In this episode I want to reflect on three themes of the TV show Ted Lasso that I think make up part of how alluring I believe it is, and what’s happening in our culture and world right now that make it such a compelling set of stories for so many people.

This is probably most relevant for folks who have seen it, but only very mild spoilers, if any, in this, so probably safe for people who haven’t seen all of it or any of it as well.

These three threads are:

1. Really excellent coach-based leadership
2. Community, belonging, and identity to a shared mission or purpose.
3. The good intentions of most of the characters, and the capacity for acting on those good intentions, and the awareness that people have of others’ good intentions.

These reflections offer some fun and interesting insight into how we interact with other people, but also how we think about designing more effective and humane workplaces, organizations, and communities.

Additional Links:

• TV show Ted Lasso:
  • https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10986410/
• Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
  • https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/478.Bowling_Alone
• John Vervaeke’s Meaning Crisis
  • https://vervaekefoundation.org/what-is-the-meaning-crisis/
• Yuval Noah Harrari’s Sapiens
  • https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23692271-sapiens
• Alain DeBotton:
  • Alain De Botton – Religion For Atheists (Ideas at the House)
• Johann Hari’s Lost Connections
  • https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921573-lost-connections
• Interview with Adam Kleinbaum from Dartmouth’s Tuck School:
  • https://hanoverhappenings.castos.com/episodes/what-happens-in-our-brain-when-having-consensus-building-converastions-a-converastion-with-tuck-associate-professor-of-business-administration-adam-kleinbaum
• Several sources of information about local community planning:
  • Revitalize or Die: https://revitalizeordie.com/
  • Climate Town on problems wit suburbanism: The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry | Climate Town (feat. Not Just Bikes)
  • https://www.planning.org/blog/9227411/active-living-opportunities-through-cluster-housing/

In this month’s Five Minute Book Review, I give a strong recommendation for Aldo Leopold’s The Sand County Almanac. Leopold is an incredibly insightful naturalist/conservationist storyteller, and a Sand County Almanac is a really engaging read that not only drops you into stories of many of the dramas playing out in nature all around us, but leaves us with some valuable insights and reflections about development and our species’ part in the broader environment.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a world where people constantly shared and consumed video content, for an unknown real larger purpose? Hmmmm… Well EM Forster imagined this world, in 1909.

Join me for the restart of the Five Minute Book Review series on the banks of the White River in Vermont for a discussion of one of the most creative, reflective, and weirdly forward thinking sci-fi short stories I’ve ever read.

It’s a 45 minute read that will touch on technology, philosophy, human connection, freedom and agency, climate, governance, travel, and so much more. Surely worth a read!

From the Hanover Happenings podcast:

In Hanover, we care a lot about making sure people have information about what’s happening in their community. It’s part of the reason we started this podcast and why the Selectboard does business the way it does. But government is only one piece to the puzzle of informing, engaging, and activating a community.

In this episode, I take a walk through Pine Park in Hanover with Rob Gurwitt, publisher of the daily email newsletter that many of us know and love – Daybreak. To the sound of gravel footsteps and late summer insects, we cover a wide range of super important topics such as:

• The value of trust in how people find and consume information, especially during and post-COVID
• How information flows in (and creates) community and how that impacts local decision making, especially as journalism and “news” has changed in the last decade or so,
• The differences between economic and community development
• How Daybreak works behind the scenes
• What lessons can be reflected on from trying to engage a politically diverse audience,
• Leadership values that can be learned from journalism,
• Unique requirements and dynamics about involvement and democracy in New England
• And what the heck happened in Tupelo, Mississippi in the 1940s.

Rob has a long personal and professional history of not only working in and around government, but in finding creative ways through various mediums to inform and engage people, and ultimately contribute positively to creating community. Rob wrote for the Congressional Quarterly, spent many years writing for Governing Magazine, and has spent years in different ways writing about what’s happening and changing in communities. Rob helped launch the DailyUV, and since 2019, has published Daybreak.

You can signup for Daybreak here: https://daybreak.news

You can find the article from Governing Magazine about Tupelo, MI that we discussed here.

For all of the Hanover Happenings updates and episodes, you can visit hanoverhappenings.com. Find the monthly reports, agenda, minutes, videos and more at: Hanovernh.org.

From the Hanover Happenings podcast:

In this episode I sit down with Associate Professor of Business Administration Adam Kleinbaum at Dartmouth’s Tuck Business School. Adam and colleagues have recently completed a study where they used FMRI technology to measure brain activity of people as they have conversations and build consensus (or don’t), which appeared in Daybreak earlier this summer.

