Overlap.

I wandered down a "intellectual craftsmanship" rabbit hole found in this week's essay from Ari Weinzweig ...

Perhaps you may object that the ordinary words of common usage are often loaded with feelings and values, and that accordingly it might be well to avoid them in favour of new words or technical terms. Here is my answer: it is true that ordinary words are often so loaded. But many technical terms in common use in social science are also loaded. To write clearly is to control these loads, to say exactly what you mean in such a way that this meaning and only this will be understood by others. Assume that your intended meaning is circumscribed by a six-foot circle, in which you are standing; assume that the meaning understood by your reader is another such circle, in which he is standing. The circles, let us hope, do overlap. The extent of that overlap is the extent of your communication. In the reader’s circle the part that does not overlap - that is one area of uncontrolled meaning: he has made it up. In your circle the part that does not overlap - that is another token of your failure: you have not got it across. The skill of writing is to get the reader’s circle of meaning to coincide exactly with yours, to write in such a way that both of you stand in the same circle of controlled meaning.

Wittgenstein said, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

Action.

Ari Weinweig on taking note and taking action ...

As I have been learning in the study of poetry and the development of a “poetic approach to leadership,” poetry cracks open emotional doors and allows us to crystallize our thoughts and focus our feelings in ways that might well do the same for others. Try reading any poem (better still, read one you wrote) out loud at the start of the next meeting you lead, and I’ll bet you dollars to Roadhouse doughnuts that you will, in the process, alter the dynamic of the whole gathering, almost certainly for the better. 

Beyond.

Ari Weinzweig on reading ...

Of course, as the news reports all too frequently of late, the drive to read is not the modern-day norm. Last summer, The New York Times cited a study from University College London and the University of Florida that found Americans’ rate of reading has declined roughly 3 percent a year for the last 20 years. 

The numbers are not encouraging, but there’s no time like the present to turn things around. In the larger context of the world, what’s at stake is not just reading for the benefit of the reader. Rather, it seems ever clearer to me that democratic constructs—whether in companies or countries—really depend on it. Regular reading builds the sort of empathy, curiosity, and culture of learning and creativity that we need to run the kind of caring, healthy organizations we’re out to create. As advocate Luis González Martin wrote last fall, 

Democracy depends on reading, but not in the abstract. It depends on the kind of reading that slows us down, unsettles us, and teaches us to think beyond ourselves. At a time when noise travels faster than nuance and democratic life feels increasingly fragile, the simple act of engaging deeply with a text becomes a form of resistance. Reading ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention, and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.

What goes wrong, then? Well, to a great extent, Peter Senge says, the problem lies with the pervasiveness of hierarchical thinking in Western society:

The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.

In his famous 1949 novel, 1984, George Orwell writes, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” One way that autocrats take charge is, indeed, by managing information—including the suppression or even outright banning of certain books and materials that offer alternative pasts, presents, and futures out of sync with the autocrats’ preferred story. As I learned in my time studying Russian history, this sort of thing has been going on in Russia for the greater part of the last 500 years. Officially sanctioned reading materials supported the tsars, and then their successors: the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, and beyond. Opposition writings were banned, and their authors often went to prison or were pushed into exile. Today, it’s Vladimir Putin and his people who manage the information, cutting off the internet where they can, kicking unruly writers out of the country, et cetera, but the theme remains pretty much the same. 

One way to take back the past, present, and future is to read. In the process, we lean into and learn about alternative angles on the world. When we read, we are increasingly able to pursue new perspectives, think things through more effectively, enhance empathy, and compound compassion. In the presence of autocratic leaders at any level, Timothy Snyder reminds us, “reading good books is important.” Their import is being seen right now in Ukraine. As Snyder posted on Instagram last month, “A lesson from Ukraine: In moments where life meets death, they don’t put books down. Reading is resistance.” 

Context.

Ari Weinzweig on having a clear point-of-view ...

As marketer and author Seth Godin reminds us, humility is key: “Having a point of view is different from always being correct. No one is always correct.” What I’m talking about here is a focused worldview—a cooked-down, concentrated version of your philosophy—not a catchy slogan. A point of view, to my point of view, is a deeply held, strongly believed-in perspective—a well-thought-out and well-articulated sense of what it is you do so differently from nearly any other business.

How do you know it’s working? One way is that your organization is hitting its bottom lines. Another is that you refer to it—along with mission, vision, and guiding principles—when you make decisions. Tad Hargrave says, “One of the surest ways to know your point of view is solid is when people you share it with are visibly relieved. They were lost but now are found. They were blind but now can see.”

