Quickthink

We got into a spirited discussion yesterday during day 3 of my negotiation course. The issue? Agenda control.

We all agree that if you can control the agenda in a negotiation, you are better off. That is the easy part. And there are a host of tactics that you can use to achieve it. They are also easy enough to understand — though sometimes hard to do. But how hard do you fight for agenda control? That question is more interesting.

In my view, you should fight hard for this. But I would be the first to admit that you only can do this when you have a clear idea why you are negotiating in the first place. In other words, you don’t fight hard for stuff that you are not sure you need.

And that, of course, takes us back to how you find the answer to the question ” why you are there”? It is a strategic issue, a hugely important one, and one that causes great confusion.

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of great books out there about how to deal with this type of strategic challenge. Why not? Perhaps it is because it is a lot easier to write about how to do stuff than how to think about stuff. Thinking is hard work — especially when you know it has consequences, like making a commitment to a course of action over time. That can be scary.

This is an area where gamification can help. In a game setting, our fear of mistakes is lower and our engagement in process is higher. And in this setting, thinking can actually be fun.

Csikszentmihalyi argues that this is the path to finding meaning in life. Not by achieving (winning the game and retiring early) but by finding and savoring optimal experiences in determined play. Not that winning is a bad thing, but it is not the only thing. How you get there means a hell of a lot too.

Well, this is old fashioned stuff, actually. I was reminded of how old fashioned when I watched the Hornblower series on TV several weeks ago. Young Hornblower is a compelling character because of his commitment to learning that produces results of a special kind. Sure, he is clever. But more important, he embodies a type of commitment where his cleverness is plainly useful. So, the other characters tend to admire him even when he defeats them in combat. Going back to the ruckus in my negotiation class — despite all the challenges, Hornblower remains first and foremost, in firm control of his agenda and that is what makes his story compelling.

But Hornblower is actually a modern incarnation of this sort of story. Ulysses comes to mind as a much earlier prototype. The hero who earns the title — so much more compelling than Achilles who was merely born to dominate.

You might protest — this is adventure story stuff! We don’t go around killing monsters in modern life. Why is this relevant? Before concluding that I am advocating a sort of “blood and guts” approach to life, you might consider that it was the crowning achievement of James Joyce to take Ulysses as his model for the modern thinking hero, Mr. Bloom. Art as adventure? Why not?

At the end of the day the key question here is whether this sort of chit chat helps create and nurture a learning environment. My view is that we vastly increase the chances for learning when we invest in strategic thinking first. But then again, that’s just me.

And BTW, there is one more factor that bears mention. That is the threat of abuse. Sad to say, people do abuse each other and they do it a lot.  By abuse, I mean they manipulate, dominate, etc. All the things that rob the victim of his or her individuality (call it dis-empowerment). I am not talking about being tough on a given issue. I am talking about a strategy to create a dominant/submissive relationship.

The typical abuse pattern starts with a seduction of some sort and then moves to isolating the victim and introducing a threat. It is not a pretty picture. Abusers are most successful with people who don’t have a strong agenda (like young folks).  Indeed, you can think of abuse as taking away the victim’s individual agenda. It can be very subtle. And the way to prevent it? Fight like hell for your agenda. That makes the seduction, isolation and threat much, much harder to accomplish. Abusers sense this and move on, leaving you free to build your networks with less distraction.

So how do we get a more efficient market for content creation? Are micropayments the answer? Some think so.

Years ago, I bumped into an interesting problem. Our NGO was trying to upgrade court practice in Estonia. We were delivering training to judges and lawyers, and that was going well. But our research told us that our training was not improving practice to address certain stubborn problems.

We might have said, “well, that is beyond our reach” or “that is too tough” and just continued on our way. Or we might have said “what can we do better?” We pursued this last question and found some interesting solutions.

The solutions evolved in stages First, we worked on institutionalizing our research to gain a more precise idea of the nature of the problems at hand at any given moment in time. We found that it was possible to develop a prioritized list of problems on an annual basis with a relatively modest budget.

So now we had a more credible “problems list”. But how to develop solutions? Hmmm … where would system upgrade ideas come from?

This was the tricky part. How could we develop an ever improving set of recommendations to actors in the system to raise standards? If we could do this, we would be creating an agenda for next steps in system development. We could use what we generated in our training and in our discussions to promote system improvement.

