Enable Positively Connective, Collective Action For Greater Impact

Mutual Accountability Is Apparently Not Always Possible Even though it’s been over a decade ago I vividly recall my shock when sitting in a committee meeting for a non-profit. The chair asked us each to report back on the task we agreed to do in the previous meeting.??Then the co-chair told us that she hadn’t started on her assignment because it had been a very busy month at work. Also she didn’t offer a deadline by which she would get it done. Nor did she acknowledge how her lapse was going to stall our project. As a journalist, I lived by deadlines and, unless I was at death’s door, I was expected to keep them. The man across from me, a former Marine, was the only other person who looked momentarily startled, as the chairperson continued around the table, asking others to give their reports. When our committee took a break, and the Marine and I fell into step towards the coffee, he turned to me and said, point blank, “My wife’s also a journalist. She warned me that things would be different in civilian life. She’s encouraged me by saying that perhaps only soldiers, surgeons and journalists must be utterly accountable for the task we are given.” That was my warning. Cautionary note: “We judge others by their behavior. We judge ourselves by our intentions.” ~ Ian Percy Probably my reaction to that experience is one of the reasons I started studying the research on accountability and connective behavior research then presenting public speeches on it with titles like Hidden Behavior Cues that Boost or Bust Credibility. I continue to feel that making and keeping agreements is key to deepening and strengthening healthy relationships and collective action.

Connect or Die Sooner Captain Eugene "Red" McDaniel was a navy pilot shot down in North Vietnam and then held as a prisoner of war for six years. In his book?Scars and?Stripes, he describes the desperate need of prisoners to communicate with one another to maintain morale. Prisoners risked death to work out complicated communication systems by which they would write under plates, cough, sing, tap on walls or laugh, scratch, or flap laundry a certain number of times to transmit a letter of the alphabet -- all so they could somehow communicate with each other. Captain McDaniel says POWs tended to die much sooner if they could not communicate with each other. On many occasions, he endured torture rather than give up his attempts to stay in touch with other prisoners, especially when he was in solitary confinement. When we think of survival, we usually list food, shelter, and clothing as the essentials. But, as abandoned, untouched babies in desperately poor orphanages know, lack of attention leads to atrophy and death.

Even when we can see people often in our daily lives, we might not actually connect with many and thus feel emotionally deprived.??Maintaining a poker face gives one strategic advantage in a poker game. And sarcastic humor can spark immediate, sometimes nervous laughter. Brief, abrupt answers might make an immediate interaction more efficient. Yet all of these behaviors tend to distance people from each other and freeze them at that distance in future communication.??As Dr. Dean Ornish wrote in?Love & Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy, "When we gather together to tell and listen to?each other's stories, the sense of community and the recognition of shared?experiences can be profoundly healing." As the popular saying suggests, "Not everything that counts can be counted," has been credited to British scientist Denis Burkitt and to Albert Einstein. In a time-pressed world, where more people live and work alone, the undercurrent of sadness is the twin phenomenon of being relationship-diminished. No surprise that self-professed loneliness and suicide are on the rise.

Consider how you recognize and offer caring and respect in daily interactions. For example, do you immediately stop what you are doing when someone asks for your help or appears to simply want to talk about "nothing"? Does your face and body look relaxed and open when you are listening, or do you appear tense, judgmental, uncaring, and waiting to move on to the next task? If you are talking by phone, do your tone, words, and conversational pace encourage others to feel heard? Dr. Rachel Remen suffered endemic pain for much of her life and she used that experience to literally show doctors how to be more compassionate listeners and complete diagnosticians. She wrote, "The places where we are genuinely met and heard have great importance to us. Being in them may remind us of our strength and our value in ways that many other places we may pass through do not." As Candace Pert wrote in?Molecules of Emotion, "Love often leads to healing, while fear and isolation breed illness. And our biggest fear is abandonment." “In the religion of love to pray is to pass, by a single word, into the inner chamber of the other.” ~ Galway Kinnell

