Change

Solid Ambiguity

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment
Graphic by CoPilot AI

I may be remembering the timing incorrectly, but it seems like early in my corporate career (started at the end of 1997…) a LOT of companies were publishing job descriptions, especially when posting jobs internally or on the fairly new Internet, with one of the desired traits/skills being “to be comfortable with ambiguity”. I feel that being COMFORTABLE with ambiguity is different from being able to HANDLE ambiguity. The latter is probably the best that most of us can muster. I’ve have never, in my life, met someone who is “comfortable” with ambiguity. Every one of us seeks stability and certainty of some degree in a good chunk of our lives. Ambiguity is the speed bump you didn’t see, the change in weather on the day you were counting on it being nice, the change in plans for a day, etc. Look around you, every moment. Ambiguity abounds. (A good friend of mine wrote a blog post about this kind of expectation/schedule yanking at https://steveawiggins.com/2026/05/07/snowballs-in-spring/)

So there’s this tension we need to be aware of and learn to accept instead of ignore or react violently to. Holding each moment as distinct and not everlasting, realizing the next one is already upon us and is different than the last one. That the chances that the next moment will be as we expect, according to habit, pattern, or what we think we know, are variable.

I’ve been reading a lot of books by Brian Greene and others about quantum sciences, cosmology, and a lot of other truly fascinating (at least it is to me….) stuff. In between that and a lot of reading concerning Christian mysticism, other belief systems including Buddhism and Native Nations’ spiritual experiences and cultures leads me to believe that the reality of the mutability of each moment and awareness of that is something that relieves this tension. Acceptance and awareness, coupled with a growing realization of how this all fits together in Ecology and Cosmology.

So, I came up with a concept that allows me to hold this kind of somewhat paradoxical sense to myself. I call it SOLID AMBIGUITY. Why “solid”? Good question. That word communicates to me the picture of something that I can rely on, a very real trait of ambiguity. Right now I’m sitting in my Office/Man Cave at home. I am fortunate enough to have 4 windows here on the second floor that look directly into the trees nearby our home. The sun is out (not a REALLY consistent occurrence here in the Pacific Northwest in Spring, so enjoy it!) and the trees are full of life. I’m listening to music (of course I am…)…right now; the group Snarky Puppy, and music by Steve Reich is cued up shortly. My body is not too achy (a nice state of things that I do NOT take for granted anymore…).

Each and every one of these items (along with the untold number of others that pass by and change every moment) changes…solid ambiguity. I can count on it. Most are pretty ignorable (teeny tiny things or “expected” items that flow past). When a big change takes place like, say, a completely unforeseen gust of wind blows through and causes one of the trees I’m looking at to keel over, I can be startled. Being in the moment allows me to take that in, be mindful of my being Right Now, confront what my response should be, and over it all allow the center of my being take the stance of “Well, THAT happened…”. I need not concern myself with the event of that past moment. I can focus on the moment I’m in so I can pay attention to the time and space surrounding me now.

Everything that I’m describing is woefully inadequate to the experience. Paying attention to as much of everything in and around me is impossible to describe. There’s too much. However, the experience and discipline is there. The moment opens itself. I believe it was Thomas Merton who wrote that each moment is pregnant with the next. Pregnancy implies new life, and new life is exciting and certainly worth being grateful for.

One Fades Out, One (sometimes) Fades In

/ Jeff Hora / 3 Comments

Sisyphus Photo by Gerard Van der Leun

I have a lot of things that I find of interest….some more, some less. Still, I feel that this is the norm for most of us. There’s a handful of things that you’ve held dear for your whole life, or at least for such a long time that it can FEEL like it’s been your whole life.

