Business first: I need your suggestions.

More and more, COVID-19, race relations, and politics seem to be crowding out all other subjects in my day-to-day thinking. That doesn’t make them interesting reading. There have to be other topics to write about that are timely and relevant without being repetitive and boring.

So give me some hints — let me know what other subjects you’d like me to cover in these weekly screeds.

And why.

You’ll be helping both of us.

Thanks.

– Bob

P. S. Oh … before I forget and apropos of nothing in particular, are you as puzzled as I am that with all the buzz about the Microsoft Duo, nobody has even mentioned its uncanny resemblance to the ill-fated Microsoft Courier? It’s sad beyond words when yours truly has the best memory on the block.

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The KJR Manifesto devoted two chapters to the primacy of relationships in effective organizations. It might be time for a re-think.

Chapter 4 (Relationships precede process) describes the “process distrust loop” — a diagrammatic representation of how poor working relationships and the distrust they breed act like sand in an organization’s operational gears, just as strong, positive, trust-based relationships are an organization’s metaphorical graphite dust.

Chapter 5 (Relationships Outlive Transactions (it earned the acronym ROT) talks about relationships in more personal terms, describing the impact of winning the proverbial battles (transactions) in ways that result in losing the legendary war. Personal success, that is, depends far more on working relationships than on even the most important achievements.

So here we are, collaborating via Zoom or WebEx, TEAMS or Slack, IM, email, and other electronic channels (sorry if I left out your favorite). Sometimes we have a foundation of trust from prior face-to-face teamwork, but increasingly we don’t. We have nothing to base trust on, and have structural reasons that make distrust logical: With workforce reductions turning many situations into games of musical chairs, trusting a total stranger just means I’m more likely to be the one with no place to sit on the day the music dies.

Wise leaders have been doing everything they can to overcome these challenges. As I said a couple of weeks ago, “Merely competent managers will accept purely transactional relationships as an inevitability and adjust how they assign and receive work accordingly.

“Excellent leaders will fight this every step of the way, recognizing that effective organizations are still built on trust-based relationships. For example, just because Zoom has supplanted … let’s start calling them “flesh-to-flesh” interactions … is no reason for leaders to abandon the once-common practice of weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one conversations with their direct reports.”

But I been thinkin’. Is it possible I’m just geezing, anchored in ancient thought patters and mistaking How We’ve Always Done Things for How We Should Do Things Now?

Much as it pains me to suggest it, this might be the right time to think about adopting a post-relational, purely transactional model of interpersonal interactions and organizational effectiveness.

Call it the Grasp the Nettle strategy.

Don’t get me wrong. When the situation allows for it, interpersonal trust repays the investments needed to achieve it many times over. Call it the Return on Relationships, and when it’s possible it’s huge.

But wishing something is possible doesn’t make it possible. Given the inflectionary, linguistic, time-differentialed, structural, and above all cultural barriers to relationship building, it might make more sense to just give up and base all work and responsibilities on specific assignments — nothing more, nothing less.

The specifics depend on … well, the specifics of the situation. As an oversimplified overview, managers might organize the work to be done into two categories: delegations and a Kanban queue.

Delegations are operational responsibilities. They’re for categories of work that, taken as a whole, deliver the results the organization is responsible for.

The Kanban queue lists everything that must, should, or might get done that doesn’t nicely fit into one of the delegations. Employees who have enough spare capacity can snag one of the queue items and get credit for dealing with it.

And maybe even extra credit for collaborating on it with another team member.

Not that organizing work this way will be easy. Especially, organizing tasks to minimize the extent to which team members are dependent on each other will be a challenge. If you don’t, should Fred’s inbox be empty at the beginning of the day because Adina’s didn’t finish the work in progress Fred is supposed to add his bit of value to, or didn’t finish it to Fred’s satisfaction, we’re right back into the process distrust loop with no resolution in sight.

