In the most recent episode of the Meet the Moment Podcast, Hannah and I interviewed Dr. Samira Rajabi. Samira is an incredibly talented researcher and scholar who focuses on trauma and digital media.
During the episode, Samira brought up a really interesting and thought-provoking idea. What if transformation isn’t linear? In other words, what if transformation isn’t actually about forward movement at all?
Recently, I went to a local grocery store in search of a single, critical ingredient I needed for dinner, but didn’t have on hand. I’ve known about this particular grocery store for years due to social media posts warning of purse thefts and car break-ins, but had only shopped there a few times before.
In the most recent episode of the Meet the Moment Podcast, Hannah and I interviewed Dr. Samira Rajabi. Samira is an incredibly talented researcher and scholar who focuses on trauma and digital media.
During the episode, Samira brought up a really interesting and thought-provoking idea. What if transformation isn’t linear? In other words, what if transformation isn’t actually about forward movement at all?
Sometimes myths aren’t so bad. Consider the widespread belief that mint-flavored toothpaste makes your teeth cleaner. (I am a mint-believer.)
However, myths about effective decision-making can be detrimental. They can get in the way of actually creating solutions and innovations that are resilient and effective.
In my research on how people process information and make decisions, I found that there are several pervasive myths that inform how people go about problem-solving. Below are three of the most common ones. And, because it seemed cruel not to include the research truths, I’ve also shared how we can better understand problems, solutions, and decision-making, in general.
Resilience Thinking Method™ Truth: Problems are not definitions, they are data points.
At the heart of this myth is the belief that a magical silver bullet problem will make the solving process easier and produce the most effective solution. In response, we spend a lot of time and energy negotiating what exactly the problem is, without realizing that all of the other problems we consider and then set aside are also real and integral to effective solution-finding.
A problem does not need to be perfectly articulated in order to start the solution-creation process because: Problems are information. They direct our attention to issues, and issues often have many interrelated problems, stresses, and challenges. An effective solution addresses a larger issue, and therefore, responds to many problems. For a solution to be truly effective and resilient, it needs to do more than put a bandaid on a singular problem.
Instead of focusing on one problem, write a list of all the related problems you’ve uncovered. Write down all of the things you’ve noticed aren’t going well. In fact, write down everything, there is no such thing as bad information. This leads us to the next misnomer:
Resilience Thinking Method™ Truth: There is no such thing as bad data.
Every piece of information about the issue you are attempting to address tells you something about that issue.
Yet, how many times have you seen people call information irrelevant or set data aside because it wasn’t considered valid? A bad review can be ignored as an anomaly. A decrease in morale can be excused because of a global pandemic. A complaint against a supervisor is dismissed because of the young age of the employee.
There will always be a “good” reason behind dismissing data points that you don’t understand. But, the reality is, you dismissed data because you didn’t understand it, not because the data was bad.
This moves us to the most fundamental (and largely ignored) part of problem-solving: processing information.
Resilience Thinking Method™ Truth: Effective problem-solving requires processing of all information. Emotions are information, too.
Recently, I witnessed an interview conducted with a U.S. voter. One of the interview questions asked the voter what they were most proud of with regard to their political party. Specifically, the voter was asked what they believed their party did especially well. The voter responded, “We make decisions rationally rather than emotionally.”
The idea that problem-solving and decision-making should be rational rather than emotional is a common misunderstanding. Rational decisions are not devoid of emotion. In fact, effective decisions need to consider all issue-related information, including critical information embedded in emotion and feeling.
My research found that when making decisions and processing related information, people time-after-time substantiated their reasoning and affirmed their decisions solely based on how they felt about the information they were considering. In other words, their feelings were front and center throughout the decision-making process.
If you are thinking, “Well, that’s interesting, but that’s not what I do. I always set aside my feelings when making a decision,” consider your confidence in a piece of data or a decision you’ve made. That confidence, its a feeling. And, so is doubt. And sadness. And joy.
The bottom line is that our feelings are not detrimental to decision-making. They are information in the decision-making process. And, most of the time, emotions are really useful pieces of information!
Instead of dismissing emotion as irrelevant to decision-making, ask yourself what you learn from a feeling or emotion. What do you learn about your values through your own emotional response? What do you learn about others’ values based on how they react?
Denying the information embedded in emotion sets you up to make an uninformed decision. It denies reality. And denying reality, is simply, irrational.
Copyright 2021, Claire Chase, Resilience By Design Consulting, LLC
A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, we are beginning to collectively recognize that even though we might be coming out of isolation, our work lives maybe, actually, truly aren’t going back to the way they were.
Have we said this many times since March 2020? Yes, we have.
Have we believed it? No.
Deep down we secretly hoped it would all just go back to “normal.” Deeper down we also secretly hoped it wouldn’t go back to normal. And this is a perfect example of the tension that we’ve been balancing for an entire year.
Perhaps, a better word to describe the work/life/society/community/family balance is pure chaos.
As a leader, I’m sure you’ve noticed a few of these tensions arise as you’ve attempted to navigate the chaos:
Employees are burnt out. Yet, there is a tremendous appetite for something new.
