Blogging with question.club

As part of a new experiment after the death of my dad, my brother Ben and I got together to nerd humbly on tech governance and public ethics. It was a hard day, so I texted in advance to say I hadn’t pre-read and would likely be in gentle dummy mode. He’d had similar concerns. Quickly we decided to keep the meeting but convene it under the warm vibes of a “kind dummies club,” approaching hard things even when brains and bodies were challenged and sore.

While our first club meeting didn’t stick exactly to plan, we ended up flowing with it and starting to exchange and interlink our language sets and existing webs of knowledge to begin building shared maps around the terrain. (At least one of our partners has affably rolled their eyes at this type of behavior, muttering “Here they go: The Goerings are Braining again.”

One of our common lifelong questions is how Kansans (like the kids we grew up as, or members of our families) can bring the heartland values sets we care about to breakneck modern tech development dialogs, like future of AI, or blockchain and decentralized computing. We’ve both become activated on ethics and tech in different ways, but Ben’s interests tend more toward the technical side of sociotechnical systems complexity and mine more toward the socio.

On this gentle, beginner, explorer, body-accepting wavelength, we found it flowed quite easily! We’d started with a vague background notion of Discourse Graphs as a modern citizen science and collaborative, persistent version of mind maps, but the front end of the models Ben had shared looked more to me like the messy systems mapping tools than an Excalidraw in terms of ease.

So we didn’t force a capture medium.

But as we mapped verbally, Ben shared an idea he’d implemented to start getting more good conversations into writing. His site has a blog, and he chatted the link to a blog entry freshly-created that was blank so far, except for the title, which asked simply, “What is ethics?”

My brow furrowed, but then peaked. The skeptic flipped into delight as I found a sense of simple, low-friction brilliance in it. Who cares on the open web anymore if some articles have just a title and no content?

The point, he said, is to start and specify a place where an answer can develop once you’ve found it. First you set the question and the place, then the answer flows in later.

We’ve spent years now playing around with the Zeigarnik effect, so I was gleeful realizing I could put this into motion and decrease the barriers to development of a body of work, just by listing questions with a blank.

All it would cost is the predictive social toll labeled, “Someone might hate me if they click on a question and realize there’s no answer there.” But my inner designer and prototyper quickly wondered, “Hate me — or help me?”

Texting again today, Ben and I found ourselves pointing back and forth at each other’s messages, saying “Oh, that’s a question blog!” Or “There - start a page.”

I typed out a disclaimer to go on new question blogs, and saved it to iPhone Keyboard Text Replacement phrases (one of my favorite tools):

“This page is a placeholder for a forthcoming article, inspired by http://bengo.is. The idea is that by creating a question or short title as an initial placeholder, we can reduce friction for the task of sharing ideas through the open web, and signal easily where conversations with others can help us complete work we intend to develop. If this topic interests you, reach out and let me know the title! Maybe we can each write on our sites to move it forward.”

This blog is my first real “question blog” creation - a short answer to explain question blogs, and potentially inspire or invite more from other folks we know who we love to converse with and would love to codevelop more freely accessible written ideas with. Ben noted that maybe KDC could just become a Question.club where we all get to start empty blogs with interesting questions, and see what fills in later.

Can you imagine? To me it’s such a more simple and generative way of writing.

Grieving our dad, there are so many notes and files we’ve flipped through in the last few months.

But something I wouldn’t mind at all is leaving (or finding) a trail of great questions from someone I loved to get together and learn, ponder or Brain with.

Three Levels of Wealth

How much money do you want or need?

I’m currently looking at three levels of wealth, on a financial basis, to give this question a bit more nuance and connection to things I actually care about, and the functionality of my life.

When we tie our goals and visioning, and our goal-setting, to real outcomes and futures we genuinely believe in, I find that it’s a lot more calm, focused, and aligned to go about getting there.

I’m currently considering wealth (on a financial, personal basis) on three levels:

1. Sustenance,

2. Reserves, and

3. Discretion

Sustenance is the level of financial wealth (including income and/or savings and/or investments) where my needs and an acceptable volume of my wants are addressed.

