choices

How Can We Avoid Confusing the Hard Parts (People) with the Easy Parts (Tools)?

question of the week / /

We all live through various hype cycles, personally and professionally. (Hype cycles look a lot like the Satir Change model, the image in this post.)  Right now, in 2024, “generative” AI is having its moment. But AI is not generating anything, certainly not new insights. Instead, the engines have ingested (without paying creators) lots of […]

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What Responsibilities Do We Owe People In or Out of Our Boundaries?

newsletter / /

Johanna Rothman’s Create an Adaptable Life Newsletter for June 2024.  We use boundaries to choose who’s in or out of our families, our work, and our lives. Those choices help us decide our responsibilities to the people inside and outside our boundaries. However, those boundaries are not particularly static. The boundaries evolve as we move

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How Can We Postpone Old (Age) Thinking and Create New Ideas?

newsletter / /

I could tell when my parents had overdosed on their favorite news channel. They said things like, “Kids these days…” Because I’m a bad, bad daughter, I used to ask, “Which kids? Can you name two or three? Do you mean our children?” (Their grandchildren.) “No, not our children,” they said. Their next favorite saying

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How Should We Confront a Lack of Fairness to Make the World a Better Place?

question of the week / /

In the past few weeks, I’ve read several nonfiction books that promote how women can improve their standing in the world, to create more parity. That’s great, but the writers surprised me. That content was not part of the title or the blurb—and that’s not why I chose to read the book. I’ve also listened

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How Many Lenses Can You Access to See Problems and Solutions?

question of the week / /

So many of us see just one problem, and therefore one solution. Sometimes, our mental models or filters prevent us from seeing alternative solutions. But sometimes, I think it’s literally how we see the problem that limits our mental models. If we can’t see the problem in all its glory, how can we possibly offer

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When and How Should We Build Community to Connect With Each Other?

newsletter / /

When my younger daughter was in high school, her principal continually invited us to events. He thought we would “build community” with “meaningful connections” that way. But I already went to high school. And the last thing I wanted—maybe not the very last, but close to it—was to return to high school. My daughter could

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How Can We Clarify the Social Contract, Trust, and Betrayal?

question of the week / /

In general, I’m willing to extend a fair amount of trust to other people. For example, when driving, I trust other drivers to stay in their lane. However, when drivers swerve all over the road, I stop extending that trust in an instant—those drivers broke trust with me. That’s because they broke the social contract

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How Can We Create Alternatives to Happiness as Our “Best” Goal?

question of the week / /

International Happiness Day occurred this week. While I’m normally a fairly happy person, I cannot express how much I hate this holiday. I hate, hate, hate this holiday. Happiness puts too much pressure on people to be happy. When we’re happy, supposedly, we smile until our faces hurt. Or we’re jubilant and joyous all the

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