The Bamboo Project Blog

Architectures of Control: How Design Influences the Ways We Use and Do Things

Just stumbled across a REALLY interesting blog called The Architectures of Control. It's maintained by Dan Lockton who says:

Increasingly, many products are being designed with features that intentionally restrict the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behaviour. The same intentions are also evident in the design of many systems and environments.

Dan goes on to define architectures of control this way:

Architectures of control are features, structures or methods of operation designed into physical products, software, buildings, city layouts—or indeed any planned system with which a user interacts—which are intended to enforce, reinforce, or restrict certain modes of user behaviour.

While the use of architectures of control in computing is well-known, and a current issue of much debate (in terms of digital rights management, ‘trusted’ computing and network infrastructures themselves), it is apparent that technology—and a mindset that favours controlling users—is also offering increased opportunities for such architectures to be designed into a wide range of consumer products; yet, this trend has not been commonly recognised.

This, of course, isn't really new--control has often been inherent in the design of products and systems in the past. We have only to look at the Windows Operating system and the Catholic Church to see this principle at work.

What is new, I suspect (although I may be wrong) is the widespread use of intentional design to control and restrict user behavior.  That is, it seems as we become more aware of how the design of things influences how we interact with them, designers are choosing to use features to control user behavior more intentionally.

This raises a few questions and thoughts for me:

• I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of "architectures of control." I instinctively recoil from the idea of "controlling" anything, yet I also recognize that it's inevitable--whatever we create invariably shapes how we interact with it, the customs that develop around the object or system, etc. It's unavoidable. And one person's "restriction" is another person's "liberation."

Take a look, for example at Dan's post on (Anti)public Seating, which includes a number of examples of how seating in parks, train stations and other public areas actually discourages people from sitting in or using those areas. Apparently one set of benches has been specifically designed so that homeless people won't sleep on them, with the effect that no one would want to sit on them. I personally see this as a restriction that serves no one well, but others obviously see it as a perfectly legitimate use of design principles for the public good.

• What is the larger societal impact of a design approach that seeks to control and restrict? This, to me, ties back into the scarcity mindset I explored a few months ago. Scarcity is about control and restrictions. It would seem, then, that we have a mutually reinforcing dynamic going on where the more we see scarcity, the more we seek to control through design and the more we control through design, the smaller and more restricted the world becomes. Is using design to restrict behavior the symptom or the disease? Or both? And how does this really influence all the ways in which we see and interact with the world?

• In looking at technology, the interplay between the open source movement, the growth of user-centric Web 2.0 tools, etc. makes things more confusing and difficult to discern.  The hoopla around Facebook as platform seems a perfect example of how the design of a thing can appear open, yet actually control, as this Read/Write Web post shows. Where else does this go on? Does it matter?

• Despite what we know about design, it's still very often unintentional. Because how we interact with a product or system often happens below any real level of consciousness, how is it shaping our behavior in ways we don't really understand? In my system development work with organizations, we often run up against the fact that the design of their  customer systems is actually reinforcing the very behaviors staff want to change. So, for example, in a system that's supposed to help people independently prepare for and find employment, most of the service functions actually discourage people from taking any independent action. One of the challenges is getting people to recognize how design really does influence behavior. It's something that happens below the radar, so they don't really notice.

I see that this has become one of those rambling posts with no real conclusion--just some questions and observations. One immediate impact for me of reading this stuff is a greater awareness of the design of things and how they influence what I do. It also reminds me about the need to assume nothing and to question everything, including how objects and systems may encourage certain behaviors that I consider to be negative, but have not noticed.

I'd be curious to hear other people's responses to Dan's blog and how you see this playing out in your corner of the world. Is this something we should be paying attention to or is it just an academic exercise?

We Need More Beginnings

Rosetta Thurman of Perspectives from the Pipeline points us to a most excellent post--Are You Ending or Beginning? In it, Hildy Gottlieb asks us to stop trying to end things and start focusing on beginning something amazing. She points out that for 40 years we've been had "wars" on poverty, hunger, homelessness--you name it, we've been fighting it. Yet little seems to have changed:

And the reason we feel like we are not getting anywhere is because we are, in fact, not getting anywhere.

