Making a habit of asking "What If?"

I wrote the scenario below --called "Dependent America" -- back in June as one of four possible 15 year futures --worlds of 2023 -- in which we'd be struggling to sustain the middle class. I'll share the other three in subsequent posts.

The project uses a powerful and fascinating technique -- scenario thinking -- in which you develop four plausible stories about the future in order to stretch your thinking about what is possible, and so that you can plan for the unexpected. (For more on scenario thinking see my website ; also check out http://www.gbn.com/ -- where I was trained to use this tool).

As I look back over these last few months, it looks truer and sooner than I expected.

As you read through it, ask yourself -- what do you see unfolding that seems to support this scenario? what about it seems most or least plausible? how would your work change if this scenario were to develop?

Dependent America: 2023
This is a world in which America’s example and vibrancy to attract global talent and investment is severely diminished. Its military power and reach have declined significantly, but government plays a larger role than it has for many years – both in regulating and providing. Globalization has slowed overall, but China and Europe have pulled ahead, having been the first movers on alternative energy and bio-sciences innovation, respectively. The U.S.’s historic role as a haven for migrants from around the world has shifted, and now more highly educated Americans are moving abroad in larger numbers.

The U.S. is a fine place to live – with higher levels of equity and a lower level of material consumption. "Simple" and "functional chic" were choices at first, when the "green tipping point" led some people to move off the grid in order to diminish their carbon footprints. By 2015, "functional chic" was a necessity, increasingly mandated by government, along with mandates about healthier eating and ownership.

ZipCars arrival on the scene in the early 2000s were viewed as a novelty, but in 2023 many people have forgotten what it was like to own their own car; vehicles are now generally shared by several families. By 2023, simple and low consumption was a way of life. Anyone who longed for the "good old days" of materialism or fast-paced, innovative business culture had to go abroad, most likely to Asia. They are now helping support families and favorite social causes back home.

While acceleration of life had once seemed inevitable with Moore’s Law and 24-7 trading, the world of 2023 is slower. Striving for success is no longer valued as the only pathway to a worthwhile life. "Slow down, don’t compete" became a popular catch-phrase. In part, this is because Americans can no longer compete with other global super-powers. But the slower-paced life is also driven by strong norms against consumption, as well as opposition to the whole ethic of innovation that had once been so pervasive. The U.S. government, in an attempt to recover an edge in innovation, is aggressively trying to attract highly-educated workers, both American ex-pats and non-Americans. One of its main recruitment strategies is an advertisement campaign in global newspapers touting America’s "multi" culture where anyone of any culture can feel at home.

Want to jumpstart your effectiveness and creativity? Invest in capacity building

We use the somewhat deadening word "capacity building" to refer to some of the most important and undervalued aspects of organizational work: helping ourselves and the people who work with or for us to access their most creative, collaborative and effective selves. And, dare I say it, tapping into our sense of passion and purpose.

Capacity comes from Middle English roots meaning roomy and to hold. "Build" means to establish, increase or strengthen.

We analytically trained people, who do policy, advocacy, writing and strategy work, tend to think we have all the capacity we need -- mostly in our heads. We have our natural talent, no increasing or stengthening needed, thank you.

But why are we willing to invest in acquiring more and more knowledge, or learning to ski, but not to tap into our best selves? Why are we willing to endure less than productive meetings and thinking processes and participate in them over and over again?

A few questions to ponder as you think about whether you need to do this:
How can you expand your thinking -- and explore it in all its roominess -- to hold the most possibilites you can? How can you make room in your day to connect with your sense of purpose? How can you help your people or your organization to hold even more of your collective energy and creativity? What will you lost if you don't do this, particularly during these challenging times?

Honor your creativity, don't drown in it

I can say from experience what it is like to be an entrepreneurially minded person: I'm in one of those moments now -- they happen every few weeks; at times every few days: I look around and realize I'm excited to be pursuing about ten ideas when all I can handle is one, at most three. I surf from one exciting possiblity to the next idea that is too fascinating and too good to put down.

Before I know it I am lost in a cloud of more and more ideas, moving and an ever faster pace, swirling around with no center. I am stuck.

Entrepreneurs, a wise person once told me, can either move mountains or burn out in despair. I do have a technique for getting out of this, if I remember to use it. You can use it too.

Buy a notebook and label it "good ideas." Use it as a place to note ideas as they come along: honor them. Write a few lines so you are sure you remember what's there. And then take the ones that have traction and leave the rest behind. You will not have lost them. They'll be there in a year or five when their time has come.

