The difference between can and must is the key to understanding the profound effects of self-interest on reasoning. It’s also the key to understanding many of the strangest beliefs—in UFO abductions, quack medical treatments, and conspiracy theories.
When a person models vulnerability, they signal to their teammates that it’s okay to feel inadequate, to need help, and to not know the answer.
Psychological safety has a lot to do with how vulnerable teammates are with one another. When a person can openly and non-judgmentally share what they need help with, other teammates are more likely to respond in kind. This helps everyone learn faster and Do Better Work
I wrote last week about appreciation. As of late, I’ve been captivated by The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry. One of Lessonly’s customers recommended it to me, and it continues to move and challenge me. The “thin book” descriptor is accurate: It’s just sixty pages. But what it lacks in thickness, it makes up for in content.
In his strange and exhilarating book The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky writes, “In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.”
If you want to make difficult conversations less difficult, these two stanzas are for you.
For whatever reason, we’ve been conditioned to view tension and conflict as signs of dysfunction. Feeling or witnessing them makes us feel as though things are damaged.
“We have difficult conversations” is one of Lessonly’s values. It is an incredibly important ambition for our team. When done well, difficult conversations foster psychological safety and give our team a significant competitive advantage
The Fundamental Attribution Error is a psychosocial phenomenon that affects everyone with a pulse. It’s what happens when you attribute your own errors to your circumstances and the errors of others to their character.
It is entirely human to feel tension and conflict in high-growth environments—in fact, tension is a naturally occurring phenomenon. But teams that are able to disagree, lean into the tension, and healthily work towards a solution have an under-appreciated superpower.