But then, we have not been aiming at getting anywhere. We have instead been setting our sights directly at our problems. And as happens when we give that much energy to anything, it grows. Yes, it grows.

We have aimed all our energy at our problems, and they are thriving under our attention.

The solution, Hildy suggests, is for us to start focusing on what we want to create, rather than on what we want to destroy. What we pay attention to grows, so why are we focusing on problems? Good advice, but how to get there?

This focus on problems and endings is a legacy of that scarcity thinking I've written about previously. It's difficult to get out of that mindset of seeing the world as a series of problems to be solved rather than as a series of opportunities to create something new. And we've spent a lot of time dwelling there, building up a system, skills and staff that are focused on getting rid of problems, not on creating a new world.

One big area of change I see being necessary is in staff skill sets. The skills it takes to solve a problem are not necessarily the skills it takes to create a new vision. Problem-solving seems to me to be more analytical, left-brained work, focused on identifying the problem, generating solutions, weighing pros and cons, and applying the solutions. There may be some creativity in generating solutions, but because the focus is on essentially destroying something (a problem), can it truly be creative?

Creating a new vision for what the world would look like without hunger seems to me a vastly more artistic exercise, one that requires us to picture something we've never seen before and to focus on what's working, rather than on what's not. It feels like an artist's eye is required here and I wonder if we even have the skills to do this in a consistent, long-term way? I wonder if you asked a staff person to describe to you what the world would look like without your nonprofit's "problem" if they would be able to do that?

I also think about the staff systems we've set up. Have we created a process where we hire staff who see the problems and can solve them, but don't necessarily have the vision to create something different? In my own work I know a lot of wonderful people who have excellent abilities to keep things running smoothly. But ask them to picture a different world? Not so good with that.

And what about staff development? We have all sorts of trainings that support teaching the skills to solve specific problems. But when was the last time we taught a creativity course? How are we teaching people to challenge their own mental models so that they can break free of old ways of thinking (the ones that focus on "ending poverty," for example), making room for new ways to see the world.

I believe that many of the things that play out in our personal lives are a microcosm of how things work in organizations, so I'm going to end with a story.

Five years ago I was in the process of getting a divorce. We knew every problem we had in that marriage and we had spent years trying to fix those problems. What happened instead was that the marriage ended, in part because we spent too much time "fixing" our problems and not enough time creating the relationship we really wanted.

Even more difficult for me was that once the "problems" were gone, I had to picture a life without those problems. And I didn't know how to do it. I only knew how to define myself in relationship to ending our problems, not in relation to beginning a new life. I still struggle with it actually, even though I'm married again and going in different directions. Sometimes I find that I'm more focused on avoiding the problems I had in my first marriage rather than on creating a new marriage, and that's when things don't go so well. When I focus my energy on what we're trying to create, then things seem to fall more into place. 

I share this more personal stuff to say that I think that what I've experienced on a personal level is what happens on an organizational level when we focus on fixing problems. I do believe that where we put our energies is what we get more of and that the first step to dealing with what we want to end is to begin creating something else. The challenge lies in making sure that we have what we need to do the creating.

The Power (and Pain) of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Fast Company has an interesting article in their May 2007 issue (sorry--not available online at this point) by Chip and Dan Heath of Made to Stick fame on the power of self-fulfilling prophesies. Entitled "Success Can Make You Stupid," the Heath brothers write about how Hollywood pumps out bad films because they get into a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies. What caught my eye, though, was this gem of a quote:

"HR is another hotbed of self-fulfilling prophecies. The researcher Albert King told a welding instructor at a vocational training center that five of his incoming students had unusually high aptitude. In fact, the students had been picked randomly. And yet random yielded reality. The "high potentials" were absent less often than other trainees, learned the basics in about half the usual time, and scored 10 points higher than others on a welding test. Even the other trainees noticed. They chose the five high potentials as their most preferred coworkers.

Is it possible high potentials across America perform better solely because, like movies, they have been given more attention and resources than they truly merit?"

