The Easy Things are Hard

I type this paragraph with one hand while lifting my coffee cup with the other. Aleta, my cat, is sleeping in her bed. Usually, she is drooling on my arms and typing secret messages on the keyboard. (If my production editor allows it, I'll leave one of her messages in. Perhaps Aleta is sharing the theory of everything.)Later today, I will drink black tea while attending five remote meetings in a row. I won't drink water. I know this because I rarely drink water. Do I know that I'm supposed to drink 6–8 glasses of water a day? Of course I do, I can Google. Also, my friend Andrew stuck a "Hydrate" sticker on my laptop.While making coffee, I took ADHD medication. My doctor warned me it will increase dehydration. When I was diagnosed last year, I started working with a neurodiversity coach, Anna Granta. I asked her: "How will I know I'm better?"

She said, "You drink water."Huh.Before I started this chapter, she and I talked about all the ways I am better. Then she said, "Yes, but are you ready to drink water?"Busted. Neurodiversity teaches me that my blindspots aren’t about ignorance — they’re about missing what my system needs in order to act. “Universal Best Practices” don’t always help me connect knowing to doing.I really hate drinking water. I’m not thirsty! Even after a friend told me a horror story about kidney stones. I could pass an exam on hydration practices. Yet, here I am, dehydrating.The tension — between what we know and what we can embody — shows up everywhere. In ourselves, teams and organizational systems. We blame lack of willpower or a myriad of other causes. Most of the time, the truth is ... we’ve missed something.If you know what a prankster synchronicity can be, the rest of this story won’t surprise you. As woowoo as it might sound, knowing seems to be seeking us.A few days later, I’m telling my medical doctor “I feel so much better. Except, in the evenings. I eat Cashewtopia Gelato, potato chips, or chocolate. Sometimes, all three. They don't satisfy my craving, and I don't want to eat them before bed ..." She said, “When the body is dehydrated, it craves sugar (or salty snacks or chocolate). The cravings aren't failure of willpower, they are a symptom. Are you drinking water?”

Et tu, Brute?“Drinking water”, she says, “feels awful when you are dehydrated. The advice "just drink water" isn't helpful unless you are into torture.”

I’m not into torture. My approach to hydration had been — push myself to do something that feels awful (drink water) while pushing myself to stop doing something that feels good (eat sugar). That was bad strategy.My doctor and I made a list of things I enjoy drinking. Bone broth, iced decaf tea, fruit smoothies, frothy warm cocoa with stevia before bed. I was willing to try.That night, a big storm blew in and knocked out power. Without power, I have no water (I have a well.) I reserved the last available room at a retreat center nearby. Spent four days writing, reading, getting a massage, and being fed delicious healthy food. I brought my water bottle with me.I came home ten days ago. Now, I need to stop typing this story. Because, for the fourth time today, my water bottle is empty. And I'm thirsty.

The Core Competencies

Like hydration, knowledge isn’t about what you can Google — it’s about what you can embody in the right moment. Knowledge is inextricable from lived experiences. It is a systemic process that we participate in and it’s not always easy to embody. Knowledge is more like an event. A phenomenon. Knowledge is the shaping of time, energy, and attention into meaning, insight, and action.The reverse is not always true. You can invest plenty of time, energy and attention and still end up with nothing that resembles knowledge. When that happens, as I said, there is usually something missing. Some insight or relationship pattern or systemic impact you don’t yet understand.As my "drink water" story reveals, knowledge is not just access to information. Knowledge is a right place, right time, right information kind of experience. My insight arose, over time. By synthesizing information with interactions, observations, metacognition, experiences, and a bit of luck. Knowledge work is the practice of generating, shaping, structuring and sharing meaning. Turning raw information into concepts, recommendations, diagnoses, decisions, and action.Wise actions happen when we uncover our blindspots. But how do you discover blindspots? They are, after all, in your blindspot? There are core competencies you can develop that help you invite, recognize and act on knowledge experiences. The core competencies I’ll describe are:

1. Perceiving: observation, interpretation, and contextual framing
2. Diagnosing: sense-making translation and evaluation
3. Connecting: curation and relational mapping
4. Creating: generative discourse, integration, and synthesis
5. Launching: adaptation and flow-making translation
6. Learning: ecosystem architecture

These are not every competency you need as a knowledge worker. YMMV. But, if you have these skills, you are well on your way to being in the flow.

