I am behind on article sorting and working on some new launches, so here are three really interesting Signals of the future that I think you should know about.
The whole human matters: helping young Afghan refugees heal
For several years, I served as an informal surrogate mom for a young man who had experienced massive amounts of trauma. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, lack of health care, homelessness, etc. He scored a 9 out of 10 on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire. One of the many things that stunned me as I tried to come alongside him was the way that his traumas blocked his abity to solve problems, to make decisions, to plan for virtually anything. It was as though his vision was fogged in, and because he could not believe that anything good could exist outside of that fog, he seemed to freeze in place, not unlike my pet rabbit.
This article focuses on refugees who are children or teens, but the insights here are crucial to all of us. Whether they’re escaping Afghanistan’s totalitarians or Haiti’s gang violence or North Carolina’s natural disaster, people who come to our communities and businesses increasingly come with the baggage and trauma of dislocation and loss and fear. And we’ve learned in the past decade about how deeply trauma changes the wiring of our brains - changes how we deal with stressors, how we problem solve and plan for our futures, and even how epigenetic inheritances change how our genes are expressed as a result of traumas - for generations.
Helping people work through traumas and build mental health is important, but we often treat that issue as Someone Else’s Problem. And in the Industrial Era and before, we could get away with that, economically, because what we requiring of our labor wasn’t their creativity and problem solving, but their hands and their backs and their ability to do what they’re told - all of which can still happen if you are experiencing post traumatic stress.
But of course that’s not the case anymore. We are asking people to use very high level thinking and collaborative skills, but a high percentage of our workers are grappling with unresolved traumas. And as climate disasters and global dislocation continue to accelerate, we will find that more and more of our best employees are already carrying burdens that defy imagination.What makes us think that our companies can work at the level that we’re asking if we’re not prepared to help them overcome those barriers?
Helping that young man didn’t take anything special. It took encouraging him, helping him learn some decision-making strategies, reinforcing his intrinsic value and giving him some of our extra space and resources when he needed it. He’s made an incredible recovery, and I am proud as hell of who he has become.
It doesn’t take much. It mostly takes willingness to toss out our old assumptions about how people **should** be, and how our businesses and communities **should** work.
And as I look at what our businesses and communities have to do to thrive, now and into the foreseeable future, this is not Someone Else’s Job.
It’s very much ours.
Do chance meetings at office boost innovation? Nope.
This article is three years old, but it’s very much on point.
Startup culture told us for years that “collisions” would result in great insights and new products and innovation! Edward Glaser’s book Triumph of the City was taken as gospel, even though he had completed the age-old economist’s trick of writing with great authority about an idea that was entirely based on theory and its own internal logic, without any real-world testing. When organizational psychology researchers actually observed behavior systematically, they found that people only collide with people they already know, or who are very similar to themselves. Collisions with the most different people — arguable, the people who might be most likely to have perceptions or information that could spark an innovation — seldom happened unless the situation was gamified to do it.
In this context, though, online work actually seemed to overcome some of the barriers that too often silence the most diverse — and thus innovation-feeding — voices:
Remote work, though, can enable ideas to bubble up from people with different backgrounds. Online, people who are not comfortable speaking up in an in-person meeting may feel more able to weigh in. Brainstorming sessions using apps like Slack can surface many more perspectives by including people who would not have been invited to a meeting, like interns or employees in other departments.
"When everyone has the same small box on the screen, everyone has an equal seat at the table, literally," said Barbara Messing, employee experience officer at Roblox, the online gaming company, which is staying remote two days a week.
Do the right thing for long term success
Despite the name, Entrepreneur magazine isn’t a go-to for me — it’s a little light on substance and heavy on clickbait, IMHO. But this article made an important point:
When you do things the right way and do a good job in the process, it becomes a sustainable, repeatable business model. By contrast, the more advanced you get with things like complex marketing strategies and lead generation tools, the easier it becomes to lose focus on what really matters. In our case, that means honesty, quality, delivering an exceptional customer experience, and practicing kindness — a lot of kindness.
And in a new era where information is nearly effortless to find and that video of your bad behavior will live forever, that sounds like pretty good advice.