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When You Fail To Forge Shared Values, Your Vision Will Fail Too | Digital Tonto
The Women’s March of 2017 was never built on solid ground. Tensions between the white activists who wanted to emphasize issues like reproductive rights and the activists of color who prioritized things such as criminal justice, corporate power, and wealth inequality were barely concealed under the parade of hopeful slogans and pussy hats. Things came to a head in February 2018, when Tamika Mallory, one of the co-chairs, was reported to have attended an event featuring Louis Farrakhan where he let loose with a torrent of anti-Semitic slurs. Further recriminations followed after Mallory refused to condemn Farrakhan during an appearance on The View. In the aftermath, three founding board members announced they were transitioning to other projects. Every change effort faces similar challenges. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The opposition, for its part, must weave together a coalition of fractious interests and competing priorities. This often devolves into infighting, recrimination, and, inevitably, collapse. The failure to survive victory is always a failure to leverage shared values, usually in favor of differentiating values that allow people to assert their status and identity. Transformational change is always made up of small groups, loosely connected, but united by a shared purpose. The job of change leaders is to help those groups connect through shared values that can form the basis of shared identity and shared purpose. To do that, you need to be explicit and up-front. Papering over differences will only give them space to fester and, eventually, they will erupt. Like so many that came before, the Women’s March failed to meet that challenge, as do so others that are failing even now. The path to success is a narrow corridor and must be tread with courage and discipline. Much like Tolstoy said about families, successful movements always end up looking alike; unsuccessful ones fail in their own way.
The Experts Aren’t the Problem. It’s How You’re Listening to Them | Digital Tonto
One of the best innovation stories I’ve ever heard came from a senior executive at a leading tech firm. Apparently, his company had won a million-dollar contract to design a sensor that could detect pollutants at very small concentrations underwater. So the firm set up a team of crack chip designers and they got to work. Shortly after, the team’s marine biologist walked in and casually dropped a bag of clams on the table. Noticing the stunned looks around the room, he explained that clams are incredibly sensitive to pollutants—able to detect contaminants at just a few parts per million—and respond by opening their shells. So instead of developing an expensive sensor, all they needed was a basic system to detect when the clams opened. “They saved $999,000,” the executive told me, “and had the clams for dinner.” The story gets to the core of the challenge of listening to experts. If you only listened to the chip designers, you would devote far too many resources and come up with a less optimal solution. If you only relied on marine biologists, you would never be able to design even simple chips. To solve meaningful problems, you need to integrate insights from multiple domains. Innovation isn’t just about technical talent, it’s about creating the space for the dialogue across disciplines. So when we listen to experts, we need to apply a critical lens and ask: What’s the nature of their expertise? If you listen to technology experts, for example, you will come away with a better understanding of what a technology like artificial intelligence is capable of. If you listen to economists, they will give you more realistic context about its potential impact on society. Yet if you examine both with a critical eye, a new story emerges. AI’s productivity on some tasks, such as coding, is already transformational. For others, such as personal services, it has been negligible. That may not predict what the future will be, but it will give you some actionable insight on where to focus your efforts most productively. Understanding the world isn’t about “doing your own research,” but listening to experts critically and integrating the accumulated knowledge from multiple domains.
It’s Good to Learn From Your Mistakes. It’s Better to Learn From Someone Else’s. | Digital Tonto
We remember our heroes in their most iconic moments. It’s hard to think of Martin Luther King Jr. without picturing him at the Lincoln Memorial, delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In much the same way, Steve Jobs will always be remembered standing on stage, calmly saying, “Just one more thing…” before unveiling the next revolutionary product. Yet those moments are deceiving. Long before Jobs became the creator of the iPhone and the CEO of the most valuable company in history, he was cast out of the company he founded. It was what he learned during his years in relative obscurity—discipline, focus, how to retain top talent—that set the stage for his later triumphs. Martin Luther King Jr. did even better. He learned from others’ mistakes. He studied those who came before him, especially Gandhi. That’s how he knew to build his movement methodically, to train activists and to pick fights he knew he could win. Rather than simply calling people into the streets, he focused early on local campaigns and boycotts, each with a clear strategic objective. All change leaders need to learn from their own mistakes—and that's crucial. But the really smart ones learn from the mistakes of others. The truth is, it’s hard to learn much just by looking at successes. You have to look at the whole picture: examine the missteps, moments of weakness and strategic blunders and the lessons learned. That’s how you improve your odds. That’s why, before you set out to make a significant impact in any field or endeavor, ask yourself: Who’s tried this before? What were their failures? What can we learn from them? And how can we apply those lessons to the challenges we face?
Happy 16th Birthday Digital Tonto! | Digital Tonto
Much of what this blog has become was born in the winter of 2004 on Independence Square in Kyiv. It was there, with the uncertainty and confusion of the Orange Revolution swirling around us, that we stood shivering in the cold. We didn’t know what would become of us, or of Ukraine, or of anything,