Perceiving

Look before you leap.A colleague sends me an irritating Slack. My fingers are already typing before I realize that it’s 2pm and I haven’t eaten all day. I step away, eat lunch, and reread their question. It is both reasonable and necessary.Perceiving is noticing what is happening without rushing to conclusions.It helps us stop reacting to everything with Fix It or Set it On Fire and craft effective responses instead.This practice includes observing what is happening, interpreting those observations and framing them in context.

Observation

Your first reaction is rarely the right one.Observation is developing awareness of what is happening before interpreting meaning or solutioning. Noticing signals, patterns, and anomalies without jumping to conclusions.In a workshop, three people stay quiet. The project manager decides to watch this pattern across other meetings to see if it changes.Notice a moment when you jump right into solutioning and consider whether or not you understand the problem.

Interpretation

Make your leaps of logic visible (to you).When we begin to make sense of observations, we are interpreting. Exploring possible meanings of what you’ve observed, without locking in too soon. Remaining open to revision because too often, our first conclusion is weak.I write down my observations, considering what I noticed and might be missing. I identify conclusions I’m drawing and any reasons I have for drawing them. Do they hold up? Notice your first conclusion. Write it down and ask yourself if there are other possibilities.

Contextual Framing

Position an idea or action within its larger environment.The value of information, insights or experiences depend on the circumstances. Contextual framing is clarifying the significance of information within its relevant context. Placing what you’ve interpreted into a specific time, place, and purpose.I open the discussion about “quiet people” in meetings with “I want to remove any friction you might be experiencing when sharing what you know. How can I better facilitate this discussion?”Notice the impact of the larger environment on a decision you are making. What supports you? What makes it more difficult?Remember the opening story about my fraught relationship with drinking water? Hydration required noticing I wasn’t drinking, interpreting why (over and over), and framing my choices within my circumstances rather than trying to apply generic “shoulds.”

Diagnosing

See the patterns, not just the symptoms.There’s an outage in production. I drop everything to fix it. Four days later, it fails again. Two weeks later, again. I gather a cross-functional group together and we map the patterns — what we see, when, and under what conditions. What else is happening simultaneously? What changed? We gain insight and design an experiment to test our hunch.Diagnosing is identifying what’s actually going on under the surface.It helps us avoid bandaiding every symptom and change the things that matter.This practice includes translating concepts so they make sense to everyone involved and evaluating our ideas to see if they are valid.

Sense-Making Translation (Convergent)

Relationships are complicated.Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone is using the same word but, it turns out, mean very different things? Sense-making translation is identifying ways that varied viewpoints are struggling to converge. Finding the shared pattern under multiple perspectives, interpretations or languages.In a new project meeting, I mention Agile methodologies and someone reacts as if hornets just flew into the room. I pause the meeting, open a blank document, and together we create a shared definition of what we mean, and don’t mean, by “Agile”.Recognize a discussion that is going around and around without resolution. Are there any concepts or experience that might be diverging?

Evaluation

Test thinking like it’s software.A great idea isn’t great in every circumstance. Evaluation is validating and prioritizing information before acting by testing its accuracy, quality, and relevance.Before I share my conclusion, I ensure I have three cogent reasons to support it. If I have no data to back me up, I figure out how to find some. Recognize an idea that you haven’t validated. Describe three reasons that convinced you it was worthwhile. Is your conclusion sound?I didn’t recognize that sugar cravings signaled dehydration. Once I did, I could test the insight. Am I on the right track? And realized that hydrating would have a bigger impact than I’d ever imagined.

Connecting

Making meaning travel.A product manager hands me a list of requirements. I don’t understand why they matter. We talk. He explains the problem they are trying to solve, and together we invent a solution neither of us could have come up with alone.Connecting is linking people, ideas, events, and digital systems so they can share knowledge. It helps us design relationships between parts so they can work intelligently, together.This practice includes curating, deciding what to leave in and what to leave out. And relational mapping, forming relationships between disparate parts.

