As a kid my cousin Jayne and I would joke about switching moms.
My Aunt Sara raised three children while building a tech business in NY and did well. I admired her joie devivre pride in her work over the long haul. Later, living in different states, we connected by phone, the comradery between us intact. A month before she passed, she spoke what she valued and how what people said to her mattered:
“The words are more than anything.”
My Aunt Sara, 101
Her voice still resonates.
In my work, I counsel people on how to utilize their core talents at work, home and play. It’s a novel approach supporting the synergy between cultivating your talents/strengths and our daily talk. Convos with ourselves, others, technology, social (it's an endless list:) close us down or send us towards possibility. It is generating personhood.
Then while writing this - serendipity! -I received an invite to lead a team sesh offsite I call “My Generative Communicative Life” at Autodesk. Generative AI is thematic there and everywhere.
It’s cool the word Generative is in the zeitgeist. Heck! A yogurt I like brands itself by writing “regenerative” across the container. I am a Generative Communication Coach and for a decade have taught an MBA course “Live Exchange: Generative Communication”. Called “LiveE” for short, it is not business as usual.
Providing clear counsel to clients and MBA students our ‘research’ is daily life. We look at the mash-up between our intentions and the results generated IRL. Doing this grounds users in the behavioral application of their SuperPowers.
Practicing ways to become a more effective communicator is just the launchpad. Introducing a generative approach to communication, we open a trapdoor to self-understanding and communicative strategies that otherwise might remain out of sight.
image by Elle Linda Yaven
The ethos is to make well-being operational by engaging the link between daily conversations and mental health. I partner with creative leaders grounding in their communicative talents -yep we all have ‘em no matter how reserved, understated, quiet, conflict avoidant, non-imposing, introverted we may appear, your communicative presence is speaking.
Generative Communication is the narrative and non-narrative conduit of Design Strategy. What’s that you ask?
Well, I am honored to join a crew of oh-so-talented collaborators developing our sold-out “Design Strategy Summit”, May 3 on the SF campus of California College of the Arts. Design Strategy practitioners across industries will share how they use this collaborative, interactive, innovative discipline in designing the future.
GENERATIVE. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
ON THE ONE HAND:
A savvy friend of mine expressed reluctance to go to dinner parties, gallery openings or social events that required small talk. It wasn’t the gathering itself. It was the time it took afterwards to recenter that was a hindrance.
All communication whether face-to-face or virtual has resonance, aftermath, residue and -results! Chatting with a manager, a direct report, a parent or child act like transports or vectors to clear a direction towards possibility, a brick wall or some combo of stumbling block and freedom.
I’ve given up wearing shoes that are too small because they are cute and apply this metaphor as a coach: you’re growing and you deserve to embed a communication style mirroring this. Rather than stuffing it or numbing yourself examining the after-effect (-using backwards design) is basecamp in architecting a communicative life aligned with your inner rightness.
In such an inventive terrain, a guiding question for myself, my client or student is:
What next possibility, emotion, strategy or action does any conversation produce?
When I get a bee in my bonnet, I am all in! As a creative, I take to phases of independent inventing to simply find out what I am thinking; -strategic puzzles included. So in developing my playbook for GenC I wasn’t inclined to look up the word right away. It was only later I glanced at the dictionary after first noting “generative” does not yet appear in my thesaurus☺.
The very first definition frames Generative in a very feminine way:
ON THE OTHER HAND:
The femme bent is apt.
The hidden side of GenC’s gorgeous productive, driven, active face is adaptability, intuitive reasoning and improvisation. It is this generative yielding that opens the door to human agency.
GenC is visceral. There is feeling before interpretation and there is feeling after interpretation.
We sense it when we are in the presence of healthy communication or an ambush. Your speaking body clues you in. It is safe to let the feels in your throat, heart or gut or tummy register in GenC. Feel good chemicals like endorphins and oxytocin are generated.