A few weeks ago, I referenced the British painter Rose Wylie—now going on 92—who says clearly and directly, “Contrast gives life.” Contrast also offers context. And as Hargrave notes, “The world is drowning in content. What your clients crave is context.” What does he mean? Pick your industry—there’s no end to the examples. Every supermarket has olive oil now! And yet, below, I write about a newly arrived oil at the Deli. Does the world need it? No. Do I need it? No. But it’s REALLY good, and if I did my writing work reasonably well, you’ll understand why it’s so special and worth at least swinging by the Deli to taste. Having clarity on a point of view makes it infinitely easier to communicate what you care about—and why it matters to anyone other than your mother.  

Questioning.

Ari Weinzweig on questioning questions ...

It comes as no coincidence that the most creative people—the people I’ve learned the most from over the years—are those who are themselves asking better questions. One of them is On Being’s Krista Tippett, who has been doing this for decades now on her award-winning podcast, and who offers some great insights into the power and significance of asking better questions:

I also find a question to be a mighty form of words, and I have learned a few things about questions. I have learned that questions elicit answers in their likeness—that answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. We’ve all seen this. We’ve all experienced it. It’s very hard to respond to a combative question with anything but a combative answer. It’s almost impossible to transcend a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. But the opposite is also true: it’s hard to resist a generous question. This is a skill that needs relearning.

Choosing.

Ari Weinzweig on the benefits of choosing the unordinary ...

The more I played with the idea of unordinary, the more it resonated. I began to see that, while the quality of our food may indeed be particularly special—extraordinary when we do it really well—most of what we do in our business practices, seen through my new lens of understanding, is definitely unordinary. They aren’t, I’m realizing, especially extraordinary at all. Anyone who wants to could do them. It takes neither a particularly special skill nor years of intensive formal training to learn to be kind. Kindness. Compassion. Dignity. Diversity. Humility. Empathy. Inclusion. Any eight-year-old could have their hand at them. Vision-writing. Extra-miling. Open-book management. Open meetings. Consensus. Also wonderful, but still, not really “extraordinary.” We have no special ingredient that makes us more able to do what we do than any other American organization.

All of those processes are really important to us, and I recommend them wholeheartedly to you too, but the truth is that anyone who decides to could do them. In that sense, I would now describe them as “unordinary.” Yes, uncommon, but not because of a rare ability that’s uniquely abundant in and around Ann Arbor. They’re hard to find because they’re not the norm—most people color within the same behavioral lines their colleagues do. They’re not the norm because, in current conditions, it may take a bit more attentiveness to take positive, dignity-based action. And, at the same time, they are absolutely unordinary.

Exist.

Ari Weinzweig on being aware of the invisible ...

Last week, I was fortunate enough to see a photocopy of a letter a local 10-year-old boy wrote to his cousin. This was not just an ordinary message from one young cousin to another who’s a year or two older and struggling, as so many are in the world today. This wonderful kid told his cousin how much she matters and how much he loves her in such a lovely way. I had tears in my eyes the whole time I was reading his letter. When 10-year-olds can write letters like that, then I know for sure that, regardless of what you might find in the financial pages of the Wall Street Journal, magic really does exist in the world. The problem is that most people miss it.

Managing.

Ari Weinzweig on managing the voices in our heads ...

[I]f we learn to manage the voices in our heads well and get the right voices in the room, the whole thing can be a much more productive experience. An experience that, when it’s working well, is akin to the kind of beauty, insight, dignity, grace, and collaboration that I witnessed in the ZCoB huddle a few weeks back and then wrote about afterward.

Why would all of this matter? Because, quite simply, the quality of the conversation in our heads is manifested in the quality of everything else we say, decide, and do in our lives.

Choosing.

Ari Weinzweig on transformative joy ...

Sometimes, of course, joy comes in these beautifully upbeat and innocent moments. But it’s of equal import when we’re struggling with a serious issue and unsure of how to move forward. Nearly a century ago, Tristan Tzara gave some advice that our whole country—me included, of course—could take to heart. “Let us try for once not to be right.” Instead, we can listen with open hearts and remember that joy is a part of living a good life, even in stressful situations. We can, in that context, skip the lectures and instead lean in and then learn some more. If we’re paying attention, the odds are pretty high that some joy will ensue. Choosing joy, even in the face of adversity, is one of the best ways we can lead positive change.

Questions.

Ari Weinzweig on what keeps us going ...

One good way to keep going—for me and maybe for Sarah and you as well—is to hang around with other people who also keep going. Spending time with folks who keep pushing through adversity, who stay focused even when the world around them feels like it’s coming apart, is more reason to keep playing when others head off to do other things. I learn whenever I lean into even small bits of time with people who keep pushing themselves in healthy, positive, and self-reflective ways. Their answers and, of course, their questions, inspire more often than not. 