Curation

Kondo information so it reveals the underlying intelligence.We are all drowning in information. Curation is discernment: selecting, deleting, organizing, and structuring information and perspectives. This practice gives a tidy, powerful shape to informational relationships to they can convey meaning.After researching user behavior, a team creates a video with examples of their pain points, along with examples of how the system is reinforcing those experiences.Link relevant information, from within a clutter of information, in a way the brings out a meaningful insight. (Bonus points if you do it again, with the same clutter on information, generating a different meaningful insight.)

Relational Mapping

Making connections visible.Relationships between people, ideas, events, and toolsets form the fabric of any organization system. Relational mapping makes the relationships that shape meaning and outcomes explicit. It is the ongoing practice of identifying, verifying, and articulating connections between people, ideas, events, and systems.A technology team creates a repository that links customer stories , business goals, and security constraints to the capabilities they are building. They tag people with business, design or security expertise when they have questions about the impact of their decisions.Link one perspective to another another, usually unrelated, perspective in a way that generates more meaning.Connecting my own insights with expertise from my doctor and coach is what led to hydration. Linking advice with lived experience. Then linking what I enjoyed drinking (bone broth, decaf strawberry black tea) to my definition of hydrating.

Creating

Bringing new meaning into being, aka the fun part.Frustrated by the suggestion that we hack the system to “get something out quick”, I model two pieces of software working together to create an even better experience for users.Creating is turning diverse inputs into something more than the sum of their parts. It helps us change things rather than maintain the status quo (when it isn’t working for us.)This practice includes talking together in a skillful way, integrating sources of input and synthesizing those sources into new ideas, actions or insights.

Generative Discourse

Building ideas together.

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Generative discourse co-creates stronger outcomes by engaging in dialogue that builds ideas rather than ... most of the ways we usually engage in ideas. This practice is another form of engineering, crafting concepts together that are sound and well designed.A journalist, engineer and product manager walk into a bar ... and improve their understanding of the relationship between content and data from each other’s point of view. They co-create a model that frames the process in a new way, and recommend a tool that brings it to life.Transform a moment when your first response to an idea would be “No”. Acknowledge what you’ve heard to ensure you’ve understand correctly, “Yes, and ..” build on it with your experience.

Integration

Discovering how pieces work as a wholeIntegration is combining multiple sources of input to create a unified perspective. This is not the same as “alignment”, which can mean “getting everyone to think the same thing.” When we integrate, we envision disparate inputs— ideas, perspectives, data sources, practices — as part of the same system where they can work together as a coherent whole.Finance, marketing, and engineering integrate their perspectives by creating a model of how a process happens, from beginning to end. They craft a common language so they can understand this process from all three perspectives.Transform an idea by showing it from three divergent, cross-functional perspectives. Describe the idea with words that make sense to all three.

Synthesis

The magic of creating what wasn’t there before.Synthesizing is creating new meaning or solutions from existing elements by combining diverse inputs to produce something new. An insight, concept, solution, or pattern that didn’t exist in any of the parts alone.A content creator finds older articles related to her topic. While reviewing engagement data, she spots a question no one has covered. She updates her piece with links to the old content and writes a new article to fill the blindspot.Transform the relationship between two silo’d parts of an organization by collaborating to generate something that neither part could generate alone.Stuck in the false dilemma of “drink water” vs “not thirsty”, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Transforming my way of thinking and synthesizing advice generated a playful list of alternative approaches.

Launching

Making knowledge move.In my daily life as a tech nerd, launching usually means “pushing code to production.” But it’s more than that. When I share an artifact describing how workflows are negatively impacting people’s daily-life experiences, I am launching knowledge — pushing it towards more effective and impactful outcomes. Launching is releasing knowledge into the wider system so it can have an effect.It helps us avoid the stagnation of “needing to know everything before we act” and encourages adaptive processes.This practice includes adapting as things change and restructuring insights for different audiences.

Adaptation

Keeping knowledge alive.The decisions we make are often correct, at the time we make them. Then, things change. Adaptation is adjusting how knowledge is used, shared, or framed as circumstances evolve over time.On Friday, the data team considers the feedback (see Launch above) and identify ways to improve what they measure based on insights from other teams.Share one small adaption that might improve an unsatisfying experience, one impacted by changing circumstances.

