Unbreaking dot org

First up, a plug for Unbreaking, an important new volunteer-led project:

The United States is experiencing institutional collapse at a speed and scale that are difficult to understand, especially through feeds and updates designed to atomize our attention. We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs—and the pushback and resilience work already underway—is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.

I encourage you to read their announcement post, or pick a topic they’re covering and read up (for example, transgender healthcare or food safety).

The curse of knowledge & cursed knowledge

The ‘curse of knowledge’ is a term coined by economists in the 1980s. It describes circumstances where someone has specialized, uncommon knowledge and incorrectly assumes—or acts as if—others also know the same thing. In negotiation, you can imagine why that’s worth keeping straight.

In my own work (including what I write here) the curse of knowledge afflicts me in a particular way. I assume that because I am experienced in a certain topic, it’s universally boring and there is no point in sharing it. This is wrong. It’s an impulse I am learning to ignore, but it’s always there. For example, the most broadly useful post I’ve written for the site is this three-minute how-to on running a premortem. This method no longer seems special to me, but it remains very useful, and the post is a decent enough introduction for those who find it and benefit from it.

Carina Rampelt wrote about a similar problem in this piece on the relationship between the curse of knowledge and interminable jargon:

The Curse of Knowledge: Is Your Expertise Turning You Into A Bad Writer? — Fenwick

“The main cause of incomprehensible prose is the difficulty of imagining what it’s like for someone else not to know something that you know,” writes Steven Pinker. This failure of imagination spells trouble for marketers. When we can’t envision what our customers don’t know, we can’t effectively co

FenwickCarina Rampelt

Slightly different from the curse of knowledge is the idea of ‘cursed knowledge’, which my pal Isaac Wyatt wrote about. In Ike’s formulation, cursed knowledge is that which one knows, but wishes one didn’t—for reasons of comfort, privacy, or to product effects such as plausible deniability.

A recent example of cursed knowledge is this collection of unwanted arcana learned by the developers of a photo & video storage service:

Cursed Knowledge | Immich

Things we wish we didn’t know

Immich Logo

Upcoming event

Registration is now open for in-person and online PuMP Performance Measurement Workshops by Brook Rolter. I took an earlier version of this workshop with Brook some years ago and found it super helpful. It has influenced how I use performance measurement in my work ever since.

Last month, I shared Donald Wheeler’s seminars on using statistical analysis for management. PuMP is a proprietary performance measurement approach that is similar to Wheeler’s, but does as much of the work for you as possible. You’ll get a detailed program to take and run for your group.

The in-person offering in Virginia in July and a waitlist available for the online offering in November. This is the real deal:

KPI Workshops | Rolter Associates

PuMP Performance Measure Blueprint Workshop and Evidence Based Leadership Program - Rolter Associates, improving organizational performance against strategy & mission.

Rolter Associates

Gratitude

I am grateful to the anonymous correspondent who wrote:

I love what you have created on the web. it is a real hoot — obviously, the product of someone enjoying life!!

The reality is that I post this a day later than I wanted to, with fewer links and goodies than I’d hoped. The curse of knowledge combines with my general perfectionism and lingering headache, all of which make me hesitate to publish anything at all. But I will, and I trust it will be useful, or at least amusing, to a few people. (And if it’s not, please go find something better over in my recommendations.)

I hope you are doing well and finding the blue behind and above each cloudy sky. What specific thing can I do to help you? Let me know.

It’s been a busy month of client work and springtime and trying to stay focused and active while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud. And at the end of this month, I come to you with an offering of words glowing on a screen. Let’s begin.

Online reading

First, Cat Hicks offers her theory of “Why I Cannot Be Technical”. This is a wonderful, challenging essay and I hope it is the first of many on her new blog, Fight for the Human. Hicks writes:

Your theory has to ask why, so your theory has to include repair. A description of the things happening for technical people and technical work has to include a realization of boundaries and how they are policed. This helps you start to see. Despite how real it feels, despite how carefully we have knit supposedly objective judgments of performance and evaluation and delivery of work into these words, Technical is not an assessment of reality. Labeling someone Technical is a reality-transforming weapon. I am structurally incapable of being Technical because in the world we have built, Technical must always be conditional for people like me, buffeted around by some unearned privileges and some undeserved exclusions as mediated by people’s perceptions and the current social location of my gender, class, race, ideological perspective, the role-related identities that the label put on my work gives me, and all of the other categories our brains are using to slice up this planet in between meteor strikes.

