Leadership

I recently had a conflict with someone I trust and respect. I made a suggestion regarding how to perform a certain task, with her being in a position of more authority than me, and my suggestion seemed to strike a nerve. She denied my case on the following three premises:

She had more experience, therefore she should just be followed and trusted.

She was distressed by conflict and so we shouldn’t create any.

She was uncomfortable with changing things, therefore, we wouldn’t.

To me, a person who expects blind obedience, who cannot step outside of fear in a moment of tension, and who sacrifices long term growth for short term comfort, is not a fit leader.

Some thoughts and examples.

1. When is leadership not accompanied by conflict? Leaders exist because we need people who can manage and wade through conflict to find good solutions. On top of that, the sheer presence of leadership almost always creates tension. In what nation does a president take office and every single citizen is ok with it? In which episode of Lost did someone not feel like Jack was unfit to lead the survivors?1 Additionally, recall that individuals have personal, often selfish, agendas. Good leaders set aside personal agendas for the greater good. This, predictably, upsets individual agendas, creating conflict. Therefore, leaders should take comfort in knowing that conflict is not always the end, but instead, if your heart and purpose are true, a reminder of the hard work ahead of you in creating teams and tribes which work for something larger than themselves.

Note: Less self-aware leaders may mistake their own individual agendas for big picture agendas. As a remedy, think carefully about not your own purpose and motivations, but the role played in society by the group you are leading. The best fit for all involved is a good place to start.

Secondly, conflict between individuals motivated by big picture, non-selfish thinking is of a different nature than the conflict I discuss above, and should not be viewed through the lens of my argument above.

2. By making any decision, or even opting to not make a decision, leaders upset balance and create disarray. Even leaders who make largely positive or good advancements create conflict and disarray. Steve Jobs caused a lot of problems. Abraham Lincoln arguably more. Jesus Christ? Insane. This is impossible to avoid - taking a stance is necessary in leadership and in life. Make decisions as wisely as you can and know that if your decisions are true and fair then the logic behind them will speak for itself. If it doesn’t, don’t be afraid to make your case. Explaining your decision and motivations effectively, with careful attention to your audience, can have a positive effect on persons involved, increasing trust between leader and follower by communicating deeper knowledge of a common purpose and shared goal. If your audience or team disagrees, you may have an entirely different problem.2

3. I would encourage any leader who is not creating conflict to start thinking bigger about the purpose of the work they are doing, and make bigger decisions to match it. Leaders who do not disrupt rarely make progress.3 Purpose is paramount here. Taking a close look at where you and your team comes from, what brought you together in the first place, and the good work you have accomplished together in the past is a great way to get a sense of the affecting potential you and your team can have. Purposes can be simple and superficial, like selling as much product as possible, or more lofty and heartfelt, like creating products which influence human lives in positive ways. Both of these examples work, but one is arguably more valuable than the other.4 Find the specific motivation that unites your team and spend time fully realizing it together.

To close, I want to specify that my friend whom I had this conflict with is worthy of much adoration. Her drive to maintain peace and speak hope and love into others is an asset in a world fraught with grief, pain, and distrust. I desire only to use this situation to speak to the nature of leadership and the ways in which it can be misconstrued. She later explained her thinking to me and I think her decision was the right one. As people, we could all learn to be more like her. As leaders, I would encourage all of us to see that conflict and disruption are not rooted in evil, but can be used as tools for positive change when wielded by those who maintain clear perspective, honest hearts, and a strong sense of purpose.

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1. I haven’t actually seen all of Lost. Is there one?

2. Still thinking about this.

3. Elon Musk’s high propensity to disrupt coupled with his hugely high propensity to progress make me confident that a leader with low propensity to disrupt would have a hugely low propensity to progress. Maybe there’s a beet farmer who creates 0 conflict by working alone and innovating hugely in his own work, but who is he leading? Let me know if you think of anyone…

4. Try this Simon Sinek TED Talk. He compares the marketing strategies used (historically) by Apple and Microsoft in order to make a case. I think you’ll find his argument compelling.  

Nexus; Why Our Devices Aren't The Real Issue (Yet)

When I was in 2nd grade I knew a girl who had an iPhone. It was awesome, it was better than my LG Chaperone, and I wanted one. So I pooled my resources and eventually compromised for an iPod Touch. It was amazing and I played lots of Tiny Wings on it. Then some years later, just when it was old enough to be part of a carrier promotion, I got an iPhone 4S. That was even better because now I was sending text messages and making calls like everyone else I knew. Then a few more years later my parents and I each got iPhone 6's, and even though I was relatively late in getting it, I still totally adored that device. I paired mine with the official black leather slip case and a space grey Apple Watch Sport and I couldn't get over myself about it. I was so proud of my little luxury entourage.

The LG Chaperone. Awful, isn't it?

A year has passed and I'm still proud of that entourage, except things are a little different now because 2 months ago that iPhone 6 bit the dust. Maybe I dropped it, maybe I didn't, but somehow the cellular antenna went out. The worst part was I had to get pretty creative about fixing it because none of us were keen on buying a replacement in full, and because the screen was cracked I couldn't fix it myself like with my ol' 4S, whose screen I had once replaced. (Thanks, Tim Cook.) So when I vied for a repair option that fit our budget and found that it didn't exist, I did something only a truly desperate Apple lover could have done. In the name of science and savings, I switched to Android.

