blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)

May 3rd, 2024

• my threads on twitter — blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) making money, wealth
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1786535408614228214

April 22nd, 2024

• ii salon on blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) template

August 28th, 2023

• one on meta-cultiness, sorta riffing on blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1696292729355936216

May 12th, 2023

• blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)

• some version of "blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)"
  • I converted my old "blindspot feedback is hard" thread into a blog post draft
  • I probably want to go through the roam page and weave in other thoughts I've collected on the topic!

May 6th, 2023

• blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
  • [really relevant convo between me & Jess today; mostly recorded]
  • seems like some aspects of blindspot feedback need to be different depending on ~whether someone knows how to Look
    • if someone knows how to Look, you can be like "I want to point something out to you, but I trust you to check for yourself and not let my story of it override"
    • if someone doesn't know how to Look (or not fluently? I'm confused about what it means to HAVE this skill... it seems kinda binary but also obviously someone can be more or less capable (in general and in a given moment))

May 2nd, 2023

• fragments about blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) &+ in a thread I published today
  • === scraps
  • you're not including their perspective
  • which means that it's going to be hard for them to hear you
  • blindspot hard
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1391959685851324421
  • ==============
  • lots of people think that if you can see through someone's mask, that gives you a license to be a jerk about it
  • fun fact: anyone being a jerk about such things isn't seeing clearly. they're seeing *something*, but not the whole picture
  • someone pointing out something you're studiously avoiding creates a weird pressure—a mix of curiosity and defensiveness
  • a sign (to me) to go slowly and care-fully
  • among growthy communities, it's common for there to be pressure to dive headlong in
  • non-exhaustive list of reasons people hurt themselves on feedback they don't understand:
  • they're desperate for any feedback at all (perhaps from a fear of hurting others)
  • they're desperate for (your) attention
  • they think it's noble to let people cut them with verbal blades
  • it's common to talk about "cutting through spiritual materialism". circlers talk about "drawing blood". violent metaphors
  • riffing, perhaps, on Lakoff...
  • I prefer to see it as a dance
  • malcolmocean.com/2021/09/non-naive-trust-dance-why-the-name/
  • to be clear, by "being a jerk" here I don't quite mean "being cruel", in the sadistic sense
  • I mean "communicating in ways that jerk people around"
  • even me using the term "jerk" is probably an instance of the phenomenon I'm decrying here
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1391959697700229127
  • bullshit
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1653595835974975489
  • you may feel the need to name some bs that's going on, for your sanity or for onlookers'
  • but don't fool yourself into thinking that just because you've named something, you're actually attempting (let alone succeeding) at communicating it
  • twitter.com/the_wilderless/status/1653418453124935688

