Month: March 2017

Positive Cultural Impact (A Formula)

The following is an excerpt from a longer e-book I’m working on which should be published by the end of May, 2017:

If you are a leader who wants to make a positive cultural impact, you’ll need to manage your energy and focus your consumption so that you can leverage time differently. With the time you free up, you need to exercise your empathetic and creative muscles so that when the time comes to re-articulate values to your team or community, you’ll be able to do so with excellence. This is the formula for positive cultural impact.

For the sake of this blog post, I’m going to focus on why you need both empathy and creativity working in tandem, like iron and carbon coming together to form steel. The coming e-book will give people handles on how to do it.

Empathy without creativity results in a message that gets you less attention and lower retention. Think of this as sermonizing without excellence in storytelling. For example, a recent blog by Michele Perry in praise of the film “The Shack” notes that “…many Christian films miss the point of being films and are actually thinly veiled sermons that dismantle whatever creative effectiveness their story line might have had.” In context of my theme, Michele has pointed out that whatever empathy Christian filmmakers (previous to The Shack) may have had, (I have no doubt that their hearts ache for humans to find our Way,) has been compromised by poor storytelling, favoring empathy above creativity rather than melding the two. I have not yet gone to watch The Shack, perhaps because I’ve become wary of films branded as “Christian” for exactly the reason she pointed out. In fact, most of those films fail to get my attention. I won’t go see them. Fortunately for The Shack, reviews like Michele’s are going to buoy it along, and I’m now interested in seeing it.

Now let’s consider the flip side. What if your attempt to impact culture is heavily weighted toward creativity but has little sense of empathy? It’s no surprise to anyone that artists are interested in influencing culture; their motives may be rooted in empathy or something more self-serving, for example, fame or self-glorification. In the Modern Art movement, artists began speaking to an ever-narrowing, increasingly esoteric group of elites. Most of my friends scorned artists like Thomas Kinkade throughout our twenties, but as I’ve thought further about his work, I realize that his idea was to communicate to a much broader audience who wanted to look at something pleasant, welcoming, relaxing and inviting, images of cottages where they could imagine themselves at peace. And Kinkade cared about people who wanted that. Those same people never felt that Modern and Postmodern artists cared one whit about whether or not they “got it.” Kinkade’s commercial success was looked down upon by the elite postmodern highbrow gallery artists, but out of a certain empathy he spoke to a broader audience, using a great deal of creativity in the process, and earned both attention and a certain level of retention, too. Here’s a blog that’s a couple years old, but was published three years after his death at age 54, noting that his signed and numbered lithographs are likely to continue increasing in value. Long term, that remains to be seen, and monetary value is only one way of measuring retention. Another way to look at it is that if the monetary value is going up, that means people are keeping their lithographs — which means they’re either speculating, or they genuinely continue to appreciate his message and the values his work spoke about. Some might put his work in the same camp as those cheesy Christian movies which do a poor job of storytelling, but the truth is that Kinkade was a masterful painter whose technique may have been formulaic, but whose storytelling moved a generation of people to buy his paintings when other painters struggled to get any attention. (And when it comes to formulaic storytelling, Hollywood is all about that, so formulas are not a problem. Experimenters can search for new formulas, but there’s nothing wrong with using a recipe whether you’re baking chocolate-chip cookies or telling a story.)

I know, that’s a lot about art, and may mislead you to think that you will have to make a movie like The Shack or paint like Kinkade to make a positive cultural impact in your family, on your team at work, in your nonprofit organization. Not so. Use what you have, both exercising and building the muscles you have for empathy, and also those for creativity, so that your message will be driven by caring for others and delivered in a way they can appreciate, enjoy and remember for a long time.

Going back to the iron and carbon makes steel analogy, a good steel is both stronger and more flexible than either of its two main parts. The fusion of empathy and creativity will give your leadership both strength and flexibility, too.

Soon I’ll be releasing a how to course online, complete with a longer e-book, videos, a workbook, and a place for community.

Note — if you’re in the Goshen, Indiana area and would like to sit in on the live audience  video taping of the course instruction, that will be happening at Art House on April 18 at 7 PM, and is free for the public to attend.

Second note — if you’d like to get a copy of this e-book when it’s done, please email me at adam.fleming.lifecoach@gmail.com, reference this blog post, and I’ll put you on the email list for a FREE copy!

 

Shifting Cultural Tectonic Plates: Baseball

I’m passionate about culture. Peter Drucker said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and as a life coach one of my favorite places for curiosity during exploration mode with my clients revolves around the cultures they are navigating.

I’m also passionate about baseball, and it provides a lot of interesting insights into our national culture.

Baseball’s a slow game. I get that some people just don’t get why you’d want to watch a guy squint at another guy for ten seconds before deciding to play a game of catch with him. Frankly when it comes to watching sports on TV almost nothing is slower than football (though this accusation is seldom made), and soccer is faster than either baseball or football, while hockey is faster yet. What people say is slow really isn’t (soccer) and what people say is fast really isn’t (football) so it really just comes down to what you appreciate. I appreciate baseball, even if it doesn’t have the same breakneck action as hockey.

What’s happening now, the way the plates are shifting in the cultural geology, is that they’re trying to speed baseball up. MLB is discussing putting a man on 2nd base to begin any extra inning.

Here’s what I think: we have a culture where we’re always rushing to get one thing done asap so we can get to the next thing we have to do asap. Baseball has an opportunity to be a respite from that pace of life. Baseball never ends in a tie (that would be un-American!) but it doesn’t have a way to end the game after 13 innings, either. There’s no shoot-out like hockey and soccer have implemented after a regulation and over-time periods. There’s no “home run derby” to finish it off. You just keep playing. We all know that, of course. It’s not that I have a problem with specific rules changes like the no-pitch intentional walk  coming into play this year; in fact it’s not any specific rule change as such (Should the NL do away with pitchers batting?). My problem is with the shifting cultural assumption that we need this thing we call baseball to be faster.

As a culture we need some things to help us change up our pace (see what I did there?). The imbalance caused by taking in an activity, perhaps on a Sunday afternoon, when we don’t really know exactly when we’ll be home, is a healthy sort of imbalance. It allows us to break our normal routine of rushing, and sit back and enjoy what’s in front of us.

It’s very Taoist. It’s in the moment. The pitch comes, split second decision, swing or hold.

For everyone else, the past and future swirls around the players. It’s story-oriented; listen to the broadcasters talk about the way it used to be, remember the guy who used to sit behind the bullpen and eat six Chicago-style hot dogs every night? And of course the sports talk radio guys love to speculate about the future, who will trade for that guy before the deadline, who might win the division.

But the cultural aficionado understands that it’s about being in the moment. So it shouldn’t matter if the game is fast or slow, over in two hours or stretched out to seventeen innings.

We need to be aware of the way that our culture is shifting, in our business, or organization. If the culture shifts it’s because values are shifting, perhaps from the larger culture outside (as the larger culture is now influencing the micro-culture that baseball is.) And sometimes the push and pull that cultures outside the one you care about are exerting on your culture are worth resisting. So resist them! Culture eats strategy for breakfast — don’t assume that you don’t exert any control over what your culture looks like, or will become. If you need to be a purist for a certain value, stick to your guns.