Reserves is the level of financial wealth, particularly financial or wealth accumulation, that meet my personal values thresholds and belief thresholds on how much “backup plan” I’d like myself and others to have access to, for cases outside of moment to moment Sustenance. This could be sketched out to include retirement, medical emergencies, unforeseen costs outside of regular/irregular costs (like a car insurance bill that comes every six moths - for our household, that’s part of Sustenance). “Reserves” is the level of “extra” I’m happy to see in my personal account for creating margin during stress, strain, and transition - those times when we want resilience and antifragility in our systems - and the level of “reserves” I care about for my household has some sort of tie to some beliefs I’m forming on how I’d like to see societies or countries distribute their own reserves. How much “sovereign wealth” should each citizen hold, vs. the modern construct where a country’s GNP is a certain level, but distribution means that functionally most citizens still don’t have access to a buffer for individual resilience, nor the three intrinsic goods of mobility, variety, and choice that Alison Gopnik and Erin Bennett point to in their phenomenal parenting book The Gardener and the Carpenter.

Discretion is the financial wealth that we hold (or could cultivate and hold - or direct!) beyond Sustenance and Reserves. Once those buckets are full, we’re in the world of Discretion. Here buying all the 1990s NSYNC albums trades off or combines with possibilities like gifting money to others (in our modern context of individual resource ownership). Some folks might invest their Discretion wealth in startups, either with or without an impact objective. Some might buy a $2,000 showerhead. Some might spend it on “hookers and blow,” or betting on a pool game, or getting a tree pruned, or paying off the county so that their favorite tree does NOT get pruned.

People prioritize these differently

The thing about these levels is that people, and even we!, seem to prioritize these differently - or at least order them differently, even amidst different contexts or different stages of life.

I’ve definitely spent money or deployed assets toward Discretion before, when my Sustenance and Reserves were not considered, thought of, taken care of, or addressed.

I’ve definitely saved for Reserves at the expense of both my Discretion and Sustenance.

It’s new for me to be generating resources FIRST for sustenance, thinking carefully and mindfully about the level of reserves I find appropriate (rather than gravitating toward the polarities of “Save ALL the money! No amount is enough!” or “Wealth is for the hoarders! Relinquish any claim on more than I absolutely can survive with in a particular moment in time!”).

How do you think about these layers? How do you prioritize them? Which come(s) first?

Do you have beliefs and goals that are aligned to these layers that organize a system where your own wealth levels and the wishes or beliefs you have about society, either how “it” is or how it should be, ladder over to your own particular experience?

We can realign these levels - and realign ourselves and our beliefs on the world

If these layers aren’t clear for you, it’s definitely possible to realign ourselves with them in a calm, grounded, and clear-minded manner.

It can be an emotionally connected and internally self-honoring process.

It does NOT have to feel like somebody else’s rules, imperatives, or dominion when it comes to how we relate to our money - not just on the level of practice, but on the level of goals, visions, desires, ideals, and patterns we set out and create for ourselves.

It can start by just journaling about these three categories.

For me, after journaling, starting conversations with like-hearted friends who are also exploring their relationships with money and wealth authentically - the good, the bad and the ugly - has been monumentally helpful. Here’s a podcast about how we did that in 2021!

Alongside that, tracking wealth, tracking income, and starting to track the way one influences the other has been a mind-alteringly, yet gradual, way of addressing and shifting some of the old world I felt about money before it was fully examined, into a new set of habits and possibilities where it’s becoming possible for me to get clear for myself and the world about wealth levels and a workable belief system about them, that allows me to nourish myself toward flourishing and thriving - rather than just staying crushed by the hamster wheel of struggle, trying to persistently overcome something shady and mysterious that - ultimately - appeared to be anchored (primarily) inside.

What will you create? What am I missing?

If these ideas or layers provoke insights or new impact for you, reach out to me on Twitter and let me know!

If I missed a layer, or if you have other favorite articles on this topic or things you think relate, I’d love to read those too.

Adding… or taking away?

When you go about pursuing a new personal goal, like being more loving, living in health, growing your leadership, do you view it as a pursuit of something new?

Or do you tend to think about it in an exercise in “taking away”?