Generative Communication is the powerful cadence between:
GenC is relational and this is key to effective communication. Creating collective noticing, feeling & responding builds "We-are-in-this-together" thinking. You cultivate a taste for the rewarding thoroughness of listening, rescinding a dominant need to control, knowing when to step up and back to discern what not to do. All a much needed counterpoint to the 24/7 demands for answers to problems we have uncloaked without much rigor.
“It is a leap of faith and a calculated risk.”
- Juan Hernandez, MBA Design Strategy
nor·mal·ize
ˈnôrmə,līz
verb bring or return to a normal or standard condition or state.
They realized normalizing the care of their life as a communicator was ultimate self-care
Origin
mid 17th century (in the sense ‘right-angled’): from Latin normalis, from norma ‘carpenter's square’. Current senses date from the early 19th century.
GenC provides guard rails, a safe structure and a ton of strategic practices allowing you to follow an inclination, lose yourself, mess-up, refind footing and iterate the path by actually walking it.
In working a terrain of design research you garner deep knowledge of a problem space along with how others engage in and address the same. Generative investigation is rigorous and scrappy.
You melt to how full throttle ensemble work asks you to stay the course, bringing that quality or knowledge or strength others count on you for. This culls wheat from communicative chaff and so, voluntarily spills you into a zone of high-value behaviors. It will hold you captive; rapturous in the gap between evidence-based data and the silken invisibility of human creativity.
Key to the charge of unpacking wicked problems through testing ideas in the marketplace, GenC offers strategic permission for the mess-ups of quality iteration. Cutting back living in fear of what your mistakes reveal about you is a true stress - buster. Mental health gushes forth from self-trust.
Iteration wants the ability to be fast and light, to swiftly attune to a mix of scenarios without sacrificing thoughtfulness and to be positively welcoming to all players.
In dialing back the need for perfection or denying vulnerability a nice surprise is in store. You find yourself more agile with your words; your way of speaking, gesturing and your entire communication style grows lighter -even in the face of iterative ‘mess-ups.’
It is beautiful to see people with expertise and high standards (my team at Auto Desk as an example) engage in a studio state of mind by being willing to put aside often hard-won proficiency to experiment with new steps of communication. This is key to honing your own comfortable brand of GenC. You grapple with a challenge until you come out the other side to feel home-free.
"There exists within me this idea of working in a space
where success is not guaranteed. I have to have faith…
the idea of forced delay or delayed gratification is present.”
-Michelle Ramos, MBA Design Strategy
Guiding the up-leveling of our communicative lives I see repeated evidence that in creating generative signals we are not in the territory of a “one-and-done” praxis. While instant results are magnificent, and I applaud and love to share the shorthand of a good tip or technique, the rewards of GenCare not just confined to the present moment.
We humans ruminate. Consider your fave rant; you know the one you immerse in every time your manager, mom, partner does that thing that makes you feel volcanic? We humans manage to stay in such fogs for quite awhile without ever announcing this to ourselves.
Retrieval is different from rumination.
In its feminine aspect GenC is cyclical. Return & retrieval are counterweights to its august forward momentum. We return to the challenge we initially set to see if it still holds or how it needs to be qualified, reformulated or inclusive of additional/alternate data.
Generative Communication abides in the realm of preventative care. One example is the team simply setting up living ground rules at the outset of a project. It is energizing to be on an adventure and to not know what's missing til we do.
Consider, what happens in a group coach convo stays in a group coach convo. Like my talented Autodesk team, I’ve seen the reparative difference group respect for recentering in your own lived experience makes. As a safety valve it peps the team up like nothing else!
GenC is a communication repertoire operationalizing well-being in motion.
You are not static. You’re changing and it's just healthy self-care to have your communication style fit like a finely crafted custom pair of shoes aligning with whatever’s been dawning on you recently. Like cycling or learning a dance routine, communicating along these corridors sends invites to a future self to step into light.
You can Just Arrive to wherever you find yourself.
Stop the spin. Enter an upward spiral!
A TALENT LAB
Like to experience "My Life as a Generative Communicator" for yourself or your crew? I offer private coach sessions and interactive micro-events for teams.
Feel free to email me atelle@ellevateyou.com to calendar a 20 minute discovery sesh!