Tell someone one hundred great things that they do. Put you mind to sharing the positives that they may not know you know.
One hundred seems a lot, but you will find it isn’t that much when you put your mind to it. The point is to make you deeply consider what someone does that is special, amazing, unique, admirable or just appreciated. One hundred also pushes you to go well past what they expect you can do.
The first quarter will be easy. The middle half forces you to deepen your thinking and consider the other person’s contributions more widely. The last quarter will flow and it’s unlikely you will be unable to stop at #100.
The final list will end up including:
widely acknowledged great talents,
talents they thought were hidden,
things they don’t appreciate, and
mutual surprises.
This is a process of appreciation, but also one of mutual discovery and learning. Use this process to deepen a relationship or refresh the value of a friendship. Use the process to make another feel seen or to help them in a darker moment. We can be uncomfortable to own our strengths. Hearing them from others in such volume provides recognition, a boost of confidence and a great fillip to the mood. This helps restore the context that only others can provide.
As impressive as delivering all this praise at once maybe you can also spread it out. One item of praise at a time or five, ten, or twenty at a time will stretch out the sharing and reflection. Make it an experience, an ongoing confidence boost or the basis of a conversation. You could even make a physical record, ritual, or gift part of the giving of praise.
Number every single moment of praise. It allows you both to track progress, to feel the weight of the appreciation and to build anticipation. Numbers will help you prevent duplication and also to appreciate that this is a particular list for an unique person. The numbers too can be a new shared language to reinforce the praise.
We can change the lives of others with small big things. Recognition, care, praise and support are small big things. They make a huge difference to others.
Is that a dark cloud on the horizon? Is that even the horizon? Photo by Kat Smith on Pexels.com
Why never a warning, either by speech or look, That love you cruelly gave me could not last? Already it was too late: the bait swallowed, The hook fast.
We have been through fatigue. We have faced languishing. After all that we feel unsettled and unsure. Now our hybrid lives have left us with fear and foreboding. The challenge now is not the threat of death from a pandemic. The challenge is that our work systems have not adapted to flexibility, adaptation and distributed work. We are in fear of the systems that have us in their thrall because we know the system limitations bring forebodings.
Those system limitations are the legacy of hundreds of years of management, particularly that with a machine metaphor and a narrow focus on atomising and individualising performance. Moving beyond the fear and foreboding in the future evolution of digital work will demand greater change in the ways we work, not just the communications technology that connects us.
Narrow Ruts of Autonomy
I don’t cut that one. I don’t cut the others either. Suddenly, in every tree, an unseen nest where a mountain would be.
Tess Gallager, Choices
Work is defined by roles. Those roles are attached to process steps in processes. The roles are wrapped in hierarchy and limited decision-making. We can increase the autonomy of people in their limited roles and processes but it is rare that an organisation gives every employee the capacity to stop and change the whole production system.
Transformational change in work demands more than delivering a better outcome in a narrow rut of autonomy. We feel fear and foreboding because we can see what needs to change around us in the system and we aren’t able to make that change happen.
Just Out of Time
The pandemic has shown the limitations of our global just-in-time logistic systems. We have ruthlessly squeezed the waste from our organisational systems too. This means employees are doing more with less and that means that the pressure increasingly falls on the isolated individual to bridge the gaps.
Capacity is essential for adaptation. Without capacity in our system we face challenges in adapting and resilience to shocks breaks down. Employees have no time to flex and adapt. Running from meeting to meeting, coping with messaging overload they focus instead on following the rut and avoiding the scythe of fear as best they can.
Fear as an Organizing System
So many of our organisational systems are founded in fear. We elaborately prepare to manage risks and their consequences. We drown organisations in policies and procedures against the fear of isolated incidents of malpractice or the rare errors.
We manage performance with consequences that range from exile (loss of employment) through to penalty (loss of income). Many employees spend much of their working life in the thrall of targets that are externally imposed, arbitrary and often even meaningless. The only meaning that achieving that target offers is an end to the fear of missing them.
When beating your head against the wall, it can feel good to stop. Why do we need to create a culture of fear and support it with so many systems?
You can call It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep; But it isn’t the unfathomable fall That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch, It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap.
