The last of the series! Thanks to everyone who was part of it.
Danny Meyer has changed the way we think about hospitality and what it’s like to eat out. His new book comes out in a few days, and it was a great excuse for two friends to sit down and talk about solving problems.
Your turn. Go host your own KnotChat. Thanks for reading and for leading.
We can either accept that this is the state of our audience and plan appropriately…
Or do the very difficult work of changing their state.
Jennifer is a marketer, project manager and impresario. We’ve worked together on projects, and it’s always a delight. She and I sat down to talk about the hard work of what’s next.
I don’t believe we’re each born with a purpose. We have more freedom than that, the freedom to choose the impact we’ll make.
Our work, though, does have a purpose. The change we seek to make. The people we’re here to make it for.
When we commit to work with purpose, it transforms us as well as the people we’re engaging with.
Who’s it for, what’s it for… if we can continue to return to the purpose of this product, this meeting, this ad–then we can find a common language and coordinate our efforts to make a difference.
Resistance pushes us in many ways. It pushes us to imagine that our work isn’t for us, we’re just biding time until we get to the real stuff. It pushes us to deny responsibility or to blame the system. And mostly, it pushes us to refuse to name the purpose of how we’re spending our time.
Stuck is just another word for being conflicted about our purpose. The knot holds us back because we’ve become entangled in goals that are mutually exclusive.
The problem is with the “and.” (Often a ‘but’ in disguise.)
I want to make the art I have in my head, and I want the market to love it.
I want to have the wedding of my dreams, and I don’t want to worry about money, and I want my cousins and friends to enjoy every bit of it.
I want to take few risks and I want extraordinary returns.
I want to have a difficult conversation and I want there to be no tension, stress or possible downsides.
We hesitate to admit what we really want because when the ‘and’ shows up, we can see we’re being unreasonable. It’s easier to simply hope and dream.
Strategic thinking doesn’t ignore the systems all around us, or the trade-offs that scarcity and competition require. Instead, it embraces them.
Nicole Walters is a bestselling author, a TV star, a community leader, a mom and a maker of magic.
Here’s the conversation we did about The Knot.
PS to celebrate the book, my publisher put the Kindle edition of This is Strategy on sale for $2 this week.
CORRECTED LINK: Today at 10:30 ET, I’ll be doing a live QA about problems and the Knot. Details are here. Thanks.
They’re not the same.
They (mostly) don’t even rhyme.
People can evade responsibility by saying it’s someone else’s fault.
They can take responsibility, even if it’s not their fault.
In fact, being an adult involves taking responsibility for things that we could point out are not our fault.
We can soothe our unwillingness to take responsibility by blaming someone else, or we could surprise everyone by accepting it in advance.
And shame? Shame’s the deal killer, the dream destroyer and toxic. It’s often on offer, but we don’t have to accept it.
Today at 10:30 ET, I’ll be doing a live QA about problems and the Knot. Details are here. Thanks.
Our world is shaped by contagious and competitive games.
Along the way, we invent scoreboards that change the culture, and badges that we award to various players.
An example: How did we end up with weddings that cost $200,000?
It’s a great example of a runway cultural dynamic, a system within a system, a game that rewards the players who keep it going.
Weddings, like most things humans participate in, are about status and affiliation. A demonstration of the hierarchy, a chance to fit in and be part of something.
Being married is a badge, but the way we get married is processed on a scoreboard.
Weddings are group events, you can’t have one by yourself. As a result, the ornamentation and structure are broadcast, often to horizontal peer groups. Friends and relatives, some of whom are likely to get married soon. “People like us do things like this” is the definition of culture, and weddings have the ‘people like us’ part built in.
The industry benefits from a more expensive event. Since a florist or caterer can only do one wedding at a time, making each wedding more profitable (see below for more on profitable) is the best way for them to meet their goals. They have an incentive to turn the scoreboard and keep the game going.
Spending more turns the ratchet, and the ratchet almost always turns in one direction.
Of course, the most prevalent contagious and competitive game system is capitalism. A simple metric–profit–that’s universal, easy to measure and rewarded–creates an interoperable game that almost everyone is part of.
If you want to change people (your industry, your community, the world), the most direct method is to build a contagious and competitive game that works within the uber-capitalism game, until it gets enough momentum that it spirals in its own direction.
It’s not simply money. We can use any easily sought and compared metric. How you look at the gym, or your time running a mile are both metrics on the scoreboard.
A badge/label (like ‘organic’ or ‘B. Corp’) is a start, but without a chance to exceed, it can stall because it doesn’t encourage people to seek status by doing more of it (hence the endless litany of post-organic certifications that some food purveyors seek out). “How can I be more more compliant to the rules?” is not an endless game. “Compared to them” might be.
Badges are finite. Check the box, get the badge. As a result, they level off.
Scoreboards that spread have ‘more’ built in. Birders have lists of lifetime finds, DuoLingo users have streaks and the Olympics, in addition to medals, have world records. Youth sports go off the rails because we act as though there’s a trophy shortage, and the cost of college increases because of the feature race of more. The same is true for diagnostic medical equipment. Compared to what?
The dynamics involved don’t automatically make each of these games bad, though. The hard work is seeing the effective dynamics and then putting them to work to build a sticky, contagious game that moves us toward better.
Who’s it for?
This problem you’re solving–is it your problem or are you focused on someone else?
I had a conversation with Rodrigo about his restaurant in Mexico:
You can have your own conversation with a colleague: find the free tool at: theknot.chat
I’ve built a simple website that facilitates the conversations that can help us get unstuck.
In The Knot, I describe how we get entangled, hoping for two things to co-exist that cannot. We hide behind the entanglements, refusing to see them, and so our problems can feel permanent.
Working with thousands of people over the last few months, I’ve found that a few simple questions can unlock a deep conversation about what’s holding us back. But these conversations are easier with someone else. In person is great, Zoom works too.
This week, I’ll be posting some of the KnotChats I’ve hosted.
If you’d like to be part of one, you can organize one in just a few minutes. I hope you’ll check out the free site I built. It’s at TheKnot.chat.
Optimized for the phone, the key is that you’ll want to do it with someone who needs you. It’s 1:1, private and powerful. Who can you help?
I’m posting a simple video with instructions below:
