by dbward | Aug 26, 2024 | Uncategorized
One of my favorite questions is “when was the last time you did something for the first time?”
For folks who are early in their career, the answer is often “this afternoon.” Life is full of first-time experiences when you’re starting out. But those of us who have been around a bit longer might find “first-time” experiences a bit harder to come by. It’s just math – but it’s also inertia and a tendency to stay in our comfort zones.
Last weekend, at the age of 51, I learned how to use a jackhammer for the first time as part of a Habitat for Humanity work session. That day was full of firsts, and was a nice reminder to myself of the importance of doing new things. Being a beginner does interesting things to our brains – we have to pay attention in a new way, we have to adopt an open posture as we try to figure out how to do this new thing. When I first squeezed the jackhammer handle I had no real idea how it would feel or how it would work. I really enjoyed being a rookie for a day.
Plenty of people stop trying new things, but nobody lives long enough to run out of new things to try. The world is full of opportunities to explore, experiment, try something new. The key is to look for them, to create them, and to accept them.
So… what is something new you might try?
by dbward | Aug 19, 2024 | Uncategorized
Collaborative culture building is the only kind of culture building. Nobody can build a culture on their own.
I find that explicit culture building efforts are relatively rare. In fact, one participant in a workshop I led defined culture as “that stuff we don’t talk about.” Another senior leader once told me “I don’t do culture, that’s too hard.”
There’s a lot of culture ignoring and culture avoiding instead of culture building. When we do talk about it, a lot of what happens is just culture describing rather than genuine building.
On a similar note, in a recent course on innovation and culture, the instructor insisted that “culture is invisible.” I really must disagree. Culture is very much visible… if we choose to look at it.
Every group has a culture of some kind, a set of “shared beliefs and behaviors” the group holds in common (that’s my favorite definition of culture). These cultural attributes are often unstated or implicitly accepted, without much deliberate discussion or decision. They often happen without people paying much attention to them. But the healthiest groups I’ve ever known are the ones where we do talk about it, where we do see it, where we do make choices about the beliefs we hold and the ways we express those beliefs. Where we go beyond just describing “how we do things around here” and get into “what do we think is really important?” and “how do we want to do things around here?”
We all play a role in building the culture of the groups we’re a part of, by the beliefs we hold and the behaviors we exhibit, whether we know it or not. Even if we’re not building culture deliberately, our beliefs and behaviors build culture every single day.
Here’s your invitation to play that role on purpose, to spark some conversations and build a culture you can be proud of.
by dbward | Aug 12, 2024 | Uncategorized
It’s not particularly helpful to advise people to “be a good communicator” or “do good work,” without giving some sense of HOW to do such things. Such advice is just a platitude that fails to produce action. When I come across that sort of thing in a blog or book, I tend to move on pretty quickly.
But in some cases, there’s an easy fix to that advice. Add the phrase “give yourself permission to…” at the front of the sentence. That often turns it into something much closer to a helpful insight.
“Give yourself permission to be a good communicator” could be helpful in an environment where death-by-PowerPoint is an acceptable standard for giving presentations, and where things like energy, enthusiasm, creativity, humor, personality, or other marks of effective communication are viewed with suspicion. This is particularly common in organizations that value technical aptitude over so-called “soft skills.” In organizations like that, people might even believe “you must not be very technical if you’re a good communicator.” In those cases, It could feel risky to give a good presentation, and so encouraging people to give themselves permission to develop and exhibit soft-skills.
Incidentally, soft skills are actually super hard, in every sense of that word.
by dbward | Jul 29, 2024 | Uncategorized
“A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.” — Frank Westheimer
The inverse of the humorous observation known as “Westheimer’s Discovery” is also true: a couple months in the library can easily save a few hours in the lab.
The challenge, of course, is figuring out which situation we’re in. When we’re looking for information, is it more likely found in a book (or these days, a website) or in a physical test tube?
Perhaps the solution to this dilemma is to spend a few hours in each place before we commit to spending a few months in either.
by dbward | Jul 22, 2024 | Uncategorized
I recently read a three non-fiction business books that I would generously characterize as “crummy.” They weren’t awful, and I did finish them all, but none were particularly good. The writing styles were flat, they lacked a real sense of humor (or wonder or passion) and the insights were a notch or two below what I’d call inspiring or insightful.
You may wonder why I bothered to finish such tepid books (and I hope you understand why I’m not mentioning their titles). Here’s the reason: while the book’s contents were mediocre at best, they nevertheless sparked a reaction in me. They got me thinking about how I would address the subject, if I was the author. I found myself spurred on to imagine a better version, one with humor and heart and surprises.
The truth is, despite the meh reaction, I couldn’t put them down.
And to be clear, I wasn’t hate-reading them, picking apart each paragraph or chapter, piling up angry critiques or assembling my arguments against the author’s message (that’s a topic for a whole other blog post!). I also wasn’t finishing them out of a sense of obligation to finish what I started. The list of books I’ve started but never finished is vast! Instead, I finished reading these books because I was genuinely appreciating what they were doing for me. They sparked ideas, and isn’t that the reason we read in the first place?
Author Richard Rohr writes “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” As I read these books, I found myself spurred on to “practice the better.” I read them all with a pen in hand, sketching outlines and excerpts of books I may write someday, doubling down on my commitment as a writer to bring humor and humanity to the things I write, to offer surprises instead of clichés.
One of the practical results of those books was… reenergizing this blog. It’s a handy way to stretch myself as a writer, to play with words and hopefully produce something worth sharing. Watch this space for the experiment to continue…
Image from Wikimedia Commons by Knoell8504
