The Latitude of Failure

We had a HUGE snowstorm this past weekend, actually we didn't but we were supposed to.

In fact, I have talked about fear marketing before, the idea of this storm was so bad there were people leaving the gig I was playing drums at in order to "beat the storm home." 

Or they were polite enough to say that instead of the alternative, which I appreciate. 

That said, each of us woke up on Sunday morning to a storm that never came, there also weren't any mass firings of weather people for getting it totally wrong, why? Because we have come to understand that in that line of work, especially with a Great Lake involved, getting weather right can be extremely difficult and that gives them the latitude of failure. That latitude allows the industry to test new modeling software, play with new video equipment, and experiment in the wonder that is the weather patterns of the planet Earth.

When you put it like that, sounds like a pretty amazing job eh? 

This past weekend something happened in the NFL that has never happened before, all four road teams won their respective wildcard games and in the process, a fair amount of sports pundits got a lot of their picks very wrong.

Again we did not witness heads rolling on Monday (unless you went on Twitter but that thankfully, is not an accredited HR department) and life in the sports world carries on. Why? Because we actually enjoy when we can beat the sports pundit since it allows us to seem both more intelligent (read lucky) and that his or her job becomes seemingly attainable since you just beat them at it.

This industry, like the weather industry, allows for some complex modelling along with the impossible task of working in the fantasy football angle in order to create a product that you as the consumer return to week in and week out to see who got what right. Because in sports broadcasting you live or die by your next HOT TAKE. 

The hotter the take, the more interesting the broadcaster.

I am reading a book right now called "Wired to Create" which got me thinking down this path of failure and how we might all talk about it butrarely embrace it the way they do in weather or sports. That isn't to say that I am naive enough to think every business can itself, or allow its employees to recklessly explore every idea that surfaces. 

But what if you just allowed yourself to? 

What if you made it your mission to be wrong, a lot. What if you woke up every day and tried something you weren't absolutely sure would work? You might at this point be thinking of the famous Edison quote about the light bulb and how many times he failed in order to create it, which is fine - but seems to have been used so many times it has become trite or at the very least a business platitude that lacks the intention you need to fail. We all need to push a bit harder to be good at failing. 

If you want to grow, you have to fail. If you want to get smarter you have to be the dumbest human in the room. If you want to win, you guessed it, you have to be willing to lose. In this month of failed resolutions what if you started one that allowed you to fail, instead of forced you to succeed? 

Why do only 8% of people who make resolutions stick with them? Because most people give up once they fail at them, game over. But if that was part of the process - no if that WAS the process, what would success look like? In the same reason you don't train for a marathon by starting off running one, you don't learn a new skill by starting as an expert.

Be wrong in 2016, it will be the most empowering 12 months of your life. 

Star Wars as single line drawings

via GIPHY

Media’s toothpaste problem

In the past 7 days two stories have illustrated a key issue facing future journalist and any of us who wish to consume news content that we find helpful.

Senator Ted Cruz posted this Christmas parody ad on his YouTube channel on Dec 18th and as of this writing has garnered nearly 2 million views. In the video he is shown reading the “Christmas story” to his children and in kind the Washington Post posted an illustration from Pulitzer Prize winning artist Ann Telnaes on their site of Senator Cruz as an organ grinder and his children as monkeys.

Political cartoons have been an important part of the tenuous relationship of the citizenry and the government dating back to the 1700’s, but this cartoon went one step too far.

The backlash was immediate and hefty enough that the Washington Post pulled the cartoon and echoed the thoughts of some that children should be kept out of the political crossfire, of which I agree. However, this is not the first time — nor will it be the last time a political figure’s children have come under fire by political satirists in any medium. It is after all, a part of protected speech covered by the First Amendment but that is not where I have an issue.

My issue is with the coverage of the cartoon being pulled.

Without fail on every platform, channel, medium, and outlet any time the host or anchor would talk about the story and how we should keep children out of it, they would show the cartoon. The cartoon would show up on hundreds of sites that were not the Washington Post, so they were in the clear. but the damage (if there is some) has been done. A clear case of nothing on the Internet every truly going away because in this report first, get clicks, viewers, or pageviews economy you need this fodder to feed the hungry crowds.

It wasn’t that these stations actually thought there was anything wrong with the cartoon, or the fact that the children were monkeys, it is that this sort of vapid reporting will get people to pay attention for a moment or two and then they go right back to their lives.

What are they paying attention to? The cartoon.

So did pulling the cartoon help? Or did it speed up the way in which the content went viral?

The second story is about Peyton Manning and did he or didn’t he take human growth hormone that was sent to his wife in 2011. The story broke on Al Jazeera Sunday from journalist Deborah Davies and centers around Charlie Sly, a pharmacist who allegedly supplied the testimony that Manning came in for some treatments and had the HGH shipped to his wife in order to avoid suspension.

After the story broke Charlie Sly recanted his statements but most people don’t read corrections. So here you have someone’s career in question using testimony that was recorded without that person knowing and then printed for the world to read on a day where the only thing people talk about, is football.

This story may be true, but it needs more vetting. If it isn’t true, it hardly matters because for 6 hours on Sunday as football fans watched the NFL on FOX getting ready for the early games to start all they heard is that Peyton Manning is a cheater, doubtful they chased down the second part where Mr. Sly says the statements were not true and somewhere in the middle is the truth — but we don’t seem very interested in that these days.

