Emergent Stress Reduction

The world is anxious. The economy is nervous. Families are stressed. The unemployed are looking for jobs; the employed are looking over their shoulders. What in the world are we going to do?

Psychologists refer to long, ongoing, challenging life events as examples of chronic stress. Unlike acute stress, the type of stress that is experienced quickly (like a spilled cup of coffee), chronically stressful situations in life often include uncertainty, potential negative future outcomes, anxiety, and possibly depression. To what degree and extent America and the rest of the world are experiencing chronic stress, and whether it enters into our day-to-day meaning making, can only be speculated at this point ? but it sure seems likely it played a pretty big role.

The best medicine for chronic stress is human control, something all people strive for in life. We like when our lives are in order, our patterns fairly predictable, and our spirits high. Unfortunately, chronic stress challenges our sense of personal control, often leading to a host of anxiety symptoms. When we are able to regain a sense of control of the situation our anxiety lessens; and when we allow uncertainty to dominate our thinking we experience anxiety. If world affairs are weighing heavily on our collective minds, the uncertainty associated with the future may prompt us to step away from the present sources of our insecurity to adequately prepare for a difficult situation ahead.

What can a business do?

One thing we can do is recognize this is more than a matter of orientation; it?s a matter of view, like looking through the rear view mirror, or looking out the front windshield.

It?s more than a shift from adding to an overwhelming supply of actions to wetting the appetites of customer who will demand more of what is supplied.

It?s moving from immersion into what people want to the emergence of what they value. By that I mean that the first key to becoming emergent is to understand what demand exists for it and, only then create a differentiated supply that satisfies people more completely than anyone else. The way you do this is to compete on value-added differentiation rather than price.

Value increases one of two ways: you either increase benefits or lower price. The emergent strategist tries to increase benefits in ways that create value for targeted segments of people, while the product strategist will try to create more value by increasing price.

Emergent strategies attempt to understand before creating supply. By understanding the people you want to serve and make happy, you are better able to plan and produce products that are sharply differentiated or scarce, which earn you higher prices and profits. Once you satisfy demand more dynamically than your competition, you have more control over price, and that ultimately, will increase profitability and growth: you compete on products, goods and services but you win on emergent demands.

Your stress may not completely resolve itself, but creating choices are critical to your managing it. It?s also critical for another reason: you can do or engage in business the same way by creating business economies that look namely at creating large amounts of goods and services as efficiently as possible, or you better understand the emergent demands in a market before you create a supply of goods and services.

In the end, managing your business like managing your stress is within your control.

Bad is stronger than good.

Centuries of literary efforts and religious thought have depicted human life in terms of a struggle between good and bad forces. At the metaphysical level, evil gods and devils are the opponents of the divine forces of creation and harmony. At the individual level, temptation and destructive instincts battle against strivings for virtue, altruism and fulfillment. ?Good? and ?bad? are among the first words learned by children and even house pets, and most people can readily categorize any experience, emotion or outcome as good or bad.

What form does this eternal conflict take in our day-to-day lives? The evidence suggests that bad is stronger than good. That is, events that are negatively valenced like losing money, being abandoned by friends, or receiving criticism will have greater impact on us than positively valenced events of the same type like winning money, gaining friends or receiving praise. This is not say that bad will always triumph over good, rather good may prevail over bad by superior force of numbers ? many good events can overcome the psychological effects of a single bad one. But, and this is big but, when equal measures of good and bad are present, the psychological effects of bad ones outweigh those of the good ones.

My own take on this is that in general, and apart from a few carefully crafted exceptions, negative information receives more processing and contributes more strongly to the final impression than does positive information. Learning something bad about a new acquaintance carries more weight than learning something good, by and large.

I remember reading a psychology textbook teaching propinquity breeds attraction. Contrary to elaborate hypotheses about similarity, role, values and other factors, the strongest predictor of who became friends was physical propinquity, suggesting that those who lived closest to each other were likely to become friends. I thought that was odd and not my experience. Later, I read that propinquity predicted the formation of disliking even more strongly than liking. Living near one another increased the likelihood that two people would become enemies even more strongly than it predicts the likelihood they would become friends. Propinquity thus does not cause liking. More probably, it simply amplifies the effect of other variables and events. Because bad events are stronger than good ones, an identical increase in propinquity produces more enemies than friends.

The relative strength of bad may also be relevant to the topics studied, written about and broadcast. In 1985, Czapinski coded 17,000 research articles found in psychology journals and found that the coverage of negative issued and phenomena exceeded positive, good ones 69% to 31%.

Why is this so? One hypothesis is psychologists are pessimistic misanthropes or sadists who derive perverse satisfaction from studying human failure and suffering. Another alternative explanation would be that psychology, like any other profession, consists of young researchers eager to obtain publishable findings that can withstand the scrutiny of weak measures and high variances. If bad is stronger than good then psychologists would gravitate towards the negative or troubled side of human life, which apparently they did.

Good, bad and strength are among the most universal and fundamental terms and it could be argued that they refer to concepts that are understood even creatures with minimal linguistic capacity. By good we understand desirable, beneficial, or pleasant outcomes including states or consequences. Bad is the opposite: undesirable, harmful or unpleasant. Strength refers to the casual impact. To say that bad is stronger than good is thus to say that bad things will produce larger, more consistent, more multifaceted, or more lasting effects than good things.