Employees are fed up. Yet, everyone is clinging to stability.
Employees aren’t looking for more of the same. Yet, everyone is stretched beyond their capacity and can’t take on any more.
Employees don’t want to work from home. And they certainly don’t want to go back to the office.
We’re done with this, but also, we aren’t done.
No decision has felt right. Every choice has seemed risky. All ideas are questionable. Any conversation could go awry.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but none of these tensions are new. They have always been there.
Rationally, we know that nothing ever goes back to “normal.” There was always a new normal lurking around the corner. We have always lived amongst tensions between reward and risk, between multiple competing desires.
Photo by Ethan Sees from Pexels
I’m sure you are thinking, then why has this year felt so chaotic? Why do the tensions feel so new?
If you have come to recognize instability in a workplace relationship or disruptions in organizational culture, the bad news is that these aren’t new problems. They were always lurking below the surface (and, honestly, they were probably above the surface).
The good news is that now you know! And simply naming the issue is the first step to creating resilient change (what the Resilience Thinking Method refers to as the first ‘resilience habit.’)
As a leader, you have a tremendous opportunity right now to act and address points of breakdown in your teams and work flows. It might feel like these issues are COVID-19 issues, but they simply aren’t. And it doesn’t help anyone to wish them away or pray they’ll dissipate once the vaccine is widely available.
If an employee has expressed feeling isolated and lacking team support, consider how their position was set up for success (or failure) before they started working from home. If employees express that their workload is too burdensome, consider the systems in place that distribute workload. Likely they were there before the pandemic.
So, what now? Well, as I’ve mentioned, the first step is always recognizing that you have a problem.
The second step is recognizing this isn’t just a COVID problem.
And, the third, fourth, and fifth steps are all focused on authentic curiosity and empowered action. I’ll be discussing these concepts and more on the blog and in The Resilience Reader, our weekly newsletter.
Copyright 2021, Claire Chase, Resilience By Design Consulting, LLC
After 15 years working in research and a lifetime of people-watching under my belt, I naturally see patterns in what I’m reading and observing in conversations (more online conversations as of late, it’s been hard to eavesdrop in public).
So, what have I been noticing?
Ever-so-subtle shifts in how people are talking about the nature of work. Specifically, I’ve noticed changes in what employees are expecting from leaders and managers.
Here are four examples of what I’ve observed that you might have noticed, too:
A supervisor was in the news for telling an employee that “fine” wasn’t a good enough response to how she’s doing.
Independent online communities of practice are flourishing during the pandemic.
A professor’s email goes viral for telling a student “its ok to not be ok right now.”
Local businesses, stores, and restaurants continue to collect donations for their employees.
Let’s focus on what these pieces of information tell us about leadership.
First, we need to clarify leadership expectations found in the normal work environment. (The Resilience Thinking Method considers this step ‘mapping the issue landscape.’)
In the normal work environment, leadership is largely focused on empowering employees to do the work through setting goals and then helping teams reach those goals. Yes, I’m simplifying a lot here. The point is that in normal times we expected leaders—on the most fundamental level—to get people to work.
This is our starting point.
An exception occurred when traumatic events happened at work or home, like organizational or family change. In response to these traumatic events, we expected leaders and organizations to be relational and honest. This means that pre-2020, relational leadership was only expected intermittently. Compassion was called upon in times of trauma or crisis. We did not expect our supervisors, teachers, or managers to be overly relational or particularly compassionate on a daily basis.
We are in the midst of an ongoing pandemic and we live in a reality of political turmoil, social injustice and inequality, widespread unemployment, and half a million lives lost to COVID-19 in the U.S. alone. Every single day for the last year has carried trauma and will continue to carry trauma for the foreseeable future.
And, guess what? Our expectations for leaders in times of trauma and crisis are the same.
However, what is different is the rate of employee expectation. What was once expected of leaders intermittently is now expected regularly. This means that employees are expecting leaders to engage in relational leadership Every. Single. Day. And, those expectations are not going away anytime soon.
This means that employees are expecting humanity and compassion in every conversation and interaction.
So, leader, how is it going? Are you fulfilling your employees’ expectations?
On March 9, at 12pm MST, let’s talk about employee expectations and dive head-first into the reality of leadership in trying times. We will discuss how the Resilience Thinking Method can help you make sense of, and successfully navigate, the leadership landscape during ‘normal’ times and global crisis. We’ll also break down what employees really mean when they say they want leaders to lead with humanity and compassion.
Hope you can join us! Click below to learn more about the event.
Copyright 2021, Claire Chase, Resilience By Design Consulting, LLC
A couple of years ago, one of my friends went to a neighborhood block party. She was connecting with an older man, a neighbor. They started chatting in the usual way, introducing themselves and talking about their families. For the most part, the conversation wasn’t memorable, however, after she told the neighbor about her husband’s work, the neighbor said, “Oh, so I guess our taxes bought your new car.”
This comment might be seen as a joke, a friendly rib. However, the woman didn’t take it lightly. It hurt her feelings. It made her sad. It made her mad.
Yes, they had just purchased a nice car. Reliable, and maybe a little on the fancy side.
