Hey friend,

How's your Friday going? Got any plans for the weekend?

We're going fishing as a family tomorrow morning, and I'll play some video games with my kids later in the day.

Also, the world continues to be on fire, and that's a little scary and hard.

There's a phrase in the final song of the game Portal that isn't intended to be comforting, but it inspires me for some reason:

We do what we must because we can.

I can keep moving forward; therefore, I must.

If this week has been hard for you, know that I believe in you. You can keep going. And you owe it to yourself and the people you love to move forward.

Nike apparently changed their slogan recently to "Why do it?"

Why? Because I can. And so can you.

Did you know this post was originally a newsletter?

It was originally sent on Friday, September 12th, though it wasn't published here on this blog until September 16th (my birthday 🎉 )

If you want to get Field Notes in your inbox on Fridays, fill out this form to get them sooner than you'll see them on this blog.

Here's what's in this newsletter:

1. Get the recording of my webinar on how to recognize and recover from burnout

2. Conflict Resolution vs. Conflict Navigation and a new course

3. New blog on the site with posts this week about AI ethics

I hosted a webinar on Wednesday about how to recognize and recover from burnout.

YouTube is still "processing" the video, which means the quality isn't yet as high as I would like, and I can't trim the beginning. You'll have to skip ahead to when it actually starts.

This is also my first webinar like this, and despite running two livestreams in the days prior to test and make sure everything worked, I still had a technical stumble that you'll get to see at 5:05 in the recording.

Despite all that, I hope this is helpful and interesting to you all. If you want to talk more, share your current situation and get some advice, or suggest a topic for a future livestream, just reply to this email.

Get access to the recording at https://fieldway.org/post/how-to-recognize-and-recover-from-burnout

Conflict Resolution vs. Conflict Navigation

I began planning my next class this week. While I haven't fully committed yet, I'm tentatively planning on creating a focused mini-course on handling conflict. I'm increasingly uncomfortable with "conflict resolution," though, because we so rarely resolve conflict.

As a long-time product leader, I view conflict as a net positive. Part of our job as leaders is to create a psychologically safe environment where people feel comfortable disagreeing with one another and talking through those disagreements. Without conflict, we let lackluster ideas advance and fail our customers and companies.

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.

- Proverbs 27:17

The Thomas-Kilmann Instrument (TKI) helps us discover how we tend to resolve conflict. People typically fall into one of five categories:

1. Competing

2. Collaborating

3. Compromising

4. Avoiding

5. Accommodating

These can change over time and even vary depending on the relationships we're focusing on while taking the assessment. The last time I filled it out, I was subconsciously going over struggles with my 4-year-old, and the questionnaire indicated that I'm in an "accommodating" state, which is unusual for me... but that's all you can really do with a 4-year-old 😂

When working with our teams, it's typically best to reach a "collaborating" state. But what if the conflict is between a product manager and the CEO? What if it's between a C-level executive and an influential sponsor considering a million-dollar investment?

If two engineers disagree on an architectural approach, compromising isn't the solution. Splitting the difference on every disagreement results in watered-down solutions that satisfy no one.

Accommodating might be necessary with 4-year-olds, but it's not how you should "resolve" conflicts with a new marketing manager.

And competing, characterized by "win-lose" conclusions to conflicts, creates an environment that kills the same psychological safety we need for fostering innovation.

The truth is, though, that in many instances at work, we can't truly resolve conflict; we can only navigate it.

The course I'm considering would focus on practical skills, such as how to disagree with someone who has more organizational power without damaging your career. How do you maintain psychological safety when tensions are high? How do you separate your emotional reaction from your strategic response? And perhaps most importantly, how do you help others do the same when you're leading them through organizational change or difficult decisions?

Is that something you'd be interested in? It would mean the world if you hit "reply" and let me know.

Field Notes Blog

I recently added a blog to Fieldway.org, and you may be interested in this week's posts. They're all about AI, and 2/3 are about ethics.

1. Who's Responsible When AI Does Wrong?

2. What does the Harvard AI study really say?

3. Do we need to be able to show our work?

Next week is absolutely packed.

• My wife is kidnapping me on Monday for an early birthday celebration while her parents watch our kids.

• I'm continuing a boot camp that I really enjoyed the first two hours of yesterday.

• Wednesday brings my first meeting with my new Leadership Springfield Signature Class Program Day team that I'm advising this year.

• And Friday involves a three-hour drive to a beautiful camping spot where we'll celebrate with friends—a close friend's birthday is just two days after mine, so we've made it a tradition to celebrate together.

In between all that, I'm reading The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss and thinking deeply about conflict while writing notes for the new course. I'm also considering switching from Clarityflow for asynchronous coaching to a combination of my membership space and Telegram.

All of this means next week's Friday Field Notes will either arrive on Thursday or I'll give myself permission to skip a week. Sometimes life's good moments deserve our full attention.

I hope your week ahead is excellent, and that you get some rest this weekend before diving in.

Until we meet again,

Best regards,

Matthew

P.S. I'm going to build the TKI into my site soon (I just learned how to do that this week!), but if you want to check it out sooner rather than later, you can use a Google Sheet I built. Give it a try, then reply to this email and let me know if the result surprised you or not!