They returned to their village
once more whole,
in ways that can never again
be divided.

Advice to others is easy. Don’t worry about having to engage in your life, all you need to do is listen to me as I tell you what to eat, who to talk to, what to invest in, how to live, what to improve, how to succeed.

Advice takes no commitment or authenticity on our part, just the issuance of judgment about what others should be doing. It makes us smarter, knowing better what they should be doing with their life. It’s actually a pleasant distraction from self-assessment or self-doubt.

The downside is that advice ends the conversation, preventing us from being smarter together.

What is more sacred, something you often use or something you don’t?

There is a great article in the NY Times today reporting on the antics of parents of camp children. Among other egregious offenses, parents are giving their unruly kids 2 cell phones so that when parents violate cell phone call rules they agree to, their child can have a second clandestine cell phone to receive parent calls to schedule conflicting gymnastic and commercial call appointments. Children apparently also need consoling calls from their psychologists for appearing “unhappy” on internet pics during their camp stays. Dude. Seriously.

This drama could not be more different than my camp counselor days in the early 70’s when we fielded all 2 parent calls on Sunday night about bed wetting fears and all 1 calls from campers on Monday night to happily arrange premature rides home. That was it. Our vision and mission was simple: return a child home who is far more durable and agile than they or their parents ever suspected they were capable.

The Times refers to it aptly as “Fading parent morality.”

“(The grade of) ‘A’ is a possibility to live into, not a standard to live up to.” Rosamund Stone Zander, co-author of “The Art of Possibility.”

I’m doing a board retreat today where we’re re-languaging mission and policies to be more useful and relevant.

This is the current mission (no kidding): “The purpose of the board is to achieve appropriate results for appropriate persons at an appropriate cost and avoid unacceptable actions and situations.”

A simple statement for sure, totally incapable of evoking objection and totally effective in preventing any semblance of focus, engagement, passion, or power.

Talking with Chris Holdwick this morning about the power of stories in patient care. She’s spent a career helping hospital cultures transform into this country’s top performing providers.

Her thought on the importance of solitciting the stories of others and sharing our stories: “How can you provide good care without knowing their stories and them knowing yours?”

Instead of featuring a Gross National Product metric for its country’s success, Bhutan relies on a Gross National Happiness metric. Hard to think of a more radical way to define thivancy. If anything can place abundance gratitude above deficiency greed, this can.

Yesterday I completed a strategic planning process with a non-profit whose own board questioned the very existence and validity of the organization’s mission. In the process I facilitated dozens of small focus groups with about 80 key stakeholders including staff and board, clients and consultants, community leaders and funders.

From the process emerges a very clear and widely supported mandate for a radical transition to a new organizational mission and revenue model. Some of the board members dismissed the listening with their own agendas, inspiring my wisdom to the organization’s director: Do not be second guessed by those afraid to listen. Trust your instinct to listen, as you have, and surround yourself with those who have the will to do the same.

Mid-point in my flight from Salt Lake Sunday, I looked up from tireless work on a new book project to observe a young father drop his magazine with a gesture befitting an intolerant parent and shoot “the look” across the aisle to his two bickering teenage sons.

I remember the look, and similar rituals like the casual reach for the belt. It didn’t take us long to learn that they were code for “No conversation will occur at this point.”

Growing up, we discovered a different wisdom, that conflict is a call for opening rather than closing conversation. It is not a call for commandments, threats, and lectures. It’s a call for dialogue on mutual vulnerabilities, fears behind angers, and loves behind fears.