Cultural Intelligence – Page 909 – Public Intelligence Blog

How to fail

There are some significant misunderstandings about failure. A common one, similar to one we seem to have about death, is that if you don't plan for it, it won't happen.

All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.

Two habits that don't help:

Getting good at avoiding blame and casting doubt
Not signing up for visible and important projects

While it may seem like these two choices increase your chances for survival or even promotion, in fact they merely insulate you from worthwhile failures.

I think it's worth noting that my definition of failure does not include being unlucky enough to be involved in a project where random external events kept you from succeeding. That's the cost of showing up, not the definition of failure.

Identifying these random events, of course, is part of the art of doing ever better. Many of the things we'd like to blame as being out of our control are in fact avoidable or can be planned around.

Here are six random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside:

Whenever possible, take on specific projects.
Make detailed promises about what success looks like and when it will occur.
Engage others in your projects. If you fail, they should be involved and know that they will fail with you.
Be really clear about what the true risks are. Ignore the vivid, unlikely and ultimately non-fatal risks that take so much of our focus away.
Concentrate your energy and will on the elements of the project that you have influence on, ignore external events that you can't avoid or change.
When you fail (and you will) be clear about it, call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won't make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they've never done it.

If that list frightened you, you might be getting to the nub of the matter. If that list feels like the sort of thing you'd like your freelancers, employees or even bosses to adopt, then perhaps it's resonating as a plan going forward for you.

2011/04/112013/02/09

Event/Trip Report/Reference: 1200-1330 8 Apr Woodrow Wilson Center DC In Search of a National Security Narrative for the 21st Century

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats

Wilson Center Collage JPEG with Y — Click on Image to Enlarge

“The National Conversation” Debuts

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has announced a new initiative launching April 8, 2011: The National Conversation at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The National Conversation will examine overarching themes of U.S. international and domestic policy, drawing on high-profile guests and experts from all sides of the political sphere to provide thoughtful, intelligent explorations of challenging issues with the goal of informing the national public policy debate.

From uprisings in the Arab world to troubled economies around the globe, challenges to America’s role in the global community have seldom been greater or more complex. And with economic woes at home and our military capacity stretched thin through involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, many are left wondering about our ability to respond and adapt to a rapidly changing world. At a time when national unity around a shared vision is lacking, there is a growing belief that a new national security narrative must emerge that defines the role of the U.S. in global affairs for a new century. But can we achieve such a national consensus in this era of hyper-partisanship? A possible answer comes in the form of an anonymous “white paper.” Two US military officers have written an essay describing a vision for the missing narrative under the authorship of “Mr. Y.” Join our panel as it discusses the ideas contained in this provocative paper from an unexpected source. Is this the blueprint for the narrative we seek?

The inaugural National Conversation kicks off April 8 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m., with a discussion on the search for a new national security narrative to guide U.S. policy in the 21st Century. Five panelists will participate in a discussion moderated by award-winning New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman. The panel will feature: Steve Clemons, founder of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation; Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim American to be elected into the U.S. Congress; Robert Kagan, senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; Brent Scowcroft, U.S. national security adviser to President Ford and President H.W. Bush; and Professor Anne Marie Slaughter, former director for policy planning for the U.S. Department of State and current Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Event Home Page

Watch Video of the Event (Permanent URL)

Note: Robert Steele invited comment starts at 01:15:12

Download “A National Strategic Narrative,” By Mr. Y (15 Page PDF)

Strategic Analytic Model from Earth Intelligence Network

Trip Report & Selected Links with Graphics Below the Line

Continue reading “Event/Trip Report/Reference: 1200-1330 8 Apr Woodrow Wilson Center DC In Search of a National Security Narrative for the 21st Century”

2011/04/112011/04/11

Reference: A National Strategic Narrative

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Policies, Policy, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Threats, True Cost, White Papers

cover strategic narrative — Click on Image to Enlarge

PDF (15 Pages)

2011 Cyber-Command or IO 21 + IO Roots

2011/04/102011/04/10

Search: violent comprehensive revolutions are of

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Here are the concise references focused on revolution. For corruption, collective intelligence, open space and other methods of non-violent consensus building and emergence, see the lists at the end of this post.

Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today

Search: four preconditions for revolution

Search: revolution theory preconditions

Here is the bottom line:

Continue reading “Search: violent comprehensive revolutions are of”

2011/04/10

Iceland Gets It Right: Say NO to Bank Bail-Outs

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Sense-Making

iceland sanity — Click on Image to Enlarge

Iceland Rejects Deposit Repayments to British, Dutch

By CHARLES FORELLE

Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2011

For the second time, Icelanders voted down a deal to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of euros lost in the island nation's 2008 financial collapse—at once a bold popular rejection of the notion that taxpayers must bear the burden for bankers' woes and a risky outcome that will complicate Iceland's efforts to rejoin global markets.

Forgotten Mother of Civic Intelligence Apps

06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, 12 Water, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Sense-Making

The post Search: errors that resulted in great ideas and especially the comment on need to fully integrate women and minorities reminded me of Ellen Swallow Richards. She was one of the first publicly acknowledged female heavy-weights in intellect and values in the USA, in my opinion. See especially her later books, The Cost of Food, The Cost of Shelter, The Art of Right Living, The Cost of Cleanness, Sanitation in Daily Life (1907), and Euthenics, the Science of Controllable Environment (1910). I had forgotten that she was also responsible for introducing the word “ecology” into the English language.

Wikipedia/Ellen Swallow Richards

Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 19th century, pioneering the field of home economics. Richards graduated from Westford Academy (2nd oldest secondary school in Westford, MA). She was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.

Search: errors that resulted in great ideas

Cultural Intelligence, Searches

It can safely be said that most great ideas result from errors (including accidents), because the real break-throughs occur when the prevailing paradgim (“business as usual”) is so demonstrably unfit as to call into question its further utility OR something really sensational is discovered that is totally inconsistent with the prevailing paradigm. PERSISTENCE rooted in INTEGRITY is the key. That is a definition of sanity. Persistence rooted in LACK OF integrity–continuing to do the wrong thing, even the wrong thing righter–is insanity. Dissent is an “error” of the system. Repressing dissent is a crime against humanity and refuses the commensurate discovery that dissent offers. The lunacy continues.

Although there was nothing specific on this site directly focused on your tremendous inquiry, here are a few things we have found that address your question and also add to the value of this public intelligence blog.

Harvard Computers — Click on Image to Enlarge

Great quote: “A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.”

Key historical assertion: “…Bacon devised the trial and error method of finding knowledge while cataloguing very carefully all the circumstances of these trials.”

Great Scientific Discoveries of the Twentieth Century

9 things invented or discovered by accident

Our greatest error has been to repress women and minorities. Women have smaller egos and better intuition than men do, and are hard-wired for open-ended compassion instead of closed-mind “justice”, which makes all the difference in humanity. Minorities bring diversity of experience, need, and low-cost solutions that the Industrial Era Empire refuses to consider because it treats humans as a commodity to be exploited, not as the co-owner and co-creater of all that we might enjoy.

Learning to See in the Dark: The Roots of Ethical Resistance — Carol Gilligan Speaks at MIT

Review: Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education

Review: All Rise–Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity

Category: Cultural Intelligence

Seth Godin’s Blog: How to Fail