Then there’s the entire ocean of all the other stuff in this world that can latch onto your attention and time. The massive bulk of this you just “let be”, if only because there’s not enough time in your day or life to pay attention.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed a cognitive pattern for me that lines up, more or less, with the the attentive emotions for the duration of a deeper interest and engagement with something. An example in my life was my passion for painting. Right at the beginning of the COVID shut-down, I decided that I would try my hand at painting. I have a friend who had been doing this for awhile at that point (this friend has since excelled WAY beyond what I felt I could do….her work is, well, “jaw-droppingly wowser”….), and I felt it would be a new and different outing for my creative side. I have been a musician most of my life, but my active engagement with that side of my creative self (other than CONSTANTLY listening to music….) had drawn down, and I felt that going a new direction that I’d never even considered before would be fun and an adventure.

And indeed it was. For about two and a half years. Before I get further into that experience, I’d like to give a shout-out to all the fellow travelers who created (and continue to create) an enormous number of helpful online videos with tips and how-tos, as well as all the members of various online groups and forums of others willing to not only give a guy a hand, but commiserate about tough nuts to crack for a newbie.

So why only two plus years, you might ask? Good question. Age and growing personal awareness has led me to learn a couple of things about myself (“FINALLY!”….my inner voice exclaims). One big one one has been that, in those areas of interest and engagement, when it stops being fun, so to speak, it’s time to either take a break or give it up.

Now, I know about perseverance and cracking a tough nut. Those were and are the areas where that virtual “cloud of witnesses” encourage and support me. I’m writing about when it stops feeling like fun and starts feeling like work. I HAVE to make myself do something that I liked and might present me with a challenge for the period of time, or confront me with a hill that I need to get over. I don’t know about you, but I spent a LOT of life having to go ahead and just DO something (or take up the tug-of-war-rope ONE-MORE-TIME just to get to the next Sisphusian point) regardless of what I felt.

Well, I’m in a time in my life where I don’t really need to do that any more. Are there regular chores? Sure. But I’m not writing about those. I’m writing about stuff over which I have the agency to say, “Nope. Don’t want to do that any more. Buh-bye…”

I’ve discovered that there are more of those in my life than I thought. Over time, I examine the things I spend precious time and attention on and evaluate whether I can, or want to, scale down, ramp up, or drop them. I now know that this has NOTHING to do with being a “quitter”. What others may or may not think about my actions in that regard has had less and less an impact on my awareness and acceptance of myself than it might have had in earlier days.

I’m going to limit my banging on about this for now, but I wanted to get this out there as a testimony, and maybe as an encouragement to any one else who might stumble across this post and is confronting the ongoing changeableness of everything in this life. It’s OK. It’s normal. If it really isn’t fun any more, think about whether you want to keep going, or move on in some way.

Don’t worry about making “the wrong decision”. In most cases, there really isn’t such a thing.

A Journey of Gaps

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Graphic by CoPilot AI

I keep reading, especially in the book I’m into about Sartre and his thought journey right now, of the unusual place of art in establishing a counter voice in times of upheaval and uncertain restraints. It’s hard for me, as I feel like I only have one or two drums to beat, and that I’ve whomped on them before, so what’s new there? I’m not sure….Perhaps the context of a new day or a different focus?

That said, I have friends who take part in various arts (music, visual, written) in regular and copious expression. I’m a bit envious of their compulsion/addiction to their artistry. But I know that I can’t compare myself to them. I can look at who I was yesterday and look at myself today. Moving this moment forward is the only change I get to really take part in, and life teaches me that THAT changeableness is the norm of Reality. Without being driven over by events, flexibility and openness to the call in that moment and the next is what I can pay attention to and live into and out of.

My real passion for the past 4 or so years has been to read and learn as much as I can. My personal library is enormous, and I’m guilty of only reading about 30+% of the books I purchased in my life (years ago I used to comb through book stores while I worked in the military or in corporate, telling myself that I was obtaining them for when I didn’t have the funds to buy them any more. Of course, being a true bibliophile, I always came up with fund for more books).

Then there’s the desire to reread those few works that call to me to be experienced again, for whatever reason. There may only be so much time between today and the day I will be unable to read or understand what I can take in, so I do my best to cover a lot of ground now. As the eyes give out, that is a challenge, although I am mightily grateful for audio books…..I only wish they also had more of the other books I have that haven’t been produced in audio yet, but it’s a good start.

