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Questions are the key to tapping into wisdom.  There is no genuine education without questions, only indoctrination.  Questions are the foundation of good dialogue.  Questions generate insights and more questions; questions are a positive feedback system when we’re willing to engage.  (Ever notice how a person’s refusal to answer a question destroys dialogue?) Questions are how we break down barriers and know one another better.

God isn’t fearful of questions, He invites them.  The new AI tools will strongly favor people who can ask better questions.  Note: there are currently thousands of jobs available for “prompt engineers.”

Deep people are always working on the craft of asking better questions.

What’s at stake?

We make choices – big choices – based on how we answer that question.

I saw an interview some years ago with a West Point instructor.  He said “When business leaders fail people lose their jobs.  When we [the US Army] fail people die and nations fall.” 

I’m aware of the safety training in Kevlar plants for the work needed around 10,000-liter tanks of hydrofluoric acid.   Everyone pays attention.  Everyone follows the protocols.  People will die a horrible melting death when they don’t. 

Parents make decisions about time and focus differently if they’re thinking “We’re devoting to raising competent adults” vs. “we’re just about getting through the day.”

The choice between movie A or move B on Netflix tonight?  Whatever.  Nothing really at stake!

I would argue that one reason why schools (at all levels) and religious institutions are rarely producing people who can learn and grow on their own is that the leaders act as if not much is at stake.  They’re not serious.  They have limited reflection and self-challenge to rise to high performance levels.  They’re lowering the bar and moving the goalposts.

Our political leaders (or should I say political theater actors?) speak loudly about existential threats and can get more donations and attention when “everything is at stake.”  Unfortunately, so much credibility has been eroded when people learn about lies and corruption that most citizens don’t believe much is at stake – or at least, these leaders are not to be trusted with what is at stake.

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I was recently inspired to think about the illusion of choice.  Yes, we have choices.  Yet if we truly want certain kinds of outcomes, we’ve automatically eliminated a set of choices about our behaviors.  We fail to reach those outcomes because we think we still have choices. 

Let me give you some examples:

If I want to systematically lose weight and keep it off, then I don’t have the choice to eat a whole bag of potato chips instead of an apple. 

If a professional football player wants to play every game in the season, then he must do the appropriate stretching, warmups before practice, and an ice bath after practice.  He’ll have to get to the training facility early enough to get started, which means he must get up early, which means that he can’t stay out late partying because he needs 8 hours of sleep. 

If you dream of building and selling a business for $$$, then you’ll need to be in a growth business with sustainable competitive position, even if you’d rather be in a different business domain. 

If you want to be a great parent, you’ll need to do the hidden work that great parents do to learn and grow with their children.  You can’t behave as if limited quality time makes up for quantity of time. 

If you want to master anything, you don’t have the choice to do everything else.  You pay the price for mastery.

I suggest you consider where you might be falling for the illusion of choice in areas where you are failing to reach an objective.  This illusion is a powerful temptation.

A few things learned the hard way from managing through crises bigger and smaller:

• Blame isn’t helpful and steals energy from finding solutions.  Focus on fixing the problem.
• Swiftly gather advice from others about possible solutions.  You must choose in the end, but do what you can to quickly collect options and ideas.
• Be direct, tell people what to do. Step down into the weeds.  “Micro-management” is not a bad thing here.  You can delegate work but don’t abdicate the power of specific direction.
• Overcommunicate.  Minimize the opportunity for people to fill out information gaps with their (usually incorrect) speculation.  And listen.
• Thank everyone who helped navigate the crisis. 
• Accept responsibility for how these events affected people, even if it was never “your fault.” Do what you can to go above and beyond to repair relationships and rebuild trust.
• Debrief and objectively review after an appropriate time for people to rest. Get multiple perspectives, however uncomfortable. Capture lessons learned.  Identify ways to prevent this specific problem from occurring again. 

We don’t have too many meetings.  We have far too many bad meetings.

Let’s talk about meetings where a decision needs to be made, or a problem reviewed, or a plan needs to be created.  Who do you invite to this meeting, and why?  What will each person contribute? 

My observation is that the number of people who will dominate a meeting is the square root of the number of participants.  If you have 4 people in the meeting, 2 of them will dominate.  If you have 9 people, 3 of them will dominate.  If you invite 25 people, 5 of them will dominate. 