When it comes to being “more loving,” for example, Tara Mohr gave a great reminder that we already contain “loving” within us: we don’t need to “add” being loving. We already are, she says — it’s not about a lack, it’s more about what gets in the way.

What gets in the way of having the marriage or partner of your dreams?

What gets in the way of your financial performance matching what you know you would love, or that you’re capable of?

What gets in the way of the work experience you would LOVE to have, either at your life’s purpose or with the managers and roles you’re taking on currently as you build toward that future vision of time, purpose, and impact freedom?

By looking at what gets in the way, we can tap into a secondary pathway for reaching our greatest potential - not by constantly trying to add or fit in “more” to our already packed lives, but by thoughtfully considering what can be edited out - which tends to add more spaciousness, relaxation, calm, and release, once we’ve thoughtfully peeled apart the aspects of old habits or systems that actually aren’t serving the goals we’re stepping into.

Carving away what is no longer needed, thoughtfully and with humanity, is an epic way to make room for who you already are on the inside, that you’d like to enjoy more frequently as part of your external or day-to-day experience.

On Futuristic Responsibility

So often when we talk about “taking responsibility for our lives,” the fun drains out and we end up in a blame game about who did what when — screwing whom.

“Personal responsibility” can devolve into a battle about whether people, ourselves or others, should somehow be “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” getting over it, stopping complaining, or suppressing what isn’t working. That should game is devastating, and can halt SO MUCH progress.

There’s a spin on “responsibility” that’s less like the should game, less a matter of justice, and WAY less reflective of judgment.

Thinking of responsibility in a futuristic way sets the tone for the future you want to lead into.

Taking 100% personal responsibility for nuclear arms, or misogyny, might not make a ton of sense.

But taking on a mindset of 100% future responsibility for the way your leadership lands with women or frequently underestimated folks in your work space can make a huge difference.

That change starts to show up when we shift our mindsets and commitment into that future of declared responsibility.

The magic legitimately moves when we act and continue acting from that commitment to a future responsibility, even if we literally just made it up or invented it freshly from nothing.

If you start from the standpoint that the future doesn’t exist yet, so literally anything could happen, you get to create it - as much as anyone else on the planet.

Anita Holub, one of the coaches I’ve truly loved in my life and career, used to remind me about my power to create by asking, “How’s life going over there, where you are?”

She’d say, “Life goes how you say!” — starting right here, right now, right in this very next moment. “So what do you say about how it’s going to go?”

The frame of responsibility as a future idea, that we can own by acting in total accordance with what we’re calling or creating about the future (at least around us), shifts the focus from what happened to what now?.

It’s consistent with the emerging research on how to move into states of post-traumatic growth after a massive hardship, rather than tpost-traumatic stress. Julia B. Canfield, referencing Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s work in Burnout, summarized once that post-traumatic stress asks “why me?” and post-traumatic growth, alongside tons of appropriate grieving, honoring, and story-sharing, asks “What now"?”

That “What now?” is the essence of futuristic responsibility.

It doesn’t mean the past was our fault.

It doesn’t mean we “asked for” or did anything to “deserve” what happened to us or our world through or lives (or the time before it).

But it does mean we’re signing up, and putting our word on the line, for a different future.

What would you like to take to 100%, if you could say anything, just by declaring your own “futuristically responsible” future?

Run a Work Process Experiment

One of my favorite things to do with clients in a coaching setting is to sit down and look together at how it goes when they approach their work.

Particularly if avoidance or procrastination are influencing your work or life reality right now, it can be so powerful to bring a specific example of something you’re avoiding into a Work Process Experiment with another set of eyes.

The process itself is simple. When I’m working with a client, we carve out time, we sit down, and they go to do the thing.

What comes up when you do?

What does it feel like?

What happens in the mind?

What happens in the breath?

What goes on in the body?

Sometimes, in trying to uncrush ourselves from backlog or overwhelm, our inner strategists get busy and try to PLAN our way out of our situations.

Stepping into a Work Process Experiment addresses the experience layer of this situation, not the theory of the reality, but the actual, lived reality.

Trying to check your email (that feels terrible) with the presence and support of someone who’s on your team and who’s got your back is a new kind of experience.