How to Break Free of Group Think: Challenge the Crowd

Why is it that we pay so little attention to the impact of psychology in our policy discussions, when it is psychology -- in this case, of the policy makers, experts and pundits themselves -- that so often leads our smartest and most talented people to achieve less than they should?

I'm happy to see that some pundits are coming around, and that we are beginning to see a conversation about the human thoughts and feelings that shape the pronouncements of experts -- with sometimes dire consequences.

Yale economist Robert Shiller recalls Irving Janis' classic book "Group Think" in his insightful article in yesterday's New York Times Business section as a way of explaining why more economists did not foresee the financial crisis. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/business/02view.html

The idea is that often experts fear that "if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with appraent assumptions held by the group."

Schiller goes even further though in his analysis of what keeps economists in particular from believing warnings about bubbles. He points to another social-psychological phenomenon -- that economists do not have the tool kit to understand psychology by virtue of their training, even if in casual conversation they regularly speak about the kind of mass psychology that can lead to speculative behavior. They prefer to focus the discussion to things they understand well.

Furthermore, those who are drawn to the study of economics, with its technical and mathematical character, tend not to be attuned to psychological nuances -- particularly those that may lead to massive errors in judgement.

This is why the new field of behavioral economics, that has so influenced Shiller's own work, continues to be marginalized by the field of economics, even as those titles move to the top of best sellers lists.

Until we focus on the humans behind the ideas, and shift the culture of the social sciences, we'll be stuck with experts who cannot lead.

How can you build your tool kit to become a thought leader?
1) Learn to recognize your assumptions: do a self assessment (design this)
2) what do you really care about: what is your vision for your personal impact?
3) When was the last time you said: "that can't happen" and been wrong?
4) Have you been willing to take outliers in your field seriously? Identify those people in your circle who challenge conventional wisdom and take them to lunch.

Looking back

One of the images most present in our minds during this financial crisis is the depresssion that began with the crash of 1929, almost eighty years ago. We talk about its causes, the institutions that were created to avoid repeating it, and the pictures of employment lines and Grapes of Wrath type migrations.

One comfort during these times is the FDIC --which guarantees that savings won't be wiped out when banks get into trouble. We look to this protection with pride about what our government will do for the good of Americans and congratulate ourselves for successful learning.

What learning or institution will we look back to with pride eighty years from now? What will come out of this crisis, which is arguably more significant given the degree to which our economy is now globalized?

Creating new institutional protections and prohibitions on profligate risk taking is a no brainer. I hope that this will be a turning point of a different sort. I'd like to look back to the crisis of 2008 and remember a cognitive and behavioral shift in our very habits of decision making.

Looking back from 2089, 2008 will be the time when leaders and ordinary citizens alike learned to imagine futures very different from the ones they expect. This will be when we learned to adjust our thinking and judgment to an inherently uncertain environment; when adhering blindly to status quo thinking became archaic, like holding court with kings or relegating women to the home.

Rather than an institution like FDIC, we will have created an institution to focus the nation on building capacity to think the unthinkable, to develop personal resilience, and to know how to survive and thrive at a time of discontinuous change.

Just as we now see information technologies as essential to every aspect of our lives, by 2089 we will have developed social technologies that allow us to exercise and train our minds to think the unthinkable and to have the emotional intelligence to maximize our collective potential.

This is just a snippet of a much longer thought. We need to begin to focus not just on rules, regulations, and protections, but on the cognitive and leadership capacities that will support the new rules. If we don't, they will be empty, like the rituals of a religion we go through by rote. And we'll continue to move from crisis to crisis without much progress.

Swamp problems

It was about ten years ago now that I heard the term, coined by Donald Schon, "swamp problems" to refer to messy, confusing problems that defy technical solutions. Schon pointed out that the problems of greatest human concern lie in the swamp, rather than on the high ground, where we develop most of our technical knowledge and apply the rigor of research.

Ron Heifetz talked about this kind of problem as an "adaptive," challenge as opposed to a technical challend and in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers, developed an approach to leadership in a world of adaptive challenges.

The problem is our social problem solving approach is still stuck in technical, rather than adaptive mode.

Check out the May 19 2008 issue of the New Yorker and Bee Wilson's review essay called "The Last Bite" for a doozy of a swamp problem. He is writing about the need to radically change the system of Western food production, "right down to the spinach." According to Wilson, as of 2006, there were eight hundred million people in the world who were hungy, but they were outnumbered by one billion who were overweight. As he puts it, "Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market."

This complex and interconnected challenges, which includes food producers, large food companies, consumers, advertisers and a host of other players, will be difficult to solve. It was created in part from a failure to develop the habit of looking at the pieces of the problem as a whole -- as a system where a solution in one place may create an unanticipated problem in another.