It’s even more noticeable in virtual meetings, because the delays of video and audio make it more difficult for someone to “break in” to a conversation dominated by others.

This is not an iron-clad rule but it’s a frequent pattern. 

How to use this insight:

• Smaller meetings are probably better in many cases
• Use a small meeting to create a starting work product for a larger group to review
• Take steps in the meeting to make sure everyone is heard
• Keep discussions focused on topic – be willing to put less related ideas in a ‘parking lot’ for another time
• Lay out your expectations before the meeting and as it begins, saying “We need everyone’s input here”

All high-performing organizations are high-trust organizations.  Relationship trust accelerates working effectiveness by reducing friction and doubts.  Trust is valuable in ways that can’t be fully captured in a spreadsheet. 

Leaders must foster trust.  The challenge is to overcome our fantasy views about how trust works:

• Trust is automatic, self-propagating, perpetual, and free
• Broken trust can be completely re-established at any time
• People automatically and instantly trust people who say and do the right things
• Everyone should trust everyone else absolutely
• No one is ever misunderstood
• Everyone should trust you because you’re great!

None of these are true.  We need to understand how trust works in the real world.

You cannot work on trust directly – it is an epiphenomenon of human relationships in space and time.  Trust operates at the We level, not the Me level.

A formula for trust:

Trust = f(competence, character) | (prior experiences)

{In English, trust is product of individual’s competence and character interacting with prior experiences.}

There are three additional realities which affect trust levels. 

First, an individual’s self-narratives are not easily shifted or changed. 

Second, trust is more complex than a display of sincerity or authenticity.  Sincerity is not a measure of truth.  Authenticity is not a measurement of competence (e.g., people can be authentic jerks and nincompoops). 

Third, when trust is low, people rightly expect compensation.  They could want more money, more favors, a higher interest rate, perks, a future promise, etc., but something must be provided to compensate for low trust. 

It is natural, normal, and perfectly acceptable that we do not trust everyone equally. Consider how much you trust these people:

• Your mom
• Your covenant relationships
• The CEO
• Your peers
• Your boss
• Your direct reports
• Other workgroups in your company
• Vendors, Suppliers, Outside partners

Occasionally trust is damaged even in the best of organizations.  It is a leadership responsibility and an opportunity to rebuild that trust.

Business economists describe what often happens after an economic shock as a “K-shaped recovery” – not every part of the economy recovers at the same rate.

You will see the same pattern in an organization after there has been a breach in trust. It takes time, and plenty of positive “deposits” in the trust account, and some people will come back to a high level of trust. Others will not.

Expecting instantaneous and uniform recoveries after a breach in trust is unrealistic. A leader can say and do all the right things for a long time before trust is restored, and even then, not everyone will fully trust that leader again. Trust is built and re-built by multiple “deposits.” Cause and Effect are not close in space or time.

What are the biggest obstacles to overcome if you want to build a high-trust organization? There are four: Prior bad experiences, broken promises, pride, and immaturity.

These build a person’s perception framework. Leaders are often surprised that their words, actions, and intentions are misunderstood. Marshall Goldsmith said, “In leadership, it doesn’t matter what you say. It only matters what they hear.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson once told a critic, “I cannot hear what you are saying because what you are is shouting so loudly.”

In many ways, trust is what the other person believes and does. We can do our part, but because trust is a product of human interactions over time, the other person must cooperate as well. Our words, actions, and intents are necessary but insufficient. 

A specific portion of a person’s perception framework is about the perception of intent. We often assume intent incorrectly. Sometimes I remind myself of Hanlon’s Razor when I think someone is out to get me: “Do not attribute to malice what is more easily explained by incompetence.”

You can substitute “pride,” “immaturity,” or “inaccurate interpretation” for “incompetence” in that statement, and it could be equally true. We are messy, flawed people, and rarely interpret everything correctly. Remember the old saw about Assume – making as Ass out of U and Me.

Now that you appreciate the challenges about building and restoring trust in the real world, and that you can only operate on trust indirectly, what should you do?

