Hello!

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Try this: the next time you have lunch planned with a friend, have him meet you at your office.  Put him on your calendar.  But don’t tell anyone who he is or why he’s there.

Then, when you sit down with him, ask him what it felt like to be a new visitor to your place of work.

How long does he wait at reception?  Does the receptionist pass him to another person before getting to talk to you?  Is he attended to quickly or does he wait for a while?  Did people say hello to him?  Was he brought to your desk or to a conference room?  Did the experience make him feel welcomed, excited, intimidated, put off?  Does your office feel active and buzzing or empty and quiet?

How was he left feeling before your “meeting” even started?  And how does this compare to how you’d like someone to feel before / during / after a meeting?

Here’s how this often works:

  • You arrive and say who you’re there to meet
  • A receptionist call an assistant
  • You wait a bit
  • The assistant comes to greet you and takes you to an empty room
  • You’re offered something to drink
  • You wait a bit
  • The drink arrives
  • You wait a bit
  • The meeting starts
  • (elapsed time: 5-10 minutes if all goes smoothly)

This particular sequence of events might be fine if you want to make a very specific impression (namely, we’re big and established).  But if the impression you’re after is “nimble, cutting edge organization” consider re-imagining the whole shebang.

Maybe something along the lines of: person arrives, they’re walked straight to your desk.

The advantage you have against the big guys is that you’re NOT them.  In which case acting just like them (because that’s how they do it) is a huge miss.

I disagree

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Each time someone says that to me (emails it to me, comments it to me), my first reaction is to be a little surprised and, if I’m really honest, just a tiny bit hurt. (“I can’t believe someone unsubscribed from my blog!” or “Really, they didn’t find that David Brooks piece compelling?!”)

But then I remind myself: if no one’s vehemently disagreeing, then no one’s vehemently agreeing.

“Vehement” is the point.

Conversations are the point.

I’m not advocating for being controversial just for its own sake, but do have something to say and say it….if you do that, some people will beg to differ.

And that’s more than OK, it’s great.

Pushing, prodding, exploring, tripping, falling, and getting up again…that’s what it’s all about.  Otherwise, you’re just standing there, not doing much of anything.

David Brooks on New Humanism

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

David Brooks’ column in this weeks’ New York Times is a must-read, so much so that I’ve pasted it in into the end of this post in full (and as soon as his talk from last week’s TED conference is posted, you’ll want to watch that too…along with Brooks’ new book which has just jumped to the top of my reading list).

Brooks proposes a “new humanism” that essentially does away with the notion of rational man that has been the dominant Western worldview the day since the French Enlightenment.   My friend Pip Coburn likes to talk about “mental models” – the simplifying assumptions we use to process everything around us.  Pip’s mantra is to remember that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself.  Easy to say, but hard to know when it’s time to live within our mental models and when we need to to step back and question the models themselves, lest they corrupt our thinking.

“Rational man” is the uber-mental model, the underlying assumption that defines how we process information about just about everything: kids’ aptitudes; what we teach and test (the SAT); how we hire (where did you go to school?); our belief that bankers won’t ALL act stupidly all at the same time; how we (the US) wage war and “build nations” and expect to be welcomed as liberators and not conquerors or even oppressors.

Even our language trips us up, because we gravitate towards words and concepts of dichotomy: if we are not all fundamentally rational, we must be irrational; if we can’t measure it with a number it must not be as important; “hard skills” matter when looking for great leaders but so do “soft ones”.

Here’s Brooks on some of the aptitudes we’ll need to understand, recognize, and cultivate in ourselves and those around us:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

When I read this, all sorts of things click into focus: not just Dan Pink’s Drive, about why intrinsic motivations are the only way to get the best people working in the most productive ways on the most important problems; or Dan Arley’s Predictably Irrational which shows that “irrationality” is not an aberration but is core to how we process information;  but also Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus, which paints a picture of a population that wants, in a very fundamental way, to act and create and connect…and which suggests that the last 50 years of TV-induced anesthesia/passivity may in fact be an historical blip.

I begin to understand in a deeper way why cellphones are the only new product in the last 20 years that has succeed on a massive scale with poor communities in the developing world: because our desire for connection, for being part of a tribe, for status and for information (in all its forms) trumps everything.

I begin to think in a different way about the importance of great teachers, about the hugely negative impact our national obsession with testing could have, since it comes at the expense of visual arts, language, music and dance.

And it becomes more clear why, as our social fabrics attenuate, as our sense of culture and connection fade, that we’ll increasingly drown ourselves in cheap, poor quality food that is slowly killing us.

The upside, and my most surprising and powerful revelation for me from last week’s TED conference is that we have an incredible and newfound power to create real, human connection in new ways – even asynchronously and across tens of thousands of miles (e.g. Eric Whitacre’s virtual choir).  If the recent events in the Middle East have shown us anything it is that as information flows more freely, as people are able to connect and to organize, power dynamics as we once knew them will change inexorably.