A place called the "Sustainable Food Lab," is trying to back out of this mess, http://www.sustainablefoodlab.org/overview/ by taking a different approach, and acknowledging this as a swamp problem. Check it out to see what they are up to.

More in subsequent posts.

Habits and culture

Stephen Covey, in his 7 habits of Highly Effective People, was one of the first to put forward the idea that being effective in today's and tomorrow's workplace requires intentionally creating new habits of thinking, communicating and acting. Covey defines a habit as "an acquired pattern of behavior that often occurs automatically."

Habits are unconscious ways of being -- we use the phrase "get into the habit of..." going to the gym regularly, for example. Or we talk about "breaking the habit of..." -- for example eating all the potato chips that come with your sandwich at lunch.

Personal habits -- what we do with our bodies for example, are only one kind. Alexis De Toqueville talked about "habits of the heart" to refer to the particular norms of American culture that make Americans different from Europeans and American civic culture so robust.

Widely shared habits -- how we think, talk and communicate -- can add up to shared culture. Once these habits are shared, largely unseen and made more stubborn and enduring through their use in schools, businesses and politics, cultural change becomes difficult. Some would even say it is impossible.


The emerging conventional wisdom in neuroscience would suggest othewise. The idea that brains are more changeable than was originally understood -- what's called brain plasticity -- may well make a big difference for what kind of culture change is possible. While there are grooves of thinking -- literally ruts along with nueral signals travel -- that are unlikely to change, it is possible to create new neural pathways, that can run along side the old, and become habitual themselves. Kind of like the super highway built alongside the old and slow country road.

Janet Rae-Depree had an interesting article in the New York Times business section two Sundays ago (May 4). While we tend to see creativity and innovation as coming from habit breaking, increasing numbers of brain scientists, coaches and others who work with people and organizations to develop innovation and creativity are saying the opposite. Innovation comes from habit-making. We can, writes Rae-Dupree "create parallel synaptic paths and even entirely new brain cells that can jump our trains of thought onto new innovative tracks."

All of this has great implications for how we as a society go about solving our most pressing social problems. What kind of habit making and habit breaking do we need when it comes to addressing climate change? Or fixing our educational system?

More on that in later posts.

tales from the edge

Where are the people and organizations who have already created the new habits of thinking that will maximize our creativity for solving social problems in a new era? Sometimes it is important to look backwards for examples. In retrospect, cultural change is always easier to see. And cultural change has always been about getting unstuck -- moving from one paradigm of thinking and behaving to another.

One of the most powerful stories of this comes from Roman times. The story is of a rabbi named Yochanan ben Zakkai. Jerusalem was in flames, and the Romans were about to destroy the temple, the very core of Jewish practice. Ben Zakkai went to the Roman general Vespasian on behalf of the Jewish community but made an unexpected request. Instead of calling for a truce or begging for mercy, so that the precious temple could be restored, he asked the general to give him the city of Yavneh. Yavneh was where the embryonic new rabbinic movement was developing. A place of conversation and debate about Jewish law and practice and how to adapt it to changing times. It was also a magnet for a new kind of Jewish thinker and teacher – the people who became known as the rabbis who wrote the Talmud. So he asked for a place and for the “human capital and talent” that had begun to gather in that place.

It was a daring move on his part. Instead of fighting to preserve the old ways – the institution and related practices that formed the very essence of what most people thought defined Jews as a people -- he asked for a place for conversation to invent the new practices that would shape Judaism in its next era, in the face of a world in which practice was no longer centralized and where the temple priests were no longer the primary arbiters of what was right and wrong.

It would not be difficult to change the names and the places and see this story’s relevance for our time. What the rabbis went on to do was to suspend prior ideas about what was Jewish or not; what defined core Jewish practice, and to look at what was emerging and what was most alive and true in their own era.

What would it mean to do this in our times? Where are the people and places that have developed the new habit of standing back and looking at what is emerging, rather than immediately imposing upon it the categories they bring from the past. Those places are most likely on the edge of established institutions. They may not be on the radar screen yet as having significance. I'd bet on them.

Capacity building

John Esterle is an unassuming man who runs the Whitman Institute out of an apartment in San Francisco's Embarcadero neighborhood. He's been at it for twenty years, though the foundation has become better known since it shifted from being an operating to a grantmaking organization just a few years ago.

This tiny foundation is at the leading edge of supporting the development of capacities the individuals and institutions addressing our most pressing social problems need. But he is very much alone in this task. While "capacity building" is the concern of the hour in the foundation world, most foundations define it much more narrowly and only in conjunction with their own grantees.

