Dear friend,
For the past month and a half I have been heads down building my startup, with an audacious ambition: AI that helps people become powerful navigators of the era that is arriving. That work has forced me to look hard at the model we are all operating from, and at what our common sense is costing us in our lives, our families, and our offices. I am not finished with it, and you are most welcome to tell me what you think.
The model we have all been operating from is this. Be strong and be right. Through strength and rightness you produce stability, peace, law, and goodness.
Look at how much of your life was built on it. Education is preparation for being right. Studying hard is a bid for strength. Promotion is the reward for having been right often enough that people stopped checking. One of Amazon’s own leadership principles is being right, a lot. Nations run on this model. Families run on it. The strong will be right, the right will be strong, and from that we will have order.
It is not a stupid model. It has a serious lineage. It borrowed its confidence from what the modern era calls science. Something verified. Something established. Something true. But the people who carried that method out of the laboratory could not help carrying the mood with them, and that mood was built for working with an inanimate world. They applied it to each other.
Look at where that has landed us. Count the wars. They are growing, not shrinking. Then come closer. How many families do you know that are a source of joy, of satisfaction, of rejuvenation? Most are separated, distant, isolated, and when they do meet, the style of the meeting is cordial hypocrisy. Then come closer still. Walk into most teams, most offices, most startups. People do not experience themselves as being together at something. They are waiting for the strong one who is right, so that some action can finally be taken.
I used to think this model worked once and has stopped working now. I no longer think that. Being right never worked with human beings. Families were broken in 1850 too. What changed is who pays.
In the industrial era, value came from control of the process, and the process absorbed the cost of certainty. You could be a difficult man who was right a lot, and the line still moved and the quarter still closed. Now the menial work is going to machines. Value comes from coordination among free agents. Coordination among free agents runs on moods and trust. So the cost of certainty no longer disappears into the process. It lands directly on the income statement.
My friend Peter Yaholkovsky has spent years mapping this, and he gives it the cleanest name I know. He distinguishes Certainty from Discovery. In Certainty you listen for how to frame your argument to win, attending to the other’s view only in order to build a better attack on it. In Discovery you listen because you are committed to a path forward that has to make sense inside their world as well as yours. As Peter puts it, the right conversation in the wrong mood is the wrong conversation.
Fernando Flores gives the error its precise grammar. What we call being right is almost always an assessment held as an assertion. An opinion carried as a fact. The captain of industry who has wrecked every relationship he has is not evil. He made a grammatical mistake and built a life on it.
Now the part that people get wrong.
The answer is not to become soft. Discovery is not gullibility and it is not agreement. Peter is careful on exactly this point. The listening he describes requires discernment, and anyone who cannot tell the difference between understanding a person and being taken in by them has not learned it yet. You can be demanding, decisive, hard to satisfy, and in Discovery at the same time. That combination is rare, and it is the whole thing.
What is required is attunement into the world of another. I want to be honest about the price. This is not a safe enterprise. When you attune yourself to another’s world you are changed. You allow a shift to happen inside you. That is exactly why people refuse to do it. Fortifying your position is cheaper.
The practice is small enough to start today.
We do not remove our blindness. To be human is to be blind. What we can do is become sensitized to it. Humility is the evolution out of double blindness. First you do not know that you do not know. Then you know that you do not know. That second position is where listening becomes possible at all.
So take the next disagreement you walk into and treat it as the beginning of a new conversation rather than the end of listening. Ask what does not fit yet, instead of what you are going to argue with. Notice which one you are running. Then run the other one and watch what happens in the room.
One more thing, because I will not hand you a law dressed up as a promise. I am not going to tell you that the open always defeat the rigid. Rigid systems win often and for long stretches. What I will say is that innovation is found in the experiment, and the experiment wins in periods of instability. We are entering such a period. So this is a wager. I am making it with my life and my company, and you are welcome to make it with yours.
More soon. I am building something in this direction and I will show you shortly.
With care,Saqib