Podcast summaries

• 0:36 - 37:24 - Recording conversations - The social and therapeutic benefits, and the logistics of the process. Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame
  • 03:21 - M > Yeah, yeah. Well, I can see why that question is a good starting point. And I'm also a little bit amused that this is a starting point, as well, because there's quite a number of recordings that I have with people -particularly in the very first conversation in which we were recording or perhaps even meeting- there's a lot of conversations that I have with people, where the the first part of the conversation is about how we're recording conversations. So you know, they're like, "Sure," and then they're like, "What's the deal with that anyway?" And I'm like, "Well..." [Laughs]. So this practice emerged in the cultural incubator that I spent the better part of the last decade living at in Waterloo, which has been known by various names -Upstart Collaboratory for collaborative culture design being kind of one of the longest running names and more recently, the liminal space agency. And we started doing this in 2016. Well, prior to that, we'd been recording our meetings. Like we would have a kind of weekly meeting that was this group practicing and talking about this new culture. But as we started to take things more seriously, particularly those of us who were living there, we would begin recording pretty much all of our conversations and the 'all of them-ness' came from how often we'd get halfway through a conversation, realize something really juicy was happening and be like, "Oh, are we recording this?" And so eventually, we just started having a really strong default to just recording everything. The mere act of recording a conversation changes it. Even if you don't have doing anything with the recordings, it gives a different feel to a few different dimensions of what's present. Like, there's the sense of awareness that other people might hear what you're saying, who don't have the context that the people that are live in the conversation have. And so that can create some different kinds of like contextual awareness. But in terms of the main reason why we started, it was that we were noticing that in terms of the group coherence that we were looking for, it made a huge difference to be able to give people a full experience of conversations they weren't in. And there's kinda a few reasons why that was powerful. So one of them is... if something important happened - somebody had a major insight, or a learning, or some sort of cool exchange happened, we could share that in full fidelity with people. There was also like, the experience of like re-listening to yourself and being able to notice, like, "Oh, yeah, that was the point in the conversation when I suddenly got really angry. What was going on for me there?" You know? You could basically use them therapeutically and in the Coherence Therapy Work I've done in the last year with a therapist, we've used a kind of just memory based technique called "Rewind," where you go into the situation where you had some trigger come up or whatever, and you just try to rewind the tape until right before the trigger. And so I've had experiences of listening -already it's occurring to me- I've had experiences of listening to recordings and literally re-listening to a particular minute multiple times [and wondering] "What's going on there for me?" And like, "What do I think was going on there for this other person?" So that's really cool. And then another big piece is basically... I'm going to say something really obvious which is, you don't know what it's like when you're not there. Like, you don't know what a conversation is like when you're not in it. And this is more obviously true for somebody as loud and boisterous as I am, but even even in general, you don't you don't know what how people talk, when you're not in the room, you know. I've never been in a conversation of all women. I can't be. It wouldn't be a conversation of all women if I were. But to have the experience of being able to witness those conversations, not just among actors on TV, but among the very people that you're usually in conversation with, can be very powerful. You can notice the moments when... I mean, for me, for instance, it's very obvious when I'm listening to a recording, and there's a moment when, if I were sitting there, I almost certainly would have jumped in with some comment. But I'm not there, so I didn't and then I get to find out what happens when I don't.
  • 14:17 - T > When I first talked to you about it, and also now, I got sort of a sense of a principle that if you record your conversations, that you can't know in advance which conversations are going to be important. But if you record it, you're just going to have it recorded and it might be extremely useful in the future to have it recorded. Does that seem fair to describe your experience of that?
  • M > Totally. Yeah. And so it's to be expected that a large fraction of them don't end up getting used. That's kinda necessary in order to get a large fraction of the ones that do need to be used, because you can't know in advance. I mean, you can sometimes know in advance that a conversation is more or less likely. And there's obviously conversations where it's sort of like, you know it's going to be historical, right? Like, in some way, you know... these people meeting for the first time or whatever. One important caveat, because people have been confused about this before, is that the culture there is not like Bridgewater. So Bridgewater is, I guess, a hedge fund or something like that. Some investment company that has itself a really interesting and weird culture, which was profiled in Robert Keegan's "An Everyone Culture" book. And they record all of their meetings. I don't think they record Hallway Conversations, which is itself interesting. But they record all of their meetings, and those recordings are, I guess, either automatically [transcribed], or maybe they even have people hired to transcribe them or whatever. And anyone who was mentioned in the meeting gets notified about that. So it's sort of in principle, there's no secrets. I think that is risky, in a certain sense. I mean, maybe fine in a sufficiently corporate context, maybe. By corporate, I don't actually mean corporate, maybe Finance is a sufficiently technical context. Because if you don't actually have the psychological safety needed to have no secrets and you try to impose no secrets, what you instead get is 'secret' secrets, right? Like you get people actually, in fact, having secrets, but sort of implying that they don't exist on a deeper level, than is ordinarily done with secrets. And that seems, I don't know, that seems stressful. And certainly, when doing the sort of collaborative culture research and development work that liminal space agency has been doing, and that I'm doing now with Eric and Sarah, you kinda need to be able to have conversations with some person without immediately sharing it with the other person. Because that's part of how you can just even make sense of what your what experience you're having. Like other people might have blind spots, or frames, that make it hard to speak to them about something that they're doing that's bothering you. I've noticed that sometimes people become kind of stupefied when they try to tell somebody about... like if one person's holding a really strong frame and the other person tries to give them feedback, they'll end up feeling dumb. And I mean dumb in both senses of the word, like unintelligent, but also mute. Like, it's just hard. Because when you're trying to tell somebody something, you're implicitly modeling, "how are they going to receive it?" and if somebody has got a blind spot about something, and then you try to point at that something, then the act of modeling how they'll receive, it makes you unable to think. And so there's something really important about being able to think outside of that context with somebody else, like, "What is this thing going on with this person and this thing they keep doing?" And like "Do you have that experience too?" It's like, "Well, I see what you're pointing at, but I see it more like this." And you can kind of triangulate what's going on and get a sense of, "Oh, I'm seeing something real here," which you wouldn't get if you tried to talk with the person themselves about it, because they'd be doing some frame thing that would make it hard to notice that you had a thing to say. And that's everybody. Like, people do it to greater and lesser degrees, but this is true of everybody - we all have blind spots, we all are hard to talk to about our blind spots, that's part of what makes them blind spots.

