The articles that changed my world in 2021
Tamsen Webster, MA, MBA
Message Designer, English-to-English Translator, Doctoral Student. I help leaders build buy-in for transformational change.
In last week’s edition, I shared which of my?2021 posts you found most useful . One of the most popular 2021 posts was actually one I?didn’t?feature last week:?the six 2020 #swipefile articles?I?found most useful .
See, every year, I share more than 300 articles with you in my #swipefile. And every year, there are a few articles that stick with me. Sometimes that’s because they give me new ways to talk or think about something I’ve seen. Sometimes that’s because they give me a new way to see something I talk or think about.
I’m delighted to say that 2021 was no different. Sometimes in ways I didn’t realize or anticipate, I kept coming back and back to concepts I read about this year. So, without any further ado, here are those world-changing (for me) articles, divided into some categories I found useful.
Though, this year it’s, uh… more than six. (Maybe I really needed the world to change in 2021? Sigh.)
The naming of things
Sometimes it helps to have a name for something you sense or suspect exists, or for a phenomenon you’ve seen but can’t describe. This set of articles introduced new names for me—terms and concepts that help give shape to the shapeless and names to the previously nameless.
2021 (and heck, much of 2020!) was certainly a year that gave rise to a lot of “What is that person thinking?!” moments. I’ve learned the hard way that when I ask that question of others, it’s often the very moment I need to be asking it of myself. This article was a great reminder of two critically important concepts when it comes to those kinds of moments:?cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.?If you’re not familiar with either, this article provides a great summary and juicy story-based examples. But it also introduced a third concept that I?wasn’t?familiar with, at least as far as its name goes:?social conformity.?That’s what drives us to “discount even the evidence of our own senses if we think that our beliefs are not in harmony with those around us.” In other words, as the article notes, “just as we seek to have harmony within our own beliefs [which is cognitive consonance, btw! —TW], we also seek harmony with the beliefs of those around us.”
This is where I learned about?negentropy, the opposite of entropy, which, I get it, is not exactly a useful definition if you aren’t familiar with entropy in the first place. Thankfully, the article defines both. First, entropy: “Entropy is a measure of how much energy is lost in a system. If a system loses too much energy, it will disintegrate into chaos.” Negentropy, then, is the opposite of that. As the author summarizes, the more you can minimize energy loss, the more you can maximize progress (inclusive of effectiveness, productivity, etc.). You likely can already see that this is a concept that could apply well beyond physics. And yes, that’s what the author suggests: that thinking in terms of avoiding energy loss in social systems (like the workplace) is an underserved means of improving organizational culture and organizations as a whole.
I’ve had an issue with calls for “authenticity” ?for a loooooong time now, and this article gives a name to the biggest issue I have with it: when someone consciously tries to act “authentic,” then by definition they aren’t being “authentic” at all. This article gives a name to that phenomenon, “performative authenticity.” This article also reminded me of one of my favorite articles from 2020, another “naming of things” kind of article on the “reflexivity trap :” “the implicit, and sometimes explicit, idea that professing awareness of a fault absolves you of that fault.”
This is another, “are you sure this fits into articles about messaging?” post, I know. But even though I didn’t ever share this in my #swipefile, it was definitely one of the articles that I thought about and referred to in my own life last year. It identifies four phases of “cognitive labor”—all the work that goes into thinking about things—and talks about a research study that seemed to show that women typically take on more of the phases than men. The article stresses that this isn’t meant to be a “See?! I told you!” discovery. Instead, it’s meant to give people, and couples in particular (regardless of gender), a starting point for talking about perceived imbalances and for understanding each other. The four phases, by the way, are?anticipate, identify, decide,?and?monitor.
New understandings
These are my favorite kinds of posts, where I’m introduced to an entirely new concept or point of view—something that foundationally shifts my understanding of people or how I see the world. Here were the articles and posts that did that for me this year.
If you don’t know the work of Christina Blacken, you should. Here, she puts forward her thinking about what she calls “narrative intelligence”: becoming aware of the stories we tell ourselves so we can use that as a basis for change.
This was the mack daddy of “Evernotable” posts for me this year (those posts I save and refer back to over and over again). I already?wrote a whole post on it ?and?it was one of my?top-performing posts last year , so I won’t spend more time here. But go back and read the original post, or my recap, and see if it doesn’t change how you think about your message, your work, and maybe even yourself.