Practice.

Ari Weinzweig on practicing curiosity and its influence on creativity ...

Teaching people to be curious depends in part on the systems in which they work. Structures that encourage people to ask questions create curiosity. Frameworks, or what we’ve long thought of here at Zingerman’s as “organizational recipes,” are a great way to do that. Like Emma Goldman, they make people think. In a sense, all of the dozens of frameworks and recipes we use so regularly here really require at least a modicum of curiosity in order to work. Our Training Compact, 3 Steps to Great Service, 5 Steps to Handling Customer Complaints, 6 Elements of Dignity, Lean, the “5 Whys,” 3 Types of Beliefs (positive, negative, neutral), and more. All of them invite the user to ask questions, of themselves and/or of others as well. All encourage people to explore what something means, what is possible, and what a positive solution would look like. Our long-standing belief in the value of continuous improvement and Bottom-Line Change® encourages us to apply our curiosity as well. We have, I see now, been curating curiosity in the ZCoB for decades now!

Although I only found her work 15 months ago, creative business writer Carol Sanford’s focus is well aligned with these approaches. In No More Gold Stars Sanford states with passion that her focus is on “helping people learn to think for themselves.” The quality of our lives, our workplaces, and our world, she writes, depends on it:

I believe it is necessary because so many of us have been trained out of this fundamental capacity. We are born with innate creativity, filled with the potential to become independent and innovative human beings who can exercise discernment and critical thinking. … Most of us are conditioned to look to others to do our thinking for us. … The consequences of this conditioning are beginning to shake the foundations of democracies around the world.

All of Sanford’s seven books, all of her talks and articles are, one way or another, about learning to think for ourselves, to be curious and ask questions instead of simply following orders and falling quietly into line. In Indirect Work, she says,

Collectively, we are trapped in a mechanistic (or even more archaic) paradigm, and this causes us to make seemingly logical and ethical choices that actually produce destructive results. The urgent question now is how to provide leadership that is more appropriate to the world we find ourselves in, a world that is in crisis precisely because of the paradigms from which we’ve been operating.

(In fact, writing this essay made me curious about my childhood hero, Curious George. In a New York Times article published 20 years ago this week and entitled “How Curious George Escaped the Nazis,” journalist Dinitia Smith explains how the original book, first published in 1941, was written by H.A. Rey and Margret Rey. The couple, it turns out, were German Jews who had escaped Germany for Brazil. Later, they came back to Paris for their honeymoon, and were in the French capital working when the Nazis quickly took control of the French capital on June 14, 1940, a month to the day after Emma Goldman had died in Canada. The honeymooning couple managed to escape, riding their way quietly out of Nazi-controlled Paris on bicycles. The draft of the first manuscript for the book was in their backpacks. Reaching Allied territory, a border policeman, worried that the two were spies, let them go after finding the draft of an illustrated children’s book in their luggage.)

Curiosity, it seems, is sort of like any other skill. To get good at it, we have to practice. Some of us have the benefit of having been brought up in cultures and communities in which curiosity was actively encouraged and supported. Others have had to push past settings in which “too much” curiosity can get you ostracized, or in harder situations still, incarcerated. Practice won’t ever make perfect, but it does sort of make permanent. When something—curiosity in this case—is in our regular routine, it shapes our brains accordingly. Each of us will, of course, have our own way of doing the work. 

Reality.

Ari Weinzweig on owning the choices we make ...

You may be asking: Isn’t “free choice” already the everyday norm? After all, aren’t Americans already “free”? In theory, yes. But in practice, most of us—including me, for the first half of my life—have been trained to act as if we have no choice. We have to go to work. We have to go home. We can’t take the day off. We can’t say anything. We should go to this event. I’m not pointing fingers with any of those—I’ve said all of them many times myself. They are not, I learned the hard way, helpful in the least. While all of these pressures to conform and fit in are real—I’ve certainly felt them—the reality is that we still get to make the decision.

Understanding this reality and actually acting on it are not the same thing. Even after I realized it was an issue for me, it still took two or three years of hard inner work before I stopped behaving as if someone else was making me go to work, sit through meetings, make difficult calls, get up early, or stay up late. Gradually, though, I managed to successfully “change my mind.” Over time, I began to internalize and act on the truth that—whatever it was I was doing or not doing—I was the one deciding. Yes, there were always consequences for the choices I made, but the decision itself was still mine.

Ari's books are HERE. 

Fight.

