Gray Rhinos Here, There, and Everywhere
Upstream: Blessings and Traumas
The metaphor of the “black swan” is used to describe highly improbable, even unimaginable events. Michele Wucker married the elephant in the room and the black swan to describe a "gray rhino": a neglected, highly probable, high impact threat.
The last two-plus years feel like a rhino ran over public and private institutions, journalism, history, psychology, urban planning, parenting, public policy, theology, and stand-up comedy.
The risk mitigation actions implemented in reaction to the first pandemic of the digital era affected global psychological safety and were a formative life experience which will remain imprinted on users and constituents of the Generation Zoom cohort.
I sought out nearly a 100 perspectives from my existing network and some new contacts to pressure-test, fill in gaps, and improve my understanding.
Before March 2020, I intuitively agreed with the belief that trauma was housed in the body. The incapacity, lack of vocabulary, and lack of emotional regulation to process trauma and tragedy can lead to triggers, unhealthy behaviors, and individual pathologies. That if we don’t control our thoughts, our thoughts will control us.
These same dynamics can occur in organizations operating at scale or any experiencing disruption. The monkey ladder experiment illustrates a traumatic thing that happened to someone else before (who doesn’t even work here anymore!) can end up defining team and leadership culture today. We are hairless apes responding to stimuli and conditioning our colleagues and optimizing individuals to institutional tribal knowledge. Sometimes, this can end up dissuading attempts at behaviors which may actually result in healthy outcomes (i.e. a nutritious banana).
My response to attrition, re-orgs, or mergers is usually “Culture changes one funeral at a time, but also with every birth.” Inconsequential leavers and influential new hires can shift tolerances and acceptable behaviors which define, as Tom Peters says, a culture of excellence in “the next five minutes.”
In the organizational tree metaphor, the structure of the entire org may be twisted and malformed for no good reason. These pre-conditions may limit growth and value creation for customers, colleagues, and shareholders. Deconstructing and examining the reasons takes intentional effort, critical-thinking skills, and intellectual honesty.
Organizations have memories and in order for them to heal, some may need to reveal impacts of the rhino.
As users and constituents in societal ecosystems, our psychosocial safety was challenged, including sense of transparency, authenticity, and risks when we:
transformed from an office-centric culture to nearly-completely remote-distributed
survived a pandemic
consumed viral digital memes
watched or participated in mass social justice movements
trafficked in an infotainment business model
embedded in the digital attention economy
generated data for surveillance capitalism
watched fellow constituents break into the Capitol to hang the VP
witnessed little to no consequences for culturally unacceptable public and private behaviors
Warren Buffet said,
“Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”
Herbert Simon said,
“the design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from the principle of ‘the more information is better.’”
In organized labor, I once heard,
“a wage is the lowest number an employer will offer to get the job done”.
For knowledge workers in the service economy delivering value, time and attention is the most valuable commodity.
Price ⇔ Wage ⇔ Time ⇔ Attention ⇔ Value
Price is what you pay and value is what you get.
For the Zoom Generation conscious of Life-Work Balance, attention of users, colleagues, and constituents is the equitable product for trade. Colleagues are more conscious about maximizing their time-value.
Active direction of many minds upon some object or topic, especially one that is neglected, highly probable, and with high impact is the objective of a healthy, sustainable leadership culture.
Downstream: Joyful & Ruthless Vibes