Enter, affordability, maybe!

In my mobile life up to that point I had only ever used iOS, so I was prepared for the worst, but when I got a Samsung Galaxy J3 I was surprised to find that Android was clunky, but not as clunky as I expected. I learned my way around Google's mobile OS pretty quickly, and the biggest problem was that for the first time I had to be concerned about smartphone hardware on it's own, as opposed to simply adopting the software-hardware blend Jony Ive claims to have so seamlessly rendered.

From this..

To this.

While learning to use my J3 I kept waiting to discover something dramatic and perspective altering about AndroidOS. I thought that eventually there'd be some feature that I didn't love and I'd say "That's it! Apple really is the best there is!" That's not what happened, and my Android experience continues to simply be workable and unassuming. What I did gain instead of an ah-ha moment was a clear understanding of something I'd always known to be true but had never really come face-to-face with. Our phones are life-altering but they are not our lives. No matter how connected we are, no phone is going to be more valuable than it's function, which is, or was at one point, to connect us to each other. Both Android and iOS have features that set them apart, but they share a profound commonality which is that they're organized by people who want you to stay within the phone. Interfaces and designs actually encourage behaviors like binging mercilessly, suggesting more content and even letting you share to other services so you can embed yourself in other platforms for a while. These designs are "evil" and they keep you hooked. Make no mistake honest design is still declared valuable, especially by Apple, but after using Android it is clear to me that the problem with smartphones goes beyond individual designs and the phones themselves. What top-tier design teams and users alike seem to have forgotten is that no text message carries more personal value than a face-to-face conversation, no matter how effectively that message can convey the senders meaning. If the function of a phone is to connect us to each other, then we need a new kind of phone. Not one that keeps us inside of the phone itself, binging and scrolling and tweefing on and on and on, but one that works in harmony with our real world interactions.

dhammza via finesilverdesign.com

Having lived in both Google and Apple techno-systems, I think it's time to take a step back and look at the big picture. There are problems with even Apple designed products that add to a more global issue; on a macro scale our phones are not improving the quality of our interactions, they are detracting from them. I believe wholeheartedly that if the true purpose of the phone is communication, and I think it should be, then I think that needs to be looked at a little closer.

Even when talking is hard we as a people are nothing without togetherness. 

Even when we disagree, disagreement makes people stronger. 

Our internet echo-chambers close our minds, our public displays online make us prideful,

and while technically phones make it easier to see each other in the real world, I think they actually make it harder by providing an easy way out of many difficult social situations. Our phones too easily allow us to avoid confrontation and honesty, things that are painful but ultimately character-defining. They shouldn't.

We need phones that, through their design, drive us away from these tendencies and help us to form equal and opposite behaviors. Phones that use the internet to keep us within the world, rather than simply within the internet. That will be an innovation, and that will reinvent. 

Cultural Reverse Engineering; Creative Oppurtunity and Artificial Intelligence

Just over a month ago filmmaker Oscar Sharp and technologist Ross Goodwin effectively realized a screenplay written by an AI that calls itself Benjamin. The film is called Sunspring. Here's a link.
The way Benjamin works is easy to sum up: the AI gets fed lots of sci-fi scripts, and then the AI spits one back out based on all the ones it just absorbed. Benjamin's core functionality is actually similar to the way auto-correct works on most phones--after a user enters a lot of words or phrases the software can learn to predict what the user might be trying to say. So now take that concept and apply it to a film and that's (basically) what happened. 

Sunspring fascinates me because there are moments in watching Sunspring where one feels the same as if one is watching any other sci-fi film. This is because, while the film has no central purpose or significance, the elements and tropes we know and love are found abundantly within Benjamin's script. As movie watchers I think we are conditioned, over-time and indirectly, to respond uniquely to certain types of interaction and dialogue, and in Sunspring there are powerful moments such as these. For example, when "H" is standing next to himself, "H2", who is sitting on the stairs, it is easy to feel surprise and wonder because a duplicated character is a common way to reveal time-travel in a film. Except there isn't time-travel in Sunspring, we just react as if there might be, and that's a strange disconnection. But in this disconnection there are patterns, we see the summation of a genre, and we can easily glean from this summation that which most-effectively characterizes a genre.

To talk about an entirely different AI for a second, what's happening with Google Deepmind is incredible. The team made a piece of software called AlphaGo that reigned victorious when pitted against Go champion Lee Se-dol. It got good at Go similarly to how Benjamin learned to write a script, they showed it a lot of games of Go. The most interesting part is not that the AI won though, it's how the AI one that is so fascinating. Lee Se-dol says AlphaGo used moves and strategies he never would have thought of, and that when he used these moves against other human players he had winning results. 

I am very excited to see what happens when AI is taught to write songs or books or any other artistic medium laden with convention, not because I want AI to do these things for us as that would be entirely devoid of meaning and punch gaping holes in our cultural fabric, but because I want the songs AI writes to teach us how to write better songs, and the scripts it writes to teach us about what makes a good script. I'm wondering if we can't use what AI creates to learn what makes up a given thing, and then turn to make our own, perhaps deciding what to keep, what to avoid, and what creative solutions or connections we haven't thought of yet.