4Sight 4 Minute Story #2: The Social Engineer (for the humanist)

Since I was in my early twenties I've always had an interest in social engineering. There never seemed to be much of anything going on in the field and what was available didn't seem to be really effective. I felt that I could build a better mousetrap or, really, in this instance, build the first one.

By the time 2015 rolled around I decided to build an Internet destination, "a self-help mental health web-site for youth experiencing adversity". I invited a psychologist friend of mine to assist me on my quest and we began regularly meeting over the next two years.

Many things come out of our discussions. We presumed that we'd need a lot of original content so visitors had lots of choices to match what worked for them. We weren't sure what that would be, but we did decide that we'd let others create it and let the audience determine what was good. As a result I began to build the web tools to facilitate that. Let the crowd contribute and let the crowd vote.

Upon deciding that, and especially given the nature of our young audience, we knew that we'd have to have some moderator controls. We planned to establish some guidelines to ensure that content was appropriate. In doing that, we also came up with a loose objective as to what the content should seem to achieve. That's where the revelation came in.

After some initial research we learned that reaching out to the prospective audience would be problematic given the nature of the content and their status as minor. However, we did hit upon the goal that all content should increase resiliency. More importantly, no matter who the person, what the situation and even what the age, building resiliency helped. That's when the light bulb turned on.

We figured out that resiliency is your ability to deal with adversity and that adversity is conflict. And your ability to deal with conflict resides in two personal skills; how you look at the past and how you plan for the future. If you do those two well - or in 4Sight speak, accurately - you will have all the desire and ability you need to be successful. In other words, you'll know what the challenges are, determine if they are worth confronting and, if yes, take action to overcome them, deal with consequences as they arise, and eventually make progress. Progress was all about taking constructive action until you succeeded.

In early 2017 we dissected exactly what resiliency meant and came up with the proprietary definitions of self-esteem and self-confidence. We tested our hypotheses with numerous candidates to determine and hone the methodology, then created services that we could bring to organizations so they could take advantage of this panacea approach. By the fall of this year, everything was in place. That's why we are now presenting our findings to you.

Ready for a 40 minute meeting? Email us now. If not, please read on.