Take a look at these two passages. The first written recently by a couple of anime fan/bloggers, Kiki and Lala, and the second written by the physicist/philosopher, Fritjof Capra, in his book The Tao of Physics, first published in 1975. 
The human experience has many faces, is described from many perspectives, in many languages, but it is ultimately the same story. There is no one in this world you can meet, no animal you eat, no plant you grow, no product you use, no adversity you encounter, no interaction of any kind you can have, of which it cannot be said, “We are in this together.”
Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
Kiki, Lala and Fritjof
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010Power and Powerlessness
Friday, March 5th, 2010
This is from a blog post by our friend, Nilofer Merchant, author of the new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy:
The challenge with people feeling powerless is this: we don’t see how we can contribute to solve problems. We believe it is “someone else’s” to own rather than something any of us can contribute to. Powerlessness leads to apathy on global issues and disdain on local issues.
Now check out this from Mick Napier’s classic book, Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out:
Two people…staring at each other and wondering who’s going to make the first move. Two people being nice to each other and allowing the other to start doing something. In that short amount of time, two humans have created themselves as powerless…Who has time? The audience is waiting. They don’t care about your support. They care about what you do. What you do now.
These two statements, made miles and years apart, reflect the timelessness of the concept: Do something! Participate! Add to the conversation! When you’re just getting started don’t worry about what the solution will be, or where the scene will take you. No one knows, and your audience doesn’t care. The most important thing is to bring to the scene whatever you’ve got.
The saying in improvisation is ‘take care of yourself first.’ This is not the same as being selfish. It is, rather, the recognition that making the first move, even if we are not always the one to make it, is always our responsibility.
Story Yourself
Monday, March 1st, 2010
Michael Margolis
Not long ago, thanks to a series of events set in motion by our mutual friend, Michelle James, I had the good fortune to connect with Michael Margolis, the founder of GetStoried.com and the author of Believe Me — “a storytelling manifesto for change-makers and innovators.”
There’s a natural affinity whenever professional storytellers get together. Everything reminds us of a story, and so the conversation tends to leapfrog from anecdote to observation to insight, and back again. Michael and I not only leapfrogged. We hopscotched. We see-sawed. We tagged, hide-and-go-seeked and monkey-barred. We were a couple of kids at recess, playing with our favorite toy.
What I like best about Michael’s approach to storytelling is that it’s active. Story, seen through his lens, isn’t passive. It’s not static. Not fixed in time or immutable.
Story is alive. It’s dynamic. In constant motion. In fact, telling good stories, while it has its place, is not nearly as productive as the living of them. This is what Michael gets at in Believe Me. It describes stories as our most powerful way of defining and shaping the world we live in. Seeing stories in this light gives us the ability to transform them from past-tense or scripted, into a form that is revealed to us in each and every breath, and transmitted to our ‘audience’ in each and every action we take.
This is the learning that emerged for me from Believe Me. Story is more powerful as a verb than as a noun.
Don’t think of story as a Thing. Treat it as an Action. The act of Changing. Innovating. Revealing. Inviting. Reflecting. Making. Learning. Leading. Contextualizing. Connecting. Understanding. Liberating. And yes…Playing!
Someday, after the fact, a Story may describe What Happened. Right now, the only time that matters, Story is What’s Happening. Knowing this difference will make you more observant and appreciative in the moment, and when it’s time for you to tell your story, it will rock, and your audience will Believe.
Over Under Sideways Down
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010One of the characteristics of networks is their flexibility. What our communication channels looked like yesterday may not be what they look like today. This, of course, can be an asset or a liability. The net that allows us to build new relationships, discover markets and expand our potential for taking productive action is the same one that swallows channels and markets like a singularity sucking down solar systems in nanoseconds. The global financial system, guaranteed, is right now teetering on the edge of such a debt-and-greed-spun vortex. Call it The Bank Hole.
In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind. We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn. A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.
What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks. These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless. They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.
One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision. And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’ This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks. So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:
Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.
Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation. Respect roots. Dig deep.
Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’ A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.
Look down. Who needs help? Some days, this the only question worth answering.
