Moving Between the Balcony and the Dance Floor

This past week, I’ve been processing the hundreds of responses to Neue Geo's first Weak Signals Survey. It’s fascinating stuff, and I think we will repeat the experiment at some point.

Thank you again if you took part — even though you’ve now given me far more work than I planned for! Thanks for your patience as I process it all. Watch this space for a mini-report soon.

(Do you recall Question #12 of the Survey? What is one thing you know is broken but don’t know how to fix?...Scroll to the end of this Edition to find out what everybody said.)

For now I’ll just say: your collective, social brain is brilliant. I’ve been walking around all week with a fresh awareness of the value of learning from each other.

I took that awareness with me into a couple of executive workshops I hosted at Oxford University this past week. At one of them, the group I worked with had just completed a workshop on "adaptive leadership", based on the work by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

One of the first principles of their adaptive leadership model is to get up on the balcony -- i.e., gain a higher perspective. (This was an ideal setup for my own work with them, which was all about making sense of the world's most shocking events.)

But with your “weak signals” on my mind, I couldn’t help but fix on the limitations of the balcony metaphor.

Is it true that we can see “more” from up there? Some broad patterns become clearer, yes. But why does the pattern look so different here, in this situation? Those why questions become harder to see, the farther away we stand.

Get the balcony view is a good principle to strive for, but it feels incomplete without its complement: close your eyes and hear what's going on around you.

Doing the latter requires a different approach. Perhaps we can each stand on the same balcony and take in the same view by ourselves, but gathering insights from local listening is something we can only do together. (Ergo, our collective Survey. 😉)

Energetically, it feels different too. Getting the balcony view is about stepping off the dance floor. It’s about rising above the hustle and bustle. It's what planners like me always crave to do. But hearing what's around me, moving with music…honestly, sometimes that’s what I fear most to do.

Blended together, both perspectives get better. I spent a half-day with leaders of an organization with over 50,000 employees, making sense together of the post-pandemic “future of work”. I brought to the conversation my view from the balcony (Professor Alan Gamlen and I are remapping that terrain right now with our academics' toolkit — theories and research). They brought to the conversation their stories, struggles and successes from the dance floor.

We both left richer for it — and honestly, I think I got the better end of the bargain. Now my theories have fewer glaring gaps.

- Chris 🙏

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Premium Content

First, a quick update: We want to start hosting some realtime "basecamps" next month around the big take-aways from the inaugural Weak Signals Survey. They'll be short, thought-provoking, Members-only events and I look forward to spending time with you there.

We're also getting closer to the launch of Neue Geo's podcast, Most Valuable Questions. I'll have some samples for you soon. You'll be the first to hear it.

Thank you again for supporting Neue Geo and helping to grow this group of learning and discovery. I recorded some further, video reflections from my workshop last week just for you. (6 minutes) 🙏

You can also ​reflect together on this Edition in the Neue Geo collective journal. It will grow as we grow.

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Hear Weak Signals

The Weak Signals Survey was not scientific or “representative”. Its value is to help you notice what other people are noticing.

Here’s a visual representation of how 327 people from 36 countries answered the question, What is one thing you know is broken but don’t know how to fix? The bigger the word, the more frequently it (or a similar word) occurred:

Here are three things I notice while looking at it:

1. Our information channels may be fragmented and full of noise, but big signals still get through. Yes, our attention is increasingly fragmented. But a very wide range of people identify the same set of similar concerns.

2. Our inner worlds struggle for attention. Running my eyes down the column of responses to Question #12 in my spreadsheet was a jarring experience…

Nature
Our connection to nature
Capitalism
Our Planet
Environment
​My Heart

That last response stopped me in my mental tracks. This wordcloud is a visual reminder to me of what tends to get crowded out by so many other urgent concerns. In this picture, they are literally pushed to the margins. (Thank you for reminding me to look inward more often.🙏)

3. There is more good work to be done than any one of us can understand, let alone affect.

My hope for New Geo is that, one year from now, we can all look at this picture again and put names beside each word — names of the inspiring and inspired people we’ve met who are helping to flip the title of this picture from “what’s broken” to “what’s working”.

What do you see? ​Reflect in the Society's collective journal.

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The Journey Continues...

“No one becomes a grandmaster of chess by playing alone."

Who said that? I can’t remember. It's not even true anymore, in a world of AI chess engines. But I like the sentiment.

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🙏 Thanks for bringing your energy here. - Chris and your Neue Geo team​

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