I’m very sad to see this happening to a great company like google. I first encountered the new culture at Google I/O extended event I attended a few months ago. It disturbed me very deeply but I couldn’t figure out exactly why since I didn’t actually disagree with anything that the diversity proponents wanted to achieve. I’ve had some time to process it though, and here’s the deeper issue that I find so disturbing about what seems to be happening at google ...
How we habitually respond to “uncomfortable situations” in life matters a great deal.
As individuals, it strongly influences our trajectory in life.
In companies, the predominant tendency strongly influences the trajectory of the company.
One option is to habitually respond by “getting curious” and by “identifying that part of our predictive model of the world which is weak and seeking to understand the situation more deeply with the intent of strengthening our predictive model.”
When we choose this option we tend to want to listen intently to those who believe differently than us, to seek to understand the deeper needs that are driving them, and to strive to pursue win-win (or “positive sum”) solutions to problems.
The option tends to leads to a strengthening of “moonshot thinking” because our confidence in our ability to solve problems grows in direct proportion to the strength of our predictive model of the world.
Another option is to habitually respond by “being offended”, ”to sink into victimhood, powerlessness, learned helplessness”, “dividing into us vs them”, “initiating conflict”, “appealing to authority to protect us from the threat of them”.
When we choose this option, we tend to disconnect from those who believe differently than us, to be unaware of the deeper needs that are driving their behavior, and to sink into pursuing win-loss (or zero sum) solutions to our problems.
This option tends to lead to a strengthening of a downward spiral of “victimhood thinking” which decreases our confidence in our ability to solve difficult problems by skillful means.
edited: What I find so tragic about this is ...
we have 7.5 billion minds in this world growing ever more connected to each other and to vast sums of knowledge by the internet.
From a first principles perspective these minds represent more than enough resources to solve the most challenging problems that affect us all.
If we would only fight each other with win-loss intent LESS and instead direct our aggression towards solving the difficult important problems that affect us all, we could solve these difficult problems so much more quickly.
Why would we choose waste time fighting each other, when we could, for example, be building a piece of the puzzle that helps researchers cure the leukemia that my friend’s young son was just diagnosed with?
Why would we make that choice?
Presumably this was the hope of the google founders who established the mission of “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible.”?
I propose that
>the tendency to “get offended” and “seek win-loss” solutions to problems
should be targeted for extermination.
We are better than this.
> the tendency to “get curious” and find “win-win” solutions should to take its place.