Flow-Making Translation (Divergent)

Helping insights travel across differing perspectives.An organization is a group of people who think about different types of activities. Flow-making translation is expressing on insight in multiple forms for different audiences. Enable insights to move effectively across these groups by shaping knowledge into divergent artifacts.The engineering lead knows that not everyone speaks geek. To secure budget for a necessary upgrade, she prepares a technology overview for the engineers, list of key user benefits for the product team, a short summary tied to business goals for leadership, and a cost spreadsheet of costs finance. Each group understands her request and she gets the green light.Share an insight you gained by pairing with someone who works in a different part of the organization.Pushing water into my sounds easy but I couldn’t do it alone. Sharing my struggles, and adapting my daily habits by spending four days in a place where self-care was frictionless, I launched skills I couldn’t have sustained alone.

Learning

Evolving with experience.While deciding on a course of action, I describe what we have perceived, diagnosed, connected, created and launched. I identify blindspots, areas where our perception, evalation, relations or decision-making process can be improved next time — so we can make better recommendations.Learning is our ability to update what we know — and how we know.

It helps us reframe knowledge as something we do, with our time energy and attention, rather than something we acquire.This practice includes architecting an ecosystem that can perceive, diagnose, connect, create, launch ... and learn.

Ecosystem Architecture

Designing for growth.Ecosystem architecture is designing processes and patterns that sustain our capacity for openness, experimentation, and trust. Encouraging playfulness, the enjoyment of knowledge work that leads to innovation, by designing and tending the human, technical, and cultural environment.Two teams, discussing a difficult problem they are solving, add new emojis to help them express their challenges with lightness and levity.Design an experiential change that will increase the enjoyment of working on difficult problems together. Here is where I confess: My miraculous recovery didn’t last. Hydration comes and goes with the other patterns I’m caught up in. When I’m stressed by my backlog, I “forget” to hydrate. Soon, I’m vaping German Watermelon-flavored nicotine instead of filling my water bottle. And eating Cashewtopia with chocolate morsels sprinkled on top for dinner. Forgetting (or ignoring) thirst reveals a need for better systems of support in other areas of my life.Consider this:What’s your “water story”? An experience where the gap between what you knew and what you could embody revealed new insight?

Explore Your Own Terrain

There is no exam at the end of this chapter. No whiteboard test to prove you have memorized this skills. Knowledge, like hydration, only matters when it becomes part of you. Knowing you need water is not the same as drinking it. I’m not even going to summarize the practices. You’ve got this. The only thing you need to do now is: pay attention. Notice moments when you are already practicing these skills. Consider trying something new.

Most of all, have fun. Don’t force yourself to do things you don’t like — begin with whatever makes your day more enjoyable. This is the good stuff, my friend. Our raison d’etre in the knowledge economy. These are the skills that sustain you. They are the journey itself and the reason you are on it.
Consider this:For the next week or two, notice how you work. At the end of your workday, pick one of these prompts and write about it. Try exploring these prompts with others (you’ll discover that your quirks are more common that you think.)Describe Perceiving

• A moment you noticed yourself jumping into solutioning before fully understanding the problem.
• A conclusion you noticed you came to quickly, then later reconsidered.
• A decision you noticed was made more difficult by the surrounding environment.

Diagnosing

• An example of recognizing two people using the same word but meaning different things.
• A time you recognized an idea you felt strongly about — and the three reasons that convinced you.

Connecting

• An example where you linked relevant information out of a pile and used it to help others make a decision.
• A time you linked familiar information with something new that you learned from someone else.

Creating

• A moment when you transformed a “No” response into clarifying what you’d understood before continuing.
• An experience you transformed by describing it from three different perspectives.
• An outcome you transformed by pairing with someone in another part of the org.

Launching

• A small adaptation you shared that had a positive impact.
• Something you shared with two different audiences in two different ways.

Learning

• Something you designed into your practice after paying attention to these skills.
• An approach you designed that made working with others more enjoyable.