The woman’s husband was an active military member. Over the fifteen years he had been in the armed forces, he had been deployed several times for long stints, up to a year at a time. Their young child was recently diagnosed with a serious disease and had been spending weeks in the hospital for treatments. And, on top of that, her husband was notified that he was going to have to spend a year abroad, away from the family. Her husband purchased the car for its reliability, its ease of service, its ability to meet their family’s needs, and, the make and model was popular in their area, creating opportunities for resale if the family needed to move again or their needs changed. Also, he liked it. That should have been enough, right?
It was a senseless comment that had a deep impact, far deeper than the person saying it realized.
Lisa Fotios on Pexel
In this situation, my friend paused and changed the subject. She had too much on her plate and didn’t have the energy to spare. She didn’t need to engage in challenging conversation with a neighbor that she could keep at an arm’s distance, politely wave to, never needing to go beyond the niceties of passing conversation.
But, the comment stayed in her thoughts. She couldn’t shake it. The moment was fleeting but the idea stuck with her for days, months, and she could still recall it years later. In that moment, she didn’t feel safe in her community. She felt that her neighbors were watching her family from their front porches, judging her every financial decision.
My friend had many words to describe this neighbor. She had many words to describe his comment. I’m sure you can come up with them, too. But she couldn’t move through the interaction. She couldn’t make sense of it. She couldn’t change her feelings around it.
Ones that we can’t cut lose from our memories. And the reason why we can’t unstick them is that we haven’t fully processed them yet. We haven’t learned from them. We can’t figure out what they are telling us, or I should clarify, we haven’t yet figured out the productive value of what they are telling us.
The Resilience Thinking Method™ is a way of processing information we don’t understand and agree with. It allows us to make sense of things that don’t make sense. It’s a way of learning about the world that gives us tools for future moments and tools for processing what we learned so that we can move forward.
Now its your turn. What’s been bothering you? Lets make sense of it together.
Copyright 2021, Claire Chase, Resilience By Design Consulting, LLC
How many times in the last 90 days have you heard someone say the word, “resilience.” When I hear it in a commercial on TV, a podcast I love, even on the radio, I cringe. Yes, I cringe. And, yes, you are right, I do talk about resilience for a living.
Why do I cringe? Because resilience is a term that has lost its meaning. I don’t mean that you can’t find it in Webster’s Dictionary. I mean that resilience is actually a very abstract term that people are using to describe a phenomenon they can’t explain, so, in response, they use “resilience” for just about anything that is hard to fathom or difficult to understand.
I’m not one to let concepts go undefined, especially ones I’ve been researching for almost a decade. Over the last 60 days, I’ve asked entrepreneurs and business leaders about resilience. What do they know about it? What does it make them think about? How do they experience it?
For the sake of brevity, I’m going to share two of the definitions I’ve noticed most frequently. The first definition describes resilience as a personal awakening, a newfound ability to finally see oneself holistically. No longer is one private or public, feminine or masculine, leader or follower, but all of these things. At once. The global pandemic created a situation in which one was forced to see their own reflection (Exhibit A: Zoom). Resilience was described as a process of discovery, finding what was there all along. It was beautiful to hear entrepreneurs and business leaders talk about resilience in this way.
The second group defined resilience as a type of pseudo-promise land. Resilience was a destination; a place that they hadn’t yet arrived and were still not sure how to get there. One entrepreneur described it through the imagery of a wayward river, ravaging the land, making its own riverbed. She placed herself on a raft fighting the river, crashing into the rocks on either side. She couldn’t gain control of the raft, or the river. She was being thrown from one side to the next as the rapids rushed forward to a destination unknown. It was heartbreaking to hear entrepreneurs and business leaders talk about their experiences this way.
Is one right and another wrong? No. They are both describing resilience. I can sense your skepticism. How can that be? How can both peace and hardship point to resilience?
The calm and the chaos, the beautiful and the brutal, these are all resilience because resilience is, in fact, not a place, but a journey. Or, as I like to say, resilience is the road, not the destination. A continuous, never-ending, winding, breathtaking, devastating path.
Have I lost you yet?
Let’s consider the last 90 days. Maybe your business experienced hardship. Maybe it experienced calm. Maybe it had growth. Maybe it was stressful. Maybe you had to furlough, or layoff, or fire staff. Maybe it was the best 90 days your business has ever seen. Maybe it was also the most terrible.
Resilience as the road means that the decisions you made and continue to make—Which way to turn, which mountain to climb, what vehicle to use, should you walk, hike, or bike? What should you carry with you?— all of these choices change your experience on the road. And the decisions you made in your own business, and more importantly, how you came to make that decision, changed your business. The resulting outcomes had a direct impact on what happened next.
Resilience, at its core, is about decision-making. And those decisions determine the life of your business (aka the distance of the road). In order to make quality “resilient” decisions for your organization, you have to process information effectively so that your decisions are easy to make when you come to a fork in the road or when the path is unclear. And, hey, did you know there are maps you can buy? (email us.)
1. How do you define “good” decisions?
2. How do you define “good” decision-making?
Your answers will help you get started.
Copyright 2021, Claire Chase, Resilience By Design Consulting, LLC