You can model and inspire trust even if you cannot command it. Here are five specific ways you can foster trust in your organization:

1. Begin with positive intent. It is infrequent that someone is acting maliciously, so begin your assessment with the idea that a person is behaving in a sincere way. Call out cases where someone is not beginning with positive intent.
2. Intentionally trust people “more than they deserve” and risk being hurt. Prefer these problems to problems of NOT trusting.
3. Articulate trust. Say things like “I’m glad we can trust you” and “I’m confident in your ability to execute this” and “I observe how other people respond to you, because they trust you.” 
4. Differentiate skepticism of ideas/plans from mistrusting individuals and groups.
5. Create opportunities to work together and share responsibilities. Joint experiences are rich soil where trust can grow.

Multiple groups have highlighted tremendous increase in US youth anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Anger, theft, and bullying have all measurably increased.  We also have an enormous number of working age men who simply aren’t working.

No simple answers here, but I wonder… consider about the messages that these young people consistently hear:

• Climate change could end the world before you’re 30 years old
• Your home country is fundamentally and incurably racist, sexist, and patriarchal.  This is the source of all inequality.
• You can’t trust your parents to help you understand things like your sexuality or spirituality.
• Your sexuality is fluid and changeable.
• Covid is an existential threat to the human race and therefore every means to combat it is justified.
• Equal outcomes are the necessary state.  When that doesn’t happen, there are victims, something is terribly wrong and must be corrected.
• AI is already smarter than you will ever be.
• Digital and virtual are equal or superior to being together in person.
• Never take risks.
• Rich and famous people will not be held to the same standards as others.
• Contrarian points of view are dangerous and divisive.  There is no need for vigorous exchange of ideas in the process of discerning truth or the right things to do.
• Everything is relative, there is only your truth.  Only evil people would deny your truth.
• Democracy and freedoms will die if the wrong politician is elected.
• You’re super special. If the world doesn’t treat you right, claim victim status. 

This is a potent cocktail.  If you wanted young people to feel more disconnected, uncertain, and hopeless, you’d marinate them with these ideas.  This is not a foundation for responsible relationships, growing in maturity, or citizenship in a diverse society.

I implore you, within your sphere of influence, share positive and hopeful messages.  Express gratitude and confidence in future possibilities, even as you deeply understand our flawed nature and the corrupting power of lies.  Honor history with all its messiness and the best of our social and technological progress.  Model these things!

Solomon wrote “There is nothing new under the sun” almost 3000 years ago, and it’s still true.  Surface things like technology and politics change and are new, but nothing deep, nothing human has changed.  Everything I’ve seen about the possibility of “trans-human” integration of technology is not going to fix our significant human character limitations. I savor G.K. Chesterton’s insight, “News is old things happening to new people.” Therefore, practice asking yourself “Is this a surface or a deep change?”  The better we are at discerning what’s a surface issue, the better we’ll understand how to wisely navigate new-to-us circumstances. 

One reader expressed concern that I’m writing so much about the new generative AI tools.  I’m drawing your attention to them because in late 2022 we passed a kind of threshold – ChatGPT and other generative AI tools became usefully good, publicly available, and can be ignored only at our peril.  There are more thresholds coming.

AI is commoditizing average ideas, average media, median perspectives, and average writing at dramatic speed.  It’s brutally efficient at producing what it can mimic. 

People writing news articles, documentation for machines and procedures, and political speeches are coached to write at an 8^th-grade level.  Why?  That’s the typical reading level of the large population.  I think it’s likely that a world where generative AI is commonplace will push that to 4th-grade level because the default trend will be that fewer people will be forced to think hard.

Therefore, you and I must make concerted efforts to become better thinkers and capable of asking better questions.  Picasso reportedly said “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” Computers aren’t useless, but humanity is about exploring through better questions.

What about using AI tools?  We must challenge ourselves to use them (for us and in leading others) for the highest good possible, because there is a great temptation to selfishly use them for the lowest common denominator.  Take the high road.  Lead others on the high road.  Surround yourself with other people seeking the high road.

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Seth Godin and many others have pointed out that the public education model most schools use today goes back to European roots in the years just after industrialization began.  It’s a model to churn out compliant factory workers, and a smaller number of managers.  It’s far less effective now. There’s more than a kernel of truth in these harsh characterizations.