Ari Weinzweig on living outside today's definitions of living ...

The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places, people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And this has little to do with success as we have defined it.

President Reagan reminded us in his January 5, 1967 Inaugural Address ...

Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.  And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.

Adventurous.

Ari Weinzweig on the adventurous possibilities of leading while lost ...

Keep going. Feeling lost is not fun. I’m reminded every day now, though, that Archie never gave up. If he kept going while dealing with everything he had to overcome, I can get through, too!

This reminded me of the "teapot section in Edward Espe Brown's documentary How to Cook Your Life ... 

Matters.

Ari Weinzweig continues his thoughts on the potential of a poetic approach to leadership ...

Writing a poem when your stress level is high might seem a silly way to spend your time. But like the work of reflection that I wrote about last week, it is anything but. The Poetic Approach to Leadership, I believe, is one more way to stay centered anytime we feel stress levels rising.

Irina Ratushinskaya’s story serves as a reminder, too, about how, even when we may feel helpless, the little things that we can all do really can make a difference. As support gathered from around the world to save her from the Soviet prison system, a campaign was organized to send her Christmas cards. As she tells it, the KGB kept the cards from going through, but she was convinced that the enormous volume of cards had them believing that she was very important and that that belief contributed to their decision to release her. I don't know what the metaphorical equivalent of those Christmas cards is right now but I’m confident that there is one we will collectively come up with.

On the day she was finally freed from prison, October 10, 1986, Ratushinskaya composed a poem in thanks to those who had kept her name alive:

We probably would not have passed

Through everything—from end to end,

Our heads held high, unbowed—

Without your valiant hearts

to light our path.

When I reflect on Irina Ratushinskaya’s life and work, I’m reminded how much what we do each day really matters. Small actions add up. Line breaks break patterns. A well-placed period—metaphorically and/or on paper—can have power far greater than a casual observer can see. When I want to withdraw and hide, Ratushinkaya reminds me to reground, to try harder to write, to stay true to my values even when (or especially when) things around me aren’t going the way I’d like.

In the July 2017 obituary in the New York Times, Sam Roberts wrote,

Ms. Ratushinskaya described the unending conflict in the prison camps between two factions, the inmates and the K.G.B. She also identified a third force: the people who refused to forget the prisoners and fought to free them.

We may feel like our efforts are insignificant, but poetry and learning to lead more poetically have practical and important impacts. And as per Seth Godin’s quote up top, “We are all poets now.” Irina Ratushinksaya would remind anyone who was willing to listen that their words mattered much more than they might imagine.

Questioning.

Ari Weinzweig on fostering free-thinking with frameworks ...

To be clear, thinking effectively for oneself does not mean reactively embracing leaders who tell you to reject ideas outright. That approach is simply another version—dressed in rebellious garb—of blindly following along without thinking for oneself. From painful personal experience, I’ve learned that reactivity is not the same as reflection. While a big “FU” to those in charge may charge you up in the moment, it is not a framework for thoughtful or constructive work.

Frameworks, by contrast, call for questioning. They push people to pay attention, to think things through in a caring and critical way, and to examine their impact on the entirety of the ecosystems of which they are part. Insightful historian Timothy Snyder’s 8th lesson in On Tyranny is,

Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. Remember Rosa Parks. The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow. 

Everyone will surely have heard some version of the saying, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” This story is pretty much the same: Tell staff members exactly what to do all day, and they’ll probably be able to take the “right” action for the specific situation they’ve been shown. Beyond that, they will almost certainly struggle. By contrast, if we help people learn how to think for themselves, they’ll be infinitely more able to self-manage, make wiser decisions, stay centered through stressful times, learn to ask for help, and be happier to help others as well.

Uncover.

Ari Weinzweig on the opportunities of rereading ...

Many years ago, it dawned on me that reading was “listening on paper.” (Writing, to take it a bit further, is essentially “teaching on paper.”) Mitch’s invitation to Deep Listening reminded me of the power of rereading. Deep Understanding does not happen on the first read, the first listen, or the first reflection. I can only imagine how many times Peter Koestenbaum read his own source material, reflected, discussed, and wrote about the ideas included in his books before they went to print. All of which reminds me that one of the most effective paths to Deep Understanding might be revisiting writing that already resonated with us, looking for what more we can uncover. Rereading might be a good regimen to consider adopting. New understanding not only comes from new material, but equally often from experiencing familiar work with fresh eyes, months or even years later. What we see on the second read is almost never the same as it was on the first time through.

Values.

Ari Weinzweig on owning choices ...