I sit with Adam in Town Hall and we talk about the study, and it’s broader implications for how we relate to eachother, how implicit narratives change based on social interactions (and other environmental factors), and fascinating implications for what leadership means – for example, that the most influential individuals that helped produce cognitive alignment were open-minded people who fleshed out ideas from others, rather than who aggressively pushed their own ideas. There is significant implication and alignments with tenants of positive psychology as well. There are broad ranging implications for this work in how we conceptualize our personal and professional relationships, and importantly, how people work together to think about and address large problems

The other study authors were: Beau Sievers, Dartmouth’s Christopher Welker, Uri Hasson, and Dartmouth’s Thalia Wheatley.

More links:

• Summary and overview of the study: https://www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/news/articles/when-we-agree-our-brains-align?mc_cid=a8c69bdd6d&mc_eid=d19549093c
• Adam’s faculty page and prior research: https://faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/adam-kleinbaum/
• The full text of the paper: https://psyarxiv.com/562z7/
• Simpsons clip I mentioned: https://youtu.be/3iFxUCSTfRU
• Star Trek The Next Generation: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation

For all of the Hanover Happenings updates and episodes, you can visit hanoverhappenings.com. Find the monthly reports, agenda, minutes, videos and more at: Hanovernh.org.

From the Hanover Happenings Podcast:

In this special spotlight episode, I host newly elected Secretaries of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas (Vermont) and Dave Scanlan (New Hampshire) in Hanover to talk about civic participation, elections and voter confidence, public trust, building consensus in polarized climates, and practical ways that people can engage in government. Both Secretaries shared some of their recent and upcoming initiatives, as well as their experience creating bipartisan legislation while serving in their respective legislatures before being elected Secretary of State – Sarah is a democrat and Dave is a republican.

Should all election-related legislation be passed in a bipartisan fashion to build continuity over years? Is there an inherent tension built into the checks and balances of American government? Do decentralized New England governance models help build participation and trust?

For all of the Hanover Happenings updates and episodes, you can visit hanoverhappenings.com. Find the monthly reports, agenda, minutes, videos and more at: Hanovernh.org.

Do you remember Netscape, AOL Instant Messenger, and loud dial-up? Well in this episode of Rethinking, we drink some cool refreshing millennial nostalgia and talk about the values and assumptions built into different social communication technologies, and how much those have changed over the last 25 years.

We trace some important differences between things like dial-up AOL Instant Messenger to the always on connected devices that pervade nearly all corners of the world now. We talk about how differing designs in technology impacts our own capacities, such as the difference between learning to navigate around by using a compass and map versus GPS. And we think about the three tier red-yellow-green system that was implicitly built into AIM (and many other areas of our life), as a framework to help us create more uniform social norms about how we communicate with each other, how present we are in what we’re doing, and how productive we are at work.

You can find all the episodes of Rethinking at rethinkingwithalextorpey.com or wherever you to listen to podcasts. Please feel free to share or like if you enjoy!

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted here, and in large part that is because I’ve been settling into living up in New Hampshire and Vermont and my new job as the Town Manager in Hanover, New Hampshire. If you want to hear what we’re up to there, we actually have a town podcast called “Hanover Happenings.” We’re working on lots of interesting stuff!

Join former mayor, municipal manager, professor, and consultant Alex Torpey as we explore some of the dynamics behind how leaders vet (or don’t vet) their ideas. And what do they do when faced with negative feedback?

In this episode, we’ll talk about some of the traps that people in leadership or influence fall into, such as creating false positive feedback loops or accepting loud feedback as accurate feedback. And then we talk about four basic questions you can build into your own self-reflection practice so as to help you understand when negative feedback might be indicative that you’re doing something very wrong and you should step back, or when it’s indicative of some sort of biased or non-representative negative feedback loop and you can, and maybe even should, continue to push onward.

We’ll cover five important concepts to think about when building a feedback environment, and whether you’re a leader, manager, influencer or just a person who wants to think critically about to ensure you are being rigorous with new or different ideas you’re putting out in the world, this episode should be interesting and relevant for you.

How we vet ideas and understand the reactions we see from them is extremely important, and I believe that our failure to think about this process more directly and intentionally is responsible for much of the bad decision making and poor outcomes we see around us, especially these days, especially in most governments.

So join me as we explore thinking about these important topics together by searching for “Rethinking with Alex Torpey” on your favorite podcast platform. And as always, let me know what you think!