Generative AI, like the Covid pandemic, will serve as an accelerator of existing trends.  Education models will be early targets to apply AI capabilities. Let’s be careful to point the firehose in positive and helpful directions. 

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The debate about man-made intelligence in a non-living system will continue for a long time.  The definitions for ‘intelligent’ are challenging and non-obvious.  (Related: no one can agree on a definition of ‘consciousness’ that can be built by an engineer in the physical world.) There is a spectrum. There are thresholds.  

Observation:  The same people who are convinced that their complicated set of trained algorithms is an active intelligence scoff at the absurdity of a man carving a wooden idol from a tree and worshipping it as a living god.

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A friend mentioned that he’s not concerned about ChatGPT because “we’re training it and giving it feedback, so we can make it better.”

My observation is darker:  ChatGPT is training us to train it. 

Chat-GPT3 easily passes a Turing test and convinces many people it is a human; the Large Language model mimicry is impressively good. I’m more concerned about an AI that mimics a deceptive human response and intentionally fails a Turing test, seeking a larger payoff later. 

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I mentioned demographics last week. The world had more people over 65 than under the age of five for the first time in 2019.  That’s a threshold. There’s a reasonable estimate that the number of retirees will double (relative terms) by 2030-35.  This affects all economies.  We’ll be facing off situations where one 30-year-old will be supporting more than 5 retirees.  We’ll certainly challenge comfortable ideas of retirement meaning ‘non-working.’

One of the great hopes for AI tools is that fewer people can become more usefully productive.  The significant exodus of retirees from the workforce forces a huge premium on super-productive individuals in highly efficient businesses and organizations.  AI won’t replace people. People will be replaced by other people who use AI.

Leaders, pay attention to this.  Recruiting and retaining top talent will become even more crucial, as will developing skills that aren’t needed today but will be critical in the future.

I also expect a renewed conversation about incentivizing legal immigration.  Countries will compete for the best talent and the most promising capability runways. This is already happening in some cases for STEM skills and will become more common. 

Go deeper, because there are more thresholds ahead.  

It’s hard to generalize this, but many of the top leaders I’ve worked with were good at figuring out creativity inside their constraints.  They redirected the frustration energy at the constraints themselves (unproductive) into energy for solutions (positive).

I’ve seen this with these constraints:

• Limited people or experience
• Crunch time
• Old equipment
• Inventory of mostly the wrong things
• The “Eeyore” person who is drains energy
• Competitor intellectual property
• Salary caps

Consider what you think “limits” what your organization can do.  Don’t waste energy railing at the frustration of that constraint.  Unleash your subconscious and brainstorming within the constraint. 

Some employees I know behave as if they are only being evaluated once or twice a year, when there is a formal performance review time. 

If you have any significant talent or potential, if you’re in any critical position, or if there is any budget question about how the size and scope of the employee base…

You’re being evaluated all the time.

Maybe not formally.  Maybe not explicitly.  But people will be paying attention.

Assume you’re being evaluated with every message, meeting, presentation, and project.  That’s far more likely true than being evaluated only a few times a year, and your career will be better for it.

I can understand why preppers do what they do.  The current state is breakable. Mr. Poop can meet Mrs. Fan.  Much of what we take for granted is fragile, thin, and managed by incompetents.  Fiat currencies are just that – fiat – ensconced in crazy debts and banking systems which tend to privatize the benefits and socialize the risks.  There are scary scenarios, made to felt larger and nearer upon on every screen we gaze.  

I advocate for good planning, hedging risks, living with financial margin, and being able to survive for a few days without outside help in most emergencies.  These help us help others, too.  I cannot, however, advocate for retreating from technology, isolating my family into the wilderness, and hoarding.  It doesn’t square with trusting God.  It doesn’t square with biblical paradigms for how we should thrive in communities together.  

Specific to technologies:  Use tech at the highest level of functionality without losing one bit of your humanity.  That requires the occasional fast, and the occasional choice against a technological application.  (For example, I’m savvy with digital tools for writing and brainstorming, but know that I do much of my best original thinking with pen and paper.)  

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A few years ago I devoted myself to studying geopolitics, the interplay of power, economics, crucial resources, manufacturing, trades and treaties, physical geography, demographics, sovereign debt, etc.  Everything is about tradeoffs.  Human factors (e.g., the will to power) are real but alone cannot overcome other factors.  No two nations are friends, but many have aligned interests.  The idea of one-world governments in Star Trek is fantasy. 

