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mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

strategy

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Finding the right combinations

“M&Ms! Incense! Black soap! Shea butter!”

I had no idea that these four things went together until today, when one of New York City’s finest subway merchants launched into a loud pitch on my train.

And he made a sale.

James Altucher often suggests that creators look for ways to combine ideas in new ways: it’s the combination of distinct ideas that are generative, not single ideas alone. In one of his latest articles, Altucher writes about combining old interests and seeing what new possibilities emerge from reinterpreting them through the lenses of maturity and time.

For new perspectives, we might also explore ideas at a different scale—scaled way up for greater complexity, or scaled way down for the simple components at their core. We might consider how they look in a new context: each new environment changes ideas and idea execution. These changes are substantive, even if the ideas’ core logics remain the same.

I also have no idea how today’s salesman arrived at his four commodities. My guess is he went with whatever people might buy at the prices he was offering. Sometimes what works will be as good an evaluative lens as any other: it’s too wearying to drag a roller bag of goods around the NYC metro system without a hope of turning travelers into customers.

And a good combination might pleasantly surprise everyone.

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How reaction can restrict us

White flower on Black background. Photo credit: Sean Allison
Photo credit: Sean Allison

A friend shared this quote from Gloria Anzaldúa this week:

A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence… All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against… At some point on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two moral combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. The possibilities are numerous once we decided to act and not react.” —Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness” (emphasis added)

All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting to.

Sooner or later, every social movement reckons with its relationship to the status quo, its enmeshment with the guardians of the way things are, and the temptation to build action around what some avatar of power has said or done.

For years, I advised one organization not to even name one of their ideological opponents in publications or press releases. I encouraged them to address the movement’s core issues, and to refute the weak critiques others frequently made of it. But I discouraged the organization from handing out free mentions of those rallying against it and also advised leaders against elevating those latecomers to peer stature by engaging them in named debate.

It was a controversial strategy at the time, and Anzaldúa’s point in this quote reminds me of it.

There’s something about battling an Other that’s consumptive rather than creative. Ultimately, identities based on dissociation from What We’re Not require an Other. The perpetual presence of that Other makes us feel whole and secure and functions as the ground where our What We Are makes sense.

With time, dueling with Others becomes something like the 20th Century Cold War: the United States obsesses about the USSR to the degree that it rewrites its civic pledge, redesigns its money, regulates patriotic customs for schoolchildren, expands the reach of its domestic and international surveillance programs, and generally stares back at a gaping abyss.

We can instead focus on what we can create and contribute, not just the people critiquing the work we do. “The possibilities are numerous once we decided to act and not react.”

Toni Morrison’s 1975 argument that we ought to focus on our unique work rather than the vicissitudes of others covers very similar ground. If it’s been a while since you’ve read Morrison at Portland State, do so now.

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Giving up the need to know it all

A shuffled Rubik's cube. Original image via Wikimedia Commons.
After this weekend’s conference closed yesterday, I invited a fellow presenter to stop by our house for lunch on their way home. We were both exhausted and fit for little more than sitting quietly on the couch and waiting for food to appear.

So I was surprised when my friend picked up my almost finished but abandoned Rubik’s cube.

You remember the Rubik’s cube? It’s been the joy and bane of would-be nerds for more than three decades. I never had one as a child and bought one about five years ago.

At first, I’d pick it up and toy with it in between writing sessions. But I was afraid of messing it up, so I never made more moves than I could remember how to reverse.

After a few months, I got brave, jumbled it randomly, and tried to restore it to order. I came pretty close, and even googled strategies at one point, but never followed them to the finish line.

Eventually, another writing distractor toy replaced it.1

Until yesterday, when my friend picked up my Rubik’s cube and solved it in half an hour.

How?

They knew the solution patterns. Someone had once taught them a handful of patterns, they memorized those patterns, and that’s the whole story.