Who’s the Smartest Person in the Room? (Wrong Question) You’ve probably heard this familiar yet wrong-headed advice from an anonymous source: “If?you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”?In fact, each person in most any room is smartest at something. Make it a top and early priority to discover each other’s strongest talents – and interests. That opens the conversation to using your collective smarts with and for each other. Dell Technologies founder and philanthropist, Michael Dell, suggests that you “Try?never to be the smartest person in the room ?but rather speak to other’s best talents and how you all make become the right team to either solve a problem or seize an opportunity that is within their realm of mutual interest.??Blogger, Chris Brogan believes that, “If you do it right?everyone around you will be smarter than you ?at something.” Make it a top priority to discover each other’s strongest talents – and interests. That opens the conversation to, using your collective smarts with and for each other. Let’s create situations where we can capture the “wisdom of the ?crowd .” To do that we need a sufficiently diverse group where we recognize and tap into each other’s best talents, Only then we can capture the power of the “wisdom of the ?crowd ” where we are collectively smarter than we are on our own. Two of the top opportunity crushers for us are probably:

1.?The individuals in the room don’t have someone leading them to discover the strongest sweet spot of shared interest that would spark them to bond and accomplish something greater together than they can on their own.?

2.?The right people aren’t in the room to accomplish either a task assigned to them or a goal that someone asked them to accomplish together.?

Either way any successful group needs a connective leader who ensures that people with all the needed talents are present and that there are no extra people on the team. Those pitfalls, which most of us have experienced more than once in our lives are why we are often wary of the rosy predictions about the power of collaboration. Yet you can become a sought-after Opportunity Maker by enabling others to use their best talents together on something they find meaningful. One sign of an Opportunity Makers is that rather than figuratively asking for a bigger piece of the pie in a situation they are apt to explore, with others, how to make the pie bigger.??Without our capacity to discover diverse viewpoints and people we narrow and harden our opinions - and thus lead more rigid and narrow lives.?“Star performers cultivate diverse networks, thus tap collective intelligence more than equally smart folks who don’t.” ~ Alex Pentland,?Social Physics :?How Good Ideas Spread

Spur Everyone Around You to Be Smarter For Each Other If you are lucky enough to be in a room with people of distinctly different smarts and/or experience than you, you all have the possibility of talking together to see more sides of a situation for solving a problem or seizing an opportunity. Consequently you have a bigger opportunity to accomplish something greater than you could on your own. That’s especially if one of you becomes the “glue” that can hold the disparate group together around a strong sweet spot of mutual interest.??Speak to and support the better side in others and they are more likely to do the same for you. A mutuality mindset matters more than ever in an era when more people are working and living by themselves, and we crave?camaraderie ?and a collective, meaningful mission.??In this increasingly connected era, we have more opportunities to meet people with whom we have strongly shared passionate interests and needs, and greater access to technology that costs less to achieve our shared goal.

Now the biggest obstacles are our lack of a?mutuality ?mindset that sees the strongest “us” in a situation and our capacity to communicate to connect to attract and work with the right team.??As?RE/MAX co-founder Dave Liniger , once?said , “You can’t succeed coming to the potluck with just a fork.”?Recognize that the healthiest relationships are not based on a quid pro quo expectation, but an ebb and flow of mutual support over time. Hint: If you give enough other people what they need, you often get what you need too—sometimes even before you know you need it, and sometimes from people you did not know could provide it.

Recognize the Power of Diverse Friends and Acquaintances “Diversity trumps ability” as a sufficiently diverse, large group of non-experts often outperform a small group of experts,” ?found?Future Perfect ?author?Steven Johnson . In our increasingly complex, disruptive world, we are face more situations where we benefit from calling on the so-called wisdom of the crowd. Thus?it behooves us to have friends and acquaintances with different life experiences and from diverse professions and industries . Secondarily, hone your capacity to recruit and involve them to support you, as you would support them, and to work together around sweet spots of mutual interest. Plus, most of us long for meaningful work with others. In fact, more people would rather be part of a productive team that enables them to use their best talents together, working on something worthwhile, than to lead, if we had to choose between the two possibilities. Looking back on our lives, these experiences will be some of the most memorable. “Leaders don’t create followers; they create more leaders,” said?Tom Peters . In our increasingly complex yet connected world, those who can?“flex” ?behaviors to become the glue that holds diverse teams and new initiatives together will probably become our most valued leaders and partners.

How We Get Smarter Together On Regis Philbin’s classic TV show, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” a contestant can call his smartest friend or ask the audience for help with the answer.??Contestants are more apt to get the right answer when they ask the audience.??The insight???Calling on the collective intelligence can get you smarter support. Cultural critic and cofounder of the Web ezine, Feed, Steve Johnson came to the same conclusion in his book?Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.?He found that intelligence resides at the street level, whether you are observing harvester ants - capable of great coordination or quick improvisational response to attack, despite their limited cognitive skills - or workers in the primitive factories of 19th-century England. Johnson found that groups could achieve extraordinary feats through decentralized thinking or what is often called emergent behavior.??More bluntly, that means that even simple agents following simple rules can create sophisticated structures. In the Digital Age, this is a powerful concept because of the Web’s capacity for facilitating far-reaching group intelligence. As massive proof of this theory consider the most popular e-commerce site, E-Bay. The E-Bay community rewards people who play by the rules, and banishes those who do not.?

