Others’ Deliberation
I have a confession to make. I struggle with having patience so people can catch up to me. Innovators often begin with a vision in their minds. This vision is developed through active and passive thinking that takes place over months, years, and decades in some places. In your mind, you have played through the changes that need to be made, sketched out the concepts that connect the various stages of implementation, and you have constructed what the world will look like after your idea has gained a following in the world. All the benefits have been clarified. The objections have been answered. In your mind, there are no obstacles and no questions. This is where you run into problems as an influencer.
Others do not take up residence in your head. When you share your idea, others have not had the many hours of careful deliberation that you have undertaken. All the questions that you have answered, often implicitly, are open issues in the minds of others. Even keeping aside the very real fact that you might be wrong about some things, other people have a hard time meeting you where you are because they haven’t gone through the process of deliberation on your idea.
Need for Growth
Because individuals always need to grow, groups, teams, and organizations have two choices: to grow or end. Groups that don’t grow end up stifling the growth of individuals, which leads to the group falling apart through people leaving or it leads to other pathologies that occur as a result of increasing energies directed into hardening and protecting the status quo.
New Approach
Within the Alternative Book Club, I have been working on a new way of writing. With great success, our club has utilized an anthology format for our books. This allows individuals to write their own chapter exploring a certain facet of a concept. The anthology process is a great way to foster collaborative writing of books. There is very little need for integration between chapters other than all feeding into an overall unifying theme. Essentially, each contributor writes in parallel. This approach allows for content to be created rapidly and has been a big reason why we’ve been able to write 4 books within 2 years.
The new approach to writing that I am exploring consists of bringing together the voices of the club and combining them into an integrated narrative. What we are finding is that this is a monumentally more difficult task. Conceived as a leadership narrative, the story involves a central chronology with three different arcs that run through the whole book. It’s a much more complex animal than what we have done before.
I first began thinking about this approach almost 2 years ago. My vision is clear and the questions I had were answered long ago. But others have not undergone the same process of deliberation. We’re not in the same place. It is easy to forget that. We published authors in the Alternative Book Club, field questions from folks who want to write books. Many of these questions catch us off guard by their seeming simplicity. We forget looking back, achievements look smaller; but, things look daunting before doing them. The same concept applies to any innovator – any influencer.
The Influencer Challenge – Help Others Catch Up
One of the biggest challenges I’ve been struggling with is how much of the conceptual vision needs to be shared with the others. Sometimes folks don’t need the big conceptual vision to do their job. That’s not the case here. After this project has been proceeding in fits and starts, I realized that I needed to give others more glimpses into my head. I’ve started sharing a series of conceptual models, which I hope will help others to realize where I would like us to go.
But even today, some of us are struggling with returning to the comfortable anthology format. But that would be counter to the goals of this project and a valuable opportunity for growth and learning would be lost.
I’m finding my biggest avenue of growth is to help articulate my ideas and to abbreviate others’ learning curves. There is quite the test of my leadership and communication skills and is providing me different, but no less valuable, opportunities for growth than the others.
We need to be patient and take the time to meet others where they are. We must help them make the connections that will help them to make their necessary contributions to our projects and to continue their growth journey while we continue ours.