The reality is that the publishers are in love with the sound of a click and the public is in love with the idea of being judge, jury, and executioner. Tell me again the last time the flames and pitchforks went away quietly after a mistake had been made? It was probably the same time you got the toothpaste back in the tube.

I got you

I was in a meeting this week where I gained two new members on my team, in that meeting, the director who was doing the hand-off handled the transition as if he was dropping his own children off at a college campus for the first time. He spoke in a way that the two employees knew they mattered, a lot, to the organization and more importantly - they were important to him. He used words to express that while things are changing, he would always be available to them and that at the end of the day this would be great for everyone. 

Even if change is scary at times. 

I left that meeting with the understanding that I have BIG shoes to fill with these two employees as the guy who had them in his charge made sure they were protected, empowered, had autonomy when they needed it and support when they wanted it. They understood where they were going as a team and how they would get there, together. 

Fast forward to last night, I was feeding my newborn son a bottle a little bit after midnight and all of a sudden Jack came out of his milk coma to become alert and curious about his surroundings and our eyes locked for the first time. 

"Don't worry buddy, I got you." I whispered to him, then it hit me.

The common complaint about corporate culture is "the company only cares about money," and in most cases that is probably true. The enity known as "the company" as if we are in a George Orwell or Max Berry novel likely only cares about emperical data and is not interested or more correctly put, not capable of mustering up empathy for a single employee. 

An employee requires a human touch, empathy, and understanding, which is why the role of a manager or director becomes vital to the health and well-being of an organization. This is not to say that a manager needs to be a defacto parent or even babysit, although these things happen. No, a great manager needs to be able to look that employee in the eye and with zero hesitation say, "I got you." 

When an employee joins a new company or even a more minor switch to a new team there is an adjustment that needs to be made. This is time is paramount to make sure that employee feels safe. Safe to ask questions, safe to make mistakes, and even built up when there are wins they are responsible for. 

We are charged with having a team of people in our care for the time that they are in our organizations or on our teams. These people leave their families, boyfriends, girlfriends, cats, or dogs to get into a car and come to work where they will spend nearly 80% of their adult lives in a corporate environment.

It is our job to look them in the eye every day and say, "don't worry, I got you." 

Journalism is officially dead

Two hours ago Gawker reported that MSNBC and CNN, along with other media outlets and apparently random strangers were allowed into the home of Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen, they are the two attackers in the San Bernadino shootings from earlier this week.

Since the story broke, I have watched (or read) in disbelief at the “reporting” that has been allowed on radio, television, and in print (digital or otherwise) that seems to have no basis in fact, but a predisposition to eyeballs as my friend Ken Evans wrote about yesterday.

But this is a new low.

In the video, you can see Kerry Sanders rifling through the belongings including personal items of the 6-month-old and even holding up things like Syed’s mothers drivers license to the camera:

I cannot even begin to tell you how wrong this is, but I will attempt to. First, there is the issue that this is still an active crime scene:

Second there is the matter of the photographs, social security cards, checks, and other sensitive documents (that were not exclusive to the attackers) that are being shown to the world live on MSNBC and CNN respectively:

You may be thinking that after what they did, this is all in the scope of “what they deserved,” but I fear you are not thinking about the precedent this is setting. The media has zero right to search your home, regardless of what you are accused of doing, or even did. Zero right.

Have you heard of Jeremy Bentham? He is known as the father of utilitarianism, the idea being that the best moral action is the one that maximizes utility which as a mathematic equation would boil down to this:

Action - suffering in said action = aggregate pleasure

At scale, it would be known as the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people would be the measure of what is right and wrong. Pleasure, in this case, can also be known as well being.

The other thing that Bentham is well-known for is something known as the Panopticon:

The Panopticon is a structure designed originally for prisons and then later adapted for other uses (like your cubicle farm) where the tower you see in the middle allows for the guard or those in power to see into every cell, but not at the same time.

Here is the genius in the design, the prisoners cannot see into the tower so they never know when they are being watched, so they act as if they are always being watched. If this is reminding you of Orwell’s 1984, it should.

I bring this up because we are handing over a great deal of power and very little oversight to companies and trusting that they are working in our best interest and journalist should be the entity between us and a media panopticon. Journalist this week are not holding up their end of the bargain, at all.

At its best, journalism should be an unbiased look at the world around us in order for the public to use the lens in which they view the world to make sense of all of it. Does it feel like that is happening this week? Or any time in recent memory?

I know it is hard to have these discussions with a tragedy like this as the backdrop, but that is when these issues seem to boil to the surface. I cannot even imagine what it is like to be Muslim in this country this week and events like what unfolded this afternoon only serve to amplify that feeling.

The unfortunate thing about this afternoon is there is no governing body to hold CNN or MSNBC accountable to any standard of journalism or even truth. You may say the F.C.C. as a gut reaction, but they haven’t made a move to have any sort of oversight of broadcast television even before the deregulation that took the teeth out of the organization in 1996.

No, that falls on us.

If you are okay with Kerry Sanders going through your belongings this afternoon, please take a moment to watch this:

If you are not okay with what just happened on two giant cable news channels this afternoon, maybe do what I did — cut the cord.