Author: simongterry

“If I have caused offence, which was not my intent,…”

Every apology ever in the age of outrage

The law of torts has a concept of the eggshell skull, which means that if you carry out a tortious act you take your victim as you find them. You deal with the consequences of your actions whatever they may be. If it happens that your victim is unduly sensitive, then you must bear the consequences of your action. The guilty party doesn’t get to determine an acceptable level of damage.

Authors don’t get to prescribe the meaning of their texts. Whatever they might have meant, the text is open to interpretation by a wide and diverse community of readers who will read the lines, between the lines and through the lines. Readers will project their own experiences and interpretations into the text. The classics are often those that are most open to this projection and interpretation. Like a good constitution, their meaning evolves through the evolution of its community, their values and practice.

Angry people on social media will often seek to blame their audience for its lack of size, enthusiasm or understanding. They are failing to take their audience as they find them. Noboday is entitled to an audience. Nobody gets to project what an audience can think or feel.

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

We commonly see this problem of projection when we fall in love. To choose to take another into our lives often involves first falling in love with our own projection of who that other person is. Great relationships navigate the projection to truly understand the other as they are. Many failed relationships have at their heart two people who never reconciled the difference between the projection and the other.

Our current focus on racism is a consequence of systemic forces that prescribe dangerous new meaning for people of colour. Running through a neighbourhood, shopping, working, interacting with police, protesting, living at home, and even birdwatching are experiences that can be situations where others begin to define them and trigger consequnces without any consideration of that individual, their intents or actions. We must remember this when we feel entitled to say ‘but I am not a racist’. We are projecting meaning. How is it ours to determine this?

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire

Slavoj Žižek

This desire to prescribe meaning is all around us. We see gurus prescribing what others should think about ideas, speech, work or lives. We see advocates projecting all manner of meaning and intent on others, sometimes genuinely and sometimes as tactics. We see politicians reducing complex situations to ambiguous catchphrases and dogwhistles. Like reader and author, failed lovers, or tortfeasor and victim, these prescriptions have real consequences even if in the most generous and neutral interpretation the outcomes are accidents of time and circumstances.

The commonest fight on social media is a fight to project meaning. Someone feels entitled to prescribe the meaning of an event, action or concept for others. Someone else wants a different meaning assigned. As their purposes are mutually inconsistent no constructive progress follows. There are two consistent barrier to progress.

“I never forget that a book is not an end in itself. Just like a newspaper or a magazine, a book is a means of communication, which is why I try to grab the reader by the throat and not let go to the end. I don’t always succeed, of course; readers tend to be elusive. Who is my reader?”

Isabel Allende, My Invented Country

To engage in these acts of projection takes two circumstances in every case:

• the ability to treat the other as a blank screen on which to project meaning (or a stereotype): Projection takes a canvas that is capable of receiving our image. If we truly looked at others and sought to understand them, we would find projection far more difficult. True empathy and understanding differentiates an individual and requires us to treat them uniquely, with their own entitlements and actions.
• the sense of entitlement to prescribe meaning for an other: I might want to tell you what to think to be a ‘right-thinking person’ like me. However, it is foolish for me to think that I have the entitlement to tell you what to think, believe or act. To go further and seek consequences for your failure to think, believe or act as I require is an act of violent subjugation.

Nobody is entitled to define matters for their audience. We need the empathy to see others as they are. Only when the projection stops do we step out of the movie in our head and back into life with others.

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out

Martin Scorcese

My eldest nephew graduates from high school in the US this year (though without the usual fanfare) and will be heading to college later in the year (at least virtually). He is going into a rapidly changing and uncertain world. It is hard at this juncture to promise that the world he will be entering as an independent adult is one that is full of opportunities, friendly to his ambitions and supportive of his success. Over the weekend, I sat down to write a note to go with a small gift to recognise his achievements.

The gift was a biography and core of my short note was the following advice:

I chose this book because it is one man’s effort to succeed, to learn all his life and to keep trying to improve. You can learn from other’s success but remember it worked for him but you will need to learn your own way to your own success.  You will make your own rules and own principles to live, love and succeed. My only advice is keep learning, keep exploring and don’t give up. 

We need to mark milestones, particularly moments of academic success, but the best learning is lifelong. Most of us at 18 barely know ourselves let alone what we want to do with our lives. We have to learn our way there. There are no shortcuts to success. As much as we would like to follow some thoughtleader’s 5 easy steps or see the miracles that flow from a 5am start, success is highly contextual, created anew and hard won. Always.

