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School of Gravity

Auteur(s): Steven Titus Smith and David Lynn Marcum
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  • The future is fantastic and scary as hell. Revolutions move like freight trains. Learning curves feel like Everest. The only way up is flying straight into the teeth of it.

    The ones fit for a brave new world are different at their core.

    Curiosity in your bones to awake the incurious, power under pressure only humility holds, symptoms only veracity—the truth-telling, truth-hunting, truth-loving ones—cure, equality in your bloodstream that supersedes status.

    It’s the science of human gravity. Here’s our ten-year-study, 8,000-survey, 250-interview how.

    The deepest power in hypercompetitive, hyperconnected, hypercreative work. The origin of insight, root of your relevance, building block of confidence, influence that supersedes visibility and volume. It’s elemental. And no one is fit for the future without it.

    Welcome to the school of gravity.
    2003 Steven Titus Smith and David Lynn Marcum
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Épisodes
  • Habit three: Be the signal, not the noise. ep.1: The constructive clash of human emotions.

    Habit three: Be the signal, not the noise. ep.1: The constructive clash of human emotions.
    Oct 3 2023
    The trendy advice on psychological “safety” feels like an emotional bomb shelter from debate, emotional clash, and negativity. In reality, it’s a creative dead end where the truth stays buried. Ask creators. Ask science. Safety—creative safety—is a little countercultural, even counterintuitive. There are thousands of articles on expressing emotions at work. Silencing “negative” emotions outnumbers expressing them, three to one. The champions of the ratio? Coaches and consultants. And the rebel backing the underdog? Science. This episode is dedicated to rebels.At the right intensity and intent, negative emotions fix what’s broken, dig up the truth, ignite revolutions. They spark friendly friction and beneficial “battles.” It’s how creators and leaders turn teams around, shatter conventions, and shock people out of assumptions into the truth. All while building trust and unity without washing away individuality. Sound like a superpower? It’s the science of truth-telling, truth-seeking and truth-hearing. And the truth—creatively, socially, politically—sets us free.You can get the first, full two chapters (PDF) of our new, upcoming book, I Am Gravity, plus a strengths and counterfeits fitness check, at https://schoolofgravity.com/. Just tap the purple button at the top of the home page.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:Teams that disrupt industries, create uncontested marketspace, or cure the disease of mediocrity have unorthodox communication habits. The kind that would make most soft-skill communication courses squirm. That’s because truth-telling, truth-hunting conversations are not soft: “Create dissension and disagreement rather than consensus. Decisions…are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views…It is…the only safeguard against the decision-maker’s becoming the prisoner of the organization.” Peter F. Drucker, The Essential Drucker“You need storms…if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time—if, in fact, we don’t even ever have night—all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up.” Brad Bird, Pixar, via Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc.“You need executives …who argue and debate—sometimes violently—in pursuit of the best answers…Phrases like ‘loud debate, ‘heated discussions,’ and ‘healthy conflict’ peppered the articles and interview transcripts…The entire management team would lay itself open to searing questions and challenges.” Jim Collins, Good to Great “…[depart] from the conventional logic…robustly scrutinize every factor…” W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy“If your disruptive product or service is not yet good enough and your team seems enthralled…raise a big red flag. If your team assures you that you’ll succeed because a new venture fits your company’s core competence, tell them that you can’t deal in fuzzy concepts.” Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovators Solution [Emphases added.]Heating things up doesn’t come naturally to most of us. Culturally, we spend a lot of training time and educational ceremonies cooling down conversations and keeping things upbeat. No one wants to make waves in the “pool of shared meaning.” Sixty-one percent of the people in one of our surveys said they need a lightning rod to get a little debate started and a surge protector once it starts. The balance is hard to strike. Let’s be clear about psychological safety, which at first appears to be the haven from debate, conflict and emotional clash. Doesn’t true safety mean it’s okay to be annoyed with bureaucracy, bored by average products, frustrated when we fail, aggravated by bad policy, alarmed by contentment, uneasy with company politics or impatient with slow budget approval when an opportunity is slipping away—and to passionately express it? Aren’t those emotions sometimes precisely how broken things get fixed and revolutions start? Activists don’t march on Washington with picket signs of mild irritation. No one breaks the grip of good with a gentle tug. Going home at night unresolved and a little irritated with each other isn’t the end of the world if everyone knows it’s not the end of the conversation or the relationship. In the name of progress, the goal isn’t always to lower the tension. You may need to raise it. And yet it’s talked down. There are thousands of articles on emotion in the workplace. We randomly sampled 100. Eliminating negative emotions wins by a 3:1 margin. Who’s behind the three? Consultants and coaches. Who’s on the side of the one? Science. “Trying to impose happy thoughts is extremely ...
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    15 min
  • Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. ep.1: THE BLESSINGS OF BEWILDERMENT.

    Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. ep.1: THE BLESSINGS OF BEWILDERMENT.
    Oct 31 2023
    Only one in five people confess to being curious. Adventurous souls stand out. And it’s not an easy path. Especially when you’re up against a wave of certainty, resistance, or the suffocating pressure to blend in or cave in. This episode is for the perceptive ones—the brave who explore the uncharted.The to-do list of the curious ones isn’t breezy: Listen to your opponents (even when it goes against your instincts), argue both sides of your own ideas so everyone feels safe arguing with you, inspire provocative questions, and dare to see things from new angles. Resist the pull of popular opinion and the trap of the “known.” Seek the unobvious in the obvious, be fascinated by views outside your own and lean on your tribe for camaraderie, not as a self-validating crutch.This episode is about diving deep into the ocean of curiosity, not just to understand one another, but to be socially perceptive. It’s about mind-reading, not surface-level skimming or guesswork. Being perceptive doesn’t require a flood of brilliant insights. It’s about sharpening your sight to see the overlooked, the hidden. It’s like walking into a dark room and lighting a candle; you’re not creating something new, you’re illuminating the unseen.Tune in as we explore how to make the uncomfortable comfortable, unsettle the settled, and cure the incurious. And that may mean you.You can get the first, full two chapters (PDF) of our new, upcoming book, I Am Gravity, plus a strengths and counterfeits fitness check, at https://schoolofgravity.com/. Just tap the purple button at the top of the home page.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:Emily gets up one morning to hear that the White House revoked the credentials of a press member who wouldn’t sit down because the president wouldn’t answer his questions. The White House has a video. The news agency has a video. Both sides have a story. Emily swipes out of her newsfeed, works out, showers, dresses, grabs her coffee and jets out the door for work. Like every other day-in-the-life morning, she checks her email and Slack channels on the subway. She has scheduled interviews to hire a new product manager. Andrew, a member of her team, messages her. He sensed a little bit of friction with engineering in yesterday’s product launch meeting. No one said anything, it was just the vibe of the meeting. Emily isn’t about to let issues beneath the surface hurt a new launch timeline. She texts the engineering director, Gaige, and asks to talk it through. The subway is more crowded than usual. A political convention is in town, so outsiders with name badges occupy local seats. A little late for work, Emily takes her last sip of coffee and throws the cup in the recycle bin. Someone with a name badge throws a coffee cup in a garbage can, ignoring the recycle sign. Outsiders. Emily is momentarily irritated but reminds herself she can’t control everything. Rushing into work, she grabs a smoothie and enters the interview room. Andrew has started the first interview. She sits down on the only chair available (the hard plastic kind you remember from grade school), grabs a heavy-duty clipboard with the candidate’s résumé securely clipped on, and joins in. The first few candidates don’t impress her. They don’t seem collaborative, a little too independent. One strikes her as very competent but a little robotic. With more candidates to interview in the afternoon, Emily drops in on Gaige to see how things are going. Gaige, rushing out of his office for lunch, smirks when Emily mentions the perceived friction, saying that things are fine but that he’ll have to talk later. Making a note to connect with Gaige later, she checks a few more messages and heads to the meeting room for the second set of interviews. The room is double-booked. After 20 minutes of figuring out logistics, everyone grabs their clipboards and résumés and moves to a different room. The new room is better anyway. At least it has more comfortable chairs. And the candidates are better. They seem more socially intelligent, better conversationalists, more at ease with the team. Emily asks more questions. They click. Andrew notices, telling Emily she seemed more engaged in the interviews. She was. Later that day, Emily prepares to make one of the candidates an offer. It’s been kind of a normal day, except that Emily was living in a few illusions without a hint of knowing it. So were the people around her. Candidates were better and worse than she thought. There wasn’t friction with Gaige’s team as Andrew supposed. And the job offer she was about to make was to a good candidate, but not as good as one who interviewed earlier in the day. And just maybe it was ...
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    13 min
  • Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. ep.2: CURE-IOSITY.