Hell yeah, as this article on the Pygmalion effect (a fancy term for self-fulfilling prophecy) makes abundantly clear (read the article for some other great info on the effect):

In another classic experiment, Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson worked     with elementary school children from 18 classrooms. They randomly chose     20% of the children from each room and told the teachers they were "intellectual     bloomers."

They explained that these children could be expected to show remarkable     gains during the year. The experimental children showed average IQ gains     of two points in verbal ability, seven points in reasoning and four points     in over all IQ. The "intellectual bloomers" really did bloom!

So here's a question--or actually a few.

• How often do our belief systems influence how we see our coworkers and how do they impact the resources with which we provide them and the ways in which we interact?

• What about how we treat our clients? Are we making judgments that negatively influence the resources, supports and strategies we make available because we expect too much (or too little) of our customers?

• Is the self-fulfilling prophecy influencing how we look at our "tried and true" organizational strategies? Is it possible that we're backing the wrong horses, putting resources where they actually are doing less good than if we really looked at the facts?

• Are we short-changing our coworkers, our clients and our organizations because we rely on subjective beliefs rather than analyzing objective information?

I would argue in a lot of cases the answers to all of these questions are yes. Mental models are powerful things and breaking free of their influence has to be intentional and ongoing. It's a battle I fight with myself all of the time and one I wish I'd make greater progress toward winning.

The Heath's suggest that there's a moral in all of this for us to consider:

Question success. Success propagates backwards in our minds and bestows the glow of wisdom on our every decision. The irony of self-fulfilling prophecies is that even bad ideas end up looking right in the end, because we've salvaged them with good execution. And when bad ideas get reinforced, there are other consequences: The wrong movies get pushed.The wrong deals get funded. The wrong employees get advanced."

So is success making us stupid? And what can we do to break the cycle? 

Guest Blogging on Scarcity and Abundance at Dollar Philanthropy

Last month, I blogtipped Carol Kirshner of Dollar Philanthropy and made the "mistake" of telling her that I liked her Guest Blogger feature. A few weeks later, after I began my journey into scarcity and abundance, she emailed me and asked if I'd be willing to do a guest post for her on the topic. I was incredibly flattered, but in the middle of some major work stuff, so it wasn't until now that I finally managed to produce something for her. You can check it out at Carol's place. While you're there, take a look around and see if there's a charity you want to help out with a dollar or two. Like Carol says, we may not have Warren Buffet's bucks, but if we all contribute the cost of a coffee, we can make a difference.

Can Limitations Actually Free Your Organization?

Lately I've been writing about the issue of scarcity thinking in nonprofits and how a focus on limitations and barriers seems to hold back many organizations. Now I see that Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen has written an excellent post on the value of limitations that I think is very applicable to nonprofits. In it, Garr argues that the rest of us have a thing or two to learn about limitations from design professionals:

"Using creativity and skill to solve a problem or design a message among a plethora of restrictions from the client, from the boss, etc. is old hat to designers. They live it. Daily. However, for the millions of non-designers with access to powerful design tools, the power and importance of constraints and limitations is not well understood. . .

What we can learn from professional designers is that (1) constrains and limitations are a powerful ally not an enemy, and (2) creating our own self-imposed constraints, limitations, and parameters is often fundamental to good, creative work."

Personally I find this advice hard to swallow at times, especially when I'm in the middle of writing a grant (as I am now) and I'm forced to comply with the requirements of the funders in putting the proposal together. I'd love to see the information they put in the RFP as design constraints that will encourage my creativity. Unfortunately I tend to see them as straitjackets and handcuffs.

Interestingly, it doesn't bother me that the funding is often not enough for the outcomes they are seeking.  What bothers me is that there's a tendency on the part of the funders to put needless constraints on the solution you can devise to achieve their outcomes. They basically behave as though they've already identified the solution and are just looking for someone who can implement it most efficiently for them.  I'm dying for the RFP that says "Here's the money we have, here's a basic idea of what we'd like to accomplish. Now give us your ideas--let your creativity go." But I don't think that will be happening anytime soon, at least not in the world where I'm operating.

