Friendship First?

Should we branch out?

We need advice please, from those of you who know us, and know our work. We’ve been experiencing an almost seismic shift in one of our fundamental values lately. A recurring theme in our lives, you could say, but like Reality is turning up the volume and speeding up the rhythm, trying to really get our attention. One theme, again and again:?

Friends. Old friends, new friends, friends we haven't met yet, friends we'll never meet, and how we can even make a better, more welcoming world for them too. How good can friendships be? How transformative can being profoundly good to each other be, across time and space?

Our Old, Proven Model

Over the last decade and a half, we’ve honed a unique, scalable way to measurably increase active, positive peace in the world: By showing businesses relational infrastructure is the fundamental asset on which everything else we value is built.

We start by teaching executives precisely how to boost their collaboration skills. When colleagues collaborate better, each improvement goes directly to their bottom line—pure profit.?

That’s obvious, right? When Margarita or I ask any CEO “If your people could collaborate even three percent better, what would that be worth to you?” it takes less than a second for them to calculate “Enough that I am now paying complete attention” before they even say a number. Mention that it could be a three percent improvement quarterly, compounding, and they are riveted. They know we understand the responsibility on their shoulders, to earn enough to pay all their stakeholders well: employees, shareholders, suppliers, taxes, and more––all while delivering a great product to their customers—a great product whose quality has to steadily increase over time.

Then they quickly grasp how, in the process of their people collaborating better, their organizational performance improves along a whole constellation of other dimensions too, and productivity goes up with the profit—all really nice windfalls and bonuses.?

“But what does that have to do with measurably scaling up peace in the world?” I hear you saying?

Collaboration is a high-level, active, positive peace behavior. The ability to do it well unlocks higher level collective intelligence, which in turn generates whole new hierarchies of competency that are simply impossible for divisions or departments or teams in your organization to achieve alone—and completely impossible for individuals—no matter how highly skilled.

And, also, oh by the way, in addition to the profits, the productivity, the lovely increase in performance, those positives will ripple out from work to families and the community and eventually the environment too. Those nice positive externalities are how we can lever our business value creation into our mission driven social impact. More peaceful behavior in the world. Peace as nice icing on the cake.?

This works. It works well. And in the process of getting businesses to pay for the development of skills by their employees that also increase active peace behaviors in the world, it builds better businesses and better shareholder value too, along with better society. It even has all the requirements to build a better ecosystem and biosphere. So while this strategy has, admittedly, a slightly delightful, subversive, robin-hood spiciness to it, on thorough examination it is still very much a win-win-win, for business, for peace, and even (eventually) for the environment. No one is getting punished or even shamed.

This is working really well. We’re going to keep doing it, and keep teaching and certifying our students on how to do it. But…..

• Could we be going much further??
• Are we missing something much more valuable??
• What if there is a far more profoundly life transforming sector of the possibility space? —and it’s unexplored??
• What if we could convene some of the most amazing and brilliant people to explore it, together —and map it?

We think there is. We’re wondering if you’d like to be part of it.

A New Way?

So, here’s the thing: Margarita sat me down a few weeks ago now, and said, “I think we might be doing this exactly backwards. In our current workshops we tell all our students that relationships are the fundamental asset—the ultimate underlying infrastructure. Relationships make everything else we value possible.”?

“But then we go directly to how that drives profit and performance and productivity. We’re all about the bottom line first, and the better relationships that result from our work—that deep relational infrastructure that we’re saying is our species’ real, fundamental asset—are nice afterthoughts.”?

“If we really believe what our work shows, we should be putting our ability to build deep strong generative relationships front and center, first and foremost—for their own sake. For the sheer joy of building, and being in, wonderful relationships, surrounding ourselves with amazing people. And when we do that well, then, “Oh by the way,” some nice positive externalities like a life full of meaning and purpose, and yes, profit and performance, in service to creativity and health, happiness and real wealth, thriving, diverse civil society and a fertile environment, sustainability and scalability, productivity and passion to be powerfully positive, suddenly those all become lovely nutritious byproducts of doing deep friendship really well—eventually with all of life.”

I think she's right. (It’s not the first time—she’s a brilliant strategist when it comes to helping people really get what matters most to them done. Just ask me. I am living proof.)?

So I want to ask for your advice, please. To test this possible new way to get our work out in the world where it can help the most people, as quickly as possible, may I run the details of this idea by you??

What if we flipped our script??

And what if this meant we could more directly engage with you??

Here’s the basic concept:?

What if we took our intensive, one week executive education workshop, stripped out all the business and corporate parts, and just focused all our skills, tools and expertise on surrounding you with much better, deeper friendships? What if we could make huge, measurable progress on that, together, by the end of that week??

And what if, in that one profound week, you could build the skills to build relationships like that—strong, deep, and life-transforming—whenever and wherever you want??

Last but perhaps most important, in this era of cheap surface social media “friendships”, what if you could walk back out into the world at the end of that week knowing you’d laid the foundation for lifelong, deep, strong friendships with both Margarita and me—and with our lab and our students too?

If this doesn’t resonate with you, thank you so much for reading this far! But if strengthening relationships, deepening friendships, and weaving social fabric does resonate with you (and only if it seems primary, and resonates profoundly, please) would you be willing to hop on a 15 minute zoom call with me, to think with me about how we could do this? ?