Anything that worked in the past cannot be guaranteed to work again now or any time in the future. There are no shortcuts to success. We must contine to respond to our changing circumstances, our growing capabilities and the needs of others. Testing, learning and growing is lifelong work.

To cope with this change, we must develop our networks to help us learn faster, to help us understand and learn more and win the support of others in our efforts and our success. Developing mentors, frienships, collaborators and personal learning networks is essential to support lifelong learning. Growing network is slow personal and methodical work. There are no shortcuts. Nobody succeeds alone. Nobody is an island.

The best learning is practice. Doing is where we stretch our skills, see the gaps and learn anew. Again there is no shortcuts to success. We have to put in the effort. We can use our whole lives to develop new skills through practice. So much of success is interpersonal skills that can be developed across all aspects of life. Hobbies and interests can develop into new opportunities so retaining and practising curiosity is essential.

The hardest thing to learn about success is that even when you have learned all the things and have all the elements to succeed you may not. Life is competitive. Life is not fair either. There are no shortcuts. You have to ‘plot, plan, strategise, organise and mobilise‘ just to stay in the game. Giving it your best shot is not turning up on the day skilled. It takes all you can do to turn up armed with support and the best plan to succeed. It also takes luck.

Last, but no means least is the importance of persistence. Learning is hard. We have to explore our weaknesses. We have to find new strengths. There are hours and hours of practice and we are guaranteed disappointments as our feeble skills strengthen, as we find new ways and as we learn more. Hardest of all learning means we need to change. We need to shed our comfortable old ways of thinking and acting and embrace the new ways that lead us to success. That can feel like grief, like disappointment, like embarrassment or like discomfort. There are no shortcuts. We need to change the hard way our whole lives long.

If only learning didn’t require us to change it would be more popular.

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) June 9, 2020

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are familiar with the concept of willing suspension of belief from poetry, fiction, theatre and cinema. It is at least as old as the ancient greek philosophers, but many know Coleridge’s phrasing, if not his ‘poetic faith’. We lean back in our chair and accept the illusion offered so as to enjoy the narrative. However, the same ‘poetic faith’ is what we need to disrupt and find again in any major change we want to make in our lives, our work or our society. We need to suspend the disbelief to go to work and to live anew creating a new narrative and supporting systems, engaging for all.

The Comfortable Illusion

There has been much discomfort to be faced in these last few weeks. Much that we look at in disbelief. However, the smartphone video and global connectivity has helped focus our attention on the cracks in the bubbles of our comfortable illusions. It has helped us to begin to see much that is ugly, unjust and unfair.

We don’t see these things normally because we willingly suspend our disbelief to enable us to live with the comfortable narrative that our system is mostly working. The system, flawed as it is and brutal as it can be, is working exactly as intended. The prejudice, the injustice, the unfairness aren’t flaws. They are our outcomes. Most of us can’t live looking directly at the system’s outcomes. The illusion fits the comfort of our privilege. We have a reassuring heroic occasionally cinematic vision of societal progress to admire, if we ignore the occasional cracks and inconsistencies.

This desire for comfort reaches its apogee when we’d rather hear a leader’s words lip-synched by a talented comedian than focus on the reality, when brand put out empty statements unsupported by action and when empty black squares drown out the messages of those they purport to support. Clicktavism reigns supreme. The next moment of comfort is only a infinite scroll away.

I know I have sought that escape in lightness, a chance to let art do the work I was resisting. Searching in art for a new and better illusion and an escape from slogging one foot in front of the other.

There is a crack in every thing God has made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Creating the Illusion Anew

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Maya Angelou, Still I Rise

We need to find a new illusion that will restore our poetic faith and inspire us to improvement beyond our current systems and illusions. We need to suspend all the reasons to disbelieve and re-engage with the hope that can inspire others to join in making change. Hope that can give people something to plot, plan, strategise and mobilise towards.

The term “politics of prefiguration” has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded…This has been an important belief for activists who recognise that change happens as much by inspiration and catalyst as by imposition.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

This is not a quick fix. We won’t find this hope in our comfortable bubbles or in the work of thought leadership. Sadly this new hope seems absent from our current politics that is focused on leverage of tribalism. The hope that leads us forward is not lying around nearby to pick up or going to arrive miraculously in a later act. We will need to do the hard and uncertain work together to bring it forth.