Regardless, I do find that thinking more like a designer who sees constraints as creative challenges can be more freeing. At the very least, that approach challenges me to challenge myself, rather than giving up in despair. It also forces me to look at things differently because I'm not so bound up in the limitations. Not that I'm always able to come up with a creative solution, but at least I'm in a better mood about the work.

On a side note--Yes, I know I should have done some blogtipping now that it's the first of the month, but I don't think that will happen until the weekend when I'm finally finished with the mountain of work on my desk.  

Another Thought on Entitlement, Scarcity and New Media

As I browsed my feed reader this morning, with thoughts of scarcity and entitlement in my head, I came across Steve Bridger's post with a link to an article in the Nonprofit Times regarding the use of blogs with donors. What suddenly occurred to me was that to the extent that nonprofits seem willing to consider the use of social media (blogs, podcasts, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, etc.), it is primarily for fundraising and managing relationships with donors. I have seen  very few instances of nonprofits seriously using new media for staff development, improving collaboration with other nonprofits, or to improve service delivery to clients. 

In saying this I have to admit to some of my own mental models. My consulting practice is with organizations in the human services arena, so I work with employment and training programs, organizations that serve individuals living in poverty, etc. There may be more going on in other nonprofit areas that I'm not seeing. But in my corner of the world, there is next to no interest in looking at how social media can better serve clients or improve the ability of staff to deliver services. To the extent that they're thinking about Web 2.0, it's to raise money, either by using social media to manage relationships with donors or to do a better job with grant applications. This is incredibly sad and disturbing to me. It is scarcity thinking at its worst.

For me, what's interesting about the social web is its capacity to help staff get better at what they do and to help customers become empowered to meet their own needs. I see the tools of the Web 2.0 as tools that improve individual ability and capacity to navigate an increasingly complex world and to continually develop the skills that are necessary to be successful in this global economy. I find that I'm much less interested in the ways that technology can help organizations raise more money. I just want to see how they can help organizations provide better services--which often doesn't take nearly as much money as nonprofits think.

Just another iteration of my thinking right now I guess. . .

Scarcity, Abundance, Mental Models and Reader Responses

In the past several days I've received a number of comments and emails on my posts regarding scarcity thinking in nonprofits. I wanted to try to summarize some of what's come my way because I think that it all furthers the conversation.

In a comment on my original post, Mike Wassenaar left me a link to an interesting 2003 report entitled Battered Agencies: Supporting Those Who Serve Low Income Communities. Based on a study of small nonprofits serving low-income communities in Marin City, California, the report makes the very thought-provoking point that many of these agencies suffer from the same stressors and issues faced by their clients, including insufficient financial resources, racial and class tensions, lack of appropriate supports for developing the skills necessary for success in their environment, and a limited role and voice in planning. As a result, many of these agencies and their staff exhibited the same kinds of dysfunctional patterns of behavior as their clients.

The report emphasizes that these organizations are responding to the very real limitations they face, and I certainly agree that they are dealing with very real barriers. But what intrigues me more is the ways in which these nonprofits' behavior and the behavior of the clients they serve mirror each other. For me it makes the larger point that these people are locked into ways of viewing the world and patterns of response that are mutually reinforcing and spreading back and forth between clients and the agencies that are meant to help them.

I also received an email from the Nonprofit Curmudgeon,  who has apparently been doing some reporting himself on the scarcity mentality as a result of an email list conversation about nonprofits and their attitudes toward technology services. As the conversation points out, nonprofits don't seem to realize that a lot of what they want to do technologically can be done for far less money than they think. Some of this is due to ignorance, but some of it is because nonprofits are locked into that automatic scarcity thinking. They don't even bother to check their assumptions about cost to see if they're really true. As a result, they either don't advance in their use of technology or they spend tens of thousands of dollars on technology that could be had for far less.

