Monthly Archives: November 2020

Postmortem as Prenatal

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

Feedback and root cause analysis:  If you’re like most people I know, you love neither.  I relish the former; my friend revels in the latter.  We make a great team!  We conducted a series of both recently, and yet another complementary relational phenomenon occurred to me:  These are not concluding activities; they are initiating.

Many of us procrastinate and dread feedback—both the giving and the getting.  On the other side of dread and gnashing of teeth, we sigh with relief when it’s ‘over.’  For more complex issues, just one session may not suffice—we must dig deeper—ask more questions, really dissect out the nerves, vessels, and tumors.  A good postmortem requires patience, curiosity, and a nimble beginner’s mind.  We never know what will emerge, and we follow clues with a balance of enthusiasm and realism.

So many times in the past week someone has told me, “This is very good information,” when I have either given or described feedback I received.  Very good indeed, and sometimes painful and humbling.  I did not sigh with relief and closure.  I inhaled deeply and prepared to contemplate longer—to gestate.  The figurative autopsies I assisted in this week served as developmental studies of our paths to current state. They shed light on the potential anatomy of better processes, understanding, and collaboration.

We dread the hard conversations.  We think if we can just get through them, we can be free and slink away.  But the joyfully ironic truth is, hard conversations are exciting and inviting beginnings.  If we both steel and soften ourselves to pass through these jagged archways, myriad new possibilities beckon.  We get to be the architects, together, of a much healthier new future.

Primed and Susceptible

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NaBloPoMo 2020 – Today’s Lesson

Text from a conservative relative:

I get it, you hated him 4 years ago and you still hate him now, I’ve seen a lot of hate thrown his way, but this guy is a consistent winner and an overachiever. That’s what the people who support him love about him Yes there have been some scandals, yes there have been some lies, and maybe a few times he’s twisted the truth to make him look better. He’s out there everyday proving those haters wrong time after time. Call it jealousy, call it envy, some people just can’t handle how successful he is and how much money he has, could even be jealous that he’s got a hot foreign model as his wife. You may not have wanted him in his role, but he’s there now and there is nothing that you or I can do about it. I know it’s possibly going to get worse over the next several days, but like him or not, Tom Brady is turning things around in Tampa.

I confess, I read this while stopped in traffic, so I may not have paid enough attention (ahem).  Also it’s not a text from my relative; it’s a friend’s Facebook post. 

It’s an exercise in attention, assumptions, priming, and susceptibility.  And man, was I duped.  I got to the end and thought, huh, that was a weird non sequitur–firmly stuck in my own narrative.  What hijacked me most was, “nothing [we] can do about it.”  I was not alone.

I wonder what myriad important perspectives, learnings, and connections I have missed, shuttered by my own biases?  How much fuller could my life be if I managed them all far better?

How much better for us all, if we all did?

Count Higher Than Two

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NaBloPoMo 2020 — Today’s Lesson

I’m starting to hear echoes of 2016, when a friend posted, “Well, now we know where the dumb people live.”  To some, if you voted this year to re-elect the president you are wholly and irrevocably:  stupid, ignorant, racist, misogynist, monstrous, evil—and more.  You are judged and defined solely by this one action.  Nothing else need be known about you; you are garbage. 

It’s us vs. them, good vs. evil, either/or, with us or against us.

This profound yet effortless oversimplification, this refusal to acknowledge, let alone explore, the inherent complexity of any given individual, poisons us all too easily.  It is the venomous root of polarization.  David Blankenhorn, co-founder of Braver Angels, describes it so well in his 2016 essay, “The Seven Habits of Highly Depolarizing People”.  He asserts that “binary thinking—the tendency to divide everything into two mutually antagonistic categories”—is the most dangerous habit of polarization.

It’s to the point where I myself feel unsafe to raise any nonconforming perspective among liberals, lest I’m attacked for upholding the toxic patriarchy I profess to oppose. How ironic that the movement of tolerance and inclusion, that claims acceptance and diversity as core values, not only cannot tolerate but violently rejects even benign and earnest internal dissent.

Can we see our political opponents as more than a malevolent monolith?  Can we allow for complex experiences we don’t understand?  Can we withhold judgment long enough to recognize and honor our shared humanity, before we respectfully condemn each other’s wrong-headed ideas?

Can we ‘count higher than two’ in our attitudes and interactions?  Our mutual survival may depend on it, and I know so few people willing to try.

Our voting choice was binary.  Our thoughts, emotions, speech, actions, and relationships should not be.