Work Your Way to the Bottom
Monday, February 15th, 2010Thanks to our friend, Nilofer Merchant, founder of Rubicon Consulting in San Francisco and author of the insightful new book, The New How, for fanning this New York Times interview with Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies. HCL is a 54,000-person IT services company based outside Delhi with 2009 revenues of $2.3 billion.
Vineet Nayar Leads With Modesty
Nayar’s ‘employees first, customer second’ philosophy aligns with a basic concept of improvisation: Take care of yourself first. Mick Napier hits this hard in his book, Improvise: Scene from the Inside Out. If you wait for the other people in your scenes to have an idea, to initiate, you’re making yourself powerless, and you leave your scene partners and the audience hanging. And if the other person in your scene waits on you, you’re lost, and so is the audience. Nayar’s point is the same: HCL can only be as good to their customer/audience as its employees are to one another. These behaviors cannot be separated. You cannot be one way to your scene partners and another to the audience. It is all part of the same space-time continuum. And productive action can only begin with you.
Other quotes by Nayar that are consistent with improvisation, and my notes in italics:
“I did not know where I had to go, and I was projecting as if I knew. I assume that you expect me to know where I am going, and you will respect me for that, and the day I tell you both of us are in the same boat, we would fail. That was a very big learning for me.” Pretending is not illusion if it is a step on the path to being.
“If you see your job not as chief strategy officer and the guy who has all the ideas, but rather the guy who is obsessed with enabling employees to create value, I think you will succeed.” Support, the giving of gifts, is the most powerful tool in the improviser’s repertoire.
“How do I communicate to employees to not look up to me, but to look within, to communicate that I’m one of you, to destroy that hierarchy? So I decided I’m going to go into this big gathering of employees dancing to a very famous Bollywood song. And I can’t dance for nuts, right? I was dancing in the aisles with these employees and making lots of noises. What happened? It completely destroyed the gap.” When you want to communicate something important, use more than information to do it.
“The failures are far in excess of successes.” Failure is not defeat if it is a step on the path to understanding.
“I don’t want people who are coming here and teaching me something or teaching the organization something. I don’t want teachers. I want people who are not only charged up because they like it, but because they will learn from this experience. I’m looking for people who see experience as a continuum and not as an end in and of itself.” Improvisers are not teachers. We are builders of environments in which communication, learning and transformation can happen.
IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE!
When we tried linking to the HCL URL with Mozilla Firefox 5.0, we got this message:
We noted this ‘FAIL’ in the post. Within minutes of publishing the post, an HCL employee, Aruj Kapoor, wrote to say he was sorry they’d been down, that they’d fixed the bug and the site was restored. And not only that, he ‘yes-anded’ by asking what specific information we were seeking when the site went down. Aruj’s awareness of what my experience must’ve been when I hit the dead link–frustration, confusion, puzzlement–led him to offer his support to the scene I’d initiated with HCL. Be sensitive to your environment and it will tell you what you need to know. By yes-anding, Aruj converted a mistake into an opportunity to extend the dialogue between the HCL brand and me. Nice move. Every mistake is an opportunity to do something useful.
Quantum Narrative
Thursday, February 4th, 2010We create and share stories as a way of understanding the world. Our ’sense of narrative’ guides us through life. Narratives are the basis of community. They inform our relationships. Characterize our business decisions. Color our music. They affect everything from our spiritual beliefs, to the schools we attend, to the products we patronize.
Storytelling is in our DNA. You can even say our DNA is, itself, a story as old as life on the planet, told in a language first translated in 1953 by scientist-storytellers Watson and Crick. Before 1953, scientists knew the story existed, they just didn’t understand the language in which it was told. Watson and Crick cracked the code and the story has been unfolding ever since.
Narratives are the most powerful way we have of organizing information. They impose structure and meaning on the chaos of communication that flows like a thousand roaring rivers into, through, and out of networks. They connect virtual experiences to the real world. They inspire action. Narratives make sense of it all, and of our relationship to it all.
As you may know, brand narratives designed for the networked world cannot be scripted, they must be improvised. Much of the work we do at GameChangers involves helping our customers become better improvisers of their narratives, and not focus as much on telling good stories as they do on living good stories. It is much easier and more cost effective to preach what you practice than it is to practice what you preach.