Once I had the curiosity bug, I was highly attuned to new information on it. And, even though the application here is towards alleviating anxiety, I loved learning about the?two?kinds of curiosity, “D-curiosity” (where D stands for deprivation) and “I-curiosity” (I stands for Interest). As the article notes, D-curiosity is “closed,” as it’s tied to filling a gap or solving an information problem. I-curiosity, on the other hand, is “open,” in that it leads to seeking to gain and explore additional knowledge. While D-curiosity can be helpful as an audience starting point for your message, you’ll want to induce I-curiosity as quickly as possible to keep them engaged and interested. This is, by the way, why I’ve talked so much about?satisfying?and creating?curiosity ?in your messages, particularly the shortest versions of them.
As someone with an active—and possibly?overactive—internal monologue, it was mind-blowing to me that others don’t have these kinds of conversations with themselves. Just that realization was an important reminder that we’re biased to think others see the world the way we do. Articles I read on the topic later in the year noted that even people who have the internal monologue don’t have or use it 100% of the time, which again led to realize there are absolutely times when I just “know” something or can just “see” the way something should be without having the words internally to describe it. In fact, it was those situations of “knowing” an answer but not being able to articulate a case for it that has been a driving force behind my development of the Red Thread?.?The more you know , eh?
领英推荐
I?featured this one in a newsletter ?already, as well, but it helped me gain a better understanding of the true meaning of “ambivalence,” and the important role it can play.
As it turns out, getting more expert in something often means you lose the emotional reaction and engagement that got you interested in that thing in the first place. I for sure experienced that with my first love (and career): art museums. Once it became my job to love and promote the art, it sucked a lot of the joy from it. This article makes it clear that this is a known consequence of gaining expertise. The good news? There are ways to get the joy back.
My MBA is in Organizational Behavior, where the negative effects of people thinking as a group get pounded into your head (going to Abilene , anyone?). That’s probably why this article surprised me?and?gave me new ideas about when, why, and how you?should?put people together to solve problems.
Warning: this article is pretty mind-blowing, at least it was for me. It’s arguing that psychology is our new mythology for explaining why things (and people) work the way they do. It’s a pretty compelling case and reminds me of a much older favorite #swipefile, a?2014 study on how brands have replaced religion ?in a lot of people’s minds.
While this was a very late entry in my “#swipefiles of the year” it’s been?so?world-changing for me that its core concept, the “dilution effect,” has already made it into at least one of the new talks I’m developing for 2021 (which is all about how to get your message across in the minimum amount of time).
How to’s (and how?not?to’s)
I love a good practical post that operationalizes an idea, whether it’s new or not. You know the ones: posts that give you new insight in how to do something or, as in the case of a couple of these, how not to do it.
While this starts out as a review of author Mark Schaefer’s most recent book, it turns into a much deeper analysis of the formula that inspired Mark’s work. What you’re left with is Christopher Penn’s deeply insightful articulation of just how intractable systemic bias is, and what actually works to undo it.
The Feynman Technique was a new discovery to me this year, first with the Farnam Street article above. As with many things you find yourself suddenly attuned to, I started seeing it everywhere. What?is?the Feynman Technique? A way of teaching yourself new things by way of teaching it to others. At the heart of it is the same mechanism at work in the Red Thread: making sure you can translate your ideas in a way that?anyone?can understand both the concepts and their impact. There’s actually two posts linked above. The first one is a bit more dense and academic. The second is a bit more user-friendly.
This duo of articles literally changed the way I speak and write. As with a lot of things I find fascinating, they highlight the biases hiding in plain sight… or rather, in plain hearing: how the words we use can reflect points of view that range from the inaccurate to the downright destructive (however unintentional). Do you use these? Will you stop using them now that you have this new awareness, too? I hope so.
This last one is a “twofer” in many ways because it could have fit in at least two of these categories. If you’re not aware of the split between our “present selves” and our “future selves” (how we see and think of ourselves right now vs. how we see and think about who we will be at some point in the future), this could be a world-shifting discovery for you. It certainly was for me the first time I learned of it! The reason why I ultimately put it in the “how-to” section, though, is because this article not only describes the challenges inherent in the present/future self split but what you can do to counteract those effects. After reading this article, I immediately put some of the suggestions to use in work with some of my clients!
###
Those are the articles that changed my world. Which ones changed?yours? Email me and let me know, and they may just appear in a future #swipefile!