I began the pandemic talking about Monsters at the Gates, big systemic changes that surround our organisations and demand us to consider how we will contribute our agency to change. Now we can see that the flexible work systems of our organisations are inflexible. Moving back to back meetings to back to back videoconference calls does nothing to improve the flexibility of the system. Allowing narrow autonomy can even create a dynamic where less change is possible given the interconnectedness of work and modern systems. We are better at flexibility of where we do what we do but most importantly we have not allowed for the flexibility of what we do, how we do it and with whom we do it.
Importantly, we do not allow the flexibility to avoid an ever present experience of fear and foreboding. If we have work to do in 2022 to repair and prepare for what comes next, it is applying our agency to these challenges which stretch far beyond releasing people from isolation and providing psychological safety. Ultimately, the roadmap we need leads to scaling systemic change, accelerating shared learning and realising the potential of growing individual agency.
Without drama, what is ritual? I look for omens everywhere, because they are everywhere to be found. They come to me like strays, like the damaged, something that could know better, and should, therefore—but does not: a form of faith, you’ve said
This week is Microsoft Ignite. As many followers of this blog know I usually look forward to the insights that Microsoft Ignite brings into the roadmap for the key collaboration tools in the Office365 stack. This week I was looking forward to updates on Microsoft Teams, Yammer and the evolution of Microsoft Viva, the new employee experience platform that is absorbing many of Yammer’s capabilities and bringing them to the enterprise in new ways. Intriguingly, much of the early discussion coming out of Ignite is on the announcements related to the new Microsoft Loop.
Microsoft Loop is a new collaboration canvas tool that also offers modules that can be carried across the Office ecosystem to enable synchronised collaboration in the flow of work. Building of work on Microsoft Fluid, the new product similarly combines components, pages and workspaces that can be brought together or spread apart, remixed, personalised, and still all keep in synch as other contribute using the magic of the stack. This flexibility comes from the vision of Microsoft Loop as an ‘atomic collaboration app’. These various components will begin to roll out into Microsoft Teams, One Note and Outlook. We can expect further evolution in this space over time including integration into many other Office apps.
The initial response of the market has been mixed as always with a Microsoft launch (more why this happens in a minute). On the positive front, many people are excited that the work on Fluid is coming to fruition. The next big thing in productivity and collaboration is much needed now as we address the new challenges of digital work and the extent to which traditional document centric or meeting centric models have limitations. There is undoubted power in the collaboration canvas model. Loop has been much compared to Notion, but the pandemic has seen tools like Miro and other collaborative canvases expand rapidly. Even Canva the design toolset is promoting its team collaboration capabilities. As we increasingly work from the one-person silos of home, seamless, liberating and powerful collaboration is the next horizon of potential. We have so many more demands to work together virtually now, perhaps it is time for a richer toolset.
I have always argued that the potential is exponential, if collaboration can be enabled across our work in organisations. This is why I have been a passionate explorer of the history of tools in this space including Lotus Notes, Groove, Google Wave, Google Suite, Yammer in all its various incarnations, Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Microsoft Teams and many more. Each generation of this capability has moved us forward to a more seamless flow of work and richer more diverse set of collaborative use cases. This diversity and richness is needed because we don’t do one thing in one way with everyone at work. We do lots of different things with different people at different times and for different goals to connect, share, solve and innovate. That’s why there needs to be a richness of modes of collaboration and that’s why Microsoft Loop is coming with new flexibility.
The Downside of Innovation in the Microsoft Ecosystem
I really feel for the product managers who bring new products and features to market in the Microsoft ecosystem. Sure life is easier when you are working for an corporation that can tackle visionary change and invest for decades in the next big thing in collaboration, acquiring new ideas and talents along the way. How exciting to deploy your new ideas to a global potential user base in the millions with all the greatest corporations already your customers.
However, that scale and the richness of the existing Microsoft stack brings its own pain. The negative feedback on Loop has been predictably from some of those most close to and most passionate about Microsoft. This feedback follows patterns that Yammer and Microsoft Teams have had to encounter in due course. This feedback goes along these lines:
You have been talking about this fora while why isn’t it here now complete in its final state – some people haven’t yet adjusted to software as a service business models and that market use by customers will shape the evolution of a product like this. We can’t expect product teams to predict every need.