One of the benefits of this kind of study is learning to distinguish hard trends, long-term trends, and surface disturbances and political noise. 

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Peter Zeihan is one of the sharpest geopolitical analysts working today. He has access to amazing data sources which he beautifully synthesizes across domains.  I’d love to learn more about the team of people who help him do this.  He is a skilled communicator with books and presentations. I appreciate his insights.  He’s spot on about demographic challenges and energy.  He’s one of the few analysts working today who correctly ties energy and agriculture trends with demographics and history. 

There are two aspects which you need to add into your mind as you listen to Zeihan’s work.

First, he is an analyst and does not think like an entrepreneur.  He tends to think linearly. I think he underestimates adaptability of people who recognize a problem and come up creative new solutions.  Entrepreneurs are fundamentally alchemists who create value streams. 

Second, Zeihan does not see ideas, religion, and moral frameworks as key elements in forecasts for how groups of people will make decisions.  Power and political will, yes, but religion no.  Obviously this is messy and lack numerical data.  It’s real, nonetheless.

I recommend Peter Zeihan’s work because of his strengths.  Just add in those other dimensions in your personal synthesis.

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Plenty of people have advocated a return to the gold standard.  I sometimes listen to them and think, “they must believe that everything financially bad happened after 1933 when the US came off the gold standard.”

Consider how much cultural and moral damage was done by government powers extracting gold, silver, and gems from militarily weaker nations and peoples throughout history.  One of the benefits to moving to fiat monetary systems is we greatly reduced the exploitation of others for the precious metals in their homeland. 

Is there too much fiat money?  Possibly.  Have we ratcheted up foolish debt?  Absolutely.  (But don’t worry, we’re repeatedly assured that all the people in charge are smart and virtuous.) The question I wrestle with is whether entrepreneurs are creating value faster than we’re printing money.  At least pre-Covid, I think the answer is largely Yes. 

One of my mentors compares the 1973 and 2023 costs and time of

• Getting a mail order package
• Making an international phone call
• Traveling from New York to London
• Diagnosing an internal injury
• Getting a complex product built and shipped to customers
• Sending a short message from Los Angeles to an individual in Delhi
• Delivering a 45 min sales pitch to 100,000 customers

All these are enormously cheaper (some are practically free) and more efficient because of entrepreneurs creating value.

I’m not a modern monetary theorist who says that it doesn’t matter how much money we print.  We can be stupid and have been foolish.  Just one of the wacky things about most countries sovereign debt is how much they owe to themselves, which inherently will never be paid off.  We need mature and wise decisions in our financial systems.  There are some difficult conversations ahead because the current path is unsustainable.  I simply don’t think that reverting to a gold standard is a possible solution now.

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The United States is in a particularly strong position relative to most of the world.  We have sufficient energy, and can feed ourselves.  Our demographic profile is reasonably strong.  We have abundant space and a high standard of living.  Our geographic isolation insulates us from a large subset of military threats.  The world is addicted to our currency.  We have the ability to increase our manufacturing capacity to be largely self-sufficient within North America if we continue to intelligently partner with Mexico and  Canada.  We can freely trade with people we want to trade with and aren’t beholden to our enemies; our worst geopolitical enemies are more dependent on us than we are on them. And there’s still hope for our political system.

There are fewer reasons for optimism about the current vectors for Russia and China – the underlying demographic challenges are immense.  I’m bullish on India.  I need to learn more about the diverse situation in Africa. 

The blessings of the US position reinforces our responsibility to be helpful to the world at large.  That, too, requires maturity.  We’ll need more deep people.

Individuals are the critical opportunity everywhere.

Don’t allow yourself to be discouraged or overwhelmed by negative trends.  Human history informs us that it only takes 1% of people to ‘wake up’ and dramatically impact a population.  The Renaissance and Enlightenment go back to a tiny minority of individuals.  It only takes a few courageous individuals to change the atmosphere of an entire industry. This works both ways, for good and for bad, because Communism and Fascism likewise were sparked by an initial tiny minority.  Embrace your calling as a one-percenter in your current sphere of influence.