The “Success” Journey: Paying Dues

I’ll walk onto the stage in one week to accept an Entrepreneurial Success of the Year award. For months, I’ve been thinking about what I want to say. Most people see me as “spontaneously capable.” What I hide is a need and drive to prepare, but not to create a perfect speech or flawlessly delivered story. I’m distracted by life and work in ways that muddy my thinking. So, I’m capturing a few waypoints along my success journey over the week. I see success as an aiming point, not a specific location. I’m still walking, running, clawing along on the success journey. So here we go. Let’s look at Waypoint #1.

Be cautious of developing a narrow vision from the communities you’re part of.

“Paying Dues”

On the Cabrera Lab Podcast this morning, Derek and Laura Cabrera mentioned how professional circles create echo chambers and that innovation comes from sources outside those circles. Committing to one field and paying our dues to organizational associations and societies seems natural. As professionals in a specific field, unity is a strong pull. I’ve joined clubs and organizations that have brought great purpose to my work and life. But…there’s a downside.

Everything we do centers around learning from my perspective. That perspective leads me to see solutions to personal, organizational, and community challenges through various lenses (no silver bullet solutions). When I launched MYNDDSET in 2008, I wasn’t part of a single community of practice. I thought K12 education could benefit from integrating cognitive science into their culture and professional development, that company strategy development would be better if facilitated through systems thinking-focused stakeholder sessions, and that learning can be transformative when we design experiences rather than curriculum. My “memberships” included Learning & Development, Organizational Development, K12, Educational Technology, Event Design, and Systems Thinking communities, which helped me look at each with an external view. I paid dues to help build MYNDDSET as an innovation across these communities.

Paying dues across multiple fields of study drives us along our success journey. While I respect singularly focused training companies, facilitation consultancies, organizational development agencies, and production studios, the business models for those businesses’ success journey aren’t in my view. We are on track to transform human, organizational, and community development.

Cheers!