Why doesn’t it integrate with everything everywhere in every use case immediately? – As above, minimum products grow with additional investment to reach the richness of the current major Microsoft applications.
This adds to the complexity of collaboration. I can’t abandon Outlook/Teams/Yammer and use only one thing. – collaboration is complex and what’s with the ‘one app to rule them all’ obsession. Many who have been placing their one things hopes on Microsoft Teams see this as a crack in the single pane of glass. Sure one app in one box looks good on an architectural diagram or a ‘what to use when’ chart but it doesn’t reflect how we work.
Useless. I can’t role this out to my global employee base today for every use case. – yes, but you can explore their needs and find the use cases where this fits to the detriment of all the other micro apps that your team wants because they are trendy.
Sounds complex. It will require adoption work. I’ll stick with Outlook Distribution Lists for collaboration – work is complex (and so are your employees) which means collaboration can’t be a one size fits all challenge. Collaboration is about the breadth of ways your organisation connects, shares, solves and innovates. That’s going to demand some agility and flexibility and even, dare I say it, user adoption and use case configuration
I didn’t ask for this. Why didn’t you build my request for X instead? – not every customer is alike.
The familiarity of these complaints is a reminder that with scale comes a legacy, an installed base and expectations. If someone had deployed Microsoft Loop outside of Microsoft as a standalone app, it wouldn’t be judged to this standard. Limited launch capabilities would be the expectation. Users would be asking for integration with Outlook, Teams and so on. The independent Loop would respond with a wave of the hand and suggest a future product roadmap.
Judge Microsoft Loop by the Work. Trust the humans to decide.
As noted above, the potential of new model of collaboration has been a long-hyped thing. Atomic collaboration is just the latest variation from all in one apps, to real-time synchronisation, to document collaboration, to collaboration on the graph, in the workspace, in the channel or on a single pane of glass. Whether atomic collaboration blows everything else away will be determined in user’s hands. For that to happen, it will come down to the value that it delivers to do work better, faster, safer and easier.
Most new collaboration apps fail because they get the model of work wrong. The engineers of these apps often work out from “What can we build, what might people do and where can we deploy it?” Sadly, that produces outcomes that are a world away from “What are users trying to achieve and what do you actually need to work together better in a real human way?” Finding new ways to enable collaboration in the flow of work demands a deep understanding of work and what employees and the collaborators are seeking to achieve.
Often these apps fail because they ask for changes in use case or work metaphor that are too unfamiliar to users and the bridge to the future is too great for adoption. We mostly understand document storage, document collaboration, meetings, calls and team chat as forum for collaboration, but we are always learning new and better ways to do each. These are not the only formats of collaboration, they are just the most obvious ones. Tools like Miro challenge us to consider collaboration at the whiteboard, with sticky notes and in a workshop. Each new tool opens up a wider array of opportunities for us.
New models require users to learn new patterns of work and to see the value to them and the organisation. The latter is why so many still query the value of enterprise collaboration in Yammer – talking to an unknown anyone hidden in everyone in the organisation to support work through connecting, sharing, solving or innovating is still not in everyone’s paradigm of work.
Creating the future patterns for connecting, sharing, solving and innovating together using Microsoft Loop will be the outcome of the interplay between the champions and change agents in organisations looking for better ways of working and the Microsoft product team who keeps up the innovations to support the growth of the product. At the same time, the flexibility will inspire others in the market. The challenge always is avoiding choice paralysis from too many options and too much complexity but this early in the product lifecycle, let the humans decide what works best. I can’t wait to give it a try and see what new capabilities it brings to my work.
We are surrounded by advice to embrace our uniqueness. We are also subject to no end of systems that ask us to fit the one size that suits the system, to trim inconvenient factors and to conform. Bringing your unique value is the harder and more challenging path but it is the path of purpose and enduring reward.