Here’s a huge distinction between scripted and improvised narratives:
Scripted narratives operate under the laws of Newtonian mechanics (also called classical mechanics). Call them Newtonian Narratives. Improvised narratives, by comparison, operate according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Call them Quantum Narratives.
Here are some characteristics of a Newtonian Narrative: It is finite, with a beginning, middle and end. It unfolds in linear time. It follows a formula or script. It has a credited author. It is inhabited by a well-defined and finite number of players. It is rooted in physical geography. It is platform specific (even when it is multi-platform). It is solid, mechanical, repetitive and dependable. It is immutable. The book you read today will be the same book tomorrow. It is causative, that is everything in a Newtonian Narrative happens because of something else. Events are related to one another according to its formulas. (”If Peyton Manning endorses it, people will buy it.”)
Another important distinction: a Newtonian Narrative can only be conjecture before the fact and can only be true (or not) after the fact. That is, until events have actually transpired, there is no truth to these narratives. A book cannot be read until it has been written, , a news story cannot be reported until the ‘news’ has occurred, and all our scripts, game plans and predictions are, at best, a positive vision of what we’d like the future to hold. None of it is our reality. Newtonian Narratives predict the future and chronicle the past, but they are not ‘alive.’ Examples of Newtonian Narratives are: market research, feature films, sitcoms, print media, TV ad campaigns, style guides and the shopping list on your refrigerator door.
One more characteristic of the Newtonian Narrative: It places a premium on knowledge, by defining knowledge as a have/have-not concept. It rewards ‘knowing,’ and penalizes ‘not knowing.’ In the Newtonian Narrative, knowledge is something you earn, or pay to acquire, at which point you are said to ‘own it.’
None of this is to say that the Newtonian Narrative is necessarily bad, or undesirable. Just like Newtonian mechanics in physics, it has its place, and that place is vital, as Toyota is learning today to its dismay, with all its recalls on defective car parts. (Something in its process didn’t follow the script its engineers had authored.)
Networks call for a different approach to storytelling. A quantum approach. Understanding this difference and acting on it presents a huge opportunity for businesses and brands, and perhaps our best chance for economic growth that is both profitable and sustainable.
The Quantum Narrative redefines storytelling by ripping up and recomposing the stuff stories have been made of since the first cave dweller showed her companions how to build a fire (and got thrown out of the cave not long after by another cave dweller who claimed the secret of fire for himself).
Though it literally has existed forever, production of this kind of narrative is still in its infancy. You can see glimmers of it in transmedia, massive multiplayer games, distributed production models, theme parks, social media, alternate reality games, activist brands, smart badges, business in China, remixes and mashups, augmented reality, micro-loans and the video of your dance in the musical, Hair.
Here are some of the characteristics of a Quantum Narrative: It has no beginning, middle or end. It has unlimited numbers of beginnings, middles and ends. It is generative instead of repetitive. It is participatory instead of authored. There’s no traditional storyteller-audience relationship; in the Quantum Narrative, everyone is responsible for creating the story. It does not foster consumption as much as it invites customization. This is why participants in these brand narratives are not consumers; they are customers. Or players.
A Quantum Narrative is not bound by time, space or geography. As with human DNA, what happened 40,000 years ago is still present and active in the narrative today. This kind of narrative can transpire in the blink of an eye or unfold over many millennnia. Or both. It happens here at the same time it’s happening across the room or the planet. It resembles the playing of a game by an infinite number of players more than it does the telling of a story by one person to an audience in a room.
A Quantum Narrative is platform agnostic. You cannot tie this kind of story to a technology or convention, because is designed to liberate itself from such conventions and transcend the media that deliver it.
A Quantum Narrative is present tense, which means that it does not get bogged down by history or saddled with expectations. This is probably its most important characteristic, because it means that every single action in the narrative holds breakthrough potential. Breakthroughs are not predicted by the narrative, they are, rather, made possible by it. It is non-causative, that is, you cannot always know how or why things occur. Serendipity plays an important role.