It was a big challenge. Stay tuned! More on this later.

I thought the idea of Bling was old hat. But apparently, it is just getting going. In a few new movie releases, bling is king. A.O. Scott reviews them. He calls them “fables of acquisition”.

Acquisition stories are old as the hills. These are stories of the sublime pleasure of getting rich. Remember, for example, King Midas? And bling is our current popular word for exultation in acquisition — whether the gains are earned or not. From the films, it appears that it may be preferable that they are not. Bonnie and Clyde redux.

So what is going on? Part of it is media hype. Hollywood needs to break taboos to sell its schlock. So it broke all taboos with respect to sex and violence. Like the alien impregnating Sigourney Weaver — hope she took home a nice fee for that one. Yech! By now these topics are boring. There are only so many times we can see someone’s head getting ripped off before we lose the shock value. So why not try stories of the sublime pleasure of sudden and “easy” acquisition of luxury? Errr … as Nike would say “Just do it!”

And to what effect on the rest of us? On the plus side, there is nothing inherently wrong with liking great things. The good life. So acquisition stories remind us that the good life can be sweet.  And according to Csikszentmihalyi, we start our quest for meaning in life by taking on a goal. Like the good life, or like being like Gatsby. Indeed, it doesn’t matter so much if we make a mistake in selecting our goal as long as we commit to learning. So far so good.

On the minus side, and this is a whopper, we all know by now (or should) that shopping — including shoplifting — gets boring after a while. As does showing off the latest acquisition. They give a very ephemeral sort of pleasure. They can keep psychic entropy at bay for a while. But at the end of the day, they are distractions and they do not deliver meaning.

Do we dare tell stories about meaning? Sure … but using Hollywood’s logic, we can do that as long as they are naughty. Naughty life learning? Sort of like a mischievous buddha? That might be a tough movie pitch, if it meant no product placements and no broken taboos.

And presto! Because of the limitations of the story telling that Hollywood can do with any degree of competence, Hollywood resorts to “dumbing down” those foolish enough to take it in its silly messaging.

Can’t we disrupt this somehow?

Yesterday, I was pleased to attend the Tartu Smart Startup event at the Ahhaa center and it was loads of fun.

One of the focus points was about “positioning”. This is a critical strategic concept that surprisingly, really smart people sometimes have difficulty with. So, what the hell is positioning?

It is one of those things that is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Here is one view.

All start ups face the same challenge. They believe that they have something new to offer. But there is the catch — “new” is only better when potential clients see the new thing that way. And they won’t see it that way just because the starter upper believes passionately in the new thing. He or she has to position the new thing in such a way that it looks like a solution to a big hairy problem (I take the phrase from Andrew Scott’s presentation).

BTW, as Andrew Scott also said, it is not important whether the clients know in advance that they have such a problem. But it is important that they discover it when they see the new thing. That the see a new potential that had been blocked.

And why is this difficult? There are several barriers to doing positioning well. First, entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with what they are doing before they fall in love with their clients. And when they do that, they can be blinded to how their potential clients see things. Second, there are often communication gaps (poor channeling) between the people making new thing and their potential clients. So entrepreneurs who don’t put on their agenda building channels can be surprised that they their relationships are not adequate

But ok — getting this right is not brain surgery. We can do better if we understand the issue. And one way is to get people who have start up ideas to stand up and pitch. And the first pitch question — so what is the big, hairy problem here?

Regular followers of this blog may have noticed that I am posting a bit less than I have in the past. I have not lost the fun of posting. To the contrary, I still enjoy it and learn from it. But … I have another love on the side. And that love growing.

What is it? Allow me to explain. Csikszentmihalyi points out in his book Flow that the word “meaning” actually has at least three different meanings. Setting aside the irony, this creates a problem for us in figuring out the meaning of life. Which meaning do we use to measure “meaning”? Good question.

The three options are:

• the thing that links things together (a thread).
• the intention that we have in doing things
• the order that we see (classifying like things together)

The first idea is outside of us, and we internalize it. For example, we intuitively appreciate the idea of living the “good life”. What’s that? Perhaps it is enjoyment of the materials or building blocks of life. Or perhaps it is an ideal - something perfect that we admire. Or perhaps it is some odd combination of the two. We make the choice.

The second idea is inside us, and we externalize it. Depending on the clarity of our vision of what is important, we show resolve in bringing things to life.