Seeing something horrible in your inbox feels different when someone else is there with you, holding space for you to watch you - not just try to force the thing.

When we do this process in realtime, it takes as little as 20 minutes (maybe even less). We play with tools from the Prototype Thinking user testing playbook, including saying “Pause” and “Resume” as though we’re actors on a movie set. Either one of us can “pause” the experiment to chat about what’s coming up, to notice what’s happening in the moment, and to share insights with one another.

Reflecting on your work practice, in the moment, specifically when stress and avoidance have you by the guts, shows a whole new view of what’s possible.

I like to invite folks to write down their "Plan” for responding to procrastination in the experiment BEFORE they begin.

Then, when your eyes hit the inbox, the plan has a way of sometimes falling out the window.

Rather than this being a problem, this is actually the first step in the stage of life-building I like to think of as “Play.”

With “Pause” and “Resume” powers at play, we then get to rerun the work process experiment as many times as we like to, making tiny micro-shifts the focus of our observations. We’re not reinventing the world. We’re not solving all procrastination forever. We’re not cheating death or shortcutting our way through.

We’re using lived experience, real emotions and actions, to invent a process that works better for you specifically, when YOU encounter the lived reality of friction.

Because there are two of us, we’ve got two brains on hand to not just explore what’s going on, but to also synthesize together the new versions of the experiment you’re designing.

Once we call it, even after just 15 minutes, you’ve got a prototype in hand you can take back into your working process.

Will it survive the realities of your working environment forever?

Will it work perfectly well without a flaw in all kinds of work situations?

Probably not, at this stage - after all, our initial environment for experimenting included two brains and two bodies, with a mission to make something up!

But in the week (or even the half hour) that follows the Work Process Experiment, you get to take your learnings and our latest iteration into real life, without me present.

You get to test it on different workflows.

You get to test it when the baby’s screaming, or when your spouse or sibling is crossing through your space to walk outside.

And having played around with those tools of “Pause” and “Resume,” you can start iterating on the really simple three-step breadcrumb trail you made for yourself in our original session.

Maybe your process will differ when you tackle a piece of light work, like email, or super-deep, creative in-the-flow work, like a strategic project or life plan you’ve been wanting to invest in.

But, there’s no rule for how many great ways you can have to interact with the work you need to do in your life!

Each of these can become its own iterative experiment, part Plan, and part Play.

When we meet again, we get to revisit how it’s been going. The coolest thing is that when we play around with real, lived, recurring experience, you actually don’t have to track and remember everything that happened. We can literally just call up something else that you’ve been stopped by, in procrastination or avoidance, and see what happens this time. Sometimes you may not even realize how old discoveries quickly leapt into your obvious, practiced reality.

And sometimes the same old hangup friends will re-emerge. :)

By playing around with a Work Process Study, I find that clients (and I!) gain the opportunity to get out of our heads, gain from planning but also keep it in its right role, and get one small thing out of the way even in the process of a coaching session. We set off a learning, reflection, mindfulness and adaptation process that becomes a new game our brain can play, besides “keep us safe from this horrible email inbox no matter what.”

We bring curiosity back to the process of our work and procrastination, giving up what can feel crushing: that analysis of our results.

Next time you’re stuck on a project, try running this process on your own. Or, if you’d like to try it with a partner on board, schedule a coaching session! Bring something you’re stuck on, and we can get right down to work!

Why We’re Not Technical Enough

Hint: It’s not us.

Today I had my first encounter with one of the best things I’ve ever seen on the internet: Bharatanatyam Dance. I found it by following the listed profile interests of a new colleague of mine from Write of Passage, an online writing program — Santhoshi DB.

Instantly I was struck by the absolute technical precision of Bharatanatyam Dance.

Some people on the internet (or in writing world) are deeply fascinated with German words. German strings together small words to become large words, and as such, each very long German word can tell a whole story.

In my very, very limited study of Sanskrit so far (the Latin of Indian languages as far as I can tell) (very limited, but very impactful), words in the realm of Sanskrit - similar to German - string together seed sounds. Where German strings together small words to describe the function or the operation in physical reality of an item or tool, Sanskrit seems - to me - to string together phenomena in the conceptual realm which tend to have some overtone of beauty or simplicity, some suggestion or pointer toward piece.