Why I Cannot Be Technical

With some regularity, kind-hearted Technical people tell me that I Can Be Technical, Too. This usually happens when I’m asking us to define what we’re calling technical in a software environment. I understand why it happens. I am a psychologist of software environments and that is something of

Fight for the HumanCat Hicks

Earlier this month I had the good fortune to see Naomi Klein in conversation with Kate Starbird about her book Doppelganger—the most recent, and easily my favorite, of Klein’s books.

Klein did a huge service for a few hundred people gathered at a local university by merely saying that what is happening is not normal, and not OK. Everybody in attendance needed a moment to hear that, and feel it, in a crowd.

This event was only a few days after Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor wrote about the “darkly festive fatalism” currently dismantling the American state and what one can do—what we can do—in response:

To have a hope of combating the end times fascists, with their ever-constricting and asphyxiating concentric circles of ‘ordered love’, we will need to build an unruly open-hearted movement of the Earth-loving faithful: faithful to this planet, its people, its creatures and to the possibility of a livable future for us all. Faithful to here.

The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them

The GuardianNaomi Klein

Moving from zero to one: how to…

Start consulting

Brea Starmer is the CEO of Lions & Tigers, a local/global consulting firm. She recently posted a remarkable six-point checklist for getting started in consulting. I truly wish I’d had this list in front of me when I began this work ~20 years ago. And as bad times are on horseback and people consider different ways of working, I’ve talked through this list with a couple folks. I think it’s a great starting point for those thinking about consulting, and specifically, how to begin.

Start writing

Liana has started up a blog where she’s sharing worthwhile advice from her work in/around writing. Now, Liana is my sweetheart and I linger over every word she publishes. Does that make me biased? Yes. Is this blog very good? Also, yes. Her first big post is about moving past fear and other self-inflicted obstacles. This will help anyone who’s ever stared into an empty page and despaired. Plus, if you read the piece, you’ll find out how the two of us met. Check it out:

Eight Principles To Help Aspiring Writers Conquer Their Fear Of Inadequacy

Talent isn’t enough. Sometimes, nothing’s harder than getting over yourself.

Liana’s SubstackLiana Kerr

Find insight in data

Donald Wheeler is a statistician, author, and consultant. I rely on his books “Understanding Variation” and “Understanding Statistical Process Control” for my own consulting work. I recently learned that Wheeler’s seminars are freely available online, with videos on YouTube. These are not flashy. But I encourage you to make time for the first two presentations, in which Wheeler makes his case that “the purpose of analysis is insight,” and demonstrates some basic, immediately useful methods.

Days like these

It’s hard to focus on anything right now. So much awful stuff is happening every day. It’s a challenge for me to treat each day and each breath as its own awesome thing, encountered whole-heartedly. Of course I fall short in this.

I hope that in memory this entire period feels like a montage—a compressed interval of political decay, massive unhinged cruelty, etc.—with a beginning and an end, set to some energetic yet gloomy song (perhaps New Order’s “Ceremony”). But we are not here in memory. We’re in the middle of things. So let’s keep at it.

Online reading

A few conversations this month have sent me back to Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. In this short essay from 1999, she wrote about formulating a list in a burst of exasperation, and then having to explain it. Here’s how Meadows introduces the thing:

What bubbled up in me that day was distilled from decades of rigorous analysis of many different kinds of systems done by many smart people. But complex systems are, well, complex. It’s dangerous to generalize about them. What you are about to read is a work in progress. It’s not a recipe for finding leverage points. Rather it’s an invitation to think more broadly about system change.

What this invitation turns out to be is a list of twelve places to intervene in a system, ranked in order of effectiveness, spanning from (least effective):

12. Constants, parameters, numbers.

to (most effective):

1. The power to transcend paradigms.

I have benefited from this document many times over the years:

• It guides me away from “inflicting help” (thanks, Jerry Weinberg) by offering interventions that are not wanted.
• And it guides me toward noticing interventions that:
  • People love to do—“quick fixes” or strategy or whatever—but
  • End up pushing problems around. They will never be effective in changing systems.

That said, what I offer now is an invitation to ponder Meadows’ invitation.

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

The Academy for Systems Change

ProSci has published a great online guide to managing resistance to change. I was pleased to see this as it shares a bunch of their research findings and recommended actions that one would normally have to hit the books or take a course to access. I’ve written about resistance before. If you want to dig in to the topic and get a few solid checklists and approaches for making the most of this important signal, start here:

The Complete Guide Managing Resistance to Change

Prepare to manage resistance to change effectively by using Prosci’s research-backed change management strategies for lasting success.