There is much fantastic advice about the power of being yourself of finding your unique contribution and bringing the difference only you can make. We can all learn a lot about how to bring our unique contributions to our lives from books like
The Power of Onlyness by Nilofer Merchant
Linchpin by Seth Godin
Originals by Adam Grant
A consistent theme through this literature is that we each have unique contributions to make because we are different and diverse people brought up in our own circumstances and experiences and supported by differing communities. Success does not come from fitting in, from losing our uniqueness but instead embracing it. Organisations, societies and all individuals benefit when we accept and support this difference.
Despite the obviousness of this advice, it runs against most of what we experience as we go about the daily challenges of living our life and building our careers. When we step away from this advice, more than anything we hear a relentless message of “Be Like Others” or “Fit in” or worse “You don’t fit in”.
My career has been a long series of Zig Zags to find my unique ability to contribute and the places where I can make a differnce that is mine. I summarised some of the frustrations and lessons of that road in my Monash Education STEM talk
Why is it so hard to contribute our unique contributions? Two reasons dominate. The first and the easiest to solve is that we don’t actually understand our advantages and our differences. It takes time, bravery and lots of learning from experience to discover what you alone can bring. When we are are not confident in our capabilities or even as they are still maturing, it is easy to be distracted or surrender to all the advice to fit in and follow the common path. It can feel hard to bet everything on a hunch but that is often what your unique path to success takes.
The second reason is much more problematic.
The Systems are Against Us
The machine mindset that underpins so much of process in our business and lives works best when the inputs are standardised. People need to be fungible to fit the roles, the tasks and the paths that the career demands. Organisations relentless focus, deliberately or unintentionally, on turning employees from the bright and unique sparks hired for their talents into yet another grey widget who can be replaced or moved with ease. Uniqueness is inconvenient to the system. Uniqueness gets pushed out. This is why so much everyday career advice is to do like others and fit in.
Fighting the system’s conscious and unconscious standardisation is hard work. It is exhausting and often unrewarding. One slip or one violation of the power standards and you will be out. More people are punished for being unique than rewarded for their talents bucking the system.
Many people pushing back on you cannot even appreciate the problem. The system is just the way it is. Any unfairness, pain or limitations are inevitable, equal and certainly not their issue. The system works for those who conform and surrender. Careers that are long unhappy and unrewarding are always available. Demanding your own way or your own approach can be portrayed as seeking excessive privileges and getting in the way of an efficient standard system.
One reason that those who pursue their unique talents end up as change agents as they discover that to embrace their special contributions they need to make changes to the system. Often they need to recruit and empower others in a community to make that change sustainable. Sustaining agency becomes the life work of those who want to live their own lives.
If you search, through trial and error you will discover how you can bring unique value to your life and work. The next challenge will be sustaining the ability to do so. Find your collaborators and be ready to fight the system to make it better for all.
We are most vulnerable after a transition. Let’s be kind and support each other as we rediscover our collective ways.
The pandemic atomised us. Each of us in our own little digital algorithmic bubble. Whether you lived alone or with others, we needed to log in to learn, work and interact alone. Even as we fought back with new collective traditions like video call drinks or family checkin calls, we were together but alone.
Now as we come back to collective experiences in person we have to adjust. That adjustment makes us vulnerable. The old experiences that we have not seen for years are intense, tiring, don’t have a mute button and don’t end on the hour as we log out. Add to that new uncertainties and stresses about new social rules and lingering risks and there’s much to put people on edge.
In Tuckman’s model groups form, storm, norm and perform. Importantly this process is a circle that continues as changes occur in the group and their environment. We are reforming post the pandemic in a new collective. Do we have the energy and patience for the storming to come?
Whether or not, we have any appetite for storming and norming anew, conflict is creative and generative. Conflict will come. The test is that we respond with skills that break the digital bubbles built over two years. Empathy, compassion, inclusion, and kindness will be much needed as we make the new adjustments. These are the antidotes to our vulnerabilities. These are the foundations of great collective experiences.
In the words of a Frank Turner song, Be more kind.
Vision is a word that abused a lot in leadership. Creating a shared vision is very different to imposing a vision. Most importantly of all the vision in a group needs to be practical, backed by execution and kept alive as circumstances change. Visions aren’t films that play and are done. They evolve over years.