I don’t have answers but I do have questions. What we can do is the work of discourse in civil society. We can work ourselves in discussion from the raw to the cooked creating new shared meaning as we do so. We can listen to new voices and look for new stories to celebrate and amplify. We can look for understanding beyond the bounds of our current context. We can listen to the irrational, the yearnings and the lightness for inspiration too.

Respect that is conditional on narrow practices can easily be withheld. It is different, qualitatively, from the respect that is given and received between people who believe in the inherent worth and integrity of other human beings.

Teo You Yenn, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

We can’t rely on tokens or a narrow suite of practices. We know from bitter experience that these cannot sustain our desire for a new illusion. They are too easily swept away. We need to base our new comforting beliefs on the inherent worth and integrity of other human beings. We can celebrate the rich creative potential in every person and our collective ability to leverage this human potential for mutual gain. Surely if nothing else that can bring forth a vision that can inspire us all to better things.

You can add up the parts; you won’t have the sum

You can strike up the march, there is no drum

Every heart, every heart to love will come

But like a refugee.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

Uluru Statement from the Heart

We can all learn a lot from Killer Mike in the art of advocating change. Listen to his advice to the Atlanta community.

Some themes of his advice are summarised below, but I’d recommend everyone listen to the whole speech.

Acknowledge reluctance.

Show empathy.

Know your history.

Focus righteous anger.

Accept responsibility.

Plot. Plan. Strategise. Organise. Mobilise.

Hold others accountable.

Make it better.

Celebrate your community.

Overcome opposition and adversity.

Show thanks.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Bells were tolled in 17th Century England to mark deaths and to share the news with the whole community. In that pre-industrial era, community connections were embedded into the work and life of towns. Each death diminished the community and given the mystery of disease, might well be a warning to all. Nobody worked or lived alone. Being isolated at that time was a punishment akin to a death sentence.

As much as we might reinforce individualism in our society today, the last few months are a reminder than nobody lives and works alone. Nobody is an island. Our lives and work exists in chains of connection too. Remove those connections and our work stops or is impeded. Individuals may be able to sustain personal productivity for a while but without the connection to others over time motivation, inspiration, knowledge and capability declines. We might be able to continue our lives longer but only by depending on the work of others to support our communication networks, to pack and deliver our needs and provide other essential services.

For over a century, it has suited our organisations to divide, to simplify, to measure and to standardise our work such that it feels separate and distinct. However, all the efforts to bring machine efficiency to our work don’t exclude the human connection inherent in our working lives. This division and simplification depends on certainty and predictability to work. Yet the greatest challenges we face today are complex and uncertain.

All our work is part of and shapes a continuous community whole. A century ago, Mary Follet described community as a process. Follet describes the process of continuous evolution of purposes, ends and means when people come together in community. We don’t need people to subjugate themselves to others, to goals or to process. We need people to contribute their talents and capabilities.

We are capable of creating a collective will, and at the same time developing an individual spontaneity and freedom hardly conceived of yet, lost as we have been in the herd dream, the imitation lie, and that most fatal of fallacies the fallacy of ends

Mary Follet, Community as a Process

Whether, we hear them or not the bells of community shape our ability to deliver our purpose, our collaboration and the value of our work. We work on the mainland or at least an archipelago. Nobody is an island.

Creating Value is Always Collaborative Work

We need to recognise that the highest value in our work and our lives is collaborative community work. We have organisations and government exactly because there is more value we can accomplish together in community than alone.

The highest value challenges aren’t changes that you can order or solve with brute force or heroic action. We don’t solve big challenges, complexity and uncertainty on our own. We need to share, discover, learn and adapt together.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has

Margaret Mead

Addressing these challenges requires the best of our human knowledge, talents and capability in community. Importantly, as Follet notes above, addressing these challenges also brings out the best in us and creates new opportunities for others to realise their potential through community. We must ensure that our work and our lives are diverse and inclusive and that we are tackling systemic barriers to people participating in realising their own and collective potential.

When we fail to do so, the bell tolls for all of us.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

Martin Luther King

Happiness doesn’t create itself.

Empathy doesn’t care itself.

Love didn’t happen by itself.

A pandemic doesn’t cure itself.

Your potential won’t find, grow and realise itself.

Your strategy won’t execute itself.

The economy won’t reset itself.

Your organisation won’t change itself.

The harmed won’t all save themselves.

Racism won’t end itself.

Structural inequality won’t remove itself.

The government won’t make itself more effective.

The climate won’t fix itself.

Ignorance won’t cure itself.