Prosci - The Global Leader in Change Management

(Although, if you have a few days and a professional development budget, consider their three-day certification course.)

On the site

I’ve refreshed a couple pages on the site recently, including:

• a less bad biography/introduction page,
• a new consulting page, and
• a much shortened set of recommended books and sites.

Upcoming event

In April, May, and June, some practitioners and teachers of Liberating Structures—a facilitation approach I’ve written about before and use regularly—are hosting a series of online gatherings under the topic of “Vitalizing Health, Care, and Community with Liberating Structures”.

One problem folks run into when learning group facilitation is that the best way to learn this is to see one, do one, teach one. But it’s not always easy to find opportunities to watch other facilitators do what they do, and then to practice the methods directly. I lucked out: I learned Open Space Technology by watching Michael Herman do it decades ago. And my first real exposure to Liberating Structures was at some local events in Seattle.

Because this series is offered online and has sliding scale pricing, consider attending if the topic or the format are interesting to you:

Vitalizing Health, Care, and Community with Liberating Structures

This series explores the relationship between health and LS. Funds will support the health and recovery of a member of our community.

Eventbrite

The storm

2025 in America has been tough so far, and things are worsening rapidly. So many people have lost so much in such a short time. It is like watching a bulkhead in ill repair erode with each tide. Can such erosion be restored, reversed? Yes, but not without huge effort and coordinated action. That’s why I am so focused on systems thinking and facilitation these days:

• Systems thinking as a way to reason about systems, power, change—not “merely” in the workplace, but all around us.
• And facilitation as a simple, whole-hearted way to improve gatherings.

Last week we had an evening of spring thunderstorms, with cautions of hail and wind damage—rare weather conditions here in the Pacific Northwest, especially this time of year and at the forecasted intensity. I grew up in the middle of the cornfields in Michigan, so something in me is always longing for a thunderstorm. Hearing rolling thunder as the clouds rushed overhead was such a joy. The beauty of weather. Here in Tacoma, the worst conditions did not come to pass—no hail, no wind damage, and so forth. But it was good to prepare, and to be ready. To watch and to listen. And now, a few days later, everything is in bloom and the blossoms are very fragrant and bright.

Online reading

SessionLab’s third annual State of Facilitation report is out. It helps me reflect on my own facilitation practice, which tends toward the solitary and variable based on the projects I take on.

Three personal highlights from this year’s report:

Facilitated sessions are becoming shorter. Comparing responses from the 2022 and 2024 surveys, the proportion of facilitators who have never conducted workshops lasting more than one day has increased by 10%.

I ditched the multi-day facilitated workshops in 2019. I traded in “big bang” three-day workshops in for sequences of 1- or 2-hour online sessions, spaced out over a week or two, with opportunity for new ideas in the margins. This works out better for everyone involved, except for the person who has to schedule all the meetings. (That person is usually me!)

In-person sessions are back, but remote and hybrid facilitation are here to stay. In 2022, 57.8% of sessions were held online, but by 2024, in-person workshops have regained the top spot.

Although 2024 was a very busy year, the only days I worked with clients in-person were devoted to facilitating workshops. If you are reading this and I handed you one of those little vinyl cactus toys, you are very special to me.

You can even detect the random walks of corporate fashion, with the rise of L&D and the total gutting of design and product organizations:

The responses to the question, “What department do you work in?” highlight that individuals facilitating sessions, training, and workshops are spread across various company departments. Major contributors include Learning and Development and, of course, Management.

Then cast one’s gaze toward the bottom of the list, where Design and Product departments accounted for less than 8% of responses.

Much more for you to peruse in this free report:

State of Facilitation 2025 – Report and Expert Insights

The 2025 edition of SessionLab’s State of Facilitation report. Data, trends, and insights from a survey of workshop design and facilitation professionals.

SessionLabKeith McCandless (2014)

Next, from Ali Alkhatib’s “Defining AI”:

We should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to ‘democratize’ AI routinely conflate ‘democratization’ with ‘commodification’. … This way of thinking about AI (as a political project that happens to be implemented technologically in myriad ways that are inconsequential to identifying the overarching project as ‘AI’) brings the discipline—reaching at least as far back as the 1950s and ’60s, drenched in blood from military funding—into focus as part of the same continuous tradition.