Reflecting back, the places where this work was most profound for me were mostly in seemingly mundane ways. Without question, I had a whole bunch of advantages on my side. Nevertheless, I was living out what 19th-century English anarchist Edward Carpenter once wrote so powerfully, “To pass through one’s mortal days … under continual compulsion from others, is not to live; it is only to exist.” Realizing that no one was “making me” do any of those things changed my life. To own the decision to get up early to prepare for the day rather than blame others for scheduling a meeting in the morning; to own my decision to be kind to the cashier at a coffee shop; to realize that I could decide not to go to innocuous social occasions I didn’t enjoy rather than feeling forced to attend. To stop myself from complaining about cold winter weather and own that I was choosing to go out to run in it regardless. To embrace that I was deciding to engage with difficult service situations rather than feeling like “I had to.”

Free choice, to be clear, does not mean, “Do whatever you want, others be damned.” It means owning that I have decided to do whatever it is I am doing—and the mindset with which to approach it—even when, as is often the case, I may well not really want to do it. Yes, of course, social pressure, financial implications, the expectations of others, etc. are always at play. But the point is the same. Going along grudgingly, I learned, is exhausting. I know because I unwittingly lived it. Timothy Snyder says, “Most of the power of authoritarians is freely given.” Physically, I was living in a democracy, but I was freely giving up my internal power every day.

Choosing to consciously own my own choices—even in the smallest of situations—changed my life. And on a bigger scale, as Peter Koestenbaum conveys over and over again in his writing, we choose our values. As he writes, "Inconsiderateness may be a small defect … [but it] is the seed which, when fully grown, becomes the cruelty of war.” Deciding to act (or not) with compassion, empathy, generosity of spirit, humility, and dignity is also a choice.

Struggles.

Ari Weinzweig on deep understanding ...

Frameworks or recipes help guide us closer to positive outcomes but still require us to think, to abstract, to construct our own creative content. What follows is my first effort at discerning something of that sort for making Deep Understanding a reality in our lives. It’s based on my sense of common patterns that people, like Carol Sanford, M.C. Richards, and all of the others I wrote about above have demonstrated. All have arrived at Deep Understanding it seems, by doing some version of the following:

1. Hard work – I haven’t yet come across anyone who has arrived at Deep Understanding who doesn’t seem to devote a great deal of effort to their work. None of them are doing the bare minimum or limiting their efforts to what’s expected of them!
2. Working through challenges, pain, and moments of despair – Every human encounters hard times, however, those who achieve Deep Understanding are able to navigate these hardships in a way that not only helps them endure but allows them to learn and grow. They use their struggles as a catalyst for long-term success, rather than merely surviving through them.
3. Pursuit of mastery – Acumen on the job is essential. No one gets to Deep Understanding without first being really good at what they do. Consistent deep study and continued improvement in the craft seem to correlate with arriving at Deep Understanding. M.C. Richards writes, “If it is life I am fostering, I must maintain a kind of dialogue with the clay, listening, serving, interpreting as well as mastering.”
4. Humility and curiosity – we have to believe that there is so much more to learn from others, more to glean from the world, new insights to aspire to, subjects to be studied, and, always, more creative questions to be asked.
5. Perseverance – Deep Understanding, best I can tell, does not come quickly. It seems to arrive after years of study, reflection, experimentation, and working on the edges of what’s already well-known. Deep Understanding happens when people stick with their subject. M.C. Richards shares, “It took me seven years before I could, with certainty, center any given piece of clay.”
6. Deep self-reflection – Best I can tell, everyone who’s arrived at Deep Understanding has gone through a great deal of self-reflection and introspective work, and made active efforts at increased self-awareness and more effective self-improvement.
7. Awareness of the world – Nearly everyone who’s arrived at Deep Understanding has made it possible by piecing together things that have not been previously paired. In order to make that work, we can’t just be good at a narrow area of expertise. We need multiple inputs that allow us to think differently.
8. Adapting, not adopting – Turning what we learn into a heartfelt and effective-in-our-own-ecosystem new approach is what Stas’ Kazmierski taught us to do many years ago. This way of adapting previously known areas and discovering new insights benefits all involved! As Harvard professor Tina Grotzer writes, it requires a “willingness to work at the edge of one's competence to pursue new knowledge." 

Work.

Ari Weinzweig reflects on lessons learned as a line cook ...

Whether you’re a line cook, a poet, a potter, or a professional basketball coach, there are always intriguing, thought-provoking, and positively impactful lessons to be learned. Deep understanding, I believe, is almost certainly available to anyone who’s ready to do the work to make it happen.

Note that even with all his experience in kitchens, he still respectfully refrains from misappropriating the word "chef".