In the final analysis, and this by no means is all that can be said about good and bad, it may be highly adaptive of human beings to respond more strongly to bad rather than good. In fact, the greater the power of bad may itself be a good thing. Even though a a bad event may have a stronger impact than a comparable good event, many lives can be happy by virtue of have far more good than bad events in their lives.

Lazy

Stephen Burt is a poet who has a great line about how poets ?accept on purpose what they have created by accident?. It makes me wonder how many perfect ideas, perfect new products, new names, new positions I use as touchstones of excellence ? all creative ideas academics take apart, analyze, diagram and reassemble ? were shot gunned into existence.

The business proposition for creativity and innovation that no one in business likes is this: excellence is not a common activity. It is, by definition, a rare activity. Rare activities that are successful are done by rare individuals. Creativity is an embrace of change. Change is an elite activity, and those who say different, who claim to heed the wishes of the common person out of professional duty, are, to my mind, lazy.

Lazy bows to the convenience of see-Jane-run-it-is-red-it-is-for-us simple-mindedness because, by gosh, that?s how you make money. You productize everything and besides, that?s all clients want from their innovation processes ? something that is fast, easy and never risks too much.

Lazy will never come clean and tell you that not all creative people are created equal and that creativity is an acquire activity, that the pleasure of doing it comes from years of smaller, slow to learn skills. Lazy will never insist that you never stop creating, that you read a lot from a wide variety of sources, old and new, and try to keep them in your head to help train and trust your thoughts. And lazy will certainly never stress that you need to love creativity and innovation?s artificial and formal aspects.

It?s silly to think that business organizations don?t have a taste for this. Business people have an odd idea of who a creative person is. Accessibility to an idea is far more complex, clients far wiser, than current innovation processes are willing to accept. Clients who have created worth for certain key creative people did so because of the value created by their ideas, and not just because of the simplicity (and repeatability) of their innovation processes.

Anyone can be lazy. Faced with creative people who have taken great pains, some would rather not take the time or the trouble. They don?t have to, of course. And its better they don?t. But let?s not let the many who don?t sell short the many that do.

Go Fly A Kite

When you talk to innovation people in business, you?ll hear quite a bit about creativity, ideation, brainstorming, focus groups, discovery, action and delivery. Sometimes, you?ll hear about relevancy and difference. Sometimes you won?t.

What will probably come to mind when someone tells you about these things is what usually comes to mind: a group of people sitting in room with lots of paper on the walls, trying to all talk at once, or not at all and one person, probably the person who called the meeting, eventually calling it quits and going off and writing a report telling everybody what they just said and most likely, telling them what everybody is going to do next, like it or not.

Or, maybe there?s a image of someone slightly off center, a little temperamental, vaguely unkempt?maybe even a little strange sitting in the back of a dark focus group room writing notes in a black pad, who leaves without saying much and then writes a report telling everybody what they just heard and what they could do next, if they have the time and the will to do it, which of course, they don?t because they have to go off to the next innovation session.

It?s perfect corporate citizen?s grind.

Well, as they say, that?s innovation. At least the kind most people are familiar with.

But there?s another way to bring purpose into your corporate innovation business and it has little to do with meetings and strategic plans and new normal innovation activities. It has to do with being grounded and knowing where your feet are planted.

This idea originated with someone else, although like the speaker, I too have been married for 33 years and have taught actors to act and worked in movies and on stage. The idea came from this year?s Academy Award winner, Jeff Bridges.
Bridges tells a story about running into Francis Ford Coppola and asking him, 'What you been doing?' He said, 'Just gave a class to a bunch of young actors.' I said, 'What did you teach them?' and he says, 'I taught them the main thing, the most important thing you should do as a young actor: Get married. Think about it?all movies, everything, is about love and having a family. Then you have a purpose for making the money and doing the things you do. It gives you a grounding, to go off and do your stuff. The kite has a string. You go way out there, but you've got this thing grounding you.'

Innovative people need to be grounded too. There?s good reason for this. Innovative people are not only different in the way they view the world they are different from each other in the processes they use to think through a problem. For example, corporate innovators are best able to understand ideas in context ? how they might fit inside a corporate portfolio or in popular culture. They are politically sensitive and politically aware.

Innovation problem solvers are less inclined to consider the long-term effects or appropriateness of an idea. ?You asked me to solve a problem didn?t you??

There are the non-linear innovation thinkers ? loosely put together, random, abstract thinkers. They are capable of brilliance but they need good and patient editors. And then there are the social innovation misfits, so wrapped up in their own models that they forget to eat, sometimes they forget to sleep.

For the most part, except for the first group, these innovative thinkers are not welcome in a corporate environment. Sometimes it?s because their personalities are too difficult to manage. Sometimes their lifestyle is too hard to manage: try to get an artist to check email. But more often, it?s because the more often need inside a corporation is for managerial talent and executional skill.

So the value of most innovative people is lost because no one has found a way to adequately ground the activities of innovative people outside the organization with the needs inside the business: being patient editors, good directors and providing the kind of support innovative people need to deliver their best thinking.

If you can manage this, and this is what Milestone Ideas can do, then you get what you know good innovation people and process is capable of without all the disruption. It?s all of the good and none of the bad.

And the innovation ideas, well, like they say, it?s grounded.