After the first five seconds of seeing a YouTube video on Bharatanatyam Dance, I was instantly reminded of a conversation with my husband yesterday, who got plucked by his division to help manage a Women in Technology track for their Culture Club in Azure.

What movie would they recommend for a “movie night”/fundraiser on issues for women in tech?

For me — if we’re going to choose a movie to watch on women in tech, my guts want to ask about the value. If we optimize for value, so that folks who participate get something awesome for their money, my brain wants to consider… who do we mean by Women? And what do we mean by Tech?

Today I am keen to suggest to us that, if and as we want to talk about the “history” of “women” in “tech,” we have a MASSIVE opportunity to create and offer meaning and make our women’s groups in technology actually powerful by looking broadly at the ways in which women have been being technically adept and designing product for tens of thousands of years. And if we are at all interested in doing that fairly, thoroughly, or inclusively, it would make sense to look at that question in context - of the factors of production that Women have had available over time, and the factors of production from which they’ve been categorically, and violently, excluded.

Dance is Experience Design

The first time I did Bollywood dancing in earnest, I came home hurting like hell from head to toe. Tiny, sprightly women warriors, compared to my five ten scale, jumped and turned and moved and pumped body iron like crossfit magnates while the rubber bands of my limbs began to squeak and then tear as I followed along shamefully but enthusiastically.

Bollywood is warrior training, folks.

Bharatanatyam Dance is straight-up product design, to my eyes.

Women completely cut off from the factors of production for capital-based products for tens of thousands of years have been doing this stuff in plain sight, with a forced customer base of men, to my eyes.

If we stopped ruling Lived Experience out as Valid or Credible Leadership or Career Experience, we’d have a whole new potential workforce of scrum masters in about one second, if the epicly powerful performers and practitioners of Bharatanayam had any interest in actually devoting their massive skillsets to the interests of tech firms.

Women in Tech are already practicing this kind of masterful art and craft on the side, and have been for decades, and tech loses out big when we force women to craft or cover their tens of thousands of hours of expertise leading teams and crafting product for rapturous audience delight through art and designforms like Bharatanayam.

A New Form of Leader

I’m so sick of hearing hand-wringing in the tech field about all the women who are just not interested in entering CS or other skills and qualifications pipelines. I’m so sick of sitting around with my amazing male friends who didn’t graduate from high school, or studied art history, sharing about their journeys in Product teams from some of the world’s biggest companies, while others in the field say cringingly that they wish they had the pipeline, but women either just aren’t skilled, or aren’t interested.

We’re interested in technology, friends. Technology, done well, blends into the background. It’s the place where science turns to magic. It’s the place where tools become livelihoods. It’s the place where we organize and scale technique, according to our values, through the essential media and factors of production of our time, so that humanity in one corner of industry or the world can more quickly both:

• Learn, and

• Live

according to the most effective ideas, techniques, and tactics of humanity elsewhere, in accordance with our values.

Tech is funded and developed according to the values of its funders and investors.

Tech is developed into high-fidelity products where folks with access to capital invest it in building out the permanence of a prototype to the extent it can be, and is, distributed to the wider market.

Marketing plays a role in determining whether that tech finds a lifelong or well-utilized home in the workflows of the masses. People don’t trust technology alone. They don’t get it. They (sometimes rightly) bear suspicion that the overlords and their salesmen are actually more interested in booking the producer surplus of the item sold, rather than the utility or wonderfulness of the consumer surplus, the profit the customer earns in terms of their lived experience, from the risk that they’ve taken to deploy the new product and invite it into their core and treasured workflows, as an input to their values - their jobs to be done.

In tech, our leadership is old and trite and often dead on the inside, rotting like a rootless old tree.

A new form of leader is immediately available. She or he (or ze) is hiding in your teams already.

They’re right there in plain sight. They’re alive on the inside. They’re rooted in the ground. They’re - very often - fertilizing and tending to that root structure with new inputs on the side, lively ongoing endeavors that replenish their buckets and inspire new ideas in their life, day after day, which get scoped right out of the workplace because our current standards for working and living have us scope out the expertise each and every human brings to work, by virtue of their outside life.