I see an incredible opportunity before us, but figuring out how to seize this opportunity requires a wholesale shift in how we think about who we are, how we process information, how we make decisions, and how we connect to one another.

Here is Brooks’ column in full.

Op-Ed Columnist

The New Humanism

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 7, 2011
Over the course of my career, I’ve covered a number of policy failures. When the Soviet Union fell, we sent in teams of economists, oblivious to the lack of social trust that marred that society. While invading Iraq, the nation’s leaders were unprepared for the cultural complexities of the place and the psychological aftershocks of Saddam’s terror. 

The intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on the columnist’s desk nearly every day.

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.

When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say. Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else.

Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on.

This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

When Sigmund Freud came up with his view of the unconscious, it had a huge effect on society and literature. Now hundreds of thousands of researchers are coming up with a more accurate view of who we are. Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism. It’s beginning to show how the emotional and the rational are intertwined.

I suspect their work will have a giant effect on the culture. It’ll change how we see ourselves. Who knows, it may even someday transform the way our policy makers see the world.

What you can’t measure

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

“So what was the measurable impact of….?”

Of course this question matters a lot, a ton, the most maybe.

The catch is that we fail to fully appreciate three truths:

  1. You can only measure a subset of the things that matter
  2. We end up convincing ourselves that the things we are able to measure are a good approximation of the whole
  3. But they might not be

A friend was nice enough to send this Skype chat along to me the other day (names changed):

[9:53:08 PM] Felipe: for lent, i’m going to do the generosity experiment

[9:53:24 PM] Felipe: 40 days of saying yes to everything

[9:53:28 PM] Felipe: you are warned 🙂

[9:54:22 PM] Samuel: wow

[9:54:27 PM] Samuel: 40 days

[9:54:28 PM] Samuel: are you sure?

[9:54:45 PM] Felipe: lent is 40 days…i have nothing to give up

[9:54:54 PM] Samuel: ok

[9:55:09 PM] Samuel: Sasha Dichter will be happy to note this

[9:56:17 PM] Felipe: it’ll be on a smaller scale than his, for sure…but let’s see how it goes

(I’m not sure it will be on a smaller scale, really.  The most profound and lasting changes are personal.)

Folks have been asking me: “do we have to wait until February 14th, 2012 for the next Generosity Day.”  Of course not!!!  Start, go, share, inspire others…and if you have a free moment let me know how it went.

Raising kids is hard, surviving childbirth shouldn’t be – Make it Obvious.

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This is a guest post from my Acumen Fund colleague James Wu, creator and curator of the wonderful Search for the Obvious website.

Search for the Obvious began with a simple idea: the most brilliant solutions to the world’s problems are all around us; sometimes, we just need a little help noticing them.

We are going beyond shedding light on these solutions.  We are highlighting some of the world’s most pressing problems and recruiting people to help us change the way the world thinks about them and to increase the urgency in solving these problems. The first Search for the Obvious challenge was Make Sanitation Sexy, and the winners were featured on GOOD, Design Observer, and YouTube (our winning videos got a million and a half views!)

In the spirit of International Women’s Day, Acumen Fund is partnering with ABC  News’ Be the Change: Save a Life and launching a challenge on maternal health.  We are looking for you (or your wonderful friends) to create the most inspiring, sticky ways to shed light on this global problem.

Not convinced? More than 1,000 women die each day due to complications during childbirth – 99% of these women live in developing countries. By the time you have finished reading this post, it is likely that one woman has died in childbirth.

Here’s what you can do. Use your creative genius to communicate this message: Raising kids is hard. Surviving childbirth shouldn’t be. Show the world that moms deserve better!

Here are some ideas for what you can contribute:

  • The most retweetable tweet of all time
  • A New York Times-worthy column that would make Nick Kristof proud
  • An iconic print ad or poster
  • Guerrilla marketing or public art that commands immediate Instagram and yfrog-ing action
  • A must-see must-share video that would hold its own against TED’s Ads Worth Spreading
  • THE UNEXPECTED. YOU DECIDE…GO CRAZY!

Enter your submission to Search for the Obvious maternal health challenge by April 17th. Winners will be announced on May 9th (the day after Mother’s Day).

IDEO.org is coming!

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Big announcement!  The wonderful folks at IDEO (the design firm that created the computer mouse…yeah, the original one) are launching IDEO.org.  In their words, IDEO.org is “focused on spreading human-centered design through the social sector and improving the lives of people in low-income communities across the globe.”

Or: bringing world-class design thinking to 3 billion more people.

IDEO has been at this for a while, including the Ripple Effect project to improve delivery of safe drinking water to the poor, and more recently they’ve been in Ghana designing sanitation solutions for urban households.  They’re also offering up a free Human-Centered Design Toolkit for social enterprises and NGOs, and an 11-month fellowship for leaders across multiple sectors to work directly with the IDEO team.

The full launch will be this fall.  In the meantime, please blog, tweet, and spread the word in real-life conversations.  Send any questions to info@ideo.org.