Anyway, as I have studied more in the (somewhat overlapping) areas of linguistic theory, critical literature theory, theology and mysticism in a number of religions, cognitive science, psychology and communication, the histories of other cultures (and their global influence), and the kind of Zen-like qualities of quantum mechanics (I’m a science geek, but I don’t have the math and physics chops to go very deep there, still….it’s awfully cool!)…my initial question to myself when I started this particular journey was, and still is, “What brings us to this place in society today, and what can I better grasp in order be an intelligent and love/life-giving person in this world?”

That’s an inadequately expressed, shortened goal. There are any number of rabbit trails to head down in working toward filling in the gaps in my understanding, usually uncovering scores of new gaps as I go. I’ll pass on some of the stuff I find out about, if it seems like it might interest you as much as it does me.

Strategy: Is Your Goal a Place or a Direction?

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Strategy

Strategy

You started out putting together something that you could call a Business Plan, right? If you had some help, or needed one to present to the bank or some investors, it was probably pretty detailed and held most everything you hoped to accomplish and how you would get there, all in one hefty document.

Then you launched your business, and got down to the day-to-day of keeping things going and growing.
The months and years flew by. Some products and services took off, and others flopped. You made adjustments, and kept at it. You marketed to your select audience the best you knew how, taking advantage of every free or low-cost method you could find so you could keep costs down. Your strategy, such as it was, was “Keep Things Going!” It worked for awhile…

Now it’s been several months or probably years. You’re working like crazy, but the return has slowed. Even if you’re getting new customers, you’re not getting as many return customers. Your products and services have changed a bit (or a lot..), but not much of the other pieces of the business framework has. You’re still not as profitable as you need to be to REALLY be making a living. You keep looking for things you can alter a bit or tweak to squeeze out more, but you’re running out of options.

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How Do You Get to Valuable Options?

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Options not Answers

Options not Answers

How many squirrels can you follow at once?

This is the thought that occurred to me while reading a recent article by Valeria Maltoni entitled Inventing Options for Mutual Gain. While describing an excellent process for arriving at options, and not necessarily “the final solution”, I am reminded of Edward de Bono and his book Lateral Thinking that I read years ago. The depth and specifics of this work long ago drifted into the “you don’t need to remember this at a granular level” section of my mind, but one of the descriptions I remember well is that the activity of lateral thinking could be visualized as you digging numerous holes in the ground. Although you may find something of interest, even compelling, in one of the holes you dig, you don’t stop digging. Don’t fall in love with the first appealing thing you come across. Other holes you dig may (or may not) offer up a more creative, more defining, more appropriate solution.

Now it’s true that at some point you’ll need to stop digging holes and bring all these potential answers up to consider, but the initial goal is to discover options, not arrive at an answer. Some of the options may well present you with trade-offs, value to different segments of the answer base (those for whom you are digging, whether they are customers, friend and family, or the factions in your head…).

In her article, Maltoni describes a prototypical strategy session that may be carried out amongst 5-8 people and many excellent points that will allow this group to get to the options, and THEN to a decision based upon negotiation. But what does this look like when it’s just you, the entrepreneur or small business owner?

There are a couple of complimentary approaches you can take.

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There are some CHANGES you should know about….

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Changes

CHANGE – And Now For Something Different

Change signifies life and the movement through time we all take part in. The dual focus I have taken within this blog has been about things I have a long-time and deep abiding interest in AND the phenomenon we loosely and broadly call “social media” and the business and more human aspects of it.

As of this past few weeks my more business-focused writing will take place on the blog that is part of my new Social Sapiens site. Some of those will be cross-posted here (and vice versa…) as they have aspects of my passion for being human online or how what happens online impacts us in real life. I intend to continue to write for this blog in broader areas that include many of the things I’ve written about before, but that business owners and entrepreneurs may or may not find as directly pertinent to their bottom lines (although my hope is that the work published here will be valuable and thought-provoking to whomever takes the time to read and consider it…).

Please join me on my other blog soon, and keep your eye here for more articles too!

 

Can You Attack the Same Problems with Novel Perspectives?

