Are You Seeking Affirmation or Information?

Friends!

I hope you had a chance to reflect a bit around re:gathering. It's an important topic, for sure. I certainly had a unique opportunity to do so this week with incredible people in so many different meetings and environments. Eating when you are really hungry tastes better than when full; perhaps the lack of being together for so long made the experience as remarkable as it was. It’s hard to tell. I will need more time to fully digest and understand. However, experiences feel markedly different when shared with others. They help you see what you might have missed, they help you zoom in when you might zoom out, and in this and many other cases, the experience simply wouldn’t even take place without them. We know that now more than ever.

And next week, I am heading towards even more togetherness with 3 board meetings (including dinners) with boards that have not gathered since the pandemic. It’s a unique opportunity for me to pay attention to what is different and how we all feel as we enter a room rather than a zoom. Was the trip worth it? Were the conversations better? In what way? And have we now changed those meetings in some way, or have we just gone back to exactly what we did before?

As we re-enter a new reality, slowly but surely, it’s important that we keep some type of score, so that our gatherings are better – simply because of what we learned when we couldn’t be together.

This week, I will hover around the real reason why I started writing these newsletters. I believe, quite passionately, that the problems we are facing are small compared to the way we speak about them. We have witnessed a near-complete breakdown of our public discourse. It’s polarized, divisive, and mean-spirited. It suffers from many biases, such as recency bias, negativity bias, and certainly confirmation bias.

So, for my own sanity, I needed to “elevate” my own perspective as a form of inoculation against the spread of this conversational virus that seems to be affecting so much of our discourse. I have discussed this here before and shared ideas around the business model problem with social media, as well as cancel culture and negativity in media, in general. Perhaps it is naïve, but it is my sincere hope that by sharing some of these weekly musing’s, others can, in turn, be affected, and together we can build antibodies (sorry for all the epidemiological references, but given recent events, it’s not that strange…is it?) towards this conversational crisis. And hopefully, over time, begin to shape a better dialogue. As Jerry Garcia so often reminded us:

“Somebody has to do something, it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.”

Recently, I wrote about the fact that our lives are centered around the stories we tell ourselves. Storytelling has remarkable power. And I don’t believe there is much we can do to change that aspect of our human condition. In fact, I don’t think we should even try to change it. But as I wrote in that post, we do need to be mindful of when our story needs updating or editing. Reality changes all the time, and lately, at an accelerated pace. Like our computer counterparts, we need updates to our operating systems if we are to function properly.

My good friend Daniel Lubetzky has inspired me for over 20 years on so many levels. He was one of the first leaders I met that powerfully, passionately, and unapologetically pursued unifying profit and purpose in creative and very successful ways. The most well-known are his KIND bars, which is such an integrated brand bringing healthier habits, more human kindness, and empathic generosity to many millions of people all over the world. He recently asked this simple question:

Are you seeking to be affirmed or informed?

Need I say more…..

I think we are all guilty —I know I certainly am— of looking for the facts that support our narrative. Our attention can sometimes operate like heat-seeking missiles. We only see or hear what we want to believe (and we shoot down the messenger and/or the message when it doesn't fit!). The story we tell ourselves acts like an effective filter, and if you add social media consumption to that phenomenon, you realize how much this probably is affecting the erosion of our conversational landscapes.

We have to find a way to free ourselves from the constraints of our own incomplete stories. Some of that happens by meeting people. And, in those meetings, witnessing and feeling their humanity, hopefully, helps us better realize that their views are not that different than ours and that their view of seeing the world can comfortably coexist alongside our own. We know in the natural world that ecosystems flourish with greater diversity and die from lack thereof. And we might be well-served by the reminder that we are a biological system, too! Difference is the engine, not the enemy, of progress.

Politics have become personal. And everything has become political, and therefore everything has become personal. Too many people walk around with their guard up and see enemies everywhere. Who can blame them? This is not the right cultural environment where innovation flourishes and new ideas can take root. All our institutions are in desperate need of reinvention, reimagination, and reengineering. And the hopelessness many feel about our lack of progress, I believe, can be traced to the deterioration of trust between people and ideas which is a necessary condition for progress. Rather than just talking about the ideas we need, we need to also start fostering the conditions in where that innovation can happen.

I will end with this quote by Andrew Sullivan from his recent post: No, the personal is NOT political linked below. Not to overly dramatize the point, but I do agree with Andrew that if we can’t have civil arguments, we will have civil wars. So, this is serious business.

Let’s not lose the distinction between public and private. Let’s remember that everything we decide to do to violate the privacy of others comes back to legitimize others’ violation of ours. The immediate payoff may be gratifying; but what it does to a society over time, as the tit-for-tats cascade, is to remove the chance for civil debate, and enhance the power of personal hatred, and ultimately political violence. That’s where this leads: a descent from civil argument to civil war.

A few articles relevant to a better public discourse:

• Bill Maher’s New Rule from Friday is great and EXACTLY about this problem. Watch it. And let’s deescalate!

• “No, the personal is NOT pollical.” The article quoted above from Andrew Sullivan

• I enjoyed this TED talk by Hrishikesh Hirway about what you discover when you really listen.

• I liked this post from Character Lab by Eranda Jayawickreme about “Don’t let disagreements lead to disdain.”

Have a great week!