowledge — Information seen, heard or read and understood. To me this is when information is transformed by the understanding of why. Our data is organized into information and that is passed onto someone else who can now recognize the value in the information and thinks, “Oh, wow. Now I understand how a trash compactor works. Slick.”
- Wisdom — Distilled, integrated knowledge and understanding. The idea here is that higher order constructions of information are based beyond our ability to consume, combine, evaluate, and interpret information. The information becomes a catalyst for creation. Think of it like this: maybe a lot of people understand trash compactors, but you know so much about trash compactors that you could build one yourself and perhaps advance the art of trash compacting in the process.
Still with me? This is going to take more than 140 characters and there’s a point. Just wait a tick.
Take a look at this list:
- New York is a city.
- It takes me about five hours to fly to New York.
- I’ve been to New York three times this year
- I never believe I’m in New York until I’m in a cab or smoking a cigarette.
Is this data, information, or knowledge? Or just four boring tweets? That would depend on whether or not you’re interested in my experiences in New York. But what I provide in this list is the opportunity for increasing amounts of understanding, and understanding is the progression through, and synthesis of, increasingly complex pieces of information. Right?
There’s another thread that ties this information together, and you may not initially see it, but if you’ve started mentally asking questions - Why does Rands go to New York? What does he do there? Did I know that he smoked? - you have started to find it.
I’ve begun to tell you a story.
A Shattered Narrative
The reason no one watches or cares about the evening news anymore is because there are a great many other ways to find your news. A weblog here, a Twitter status update there. In the deluge of information variety we’ve realized that the evening news is just one set of facts and just one carefully constructed story, and increasingly one with its own specific agenda. Who wants to be spoon-fed 30 minutes of ad-infested evening news when I can figure out what my world thinks is important by glancing at The Daily Show, Twitter, and NetNewsWire?
The traditional narrative has been shattered into bits of well-indexed information. Google wasn’t the first indexing tool, but it’s certainly the best. Still, Google is powerfully dumb. Yes, I can find whatever piece of information I’m looking for, but what’s more interesting are all the related pieces of information. How do you query for knowledge via Google? How about wisdom?
If you’re buying my definitions of the informational hierarchy, there’s no replacing the process of understanding if you want to delve into more interesting forms of information. There’s no replacing a human being combing through seemingly disparate pieces of information to evaluate, interpret, and combine it into something unexpected; into a new work. Into a story.
Those frustrated with Twitter are frustrated because they have a belief that a story needs a beginning, middle, and end. And that it should have all of those parts before it’s presented to them. What the hell am I supposed to learn from a tweet? The point of Twitter isn’t knowledge or understanding, it’s merely connective information tissue. It’s small bits of information carefully selected by those you’ve chosen to follow and its value isn’t in what they send, it’s how it fits into the story in your head. There are great stories to be found on Twitter, but you have to do the work.
This is what is going on all day. It will start with a random tweet about conferences and you’ll think, “I don’t understand why everyone goes to conferences”. You won’t act on this thought; you’ll leave it buried in your head until you see that link on del.icio.us where someone important rails on the lack of women presenters at conferences. And in that moment, you’ll remember that drunken thought you had at that conference last March when you discovered the basic truth about conferences: it’s not what you learn, it’s who you find.
From a disparate set of information, you continually find your own arc, your own story, and my question is: What are you going to do with it? You’re an information nerd, you’re adept at consuming massive amounts of micro-information, and those who watch you do this are saying you’ve got a short attention span, and you might.
But I think all this micro-information has macro-story potential.
Rands’ Story Hierarchy
As we’ve established, there’s information. Like everywhere. You, as a consumer of information, fall into one of three progressively complex buckets regarding this data:
- You can understand the information — What does it mean? Why is it important? How does it relate to other things I care about?
- You can explain the information to someone else — Hey Bob, this is what this means. I can explain it to you and impart my understanding.
- You can create more information, building something new and telling a story - Hey Jim, actually, we discovered a better way to do X. Bob and I were working on Y one time and realized that…
But Rands, I’m not a writer.
This is a poor excuse and the death of many a worthy story. The construction of a story has very little to do with writing. It has to do with the semi-magical process of you taking disparate pieces of information, combining them into something new, which includes your experience and understanding, and then giving them to someone else. Look around the walls of wherever you’re reading this and pick two random objects. Got ‘em? Ok, now tell me how they relate. No, you can’t say, “They’re both in the coffee shop”. What’s the first novel thing that crosses your mind about the intersection of these two items?
But you don’t have a story, yet. Just like information isn’t knowledge until it’s understood, your tale isn’t a story until you give it someone else — until they have a chance to see what they think about your inspiration.
But Rands, my thought is really, really stupid.
I understand what you’re saying but I don’t think that’s what you mean. I think what you’re saying is, “I don’t think that anyone will find anything of value in my thought,” and you’re wrong. You’ve got two things going for you. You’ve got the inexplicable moment of inspiration that created your idea, and it’s the closest thing to magic you’ll experience in your life. Second, you’ve got the entire planet listening and there’s just no telling what any of those folks are looking for.
The value of the idea is one part that it is yours and one part that you gave it to someone else. It’s you and something new.
Information Is Getting Smaller and Faster
Look at the historic progression of popular personal written information containers over the past 10+ years:
Home pages > Blogs > Lists of Links > Tumblr > Twitter
I see two symbiotic trends. First, I see a reduction in the average size of a piece of information. I see information that feeds our short attention spans. Second, and more important, I see our tools increasingly removing barriers from producing information. Remember when you needed a nerd friend to set up a weblog? Did you have any issue figuring out how to publish a thought with Twitter? I hope not.
Yes, these frictionless tools make it so anyone can say anything about any topic, but these tools are built with you in mind and I do mean you. Imagine if Twitter forced you to follow certain people. What if Facebook randomly added folks to your friends list? You know what you’d have? The evening news. Random stories from folks you don’t know and probably don’t trust.
We’re in a share everything world and you get to choose your role. You can be overwhelmed and sit in the coffee shop with your friends and say, “Twitter: what’s the point?” Or, you can jump in with both feet, grab those three random ideas and tie them into a story that no one has ever seen.
An Essential Skill
I wrote, edited, and published an entire book without physically interacting with a single person at my publisher. The t-shirt I produced last year and the one I’m doing this year were entirely designed, developed, and shipped by interacting with two different organizations that I never met. Paradoxically, it’s never been easier to share or meaningfully interact with more people with less physical, in-person effort.
Your ability to compose and convey information as well as express yourself through your fingertips is a skill that is only going to increase — and increase in value — as people become more comfortable with their place in communities that span the planet, and as the tools to connect them become more commonplace.
In this digitally distant world full of information that appears to only be moving faster and faster, you get to choose: how much will I consume and how much will I create?