Finally, Erin Kissane’s celebration of Ursula Franklin:

Ursula Franklin's lifework was highly practical. As a metallurgist, she studied the structure of ancient artifacts to produce knowledge about the cultures that made them. As a peace activist and conservationist, she practiced civil disobedience and obstruction as well as healthy renewal. As a far-sighted thinker about modern technology, she worked relentlessly to lay the foundations of ways to think together that could produce better technologies—and to define what “better” meant. Maybe starting with this small way into her work—a single list for thinking about decisions—makes sense.

Kissane wanders through a little passage where Franklin wrote seven questions to consider when designing a public project. Here’s the seventh:

Whether the reversible is favoured over the irreversible? The last item is obviously important. Considering that most projects do not work out as planned, it would be helpful if they proceeded in a way that allowed revision and learning, that is, in small reversible steps.

If we’ve worked together before and Franklin’s name rings a bell, it’s because I rely on her formulation of “small, reversible steps” (which I sometimes call “small, reversible changes”).

Ursula’s list

Ursula Franklin is one of my all-time favorite thinkers about both the obvious and obscured parts of our technological world.

wreckage/salvageErin Kissane

A plug for better online typography

There was this thing going around that the presence of em dashes (—) is a hint that a text is generated by an LLM. Of course, the real tell is that the text is boring as shit. You have my eternal permission to stop reading anything dull. When your mind wanders, let your feet follow. For example, I recently resolved to stop reading anything containing the word “alignment” and this has saved time.

Anyway, my purpose is to share Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, a site on using typography—including em dashes—to improve your written communication. This is not a topic I know much about, but I do know enough to crib from an expert and spend an additional 5 minutes making things look nice on the screen or page before proceeding onwards.

Butterick’s Practical Typography

Butterick’s Practical Typography

Podcast appearance

Last week I appeared on my pal Andy’s “Own Your Awkward” podcast. True to the name, it was an awkward, but ultimately fruitful, conversation.

My main awkward thing is that I’m too hard on myself. For the awful details on what that means and ways in which I’m a work-in-progress on getting past it, listen in your podcast player or watch on YouTube.

Take good care of yourself and the people in your life.

There is so much more to do, urgently, but let’s begin there.

My accomplished, wonderful pals

2024 was difficult—but ultimately very good—for me. Something that got me through the difficult parts was enjoying the successes of my friends, pals, and comrades, of which I offer an incomplete list here, in roughly chronological order:

• The boffins over at Fenwick released the Think Like a Writer course, which I have taken and personally recommend. Most online courses are bad. Not this one. Instead, it’s a three-week commitment that produces immediate, durable results. (I wrote about this in May).
• Lissy launched her playful learning company, HuMindWise, “turning burnout, stress, and imposter syndrome into opportunities for growth through game based learning and community.”
• Devon completed and published her book project: The Accessibility Operations Guidebook. (My notes from October.)
• A bunch of my friends rafted the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. No names and no URLs to share, but everything about that adventure astonished and inspired me.
• Shannon and Jamie completed their 80’s Kids cover album, which you can stream now, and which they’re taking on the road next year. My favorite track is the Boss’s Dancing in the Dark; play it really loud.
• Over the summer and fall, Neetal released a set of 4 children’s books in her Pineapple Friends series of social impact books for kids. These passed muster with my seven-year-old child—so they’re the real deal.

On the site in 2024

I only shared one new blog post this year. I did manage to keep up with monthly links & notes, and did a bunch of cleanup—tidying older posts, organizing the junk drawer, and so forth. Everything about this was good, but I’d like to do more soon.

A format for year-end reflection

Greg and Brett at Same Team Partners created a simple, free activity called Replay and Reset for 2025. I worked through this over the weekend—in under an hour—and uncovered a couple ah-has as well as committed to some new to-dos for the new year. I encourage you to try this for yourself.

• If you’re a video person, watch this 10-minute introduction that walks you through the activity and how to do it on your own.
• After drafting my own Replay and Reset for 2025, I had coffee with Greg and shared what I came up with. Here’s what Greg had to say about that.

The bit about my waders

I hope you find some time to say farewell to 2024 and get your waders on for 2025. The water is rising fast and looking pretty choppy.

I leave you with this, from §67 of the Tao Te Ching, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation. It’s as good an answer as any to the question of how we are meant to proceed from here.

I have just three things to teach:

simplicity, patience, compassion. 

These three are your greatest treasures. 