A mountain doesn’t climb itself.

It won’t fix itself. They won’t fix themselves.

Time heals wounds. It doesn’t prevent them.

We can’t rely on other nouns, other entities and other people to solve our problems for us.

If we want change, at any level, then we must make it happen. Ideally together. Alone if we must.

I miss the daily transitions. In our new lives working from home in a global pandemic (‘WFHIAGP’), we have lost transitions from one venue to another, one organisation to another, one phase and one task to the next. In addition to marking change, transitions give us in-between time to reflect, to relax and to reset. Boundaries matter

The Lost Transitions

The commutes went first as I adapted to working in my study every day. Travel now seems like a mythical experience. Walking through an alien foyer seems like a transgressive experience when navigating the local supermarket seems like a game of social distancing bumper cars.

I had to make coffee a consistent morning and afternoon ritual to remember to take regular breaks. My pomodoro clock sits abandoned in a city office. Lunch is often threatened as a break when someone is only available to talk at that time, but at best it’s a walk down the hall for a quick sandwich or toastie. Other meetings and catchups extend the day into the evening until dinner or beyond. Without transitions of scene, everything blurs into one long day. The only real changes of scenery are walks, exercise and grocery shopping, often combined into one excursion for simplicity’s sake.

Twitter has become a regular place to be exposed to different voices and to find some inspiration for the mind and heart, but social bubbles aren’t always healthy. Not all of life is work, but the lack of defining transitions means it can be hard to switch off, to change pace and to move on. Stress and anxiety have to be beaten back from every part of life.

Lost Reflection

I don’t do always on particularly well. My personal practice is to balance intensity of work and life with withdrawal to reflect. Things like commutes, travel time, meal breaks and even cups of coffee alone or with others were opportunities to muse on life the universe and everything. Missing transitions have meant that I need to make time for this reflection and I haven’t always been successful. As a result my energy levels often sag.

Writing blog posts is usually documenting these reflections and conversations for me. Now the process of writing is more likely to begin with forcing some time for reflection. A chance to force a caesura into the regular metrical flow of the day.

Endings

Paul Valery famously said ‘a poem is never finished, only abandoned’. I feel the same sense often in my transitionless existence. Without boundaries and deadlines, personal and work tasks fall into a liminal abandon. Closure is missing.

Transitions help us to see beginnnings and endings. Those moments also help us to appreciate what we have and what we lose.

Don’t it always seem to go 

That you don’t know what you’ve got 

Till it’s gone 

They paved paradise 

And put up a parking lot

Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi

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Boundaries were a big project for me in 2020. Those boundaries got lost in the chaos of isolation. Now is the time to reflect and refurbish them for our continuing project of social distance.

In ancient Greek myth, Sisyphus was condemned by Hades to the eternal task of rolling a boulder to the top of a hill each day for it to roll down each time it neared the top. Oddly, the boulder is often represented in art as round. If you were a god assigning this daily struggle, wouldn’t you make the boulder misshapen? Work is a greater struggle when it is precarious, volatile and uncertain.

The Struggle

Yesterday, I discussed that uncertainty is the work. Today, let’s look at what that means for the worker.

Many of us have had Gianpiero Petriglieri’s experience in recent months. Work can feel like it is disappearing due to our crisis and expanding at the same time. We have been exposed to the struggle of precarious, uncertain and volatile work. There has been lots of change, much ambiguity, and a need for continuing adaptation to cope with the evolving situation. We are faced with constant effort to understand, to learn, to change and to adapt. The unthinking rote activities of work have been replaced with reflection and mental effort.

This experience scales as organisations understand that uncertainty is the work. As our organisations grapple with greater uncertainty that flows onto individual work. The precarity, volatility and uncertainty that is often reserved for freelance workers, partners and contractors becomes a more common part of our experience. In addition to doing the flow of mechanical work, we become increasingly enagaged in the complex struggle of managing work: understanding context, creating demand, managing changing, resolving issues and all the related interpersonal relationships. Stable predictable process work requires effort but less of this demanding struggle.

As we have this new volatility in our work, we experience more time on ‘balcony and dance floor’ to borrow from Heifetz and Linsky’s work on adaptive leadership. We are taken out of our normal busy lives and asked to reflect on the overall system, relationships and circumstances of our work. This is new work for some and demanding work for all.

Why should I do it if it ain’t easy?