You don’t need to be able to navigate 166 logic trees to solve a Rubik’s cube. You don’t need incredible spatial reasoning skills. You can study a few simple patterns, and those patterns unlock the game for you. It’s not as complicated as it could otherwise be, and most importantly, you’ll never know that unless you’re in relationship with another person who knows and will tell you.

Surrounding yourself with people who know things and will share them with you is how you don’t have to know it all and can still flourish as if you do. It’s why even people at the top of their class still hire tutors, why winners still hire coaches and mentors, and why businesses that want to move forward hire skilled consultants and contractors.

Good teammates, who at their best are peers working constructively toward goals you share, free each of us from the trial of the Little Red Hen: plenty to do, no cooperative hands on deck, and the sense that we’ll just have to find all the answers by ourselves.

There’s pleasure in searching and studying, of course.

But others will always have a skill, an insight, a perspective—something—that adds to us and resolves a conundrum we’d probably have never resolved on our own.

Treasure your teammates.

  1. I haven’t found better desk toys than Magnetix (recalled in the mid-2000s when children ate them), the construction classic Play-doh, and the Ball of Whacks. [Back to text: ◄]

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The price of the purple cow

A black sesame burger bun filled with regular colored burger and toppings.
Photo: Burger King’s novelty black burgers, via CBS

Seth Godin, who posts thoughts on marketing, value, and originality on his blog every day, published the book Purple Cow back in 2003. Online marketing hadn’t yet peaked then but web marketers were already challenging conventional advice about how businesses should map out and manage their public-facing communication, influence and impact, and reputation.

Purple Cow is a manifesto about building “remarkable” products and businesses. So many business writers still refer to it more than a decade later, and its title is enough to prove its thesis: we remember products that distinguish themselves and we stick with makers who demonstrate value over time.

The Godin book I read a few years ago is Linchpin (2010), which applies Purple Cow‘s principles to people. Linchpins distinguish themselves professionally with exceptional contributions over the long haul. Their contributions aren’t about whether they’re part-time or full-time, staff or contractors. Being a linchpin, for Godin, is about transforming common labor into art and recognizing that whatever our roles in a system, we can use our skills to reinforce human connection and to produce change. We don’t need to be system-authorized to do any of that.

For about a decade, attention has flowed to the purple cow, the linchpin, the innovator, and the disruptor. It’s nice to be thought original and exceptional, and there are still many rewards for being “first,” even if, like Burger King (US)’s novelty black burgers, your change doesn’t last. (Those burgers, which McDonalds pioneered, did just fine in Japan even if they flopped over here.)

But what happens to the ordinary in the meantime? Maintainers and sustainers don’t get awards in the way that innovators do, so does elevating the purple cows mean we must devalue the brown ones?

Surely not. Change still depends on stability, and even as we work to birth the new, we get to keep stewarding what already exists. I work with a lot of people who have strong visions for social change and improvement, and in some cases that change vision is quite radical. But even those groups demonstrate concern for conserving what’s good and building on what still needs developing.

Departures from the past aren’t quite as large as opponents perceive them to be, and it’s that continuity that builds a bridge from the “is” to the “could be.” Whether we’re cogs in a social machine or truly remarkable artists is ultimately not the most important thing. What matters is whether the amazing, rare experiences we know how to design can ever escape the sabbath, the holiday, or the weekend and take root in the regular hours of our lives.

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Accounting for history

"History makes the present. Good decisions take both the proximate context and the temporal context into account." —@mackenzian
To make good decisions and to keep relationships running smoothly, consider accounting for at least two types of context.

Proximate context includes what’s happening in and around the decision-maker and the community or problem they hope to engage.

Temporal context includes what’s happened up to the present moment and future possibilities, probabilities, and risks given past performance.

I’ve been in strategy sessions that fail to take immediate or time-distant contexts into account. We can have the most creative and committed people around the table, but if the conversation is ahistorical or not connected to “the context of use” (the communities and circumstances where ideas, policies, or processes eventually go to work), anything we produce will eventually hit the ground hollow.