Simple in actions and in thoughts, 

you return to the source of being. 

Patient with both friends and enemies, 

you accord with the way things are.

Compassionate toward yourself,

you reconcile all beings in the world.

Online reading

“I feel connected to my organization’s culture.” Only 40% of leadership, 23% of management, and 19% of staff agree with this statement.

My pal Jenny Zhang recently gave a superb conference talk on ways it might be more useful to think about values (fit/mismatch/tension) in the workplace, instead of culture.

I particularly enjoyed this:

The expected return of going to leadership with negative feedback is terrible. Risk alienating your boss for the sake of telling the truth? Why? Even if you’re not directly retaliated against, and people often are, it can still really damage your standing. If you speak up too often, you’re branded as the naysayer. If you’re part of a marginalized group raising issues about how marginalized people are treated, you’re tarred as being “political” or “biased”. And of course, most of the time the canaries in the cultural coal mine are the marginalized employees with the least standing, because they’re the ones with the least protection when the cracks start to show.

Part of my client work is to get emerging leaders to develop systems for:

• hearing bad feedback and
• actually doing some damned thing about it—
• even when the doing is difficult.

An important predicate here is that leaders must realize that by the time one person is willing to speak up about a problem, they typically speak for a scared-as-shit coalition of their peers. And, as Jenny points out, leaders should understand that the people who have the capability and urgency to speak up first tend to be the least protected.

Please, read Jenny’s talk or watch the recording:

the values of work

In October I gave a talk at Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine, a small and intimate tech conference with a big impact in the industry. It’s quite unlike any other conference I’ve been to, which is explicitly the point. I’d been hearing about the conference from friends for years, and it somehow still managed to exceed all my lofty expectations. Monktoberfest asks that your talk be something you wouldn’t be able to hear at any other conference. Mine was about values and how they show up at work and what happens when there is a gap between your stated and enacted values. It’s a theme that percolates through a lot of my writing and something I’ve spent many sleepless nights ruminating on, and giving this talk to such a receptive, empathetic, and compassionate audience was incredibly meaningful to me. You can watch the talk here: Seeing as I am personally allergic to watching any YouTube videos longer than five minutes unless I absolutely have to, I’ve also included a lightly edited version of the text of the talk below.

The Roof is on PhireThe Roof is on Phire

The “Multisolving” Book

I think this book by Elizabeth Sawin, just released, is an instant classic in systems thinking. The approach:

While the idea of killing two birds with one stone (or “filling two needs with one deed”) is age-old, and the notion of co-benefits in policy-making has been around for years, Multisolving addresses the current mismatch between complex, deeply intertwined societal issues and our siloed approach to them.

Systems thinking is vital for so many kinds of work, but it can also be easy to encounter it and come away thinking—that’s neat, but all a little theoretical, and I have these specific things I am trying to get done this week. This book builds on systems thinking from Donella Meadows and others, but organizes it all in a direct, useful way. Each chapter ends with two things:

• First, some questions for reflection that I am finding useful, both for myself and to bring into discussions with others.
• And second—this is a really wonderful surprise—a short poem that crystallizes the point of the chapter. I remember the images from these poems better than I do the content of the text (which is a good thing).

Buy a copy at the link below and use the code MULTI for a 20% discount.

Multisolving Book - Multisolving Institute

MULTISOLVING: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World Order the Book Synopsis For most of Elizabeth Sawin’s career, she was not a multisolver. Instead, she worked on a single, albeit immensely important problem: climate change. Despite tremendous effort—long hours of teaching, attending conferences, publicizing analysis—at the end of the day, she felt like she was […]

Multisolving InstituteKelsi Bowens

Whole-heartedness

A theme for the month of Zen readings and week of silent retreat I did back in October was “whole-heartedness”—which I cannot think of as anything but the opposite of half-assedness. Here in the USA, we’re entering a season of the politics of the very worst. Achille Mbembe’s 2019 “Necropolitics” is the book through which I understand where we’re heading.

My task right now is to know where the community is—where my communities are—and to engage gently, but whole-heartedly. Does everyone know it’s OK to ask for help? Or to share their fears and specific, material concerns? Because we will continue to need each another. There is no one, or nothing, else.

I’ve been listening to this song for 25 years. It is what whole-heartedness means to me, and I hope it lets some light in for you:

Anthem by Leonard Cohen on Apple Music

Song · 1992 · Duration 6:09

Apple Music - Web Player

Take good care of yourself and the people around you.