One challenge future of work advocates have faced in recommending new work practices to manage uncertainty, learning and adaptation to the managers in organisations is that the managers understand these struggles. They know that there is comfort and security in stable, predictable processes with clearly defined goals. Anything precarious, uncertain and volatile is a struggle to be avoided, allocated to others or assumed away. Constantly changing, learning and adapting is a struggle as a leader and a challenge to lead in a team.

Sir Richard Hicks said ‘the best of all monopoly profits is a quiet life’. Organisations have taken this to heart allowing teams monopoly power over processes to their own comfort and weakening adaptation externally. Struggle was outsourced to the edges of the organisation where sales teams and customer contact teams managed adaptation as best they can and experienced higher performance expectations and turnover.

The expansion of global demand in the 19th and 20th Centuries lulled us into the security of stability. For a traditional organisation focused on uncertain demand, the global growth in markets made demand a forecasting challenge. We can no longer separate stable processes for making products from the customer engagement, marketing, distribution and servicing. We need change, learning and adaptation along the entire value chain. We need to bring struggle into the heart of all our work.

Leading organisations are building the leadership capabilities, the skills and the cultures that enable their people to adapt to this new struggle. They are addressing the real anxieties of middle managers and employees about these new ways of working. The outcome is to build the resilence and the capability of both the organisation and its people. Traditional organisations are stable until they are not and the consequence for employees was usually that they would be ejected from comfortable stability to new precarity through layoffs, restructures or other changes.

You may not make this struggle go away, but we can be explicit that the struggle is part of work and skill people to succeed in managing work in new adaptive ways. Leaders will need to embrace different approaches and model the new practices. You can help people to smooth the edges of the boulder with new work practices and approaches. Until we do so, the legitimate resistance to additional struggle will remain a barrier to adoption in organisations.

Organisations exist to manage uncertainty. They must place a priority on learning change and adaptation to do so. Once the greatest uncertainty was consumer demand. Now organisations must deal with multi-dimensional and volatile uncertainty.

Theory of the Firm

Economists are highly rational people. For a long time, economics has struggled to justify exactly why organisations exist. Contracting can be efficient and resources and capabilities in the market might be superior. Why would people organise slow to change, expensive, often inefficient organisations to manage work?

Most of the rationales for the economic theory of the firm have come down to managing uncertainty. Uncertainty and its related psycho-social characteristics like power, control, trust and culture tend to sit poorly in classical economic models of perfectly informed ahuman rational actors. In a sense Steve Blank’s classification of organisations between traditional organisations and startups also revolves around uncertainty. A traditional organisation with its scalable repeatable process manages uncertainty in demand for a proven product. A start-up manages the uncertainty of whether there is demand and whether the product can scale to the demand economically.

If you take a human social view of the organisation, you quickly return to a major role of managing uncertainty. We join organisations to provide a sense of belonging, safety and security from precarity, though these may all be illusions. Organisations work because they align people to goals and shape trust networks facilitating collaboration and cooperation. Organisations help manage and develop uncertain human talents over time, which can be a challenge in even the most deep and fluid labour markets. Organisations can sustain passion, vision and creativity that might wither in a volatile and uncertain marketplace.

The Fluid Firm

Whatever our view, managing uncertainty is a large part of our organisational life, so why do we focus so much on the static machine view of our organisations? The best strategic models recognise that organisations learn and adapt and that strategy should be iterative. I am a regular user of the Lafley & Martin Playing to Win framework which calls this out explicitly. We should devote the same attention to learning, change and adaptation as we devote to process, structure and compliance.

If recent months have highlighted anything, they have shown organisations the importance of the ability to adapt to uncertainty. We need to foster the management capabilities, the talents and the mindsets that enable our people and our organisations to learn, adapt and change as an everyday task. The future will not include a new normal. The future will include an everchanging uncertain series of challenges. The obstacles are the work. So is managing the uncertainty of our new changing competitive connected world.

Successful organisations already build strategies and capabilities that seek to leverage the potential hidden in uncertainty. They enable their people, their systems and their culture to thrive when things get difficult, messy and when change is required. The work ahead is to continue to evolve and adapt the fluid firm. We need to build disciplines, process and capabilities to manage this adaptive learning organisation that are as refined as the processes of traditional management. When we can show others how to embrace and thrive in the uncertainty, a new wave of potential will be realised.

I am talking at Microsoft365 May on Thursday 28 May on Yammer as a Strategic Talent and Coordination Tool exploring these topics in greater depth. Register at M365May. There is already fantastic material from a range of speakers there already.