Commit publicly

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

Here’s a good way to overcome the resistance and execute on the big ideas that terrify you: tell others about your grandiose plans.

You can decide how “public” you want your “public” announcements to be – if you want to go big, you can tell thousands of your loyal readers; or you can just talk to the people you’d dream of collaborating with, your colleagues, your spouse, maybe your boss.

Saying it over and over again has two effects: it makes the big idea more real to you; and you can replace your fear of getting started with how silly you’ll feel having talked about something to people you care about and having not followed through.

(The catch, of course, is that then you have to execute, otherwise you’re just a big talker.  But I know – and you know – that you can execute.  What’s holding you back is the fear of starting.)

Voice, and wisdom

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Sarah Kay, spoken-word poet and founder of project V.O.I.C.E. (and all of 22 years old), rocked the house at TED last night.  Sarah’s powerful poems are open, honest, vulnerable and beautiful…and man I wish I’d had her wisdom and creative guts when I was 22 years old.

When she’s not on stage, Sarah works with young kids to find their own voice through spoken word poetry.  She’s helped countless kids find their voice when they thought, over and over again, that they had nothing to say.

Reflecting on the path of finding her voice (a path she began walking at the tender age of 14), Sarah shared three excruciatingly simple steps (that I’ve paraphrased) that everyone can learn from:

STEP 1:   “I can.”

STEP 2:   “I will.”

STEP 3:   “I will write about what I know to be true, and write so that I can understand things that I do not yet understand.”

All three of these steps are decisions that Sarah made and that you can make too.  What’s stopping you?

One other reflection:

Step 1 and Step 2 are point in time decisions.  Step 3 goes on forever – it is the process of discovery, the process of continuing to explore the boundaries of what you know and what you hope to understand.  It is the daily re-commitment to do the work, to practice your art, to move forward, to find the cusp of what you do and don’t know.

Step 3 is the hard part, the part with a dip, the part that slowly, over time, transforms you and transforms how you interact with the world.

(This video of Sarah is from Def Poetry Jam in 2007…and she keeps getting better.  Look out for the post of her talk coming soon on TED.com)

UPDATE: her TED talk posted below.  Rocked my world.

Collective Effervescence and Mass (networked) Synchronicity

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Why was Generosity Day such a success?

Sure the message was “sticky”, but there’s more going on here.  I’m beginning to understand in a deeper way how people desire to participate in collective opportunities to create something positive, and our increased ability to create these opportunities.

Throughout the first day of speakers at TED2011, I’m seeing a pattern emerge in a number of talks that touch on the power of the internet to allow us engage in global, connected experiences – sometimes simultaneous in real time (like Generosity Day), and sometimes made simultaneous by the curator.

Eric Whitacre today shared a video that I found deeply touching.  Eric, who is a musician and composer, shared sheet music for a composition he’d written and asked people to record videos of themselves singing one part of the music.  185 people from around the world made usable submissions.  They were, of course, singing asynchronously, but Eric and some friends stitched everything together digitally to create a virtual choir.  What’s so amazing (in addition to the sheer beauty and wonder of the video itself) is the sense of connection the participants felt to each other and to the collective experience.  That, as much as the final product itself, is what Eric created.

Aaron Koblin is also combining mass participation in novel ways, whether through having people sketch parts of massive drawings of sheep, or having Jonny Cash fans from around the world create individual sketches that, when played at eight frames per second, create a powerful, fan-generated tribute to this musical legend.

Tony Salvador is an anthropologist who has studied and experienced numerous mass religious pilgrimages, and he’s found that as people come together, it is impossible to avoid getting caught up in the feeling of “collective effervescence” – impossible not to feel joy and connection just from being in the presence of throngs of people who are having joyous experiences.

There is an increasing power and a potential to use the web to create opportunities for collective experience and collective action, and more than ever there is an opportunity to initiate and curate these experiences in a way that taps into a deep sense of connectedness and being part of something bigger.

People are longing for this sense of connection, and maybe, just maybe, the web gives us the power to make this kind of connection happen in very real ways in the very real world.

Here’s Eric’s beautiful virtual choir.  Enjoy.

Have personality

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Saw this great sign yesterday morning at Fairway Supermarket in Pelham.  Fairway is the best combination of high quality and affordable food at any supermarket anywhere (they also make Zabar’s-quality lox, pickled herring, and olives, among other things).  Fairway’s original supermarket has been in business on Upper Wast Side of NY since the 1930s, and in 2007 they started an expansion blitz that has taken them to Harlem, Red Hook, even Stamford, CT.

This sign made me laugh out loud, and it reinforced the notion that it’s always better to have a personality.  Personality has a point of view.  Personality has a voice.  Personality will piss some people off but will make your rabid fans even more rabid-y and fan-y.

If you’re going to have personality, do it every time.  Every sign, every email you send out, every blog post, every quick reminder.  We’re not talking stand up comedy here, but if you write more like you talk and less like you think you’re supposed to write, you’re heading in the right direction.