The third idea actually doesn’t exist. It is our interpretation of data. In effect, it is the series of stories that we create as we experience things.

Here comes the big idea. Csikszentmihalyi argues that life has no meaning other than what we give it as we tell these stories about ourselves, trying to harmonize our vision of what we should do with the resolve we show in doing it. In other words, we build harmony from trying to match the first two options for finding meaning.

And this story starts off with a goal.

Ah … starting off with a goal. This is the origin of my second love. Blogging is fun, but for me, it does not start with a goal. It starts with experience. So I have been moving more towards other forms of connecting that start with goals.

Hmmm … what does that mean? Stay tuned here and I will follow up. Or send a comment and I will connect you!

In our third day of the negotiation workshop we start talking about bargaining. It is a fun subject and there is a lot to be said about it. But I always get a bit antsy when we get deeply into this discussion. And we do get pretty deep. The reason I get antsy is that I know that bargaining is a relatively small part of the overall negotiation process and we that tend to over-estimate its importance. Indeed, some think that negotiation and bargaining are the same thing! Can you imagine that?

Bargaining is the most highly gamified part of negotiating. Once we have our options on the table, we play the bargaining game in order to test relative valuations. Can we close or not? There is nothing wrong with that. But people tend to do this before they set up the overall game. They come in the room with a closing argument in their mind. Before they even know for sure what winning is — and what winning might be. And so they often do not see what is staring them in the face.

In other words, bargain we may, but we are fools if we think we learn that much from it. There is a lot more to learn than prices, even of the things we call “crown jewels”. And how do we do this learning? We don’t … unless we create a learning environment.

According to Ken Robinson, these environments have at least 3 characteristics (1) they promote differentiation over conformity (2) they promote curiosity rather than rote mechanistic thinking and (3) they value the creative process. Differentiation, curiosity and creativity. At the core of these environments is the relation between teacher (either a person or a set of circumstances) and a student (he or she is the one who is trying to do something).

How does this work? Well, let me answer by asking you this question. How good are you at learning?  We are all pretty smart — so don’t answer by saying something about being smart. Learning is about using smarts, not having them. Perhaps we can say that it is about creating the opportunities for exchange rather than just doing an exchange.

We tend to do this more when we are in trouble (with a pressing agenda) and so one might think of using our learning capacity as par to of a coping strategy. We have a lot to learn about how these coping strategies work, but we know that our coping strategies are tested every day. And we get better or worse at coping as we go through life. Of course, we would like to think that we are getting better. But are we? Mea culpa, I will admit that I cannot say that I have consistently followed this path. I have sometimes, but I have found myself deep in the woods at other times.

And this is why I enjoy the work of someone like Tim Ferriss. Tim talks about how he learns faster and he makes some good points about deconstructing problems, selecting priorities, sequencing practice and gaining a stake in results. But more important, I think, is the learning attitude that he espouses. As a committed learner, he does not play a domination game. To the contrary, he looks for challenges where the risk of failure is huge.

How well do we do that?  Well once again, research shows that we don’t like doing it. We are more motivated to protect the crown jewels as they are rather than to fight for new opportunities even if the pay off is much bigger. Interesting, I think.

That means we have to work hard to create learning environments - they don’t just pop up. And we need to practice doing that to get better at it.

Many years ago, a few really, really smart people began talking about how mankind should explore space. NASA ended up using the model proposed by one of those really smart guys, Werner von Braun. And the result was the space programme that we recognize as history and that now confounds us.

Why does it confound us? Because von Braun’s ideas are really expensive to implement and they are limited.  They got us into space in a hurry and to the moon but  they did not give us much leeway to figure out how to stay there and what to do there. And more than a half century later, we still have only one space station —- a thing that itself seems rather more of an after-thought than a magnet for people and ideas.

In other words, von Braun adapted to short term priorities, but he may have been less successful in embracing long term needs. Ron Miller tells this story rather well. Did a guy by the name of Darrell Romick actually have better ideas? Ooops.

Well, I would not be surprised because this type of thing happens again and again. Humans are very adaptable and we think this is great. We think it is our trump card to cope with a chaotic external environment. But adaption is a short term strategy. To go beyond short term thinking we need to embrace new environments. And that is really hard to do.

