The reason why your value prop is full of “and”, your product is full of features, and your strategy is full of verticals and use cases (and exceptions to both), is that we are biased towards additive solutions.
We think that adding is better than subtracting when we look for solutions.
Of course, it is not.
But convincing others will always need a lot of work.
Is the workplace the best place to discuss societal and political issues? No.
Should societal and political discussions be banned from the workplace? Also, no.
The problem with a ban is that it rarely hits where it aims. You might want to curb animated discussions on your internal tools and you end up making your people feel less comfortable expressing themselves.
We do live in challenging times. Most issues are polarized. Most fail to see the greys. Most feel the only possibility is to be fully in or fully out. And if your people want to talk about a delicate issue, your role as a leader is not to direct the conversation towards the appropriate forums, but rather to sit down with them and provide a safe forum for the discussion to happen.
Even if that means a loss in productivity.
When we make a mistake, that immediately becomes the center of our life. Who we are. What we can achieve. How far we can go.
We should instead put the mistake at the same level of our wins and successes. If we manage to give it context, the mistake will look much less threatening. How many times did we do it right? How often are we proud of our work? How much have we achieved so far? And if we are way down into failure mode, a friend or a partner can help us get out and see.
Mistakes are inevitable, the same way as successes are.
When a system is broken, there is no patch, no tool, no framework, no novelty that can fix it. All of that can make it work for a while longer, and a little more, but in the end the system will still be broken.
So, if you are serious about making it work, the only way is to take a step back and have a look at the system itself.
It is painful, because it means that what you have done so far might have taken you somewhere you were not supposed to be. Yet, the alternative is to end up even farther away.
Your choice.
Acceptance is not about taking what makes us miserable, shutting it in the closet, throwing away the keys, numbing the feelings that inevitably it will keep us giving, and pretending as if that does not exist.
Acceptance is taking what makes us miserable, understanding it, putting it front and center for a while, making friend with it, finding a way to go about our days despite it. Until eventually it will go shut itself in the closet by itself.
The former approach will make misery expand and take new forms. The latter will make it go away once and for all.
Two different ways. Two very different outcomes.
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