?In fact, the collective intelligence of the E-Bay users has raised the level of their collective game over time, to the benefit of all players. Some participants have built an entire business for themselves that could not have existed before the emergent intelligence of the E-Bay model. This finding is especially important in our post-7/11 world, when we want to live a life that matters.??More that self-styled solo star performers, we seek out those who want to create opportunity and community together.??We want to find healthier ways to communicate to connect. Pods are another way for people to feel more connected and capable, even in a larger group, and to reap the benefits of their collective intelligence.??Transform a larger organization such as a company, college student body, synagogue or civic club into 8 to 10 person pods of diverse people with specific goals and Rules of Conduct.

?Like the ants, we can accomplish much together.??We are more nimble in changing direction when we’ve established one in the first place.??People in pods tend to feel a deeper affinity with each other and for their common purpose.??Further they are more likely to demonstrate more confident, higher-performing behavior. The University of California campus at Santa Cruz, was created around pods of students who are then part of colleges within the larger campus. Compared to the other UC campuses their students have fewer reported health problems and accidents, and a higher sense of well-being.

In the early 1990s, George Colony began organizing his company into pods of 8 or 10 people from different disciplines. Colony is chairman and CEO of Forrester Research, Inc., one of the largest Internet research firms.??Says Colony, “The pods are a way to mitigate the alienation of size as our company grows.??It’s like being in a squad of people in the military.??You get so that you are willing to die for the guy next to you.” In his book?The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell writes that the human brain is wired to have no more than 150 relationships.??The deeper the affinity and rewards people feel in those relationships, the more optimistic they feel about their participation. Usually, the more optimistic we feel, the better we perform. Thus the group creates a reinforcing upward spiral of smarter mutual support.??That’s probably why people are more likely to excel, not in solo tasks, but when they are part of a small group with a specific goal and deadline, be it a school play or a cause fundraising project. In this time of turmoil and greater uncertainty, when people are more likely to seek affinity, we have grand opportunities to test these ideas. We desire camaraderie more than competition.??We want to make a difference with others.??How’s that for a holiday wish???Find or form a pod around your greatest passion and see emergent intelligence in action.

Benefit From Befriending Those Who Think and Act Differently Than You I love to design and arrange furniture and glass lighting yet have difficulty with even minor computer problems. One of my dearest friends is a gadget geek who helps me with computer fixes and advises me on when to buy the shiny new thing. And I thoroughly enjoyed creating Danish/Italian-style sofas, chairs and a dining table for the home he just bought. Those who are keenly aware of their top talents are more likely to see the benefits in befriending individuals with different ones because such relationships enable them to accomplish greater things for each other – or together. This is called the?Complementarity ?Effect . Sure we can find most anything online yet no one can be an expert at everything. Having friends who have different talents and interests makes life easier and much more enjoyable. As Samuel Johnson noted, “If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself alone.?A man should keep his friendships in constant repair.”?We have to go out of our way to keep such friendships strong because we have different top interests and ways of thinking, talking or doing things.?Yet research shows that we tend to take for granted that which comes easily to us and to value that which we work at maintaining. Here’s to cultivating and keeping ever-deepening relationships to savor?

Enable Positively Connective, Collective Action For Greater Impact

Turn to Your Strengths More Often “The good life isn’t drinking find wine or owning the latest sports car,” according to Martin E.P. Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and author of?Authentic Happiness:??Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. Seligman believes that identifying your strengths and living your life around them – in work, in love and in raising children – is the key to lasting happiness. According to Seligman, “Positive Psychology is founded on the belief that people want more than an end to suffering. Seligman led a Values-in-Action Classification Project that involves the systematic classification and measurement of these universal strengths and virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and spirituality.??Their mission, in part is “to understand and build the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. Want a snapshot how of your “signature strengths”? As part of their ongoing research on how positive people demonstrate their values in action, Dr. Seligman’s center is providing an “Inventory of Strengths” survey.??It is free at?https://www.positivepsychology.org/