Quantum Narratives do not focus on who has knowledge and who doesn’t. Instead, they begin with the premise that everyone (and everything!) has knowledge, and the fact that we don’t all know the same things is an advantage, not a drawback. Quantum Narratives are designed to be shared, not owned. They emphasize interpretation, context, and perspective over a so-called body of knowledge.
Quantum Narratives create the conditions for unexpected collaborations and syntheses of ideas. They connect what has been scattered, make whole what would otherwise remain divided, and continually evolve.
They focus more on theme than on plot. They assess performance in terms of consistency (thematic alignment) and inconsistency, not in terms of rightness (on message) and wrongness. There’s only one way to be right, but there are unlimited ways to be consistent with a theme. This, too, has huge implications. It means that Quantum Narratives, in addition to being more adaptive, possess way more potential than Newtonian Narratives do. It’s the difference between an atomic reaction and a stick of dynamite.
‘The President’s Question Time’ Scene
Saturday, January 30th, 2010There’s a great tradition in British government that, if you’ve never seen it, you ought to. It’s called The Prime Minister’s Question Time, and it is wonderful political theater. Watch some of this.
Quite a difference.
The first is improvised.
The second is scripted.
Improvisation is active. It is alive. Members of Parliament are energetically engaged in the conversation about the matter at hand, supportive of, but not bogged down by, their various ideologies and positions. Their actions and reactions are immediate, emotional and visceral. This honors the problem. American politicians dishonor a problem, and obfuscate it, when they use it as a foil for politicking, which is how almost every problem faced by the federal government is regarded now. An excuse for campaigning.
This is the big point President Obama underlined yesterday in his meeting with the Republicans. That 66-minute conversation may be the best thing that’s happened in American politics since the Watergate hearings. Obama changed the game by calling out the current political game for what it is. Let’s call the current game “Our Way or No Way.” It is played by Democrats and Republicans alike, with equal vigor. This game is toxic. Limiting. Stultifying. Divisive. And ultimately it’s unproductive. This is not about blaming one party or the other. The bad game is to blame.
Yesterday, Obama not only called out the current game for the quicksand pit it is, he suggested a better, more liberating, more productive game. You might call the game he’s proposing, ‘Part of a Pie is Better Than None.’ In other words, the invitation to the Republicans (Dems, you’re next!) is to find an area of agreement and agree on it. Do it knowing that some, but not all, and probably not not 80% of what you’ve got scripted, will come to pass. Don’t be greedy. Be generous instead. Don’t place blame. Accept responsibility. Don’t point fingers. Shake hands. And then come out fighting. Let’s relish the good fight, one where we fight together to solve the problem, not the bad fight, where we fight over who’s right and who’s wrong about how to solve it. Let’s pick battles we can win instead of battles we can make the other guy lose.
Cheers to the GameChanger in Chief for changing the game once again. Our political discourse needs more of the kind of energetic, intelligent, articulate, performances that the Brits demonstrate in their ‘Question Time With the Prime Minister” and Obama and the Republicans staged yesterday. It will be a healthy transformation. And it’ll make great TV. Nothing we Yanks like better than that!
Do not get locked into your script for success. Be prepared, instead, to improvise your way there. Remember that other people have scripts, too. As I can tell you from working in the entertainment business, when all we do is fight over whose script we’re going to follow, the show does not go on.
Mix Mills and Grain Bins
Monday, January 25th, 2010
I grew up on a farm. My father spent a lot of time away from our farm selling and installing systems for other farmers that gave them more opportunity at what was, quite literally, the grass roots level.
One of these systems was called a Mix Mill. It was a processing machine about the size of a small refrigerator that ground grains like corn and soybeans into livestock feed. Using a series of black dials on the front of a cool-looking and very loud mint green machine connected to a set of augers, a farmer could dial in mixtures of grains and nutrients, and control the blend and texture of the feed. This saved the farmer all the time and labor of loading grain into a truck, hauling it to a centralized grain mill, grinding and mixing the grain there in one big batch, then loading it into 100 lb bags and hauling it back to the farm.
Another product, a Grain Bin, was a big silvery cylinder with drying fans installed around its perimeter that allowed the farmer to store and dry grain until the market presented the best selling opportunity. No longer did a farmer necessarily have to sell his grain at harvest time, when the market was glutted. The Grain Bin gave farmers more flexibility by giving them a much larger window through which to move their product.