Traditional trust-based teams solve this through an arcane procedure called “helping each other out.” Transactional not-really-team members might mitigate the challenge by working on something in the Kanban queue while awaiting the work in progress to show up.

They might use the time productively by taking on-line training classes or perfecting their FreeCell skills.

Or, they might try something radical, like getting to know their teammates better.

I know it sounds like crazy talk …

When I was a kid, my brother Mike and I were playing Cowboys and Indians one day. Another kid shot brother Mike, who went down with a convincing death scene.

So convincing that Mr. Peepers, our loyal half sheep dog and half lots of other breeds sank his teeth into the shooter’s ankle.

Mr. Peepers understood something profound. It starts here: We knew who the good and bad guys were without having ever once met either a cowboy or a Native American, just as when we played Cops and Robbers.

Mr. Peepers understood who the good and bad guys were, too, only his perspective had nothing to do with cowboys, Indians, cops, or robbers.

Happily, brother Mike’s killer didn’t end up with rabies, nor did any of us end up infected with animosity toward Native Americans, or, for that matter, toward robbers. But playing Cowboys and Indians probably did give each of us a bit of a cognitive hill to climb when the ’60s came along and exposed us to, in addition to the occasional doobie, a less one-sided view of who did what to whom in American history.

Back to Mr. Peepers.

As has been pointed out in this space from time to time, most of us, most of the time, divide the world into us and them. We are the source of all that’s good and right with the world, they cause everything and anything we dislike. That’s true whether we consider “us” (or them) to be: Democrats, Republicans, Unix jockeys, mainframe dinosaurs, scientists and engineers, pointy-haired bosses, whistleblowers, loyalists, mavericks, bureaucrats, ELCA Lutherans, Missouri Synod Lutherans, or …

You get the picture. Now paste in Mr. Peepers. As the rest of us divided into two tribes — cowboys and Indians — Mr. Peepers knew which tribe he belonged to, and it was neither of the above.

He was a Lewis.

We’ve talked about culture from time to time in this space, defining culture as how we do things around here.

Or perhaps it should be how WE do things around here, because how, and for that matter what we do around here is dictated by relentlessly enforcing peer pressure. Every affinity group has its own approved narratives, which means all of us … not most of us, all of us … are subject to starting our thinking about whatever issue floats into our view by matching it to one of these approved narratives.

The narrative supplies the logic. Evidence? We might find it interesting, but mostly to the extent it provides ammunition, not illumination.

Our thinking works this way whether we’re evaluating our employer’s decision to lay off staff due to COVID-19-driven revenue shortfalls or we’re deciding whether to wear face masks in public places.

And while there’s a glimmer of hope for developing a COVID-19 vaccine, there’s no such outlook for immunizing us from tribal thinking.

The best I can do is offer a palliative: Whatever the controversy at hand, join a non-combatant tribe and follow its narratives. Ideally it would be a tribe that has a legitimate stake in the subject and isn’t one of the major current combatants.

When I find myself falling into a tribal trap my go-to is trying to climb out of it by self-identifying with the tribe of engineers, where I define “engineer” as someone who, faced with a problem, sees it as something to solve, as opposed to non-engineers, who respond to problems with “Oh, no!”

But it depends on the situation: If the question at hand is, for example, the aforementioned round of layoffs I might instead choose the tribe of Bloomberg opinion-writer, where I’d be deeply interested — it is, after all, my beat — but not predisposed to a particular opinion as to whether any specific layoff decision is a good or bad idea.

The great thing about conscious tribal choice (should we make this an acronym? CTC?) is that we don’t have to pass any tests or otherwise get anyone’s approval to join.

In fact, this would defeat the whole purpose, which is to drain as much hero/villain thinking from our brains as possible.

Maybe we should all make one of our alternatives the canine clan.

Because I don’t remember whether Mike was a cowboy or Indian on that fated day, so I don’t know if his killer was a hero or a villain. Mr. Peepers, on the other paw, knew the killer wasn’t a Lewis.

That’s all he needed to know.