In response to that email conversation, Michael Gilbert pointed to another side of the scarcity coin, the "sense of entitlement" that many nonprofits have (described so well by Putnam Barber in this article). Entitlement is an advanced version of victim thinking, another outgrowth of the scarcity mentality. I believe that I can't take care of myself in this scary, world, so someone else needs to. The more I'm taken care of (by having things given to me), the more likely I am to begin believing I "deserve" free things. We see this all the time in both individuals and organizations. Many nonprofits have turned this into an art form.

The answer to all this, suggests the Curmudgeon, is "an attitude adjustment." What he's getting at is that nonprofits are operating with a certain mental model and that the models have to change. But as this two-pager on mental models indicates, this is easier said than done. The influence of mental models is very subtle--people don't even realize that they are viewing the world through a particular lens. They are also very powerful, influencing what information we allow to come into our consciousness and what information passes us right by. Whatever mental model controls us determines what we pay attention to. The only way to break out of the model is to start questioning our assumptions and developing a new way of looking at the world so we can allow all information to flow into us.

While I think that we have to change our thinking, though, I have also begun to believe that it may be easier to start with changing our actions. This is what I've been trying to get at in my posts on specific behaviors in which organizations could engage that might change the scarcity thinking process. In some sense I think that if we could change the behaviors, then our mental models would change, too. It's the "fake it till you make it approach" where we ACT as though we believe something and then at some point we realize that we DO believe it. For many people, I think it would be a lot easier for them to start ACTING differently rather than trying to THINK differently.

I find it really interesting to see how this line of thinking seemed to strike a chord with people. I've probably had more responses to this series of posts than to anything I've written. I'm not sure why that is, though. I suspect it's because it's one of those things that resonates with people--one of those "aha moments" when a lot of specific behaviors that they've observed all of a sudden "hang together" in a way that makes sense. Regardless, I appreciate everyone's comments and thoughts on this because they are really helping me move forward in my own line of thinking on the subject. One of the reasons I love blogging. And of course, it's a great example of the abundance mentality at work--people giving freely of their time and thoughts with no expectation of reward, yet the contributions enrich us all.

Move out of Scarcity Thinking By Embracing Your Mistakes

Continuing on my abundance vs. scarcity thread, in a post a few days ago I quoted from Chief Happiness Officer, Alexander Kjerulf, who notes that scarcity thinkers have little tolerance for mistakes, while the abundance mentality embraces mistakes for the learning that they bring. Reader Marie notes in comments that most people she knows are deathly afraid of making mistakes and that it's particularly true the higher up the ladder you go.

Trying to "mistake-proof" an organization is clearly a strategy for trying to control risk and hold on to your piece of the pie--a symptom of scarcity at work. One thing I love about the participatory culture of social media that's emerging, though, is that there seems to be a higher tolerance for mistakes, particularly if you learn from them. Now it's about rapid prototyping, trying lots of iterations of something to see how they work and making refinements to the glitches along the way. Blogs, wikis and social networks by their nature must embrace mistakes--their rapid publishing options mean that we are always revising and correcting ourselves.

Nonprofits in my experience are deathly afraid of mistakes. It's one of the reasons that in many of them it takes so long for anything to get done--staff have to endlessly tinker BEFORE something is released to try to remove all possibility for error. And because they've spent the time on this and because it's so painful to admit mistakes, when one is made, there's a tendency to brush things under the rug rather than to admit the error and do something about it. I also think that this fear of mistakes is a big impediment to nonprofits trying out social media. What if something goes wrong? What if they say something in a blog that they shouldn't have? What if employees put incorrect information into the organizational wiki? What if they allow comments and a contributor says something that makes the organization look bad?

It occurs to me, then, that another route out of scarcity is to embrace mistakes as learning opportunities and to make learning from mistakes a part of the organizational culture. In How to Make Mistakes, Paul Lemberg makes some helpful suggestions:

• Don't penalize mistakes. Encourage, or even reward them.
• Have a "mistake of the month" meeting where you dissect what's gone wrong, not to blame who made the mistake, but to learn from it.
• Get in the habit of rapid prototyping where you get out a "good enough" version of something, making it clear that it's a prototype, and then you refine through several iterations based on feedback and usage.
• Avoid the witch hunt when someone makes a mistake. Instead, cast your mistake makers as heroes who are helping your organization learn.
• Create a company of learners with a formal debriefing policy. Get in the habit of debriefing on everything you do to identify what went well, what didn't and to plan for how you'll handle things the next time around.
• Forget about "total quality" and focus on the 80/20 rule. Use the errors you make as opportunities to generate new ideas and new ways of doing things.

