Strategist that You Are

I've written about his before, but it crops up so regularly that I can't help myself.

I run across people who lament that there's no strategy in their organization or that they have a significant challenge in their life and no plan to deal with that challenge.

It might just be a matter of semantics, but typically my reply points to Mintzberg's notion of "emergent strategy".

It's pretty simple.

You already HAVE a strategy. You've been executing it for the last while. The question is, How is it working for you?

Let' find an example.

Think of a challenge you possess.

Now, look back at how you've been operating around that matter. What 3 or 4 main things have you been doing? They're there; otherwise, the problem would have eaten you alive by this point.

That's your strategy. You DO have a strategy.

Are you optimistic about it? What can you do to enhance it? Even if it's a teeny weeny thing, what could you do to deal more effectively with that challenge?

Go ahead, crank it up a bit.

Road Sign Safety

Imagine driving along, speaking on your car phone, and needing to know how far apart these two exits are.

Too Much Information

A small community of information theory thinkers offers the word 'exformation'. As opposed to 'information', exformation is the stuff we leave out.

Poetry, for example, is loaded with exformation. The poet expresses a lot with only a few words, leaving readers and listeners to play a role.

Old friends use lots of exformation. Sometimes they don't have to say much in order to be completely understood.

The idea is that exformation is a good thing; the more the better.

Too much information is a nuisance. A cover letter from a job applicant, loaded with paragraph after paragraph is a great example. Or, the gibber jabber from someone who talks too much.

I suppose the principles of effectiveness and efficiency are alive and well in the domain of interpersonal communication. Perhaps the matter is another way of getting at the definition of elegance.

Defence Mechanisms

A June, 2009 article in Atlantic describes how Harvard researchers have undertaken one of the longest longitudinal studies in psychology. The researchers have been following 268 men for 72 years. The author of the article gained access to the archives of the unfinished project.

The leader of the study (Vaillant), has gained some views of defence mechanisms — those personal reactions to life’s misfortunes, big and small. Such a long-term study offers us an evolved understanding of a basic human trait. This is nice to see for two reasons. First, defence mechanisms are finally being positioned as things that evolve over a person’s life rather than being about the (sexual) relationship of a child with a parent. Second, they are coming out of the closet; no longer are defence mechanisms the stuff of deep psychiatric theory. They are responses to life’s stuff -- responses that you and I have and can talk openly about. The idea is that in the same way the body automatically responds to a bruised ankle, or a sore throat, the brain’s circuitry has its own, at-least-initially unconscious, patterned response to things like pain, conflict, or uncertainty.

So you’ve got them and I’ve got them.

He divides them into four categories. Going from not-so healthy, to optimal (productive in the long-term, conducive to a happy life), here they are: psychotic responses (paranoia, hallucination, megalomania); immature responses (acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, fantasy, and blame or other sorts of projection); common neurotic responses (intellectualization, removal from one’s feelings, and repression such as seemingly inexplicable naivete, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a sense organ); and, healthy responses (altruism, humour, choosing to wait until later to process an emotion, and finding another outlet — such as sport — to express or otherwise process feelings).

Defense mechanisms operate unconsciously, but that doesn’t mean we can't be aware of our patterns. And tweak them.