/ Jeff Hora / 1 Comment

Strategizing

Strategizing

A hundred people at an event heard the word “Strategy” as part of a presentation I gave recently. Likely there were at least a hundred different interpretations and mental pictures that lit up for the attendees, some very related and others quite different from the others. Each was a product of their experience, education, beliefs and prejudices. This fact gets to the heart of effective, and ineffective, communication….always a challenge, but a well known one. As Valeria Maltoni has written, “There is more to semantics than meets the eye.”

Just like having a solid business plan, having a marketing strategy that supports and advances that plan is crucial to success. Many programs, classes, books, and online tools (along with tips and suggestions of varying degrees of helpfulness….) may help you assemble a business plan that will pass muster and get you going. To many entrepreneurs and business owners, though, marketing strategy embodies a different kind of geography in their thoughts and can have too many connotations to list. Nonetheless, here are two thoughts you need to consider, regardless of your particular definition:

  • Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare. – Japanese Proverb
  • However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.  – Attributed to Winston Churchill
What does a strategy get you? It can establish a specific direction, a foundational launch pad, for your business, focus your resources, generate a plan that is both effective and agile, and give you a reliable way to “gut check” your direction and efforts over time. Most business owners I have met are world-class technicians, but struggle with strategy. Even those who have had some education and experience in that area can suffer from being too close to their particular industry and business, thereby missing the “We don’t know what we don’t know” gaps in what they put together. What they need to do is get some expert help putting together (or reworking…) their marketing strategy….bring someone on board to view these problems in new and novel ways.

All of the books, articles, templates and other information inputs we encounter bang on about the importance of goals. When I initially think of goals, especially in the U.S., I am presented with the mental picture of a football goal post. This implies that once I Hit The Goal, I’m done. Of course, many of the resources I mentioned earlier encourage you set new goals, circling back and starting the circle of attainment over again. That just feels kind of jerky to me. In her article “On Strategizing” Maltoni quotes Scott Adams on why a system is more useful than goals:

“For our purposes, let’s agree that goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction. My proposition is that if you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals.”

I tell my clients that, once they build and initialize their strategy, implementation becomes a “horse they cannot get off of.” The majority of them are not happy with that message. As a business owner, if they’re involved in a project, they want it to be a project….that is, it is this lump of work that they (or the hired expert…) can complete and get off of my desk, so they can move onto the next project and get back to selling their products and services. When reminded of the importance of working ON the business as well as working IN the business, and how it strengthens the business, the strategizing process and system look much more valuable and key to growth. The dynamics of every business now require a consistent process and may require much more frequent course corrections than in the past (or in the past as we perceived it…). A sustainable business depends on making dynamic choices. Regular, if not constant, co-ordination of the current state of things with what is on hand to work them out is the new norm….fixed objectives are not viable because of the more frequent and unknowable disruptions our society and world endure daily.

So, the novel view: A Strategy feels like a “One-And-Done” item which, sadly and frequently, ends up in a filing cabinet. Strategizing is an action word. It’s something you do with some kind of frequency because of the need for it in your business. Again, many business owners are not expert strategizers, and that’s OK. As I mentioned, they are world-class technicians for their business’ focus. Do some research, get some recommendations, and start up a valuable relationship with an expert strategizer for your business.

What could be more valuable than establishing your business system of growth and success, and not just “hit the sales goal for this quarter”?

New Facebook Data: A Powerful Challenge to Fundamentals

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Queen of Hearts

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What you knew yesterday may not apply today….

I hate that….you probably do to. In the land of social media and digital marketing it really is like what the Queen of Hearts said to Alice, “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”  Drives me crazy…

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The Emerging Truth About The Change of Business

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Dealing with Change is a Class-A Pain!

No, really…

First, what does change mean to you, your life, and your business? Is it rapid, gradual, ignored, accepted or the object of ‘magical thinking‘?

Second, how do you manage? Can you really manage without engaging a fortune teller and hoping against hope you can see the future and get ahead of the unknown?

Lastly, how do you feel about it? What does this mean for your business? I’ll get to that…

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