Of course the point of a culture that embraces mistakes is to create a process that learns from them. Repeating the same mistakes over and over again is NOT what we're looking for. Yet ironically when we have a culture that insists mistakes can't occur, this is when are most likely to repeat them. To learn from an experience, you must acknowledge what has happened and figure out what needs to change as a result.  Creating a culture that accepts mistakes as a natural part of the process of taking risks and of getting better at what you do is another way operate from an abundance mentality.

One Way to Move to Abundance Thinking:Focus On What You Can Give

Lately I've been reflecting on ways that organizations can move from scarcity to abundance thinking. Seth Godin has one idea based on his father's 50 years of consistent business success:

I was thinking about the way my Dad does business the other day. He's been a successful executive (and then entrepreneur) for more than 50 years. I realized that I can't remember one time when he did this to get that.

When he volunteered to run the United Way or the local theatre, or when he helped a local church raise money for a new building, he didn't have an ulterior motive. When he negotiated with the UAW to create a different sort of workforce structure for his plant, it wasn't so he could get more. It was so they could get more. Same thing when he helped dozens of people emigrate from the Soviet Union a few decades ago.

It's been a consistent approach, and it sure seems to work. Consistent as in all the time, not just when it's convenient. It works for a factory in Buffalo but it also seems to work for others... for successful marketers all over the world. Now, more than ever, it's easier to give even when it seems like you're not going to get.

Back in December I was writing about how nonprofit networks can build collective value, but noted that one of the difficulties we see in network building is that nonprofits don't always like to share, something that's necessary if a network is going to really be successful.

Unfortunately my own personal experiences in working with nonprofit network building have shown me that nonprofits can be some of the greediest organizations around when it comes to getting something from any situation (a sure sign of scarcity thinking).

What happens is this. . .  We arrive at a meeting to discuss collective action, only to spend the next several hours dancing around the "What's In It for Me?" question. Most nonprofits are too polite to actually say it, but it's clear that the reason they're at the table is because they want to know what they will GET from the collaboration, not what they can GIVE. Will they get more money? More people? More influence? If not, then they aren't particularly interested. There doesn't seem to be a belief that what goes around comes around, so maybe we should start giving more if we want to reap something in return. I suspect that this is also what turns off a lot of donors, volunteers and clients.

So if a nonprofit is serious about starting to go down the road toward abundance thinking, it seems that one of the easiest things they could do is start constantly asking "What can we GIVE in this situation?" Going to a meeting to plan for a grant? Ask "What Can We Give?" Working with donors or customers or whoever? "What Can We Give You?"   I'd love to see big signs all over the office that said "What Can We Give?" Meetings that started with that mantra. A big billboard somewhere. And even better, the ideas for how to give were taken seriously and carried out. That would be abundance in action.   

Seems like it could be a really good place to start.

More on Scarcity vs. Abundance Thinking

In between a grant proposal and a website I'm working on for a client, I've been continuing to think about the issue of scarcity thinking in nonprofits that I started on yesterday as I read what others have to say on the subject.

Allen points out that scarcity thinking is the enemy of change management everywhere, not just in relation to IT projects or nonprofits and I completely agree. He suggests that  good planning can help people adjust their scarcity beliefs, although I wonder if the right kind of planning is possible when management is in the grip of the scarcity mindset themselves.