The new Leadership Laboratory for tech, especially in an age of COVID, is Life. Specifically, the practice and real weekly investment of being a leader who also Co-Invests alongside their dayjob in a Life that Leaves Them Alive.

When women do this, either while participating or taking a step out of the formally-recognized workforce, they prosper and exponentially expand.

If you want to learn about time management in the workplace, goes the 100% consistent advice behind closed doors, go ask a woman leader who has just returned to the workforce after having a baby.

She’s got something important going on outside work. She’s scoping and scanning her environment like a boss. She’s primed for prime investment. She’s absolutely rigorous about creating amazing results not just for one endeavor, but for her portfolio. She’s acting like an investor. And get ready for a TON of great advice if she is willing to staff her own time to share with you her methods for some outlandish Return on Invested Capital.

But I think we get wrong in tech, conventionally, the mechanism by which women who return from having kids become such absolutely badass Time, Energy, Effort, Leadership and Cycle investors in the world of conventionally-recognized Tech Work.

They’ve also grown.

Growing Outside Work

This will not be a long section.

Growing outside work is a matter of facing challenges head-on, and then reflecting on them, with intention to develop.

Employees who do this actively outside of work will develop first as individual people, then as family/community leaders, and immediately as professional leaders.

Employees who do not know they need to do this outside work, even very high-ranking leaders, will not develop, and their root structure and inner tree fibers will rot.

They won’t know what to do, so they’ll protect the bark of that disintegrating inside.

It starts to function like narcissism, or junkyard dog syndrome, or an old and festering, hidden wound.

They’ll also feel dead inside, which will slowly expand toward the outside, until the conflict between their bark-mask and underlying empty feeling, that unrelenting ache of growthlessness and alivelessness, threatens to cut off their heart’s meaning-as-blood-supply. They’ll leave or spontaneously combust. I strongly believe the absolutely shitty behavior we’ve seen from highly-leveraged male leaders in our time has a LOT to do with this phenomenon of feeling and experiencing deadness on the inside. Really high-level creepers are constantly seeking out underage women to hang around with in our culture. It’s predator species behavior, it’s seeking companionship with prey, and it’s a power dynamic that leaves men (and non-men who practice this form of companionship) dead and dying on the inside, and now we’ve seen plenty of documentaries about how the Dying Stars of Michael Jackson (god love him), Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and so forth, become well-understood black holes that drag so much aliveness down with them as they burn.

The most well-understood black holes are created when a massive star reaches the end of its life and implodes, collapsing in on itself. - Korey Haynes, Discover Magazine, “How Do Black Holes Form?”

Growing Outside Work is the #1 way to stay fed as a living star, a living light source and living leader, in an organization. And I believe everyone should have access to activate and direct our own personal leadership capability. I believe all teams who fail to take advantage of this will be less resilient, engaged, and lively; their retention and capacity will suffer; and they will absolutely fail over time to capture their highest potential with customers, cross-functional colleagues, and their company’s top and bottom line purposes.

Where We Go From Here

It’s not always that much fun to look at leadership, and look at space or nature, and see that macrocosm translate right back on into our own inner microcosms, our inner orientation of ourselves and our colleagues on our teams, and to feel that ache of collapse sitting right in the ligaments between our bones and our muscles.

But, seeing the frame, we can adjust it.

Find your true leaders.

Find the people on your teams who are practicing Bharatanayam on the side, leading in those endeavors, risking alienation if they can’t cover their aliveness in the contagion of deadness that is modern middle workforce participation, even in Big Tech America.

Don’t out them. As a leader, Out Yourself.

To solicit your best people to shift their behavior of leaving their best traits off the table, stop silencing yourself and your outside-of-work greatness, so your team can watch from the response you receive and shape, whether it’s actually safe yet over there for them to do the same.

Eat the Dogfood First.

And once you do, get ready for the best 1-1s of your life; get feedback on the risk you took to share honestly about your Aliveness Outside Work and the impact it had on your people.

Note who loves it. Note who’s freaked. Note who looks away when you ask them, and get curious.

Maybe there are folks right here on my team, right here on my family, who could absolutely be trusted with More.