    Habit two: see what they can’t, say what they won’t. ep.2: CURE-IOSITY.
    Nov 1 2023
    The future is fantastic and scary as hell. Revolutions move like freight trains. Learning curves feel like Everest. The only way up is flying straight into the teeth of it. The ones fit for a brave new world are different at their core. Here’s our ten-year-study, 8,000-survey, 250-interview how.Curiosity in your bones to open what’s shut, bravery to battle the gods of mediocrity, humility to crush the havoc ego creates, love synced to the needs no one else sees, equality that idolizes no one and sees everyone, veracity to starve bias and feed the truth.It’s the science of human gravity.The deepest power in hypercompetitive, hyperwired, hypercreative work. The origin of breakthrough, the root of your relevance, the building block of confidence and competence. Identity that isn’t a demographic, influence that supersedes visibility and volume. It’s elemental. Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. Here’s the transcript (copyrighted):This is part four of the book, I Am Gravity: irrepressible curiosity, ch.2, cure-iosity. If there were a theme for curiosity, especially ch.2, I think it would be “The power of inexperience --in a world that craves expertise.” As with every chapter, it assumes you’ve read or listened to the intro---and although the chapters of each element are mostly independent of each other, it does help a little if you’ve covered the first chapter of part four, the blessings of bewilderment. Straight out of college with his Ph.D., on his first project with his first team at his first job that happened to be a Fortune 100 aerospace company, John was, in every -way- possible, --new. and That was his only advantage. To learn the ropes, the company placed John on a team trying to fix a major problem with a satellite in orbit. The satellite cost $1.2 billion to build and $200 million to launch. Bringing it back to Earth and sending it up again would cost a few hundred million dollars. The engineers—all experienced, all with the company for at least a decade—had worked on a fix for weeks. When John arrived they were still at square one. After a few days of listening and asking few (very few) questions, John couldn’t sit on the sidelines any longer. He spoke up. Maybe they were thinking about the problem all wrong. The team courteously listened. And then ignored him. On the face of it, square one seems the perfect place for curiosity to thrive. It is—sometimes. But the pressure to do something fast and “right” weighs so heavily on the souls of the people inside the square that skipping along the surface of curiosity substitutes for diving. John decided to dive. Tenaciously curious, John experimented, --talked to engineers one by one, dug into details and fine-tuned his ideas. Armed with a proposed solution, John entered the next big meeting, shared his ideas and got a response: Highly improbable. Won’t work. One engineer told John to ease into the culture before debuting rookie solutions to complicated problems. Whatever John was pitching, the straight-edge puzzle-people weren’t buying. The work of a 1950s sociologist helps us understand why. The resistance.Sociologist Everett Rogers developed an adoption curve of new ideas that’s used in everything from technology to farming. The phrase “early adopter” comes from his theory. The adoption curve spans from innovators and early adopters (16%) who are open to new thinking or trying something new—initial flaws and all—to laggards (16%) who adopt an idea only when everyone else is using it and they can no longer avoid adoption without complete withdrawal from civilization. No surprise that 84 percent of adopters (from early majority to laggards) lean toward the less open, incurious, secure side of the curve. Certainty is a security wall to keep new away. “Throughout the history of scientific thought,” wrote the late Stephen R. Covey, “most laymen have been so anxious for certainty and have had such a low tolerance for ambiguity and change that they have been eager to say that a theory is a fact.” The danger of quick resistance to new thinking is that the resistance may sound intelligent. Maybe it is. But it comes too early to be constructive. All it does is keep new ideas and new people cornered. In the face of certainty and resistance, or when you’re under pressure to fit in and say nothing, curious human beings—the perceptive ones—have to listen to opponents (not our first instinct, especially if we’re cliquing), argue for and against their own ideas so others aren’t afraid to speak, inspire provocative questions, switch perspectives, walk away from the tide of opinion, resist rigidity, cut to the chase, ask questions that seem obvious but are not, be fascinated by views outside their private universe (not just tolerate them or pretend to pay ...
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    15 min
Gestion et leadership Éducation Économie Réussite
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