After breakfast this morning with Scott Walker, the founder of BrainCandy LLC, whose Runes of Gallidon explores production using a networked model, I can see more clearly than ever that we are in an analogous scenario today. The ’small farmers’ of our time are Independent Media Producers (IMPs) such as app developers, gamers, bloggers, filmmakers and storytellers of all stripes.
The Mix Mills and Grain Bins of new media–some of them even sporting agri-names like FinalCut, Feedburner, FeedRoom, FeedCompany, Mailbeans and Sprouter–are abundant, and give an IMP almost unlimited ways to intersect with market vectors. (In fact, anyone thinking of launching a media app would be well advised to take a look at this first. All 67 pages of it. It should be mandatory.)
Like Mix Mills and Grain Bins did for farmers, these apps give the IMP much more say in the supply chain. A say in when the feed gets ground. How long it gets stored. What goes into it.
The apps also hold down the IMP’s expenses. Costs of fuel, labor and transportation are all lowered. What was once produced at the centralized grain mill (e.g. a large post production facility with heavy-duty Avid machines and 24-track consoles) can now be produced using laptops in someone’s home studio.
With all these ‘Mix Mills and Grain Bins’ and the unlimited spectrum of mashups and market entry points they make possible, we IMPs– we tillers of the cybersoil, farmers of the fractal, growers of the game–are left with only two questions that have no off-the-shelf answer: What are we planting? and Why?
Be Nice to the Mice
Monday, January 4th, 2010The end of the year, the decade, passed fitfully, at times stressfully, with no pause for reflection, and no Resolution for the New Year except the fairly vague intention of being more Resolute. What to be resolute about? That was still the question.
And then this article by Errol Morris in the New York Times came across the network this morning, the hook being a quote from Walt Disney (”I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing — that It Was All Started By A Mouse.“) as its headline. I’d already seen the link a couple of times when Howard Green from Disney Studios called to invite me to a tribute for Walt’s recently-departed nephew, Roy Disney, on Sunday at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. Suddenly the universe was in my ear bigtime, whispering that I had to click on the link to the Morris article. Something was there to be discovered….
The article itself is a photo essay and dialogue with photojournalist Ben Curtis about the forensics of war photography, the context of image vs. imagemaker, the technological challenges and dangers that come with altering photos to create propaganda or enhance a certain point of view. The kind of stuff in which Morris specializes. After I got the context, I began skimming. But I kept coming back to a photo by Curtis that led off the article:
In seeing the photo, I found what had been missing over the holidays. I might have decided to be resolute, I was still waffling on a theme, what, exactly I’d be resolute about. This photo resolved that. I wrote the following Comment on the Morris piece:
Errol
As our old friend Onosko, who worked at the House of Mouse for many years, might have said, you’re making it more complicated than it is. Focusing on the cosmetic level of communication–the toy itself, the shards of glass, the smoke, the interaction between imagemaker and image–is a fascinating narrative, and yields neverending complexity, but this complexity obscures meaning instead of bringing it to light. How Mickey got there is not nearly as important as the meta and emotional levels of the communication: War’s awfulest tragedies are its children.
Until we begin thinking of children first–begin with the Mice!, that what Walt would’ve done–War will be an adult theme park where children get crippled, grow old and perish before their time.
And so, finally, thanks to Howard and Errol and Ben, I have it — my New Year’s theme — the thing I can be Resolute about: Be Nice to the Mice.
Hit it, Kid!
Pat on the Back
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009A VERSION OF THIS FIRST APPEARED ON THE HUFFINGTON POST WEB SITE…
I am at our local hardware store on Vermont Avenue in L.A. where I’ve recently been spending a lot of time and money on our fixer-upper, when I see one of the store’s employees give another one a pat on the back. It makes me smile because it’s something I don’t see too often in the workplace these days: generous, a gesture of appreciation — for what, exactly, I cannot tell. A favor returned? Encouragement? A conflict resolved? Good news? A joke? All I can tell for sure is that it’s a connection between two people who, in that instant, are enjoying their scene.
