Newsletter: Socrates is Wrong & QAnon Musings
Ticonderoga Learning & Talent Newsletter
What's in this Newsletter?
Jobs & Talent
Socrates is Wrong
The Social Psychology of QAnon
Professional & Personal Updates
Jobs & Talent:
Jobs:
I'm hiring! I'm looking for someone as a part-time business development colleague. The right person has extensive contacts and strong relationships with L&D and HR leaders. This is a perfect opportunity for someone who has their own portfolio of clients for whom they do business development, or even a retired (or partially-retired) former executive looking to supplement their income.
Talent Searching for a Home:
Early-career* professional in the NYC-area is looking for a job in credit card marketing/corporate partnerships. (*He's an Olympic-level athlete transitioning away from his full-time career as a professional runner.) He has a BA from Columbia and an MA in marketing from UT-Austin.
Outstanding talent seeking to return to a larger tech organization in Strategy & Ops or Chief of Staff type role. After over a decade first at IBM and then at Google, she's opted for a start-up job to learn that trade and is ready to bring that experience back to larger organizations. She has stellar experience leading the "rhythm of the business" (goal-setting, product and business reviews, resource planning, internal comms, process improvement, etc.) and adapting to change. Location flexible.
Tenured CTO looking for a new home with an organization whose leadership more closely matches their personal values. Experience leading large (60+ person) infrastructure and technology teams at major organizations like Cisco, Amgen, etc. Open to all locations.
Message me if any of this strikes a chord...
Socrates is Wrong
I've seen this quote about change floating around the internet: "The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new," - Socrates.
That's incorrect.
First, a few notes about the quote itself:
It isn't actually attributed to the Greek philosopher Socrates. Rather, it was said by a character named Socrates in the book Way of the Peaceful Warrior.
It was tweeted by Ivanka Trump a few years ago. That fact alone is enough to doubt its validity.
Why is (fake) Socrates wrong? Well, the obvious answer is that there is no one secret to change. To say so is clickbait hyperbole. More importantly, extensive study of change finds that a dissatisfaction with the current state is an essential ingredient to moving forward. To ignore the current state and focus all your energy on the future is to overlook a critical component of effective change efforts.
There are many frameworks that explain change. One of my absolute favorites is Gleicher's change formula. Broadly, Gleicher's formula is written as:
C = (ABD) > X
C: Change
A: Dissatisfaction with the Current State
B: Desired Future State
D: Tangible Next Steps to get from A-B
X: The "cost" of change
Essentially, change occurs when those three ingredients outweigh the cost (both economic and psychological) of change. Many other models (Dannemiller, Harris & Beckhard, Jacobs, Wheatley, Cady, etc.) build off of this equation. Fake Socrates (as he permits us close friends to call him...) misses the mark.
If we're initiating change, we may want to spend time over-emphasizing the downsides of our current state. We may even want to increase the 'pain' to make the future that much brighter. A professor once shared an anecdote with me about how a hospital stopped ordering new boxes of pens as a mechanism to make the change to computerized record keeping seem more palatable for the doctors and staff.
While I don't necessarily advocate making life (much) harder, the value of dissatisfaction in driving change is undeniable. Sorry, "Socrates".
QAnon: How do we bring these people back?
Many articles have been published in recent weeks about QAnon. (For those lucky enough to be uninformed, according to the NYTimes, QAnon is "the umbrella term for a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring." Yikes.)
I spent the first years of my doctoral program researching cults. In particular, studying believers who left cults and how they reintegrated into mainstream society. I had planned to write my dissertation on the subject but ultimately went in a different direction. Needless to say, the cultish features of QAnon (and the diehard MAGA crowd, more broadly), interest me greatly. There's a lot to unpack here (a dissertation's worth, perhaps). The most prominent question is how we somehow convince Q adherents to see the light?
In my academic reading and speaking with former cult members, one of the key conclusions I reached is that attempts to reintegrate cult members ought to focus much more on providing new socially-meaningful communities that will embrace them and provide a psychological support structure after leaving.
Understandably, much of the break-the-cult energy is spent on how to "reach" these people and break the spell they're under. But a major challenge with extracting members from their cults is that they want to be there. The cult is providing a form of psychosocial support they were missing and (almost) no amount of rational thinking can outweigh that reptile-brain compulsion. The pain of leaving the environment they've hunkered down in is often too great. It is quite rare that a cult member simply sees the errors of their thinking and walks away into the abyss (and yes, the world outside the cult is always painted as an abyss from which the cult provides unique sanctuary).
Put in terms of the earlier discussion: Far too much emphasis is spent on trying to reason with cult members and create dissatisfaction with the current state, while far too little energy is placed on creating a future state that meets their needs.
What does this mean we ought to do? I'm... not sure. I certainly don't want to be inviting any QAnons over for dinner (even post-pandemic). But as a society, we ought to think more about where to bring these people to rather than simply where to pull them from.
Interestingly, I suspect this task may be easier to execute for QAnon than more traditional cults because QAnon believers are not physically segmented. Self-imposed isolation is a critical element of most cults as it allows for the external world to be cast an ever-present demon. It also makes leaving that much harder if the rest of the world is truly alien (think: Jonestown, FLDS, Branch Davidians, Rajneeshpuram, etc.). So I am hopeful that the physical integration of QAnonners in mainstream America reduces the traditional barriers to reintegration.
In the short term, I expect Q believers to do one of three things once Biden is sworn in and their core belief in an ongoing Trump presidency are shattered: a) continue to believe that this is all an intentional 'part of the plan' and a big reveal is yet to come, b) rationalize that they actually did achieve their goals, somehow (e.g. The Seekers in 1954), or c) realize it was all a sham and either come crashing down to earth after this disorienting dilemma or convince themselves they knew it was 'just a game' all along.
<end rant>
Professional & Personal News
My website is live! Check it out at www.ticonadvisory.com. It has a long way to go but at least it's there. Special thanks to a handful of clients and partners - readers of this newsletter - who provided some very kind testimonials. (I am looking for more! If you've ever been a client, partner, coachee, or even participated in a workshop and would be willing to be featured, please let me know!)
Quite fortunately, my calendar is beginning to book up for 2021. If you're looking for coaching, training, or executive search work at any point this year, please let me know!
Charlotte is 13 months old. Apparently, I have a full-on child now. She walks around the playground babbling to anyone who will listen, communicates remarkably well for someone that really uses one word (and that word is "ehrrrr!"), and has a very particular taste in music (right now The Beach Boys and Lil' Nas X are on repeat. Don't ask). She's super fun - I just wish she would sleep.
I'm getting serious vaccine envy. I'm excited for Biden's aggressive 100 million in 100 days campaign.
That's it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Stay safe, stay inside. Be compassionate and intentional.