Context makes a healthy base for the choices we make in designing our own work, engaging the people and organizations around us, and responding to the contributions of others.

Accounting for history as well as the here and now supports us in accepting the capacities, potentials, and limits of our structures, the people who keep them running today, and the legacies that influence us all and make some outcomes more likely  than others.

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Scripting Interactions Only Gets You So Far

A person writes "Ideas" in different script styles. Only their hand is visible in the top right corner of the photo.
Scripting interactions assures certainty, but restricts creativity. (Licensed image)

Scripting interactions is the quickest way to make sure everyone on a team gets on the same page about how to deal with common issues.

That’s why large tech companies like Microsoft use scripts to standardize the support they offer customers, and non-profit organizations use scripts to train fundraising phone bankers.

You might feel at a loss when your computer automatically updates and the update causes basic programs to stop working, but you can be sure that the manufacturer’s customer experience department will already have mapped out a path for you. They’ll know and have planned for the questions you’re likely to ask, where you’ll go on the company’s website to find answers, what will happen when you call for help, the questions support team members or technicians will ask you, and who in the support chain they’ll refer you to next.

Veterans’ charities, the paralympics, your local city symphony—they all caught onto the value of scripting years ago. So when cold callers ring your home or cell phone, they sound roughly the same. They’re reading from the same interaction script, they’re required to make a certain number of calls per hour, and their rote approach means you’re unlikely to hang up satisfied or feeling heard.

Interaction scripts define minimum standards of behavior for the people using them. They simplify reality into this-then-that prompts, sequences, and branching decisions: team members take specific actions in a specific order so that specific outcomes can result.

The scripts’ goal could be a satisfied client or a contributing donor. Goals could be quantitative too: how many customers or donors engage the team, which actions they take after their interaction, and how quickly the team serves the public each time.

Ultimately, scripts keep staff on topic and on target, and limit how much those team members can innovate. That’s great when questions are closed-ended. It even gives people a clear, comforting sense of what the rules are and what they can expect: Press 2 for billing and 3 for support. Say No at least three times, ask the cold-caller’s supervisor to remove you from the call list, and we will leave you in peace.

But these patterns fail miserably when problems are complex or the task requires creativity. Team members who haven’t been trained, authorized, or empowered to really resolve customer concerns flounder when confronted with real, unscripted life, especially that slice of life that takes longer than seven minutes to wrap up.

Scripted interactions may be clean, discrete, and easy to measure. But they undermine the creative, problem-solving process precisely because creating solutions means questioning the assumptions that standards and policies are based on. Creativity means perceiving more than what’s already known and accounted for. It requires us to push beyond the script.

I recently spent half an hour trapped in one of the most labyrinthine support networks I’ve ever seen. The staff shuttled me between three departments, all represented on the line by people who didn’t understand me or my issue and struggled when I asked questions that their scripts hadn’t anticipated.

As it happened, forcing me to use NATO’s phonetic alphabet didn’t help either. (YANKEE ECHO SIERRA, ROMEO ECHO ALPHA LIMA LIMA YANKEE: The phonetic alphabet.)

I wound up on hold, resolving the problem myself through research, trial, error, and improvement, all as I resolved never to call or recommend that company’s support line ever again.

In some circumstances, like when problems are well-bounded and time is short, it makes sense to limit staff’s responses in the same way you might restrict your morning routine or clothing choices to free up your willpower or mental energy.

But in overly scripted systems, that freed-up mental energy has nowhere to go. Hyper-scripted team members don’t have room to listen deeply or innovate; they can’t easily discover as life presents because they’re expected to just follow the process as given.

Yet when situations have a lot of moving parts and are uncertain, complex, or even wicked, you’ll want staff members in the right frame of mind to perceive, analyze, and design creative solutions.

You’ll want to give them space to listen, to innovate, to surprise themselves as well as each other and learn new possibilities in the process.

Because following the script won’t get them all the way there.