We earn our money by learning from the Past and by being correct more often than not about the Future. But we do our living in the Now, and nothing says Now like a pat on the back.
And yet, there’s a problem with this, at least where the workplace is concerned. Touching is a vital element of communication, but between the computer culture and the corporate playbook, it is being systematically eliminated from the game.
To get the complete picture, I phone Martin Ett, an HR consultant with ObsessiCom Outsourcing Services, and ask him to interpret a pat on the back like the one I witnessed in the hardware store.
“It depends,” says Ett.
“On?”
“A lot. Was it a display of affection? If so, was it sexual in nature? What was the duration of the gesture? We recommend a three-second limit on casual contact, including handshakes, conversational touching, hair or clothing adjustments, and lint-plucking. Back-patting falls under the three-second rule.
“There’s also the nature of the contact itself to consider,” Ett went on. “Was there rubbing involved or was the contact static? Was it hand contact only, or was it of a hugging nature so that bodies were touching? This is an important distinction, because hugs are becoming increasingly problematic in the workplace. Many employers prohibit what we call ‘full frontal clutching’ while still allowing what we call ‘casual side-to-side linkage.’ We’re seeing strong anti-clutching trends across the corporate landscape.
“I’d want to talk to each of the employees separately,” Ett continues, “to determine both intention and interpretation, an ‘I-to-I Analysis,’ we call it.”
“Eye-to-Eye? I ask. Misinterpreting. “Is that like a 360?”
“You mean a 720? Uh, no. It means was there alignment between the patter’s Intention and the pattee’s Interpretation of the incident?
(Incident?)
I get where this is going but there’s no stopping him now. I put the phone on speaker and tend to my Farmville on Facebook as Ett continues: “Did the pat make the pattee defensive or uncomfortable, or imply some kind of future obligation? Also, what was the proximity of the parties? Was one of the parties backed into a corner, or was there space for the pattee to avoid the pat if it was unwelcome or unwarranted?”
“It happened in the hose aisle,” I say. “It’s cramped in that store. Space is tight.”
“Hose aisle,” repeats Ett, gravely. “That could be an issue. Context is key. I’d need to know more about what exactly goes on in the hose aisle. Is one of the parties the hose manager, or is that aisle considered neutral space? Was there actual hose involved? Because that’s a whole new kettle of worms…
Kettle of worms? When did a pat on the back turn into a scene from a Wes Craven movie?
“Also what, specifically, was ‘the back’ being patted? I’d want to know that. Was it in the region of the upper, or Cervical, vertebrae? If it was on the upper back it was probably okay, assuming of course, it didn’t last for longer than three seconds and no rubbing was involved. Middle, or Thoracic vertebrae, are a gray area, especially numbers T-One through T-Four. You find HR people very divided about this, and there are no clear guidelines, so my advice is to steer clear of the Thoracic region entirely, just to be safe. The lower, or Lumbar region, is a definite no-no. And a pat on the Sacrum will get you a visit from Security, no question.
“Was one of the employees the other one’s superior?” continues Ett. “If so, the gesture could be taken as intimidation or harassment. Was the patting public or did it happen in private? Was this an isolated incident, or was it part of a pattern?”
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling a bit harassed myself now, for even bringing it up. “They just seemed like a couple of guys enjoying a moment.”
“Couple of guys, eh? We’re seeing a big increase in same-sex sexual harassment these days.” Ett says it with the ominous satisfaction of an exterminator describing a cockroach invasion in the building where you live.
“What about giving myself a pat on the back?” I ask. “Do you have a rule against that?”
“Are you making fun of me?” Ett replies. “If you are, you’re barking down the wrong well, buddy. There are rules about that.”
Next time I see them, I’ll warn the guys over at the hardware store they’re skating on some very thin skin.
The problem with rules of the game like those cited by (the fictional) Martin Ett is that they define workplace interactions in the context of the Past or the Future while minimizing the impact of the Now. Because of this they tend to suppress rather than expand our ability to communicate in a productive, meaningful way.
In this kind of sanitized environment, we may be making our money and limiting our liability, but it has very little to do with how we’re living our lives.