Here is the Whitman Institute's mission: "promotion of open-mindedness, cross-perspective dialogue, and engaged communication to improve the process and quality of public and private decision-making. Our ultimate goals are to broaden the public conversation about the importance of critical and collaborative thinking and to link that deepened awareness to effect individual and social change."

More specifically, the foundation is committed to the following capacities (from their website: www.thewhitmaninstitute.org:

• exploring diverse viewpoints broadly and deeply
• engaging across difference, discipline, sector, and geography
• discovering how language affects perception
• approaching problems and decisions from multiple perspectives, particularly perspectives that may challenge their own
• recognize and question assumptions underlying their beliefs and action
  test the logic behind their thinking
• become aware of, and learn from, the interplay between thinking and feeling
  develop a capacity for empathy
• creating sustainable processes for inquiry and reflection

As Esterle says, there are really no other players in this field currently. They hope that there will be more. All of the foundations are in perpetual strategic planning mode, he said. They are struggling for a new paradigm. What could that mean? Something is changing in philanthropy, and focus on capacity as a primary grantmaking area, not a secondary one, is critical.

In our discussion we realized that there are three pieces to getting unstuck: changing incentives; making the time for a different kind of decisionmaking; and tools for shifting our habits of decisionmaking.

Imagine, I said to him, that we are now at the point regarding tools-for-thinking and decision making --call these social technologies -- that information technologies were in the early 1980's before PC's and the internet penetrated and shifted every aspect of our individual and organization lives. He and I are betting on the idea that ten years from now, every educational program, every organization, every political campaign, will have integrated the available tools to the point that they can barely remember life without them.

crossing boundaries

I sat down recently with Charlie Halpern at a sunny Bay Area cafe. Having just read his memoir in preparation for the meeting, I realized how intimate this meeting suddenly felt and how different he seemed to me now that the layers of his life had been uncovered in the book. I also felt a new bond with him since I now knew that we shared a passion and a commitment to bringing the internal practice of wisdom to the work of solving our society's most pressing problems.

In the foreword to Halpern's new book, Making Waves and Riding the Currents (Berrett-Koehler: 2008), Robert Reich points out that Halpern's personal journey "illuminates and integrates two overarching social movements that have occupied what is commonly referred to as "the Left" over the last forty years. One has focused on the potential for a more just society and the world...The other, by contrast, has looked inward. It has focused on the potential within every person for a full and meaningful life. These two overarching movements --one exterior and the other interior, if you will -- have evolved separately...By findging the means of weaving the movements together in his own life, Halpern invites you to do the same in yours..."

Integrating these two pieces is countercultural for each of these movements. Getting unstuck in addressing our most pressing problems requires this integration.

Halpern tells his own story through memoir, which is probably the best way someone trying to illustrate the importance of what he calls "cultivating the practice of wisdom" could. It is a story of changing from the inside out -- from beating the doors down as a public interest lawyer convinced of the rightness of his position in the face of abuses of power and injustice, to someone who thinks that solution is only partial -- that change is more likely to come from within, which entails having compassion even for your opponent, listening rather than debating, and opening your mind to unlikely potentials for new forms of understanding with your opponent.

There are several wonderful scenes in the book that illustrate Halpern's struggle to integrate the world of law and social justice with that of meditation, yoga and other techniques for gaining inner wisdom.

Halpern has been a pioneer in trying to bring contemplative practices into the world of advocacy, law, medicine and even academia. First, when he was president of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, he created a funding program for integrating contemplative practice with social change efforts. Now he is the chairman of the board of the Center for Contemplative Mind and Society which has developed a number of programs and fellowships to do the same www.contemplativemind.org

Getting unstuck from the inside out --using ancient and new wisdom practices -- and bringing the cultivation of wisdom to the work of social problem solving is one of the most important trends of our time. How many others like Charlie Halpern are there who embody this trend?

Cognitive age

David Brooks' column (I find myself in surprising agreement with him much of the time) points out something really important about our current policy dialogue and a way in which it is stuck. He makes a distinction between globalization as a process, and how that affects American workers on the one hand and technological change that requires different cognitive capacities on the other. Calling this the "cognitive age," he says that our focus needs to be on skill building, rather than tweaking and critiquing trade agreements. The focus needs to be within not pointing fingers at foreigners.

While the business community, and to some extent the military, has focused on skill building for a long time, the policy community is behind -- not just in devising policies to develop and fund skill building for all, and at all levels, but in focusing on its own need for skill building --in the complex of institutions that develop, talk about and implement solutions to society's most pressing problems.

What those capacities are, the tools we already have to build them, and how important they are for solving our most complex problems going forward is the topic of my book.