Michelle Murrain of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology tells a story about a nonprofit she worked with:

A long time ago (in web years) I was working with a certain CEO of a certain chapter of a certain very-big-nonprofit (whose role in life is to fund other nonprofits - this kinda gives it away, but it's necessary for the story.) We were talking about whether or not this certain nonprofit, who had mondo resources, should help facilitate web development for their client organizations. They had realized that if they did that, the client organizations could begin to raise money themselves, instead of depending so heavily on this certain nonprofit. So, guess what? No web development help. I was, of course, surprised (that's mild, I was frankly horrified - wasn't it the mission of this certain nonprofit to help the client nonprofits raise money? Wouldn't helping them raise money themselves fulfill their mission?) But that's scarcity thinking for you. Even though this very-big-nonprofit was rolling in money, they thought the pie was finite, and that if the money didn't go through them, they'd get less. So the scarcity mentality isn't just for small, struggling nonprofits. It's very widespread.

What's sad and scary about this story is that the nonprofit she's talking about was "rolling in money," yet STILL saw the world in terms of scarce resources. It wasn't a picture based even on its own experienced reality, but on a world-view that I'm sure had never been challenged.

I have to wonder if one of the reasons we haven't seen as much progress as we'd like in achieving our various nonprofit missions is because of this scarcity mindset. Scarcity thinking allows us to make excuses for poor performance ("We don't have the time or the money or the people to do this!"). It isolates us, not only from other nonprofits with whom we might share resources and ideas, but from each other and from our clients. We're so busy maintaining our slice of the pie, we fail to see the ways in which we should be working on making the pie bigger. This scarcity mode is divisive and keeps us focused on the wrong things--on the problems and the barriers rather than on the opportunities and the solutions. I think it even moves us to keep clients dependent on us and our services, as Michelle's client did in the story above.

I've been looking at other resources too. This post from the Chief Happiness Officer is a good one, contrasting scarcity thinking and abundance thinking:

Scarcity	Abundance
It’s every man for himself	We can work together
I never have time	I take time for the things that matter
Mistakes are disasters	I can recover and learn from mistakes
Ideas are hard to come by and must be kept secret	I can always have a great idea
Our company is lacking	Our company has everything it needs to succeed
Look at all the resources we need	Look at all the resources we have
The market is full of threats	The market is full of opportunities
People are out to get me	People are out to help me

How often do we hear or see some version of the left column in our daily work? Far more frequently than we see the right column thinking, I'd guess.

I also found this post by Ross Mayfield who wrote last October about the issue of abundance and how he's spent the last five years blogging from that belief system:

I've been blogging for five years as of this month, and here's what I've learned:

ABUNDANCE

I have discovered I have a lot to give.  And when I give, I notice others give more.  Some of them I've formed relationships with, and trust opens giving, but I have also learned to trust strangers to share in abundance.  Life is iterative, markets are not transactions and scarcity of attention is false. Our learnings compound abundance and there may be no limit to what we can produce.

I think that it's this picture of abundance that I find so engaging about the Internet and social media. A lot of people give generously of their time, their expertise and their support to write their own blogs, comment on others, create videos and podcasts and beautiful art that enriches the rest of us. And they do it for nothing.This is abundance thinking. This is a belief that there is an endless flow of ideas and information that we can connect and shape to create new things all the time.

I'm rambling a little, but it feels important to me to begin thinking differently about how I do my work. I know that I'm as guilty as anyone of scarcity thinking, especially under stress. Patricia Soldati talks about how fear drives scarcity thinking in her post on the "allure of scarcity":

(Scarcity thinking is) a powerful notion that's been with us forever, but has exploded in our consciousness since 9/11. Scarcity is rooted in fear and lives in the world of ego. It says: "The world is not safe, so I am not safe. I need to have greater and greater control to feel safe – over my health, my finances, my family, my work. If you have more, I have less."

Safe…maybe, but a scarcity mentality effectively embraces struggle, and abandons any opportunity for you to have a compelling identity about yourself, or to express your values or passions.

Scarcity is limiting, but safe and I think that most people value safety over just about everything (myself included, far more than I care to admit). So part of the challenge is to override your fear and to recognize when you've moved into that anxious scarcity mindset.

This kind of mindful practice is fine for individuals, but what about for an entire organization? It seems that we can only go so far in having individual people willing to challenge and re-formulate their belief systems, particularly if the leadership of the organization is not concerned with changing those patterns.

So the big question for me is what kinds of activities can organizations engage in to begin moving from scarcity to abundance?