• Keywords: Eric Chisholm Sarah McManus Conversation As Medium blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) ottergroup fishbowl frame dialogue frame blindspot Circling Liminal Space Agency NNTD upward spiral fuel the upward spiral nobody is to blame What is Blame? building trust out of distrust trust-dancing is an element of all human interactions Game A Game B Circling NVC NNTD has let me see how certain attempts towards trust-building will fail to build non-naive trust obvious

• 18:40 - 28:58 blindspot blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) it's only possible to be rational within a frame make shared or different frames explicit Change doesn't just happen

• Keywords - brain hemispheres McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model Perceptual Control Theory barn-raising Internal Family Systems blindspot blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) it's only possible to be rational within a frame make shared or different frames explicit Change doesn't just happen Intend productivity Intend Philosophy & Paradigm how to think about goals PCT internal conflict much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly What are the components or dimensions required for collaborative culture? Geoffrey West Questions for teasing apart the concept of commitment commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing acceptance isn't the same as acceptance safety self-trust right hemisphere left hemisphere self-energizing

• 40:04 - 56:41 - Forgiveness and blame in relation to re-establishing trust. Examples from personal situations. What is Blame?, everything makes sense, there's no way to communicate correctly or incorrectly - there's just what works in context and what doesn't work, apologize in the other person's frame; forgive in your own frame, building trust out of distrust, blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
  • 44:41 - M > I don't even know if this is what I was gonna say, but it's relevant enough and it fits a slot. So, there's a thing where, you know, when people ask each other when... when one person says to another, "Hey, you did a thing that hurt me," it's very easy to feel like your only responses in that moment are to say, "Oh, shit. I'm so sorry, I won't do it again," or "I'll try really hard not to do it again." Or, alternatively, you might say, "No, I didn't." You might say, either, "You're not actually hurting the way you think you were" or, "Like, I didn't actually do the thing you think I did," or, "Yes, I did the thing, but you shouldn't feel hurt about it because of reasons X, Y, Z". Or you might say, "Look, yeah, you got hurt, but I couldn't do anything other than what I did, given what you did." Or you might say something like... I mean, there's various other soft, more subtle ways of deflecting, like saying something like, "Whoa, why are you blaming me?" Right? Which, on its own, is like, well, yeah, maybe the person's engaging in blame as a structure. But if you don't actually address that, like separate from the blame element of what they're saying -they're trying to tell you about, about something that's not working- so if you don't actually address that, structurally, then that will also produce a sense of their concern of not feeling heard. It turns out, I think, in most cases, except for anything really simple, in most cases, the thing that is actually most mature to say in that situation is, "I hear that I hurt you. I don't fully understand why my behavior hurt you in the way that I did." Although maybe I mostly understand that, like, often that part's pretty clear. "But then, I also don't understand why I did what I did. Like, I actually genuinely don't know what generated that behavior in me. And until I understand it, I'm probably going to keep doing this thing. So I want to learn to do something different, but I actually don't know what that's going to take. And in the meantime, how do we design our interactions to minimize that damage? Or is this a kind of thing that's an issue but is not like a big issue, and you're willing to sort of be with me in my learning process through that?" We have no idea how to say that, like, that's the whole level under the taboo, you pointed out of being able to say, "I don't trust you."

• 47:54 - 56:29 - What if gossip were good? what might a healthy community look like? doing community well blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)

• 1:13:52 - 1:23:09 - Resolving differences in the Game B community. blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!). What is the difference between power-with, power-over

September 2nd, 2021

• which has a lot of implications for interpersonal stuff and is part of why and how blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)

August 1st, 2021

• and understanding why blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) but also how it's possible

July 29th, 2021

• a friend commented this in a group chat and I don't per se agree with it but it points at something really important about frame override & blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
  • > if a relationship feels 100% safe maybe you’re the threat
    • something like "priors are way higher on you doing something that causes the other person to be unable to express concerns about you than that there don't exist any points of tension"
    • the meanings here ofc hinge tremendously on what "safe" means in both a conceptual and an embodied sense
      • conceptual ~= what does "safe" imply?
      • embodied ~= how do you know you're safe?

July 20th, 2021

• oh hm this tweet is slightly a parody of stuff in the space of Change doesn't just happen and blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
  • > spiritual relationships:
    
    Person 1 "I am in this state and it is good but also bad, it could change and I have equinimity about that."
    
    Person 2 "I support you being in that state and it is good and also bad, I am open to it changing if it does. I recognize you have equinimity."
    • twitter.com/HanjoYoutaku/status/1343005193609355270

core principles of the NNTD

• blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) - see blindspot principles

May 23rd, 2021

• ahh I have a blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) thread that could become a #blogpost
  • twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1391959685851324421
  • oh, it references collective blindspots, which probably should have a page - collective blindspots naturally occur in groups
    • / every entity has a blindspot at all fractal scales

Sequence on NNTD

• blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
  • (had a tweetstorm about this + posts in NNY)
    • (+notes now in smmo I think)
  • could use several good examples, maybe a small one and a big one
  • layering - Mark Lippmann's meditation protocol

May 10th, 2021

• blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
  • a thread: twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1391959562752716805
  • twitter.com/atlaz_chugged/status/766493897849708544