Don’t believe me?`Consider how Europeans adapted to the new world —- the early colonies were all failures because they tried to adapt to rather than embrace what it meant to live on a different continent. The results were gruesome.

Or if you want a more recent story, go ask NYT - Om Malik offers a very interesting tale about NYT and their very belated “snowfall” project. The venerable newspaper, full of really, really smart people seems to be just now (more than a decade late) embracing the internet rather than trying to adapt its old content generation model to it. Oops.

Is there something to learn here? Yes. Strategic thinking fits into a “one step at a time” implementation regime. No matter how grand the goal, you achieve it by taking a next step. But here is the kick in the pants. If the next step is a mere adaption to changing circumstances, we better hope that the needed change is minor. If it aint, we are bringing a knife to a gun fight.

BATNA? You might be wondering what the hell is “BATNA”? It is an acronym for “best alternative to negotiated agreement”. And it is not a new concept. The basic idea is that you need to know your BATNA before you start negotiating.

But there is not a lot of writing about where one finds BATNA. Alternatives do not grow on trees. Nor do they arrive at the table from a menu. We need to build alternatives ourselves.

So how do we do that? Let me know if you are interested in this topic and we can chat further.

Prof. John Butman offers a nice post today about persuasion. He argues that more and more people are motivated to change the world by implementing great ideas. This, in turn, creates a demand for skills to manage the task.

I think he is right about the “more people …” part. The barriers to implementing new ideas are falling as technology lowers communication costs and raises expectations.  I would go farther. I think it is a long term trend that is just getting going. The “start up” era is just starting up.

But I take issue with Mr. Butman in how this will play out. His pitch is geared to leaders or incipient leaders. The next generation of Steve Jobs types. Well, no doubt some of us will attempt this daredevil life style. But more of us will not. So are we excluded simply because we choose not to lead the charge? Nonsense.

The wider trend here is about group dynamics - not just group leadership.  That dynamic includes forming groups, energizing groups, leaving groups and working in an ecology of groups. And I would argue that the value added will be squeezed out of the conversational threads between groups over time.

So we don’t all have to run around pretending that we are like Gandhi. We do need to invest more in the groups ecology that we are a part of.

And BTW do Mr. Butman’s ideas gel with those of Dan Pink, who recently authored a competing book on persuasion (To Sell is Human)? Dan’ s book is more about person to person connection. John is floating in the clouds - talking about communication “strategy” rather than communication “skills”. In fact, both are critically important. I have not had the chance to get into John’s book yet - but I am interested to compare his strategic thinking with Lafley’s Playing to Win.

More on that later … I hope.

 The recent tragic events in Boston deserve a moment of strategic reflection. Don’t you think?

It seems as if 9/11 happened rather a long time ago. So long, in fact, that I can barely recall the time after the dreadful bombing but before the US invaded Afghanistan. But I do recall one interesting conversation that I had back then. It was about who is the enemy.

I was chatting with a rather wise German colleague who was concerned that the US would over-react to the bombing and in doing so, alienate potential allies. Well, he had a point. Back then, it was more clear than it is now that terrorists are the nut cases (extremists) not the norm. And the best strategy to defeat the nut cases is to unify the moderate world against them. Has the US done this? Let’s consider what has happened.

The US has expended considerable effort to disable extremist networks and kill of their more important leaders. Cutting off the head of the snake, so to speak. And this has been relatively successful. One might quibble about the cost, but Bin laden is dead and his networks are disrupted. And drone strikes have kept terrorist leaders off balance. So, bravo for the good guys! But the aggressiveness of the response confirms to some that terrorism is a war to be waged against the US - rather than a war against moderation. And in the war of words, the US is an easy target. Oops.

Is there a better way? I think so. First, I think it would pay to see terrorism more as a police problem rather than a military one. The police and the courts are very good at de-glamorizing crime. Whether the US should have invaded Afghanistan and Iraq or not, it is wise to draw down the level of military activity. And I think that President Obama is on the right path here. Second, I think it would pay to develop a positive counter-message to the negative terrorist message. Terrorists thrive where there is poverty. They thrive where conflict seems impossible to end. The US would be wise to address these problems at a higher level of priority. Or sadly, we are likely to see more home grown terrorism.

These are not new ideas. But given what some are saying about intervening in Syria and Iran, I think that it is important to keep in mind the larger strategic picture.

What do you think?