Leadership books and leadership thought leaders rave about vision. Leaders must have vision, preferably big vision. It is what they bring to the team. The vision a leader brings is what unites a team in common purpose to achieve extraordinary performance. All of which is nonsense.
Most visions handed down on high are fleeting and feeble. They don’t make sense because the team that receives them after the executive offsite lacks the context to make sense of the vision. Follow through and execution on such pronouncements are weak. Many are little more than the collective sticky note hallucinations of executives overfed, over caffeinated, and fired up on Mentos.
A vision is not inspiring words, or a pretty picture of the future, or even some fancy graphic recording of a road off to a summit capped with a flag. A vision is a meaningful end point that each individual in a team can embrace and use to guide their work towards a shared goal. A vision needs to endure longer than the post offsite debrief or this next 90 day plan. There’s no excellence in performance when the team is confused by an ever shifting set of goals and big words handed down and never implemented.
A Shared Vision of the Possible
If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants
Isaac Newton
So who are the giants? In Newton’s case, it was those he learned from, his predecessors, teachers and peers. The giants in any organisational vision are not the visionaries in the executive leadership offsite. The giants whose shoulders are so essential to any truly great achievement are the team doing the work. A meaningful vision is one that a team creates and sustains for themselves of where they want to go together. Members of the team can help facilitate that process but they cannot just hand it over.
A vision like this won’t necessarily be as elegant or high flying as the one from a fancy consultant but it will be grounded in the practical experinece of the team, their understanding of what is possible and be built with an eye to implementation and the issues for stakeholders. Powerpoint slides are great for presentations but they are terrible roadmaps for a business to execute on. Teams who share a vision don’t talk in Powerpoint. They understand the stories of what the future looks like and the milestones that come on the road there.
Most importantly this practical vision of a shared future is one that recognises that visions aren’t announceable. Having visions is easy. Organisations are full of empty and abandoned visions. Just open any filing cabinet. Bringing them to life is a whole other thing. They aren’t done when the strategy session ends.
Truly great and empowering visions take time and effort and grit and setbacks. Truly great visions are an endlessly iterative experience across the team as people learn and evolve and see what is possible next. Most overnight successes are an outcome of a nearly decade of work to construct that vision within a team and to fight like hell to bring it to life.
So the next time someone claiming to be a leader offers you a vision offer to work with them to create a shared one with your peers. You will be the one in that process doing the work of leadership
We can’t let others do all the work of change. The problems we face demand contributions from everyone.
Through much of recent history, driving change was something that society and organisations could rely on a few individuals to deliver. Most people went on with their life unaffected while a few dedicated change agents worked to make change happen. Often, this was possible because the changes impacted only a few people, often those who were creating the problems or who were less privileged and needed change to improve their position. Small scale changes to grant rights or enable capabilities for a few can make big social change without widescale social participation. Most people will acquiesce and go along with not much changed.
The changes we need to tackle the major social challenges of this time impact a much wider community. The pandemic will survive as long as even a few individuals fail to follow the simple steps to help protect the whole community. Individual risk appetites and actions can impact the safety of the community as a whole. Climate change will involve a widescale restructuring of our economy and our lives to a post-carbon state. We have waited decades and can wait, but it only increases the risks of catastrophic change and the size of the subsequent dislocations. Challenges like racism, sexism and respect generally can’t be solved by the grant of rights centrally, they depend on the development and practice of social norms collectively. One bad apple sustains the impact on those discriminated against to the detriment of us all.
Much of the social stress, toxic behaviour on social media, and extremist political behaviour is driven by the fact that we are facing change that has a widescale influence on how people live their lives and work. There is a backlash of scale from those who want nothing to change, for their lives to be undisturbed and, at times, for things to go back to distant ages when many of these issues weren’t on the radar, let alone concerns. At the same time, those seeking change have lost patience and want a faster wider scale escalation of societal transformation. Throughout history conflict and stress in society has risen in periods of demands for major social change. Conflict comes with the territory.
As always, community will settle on new norms that are sustainable and likely do not reflect the views of either extreme. Some will remain unhappy that there is not enough or too much change. For those who are concerned about these issues, the path forward is not to disengage but to focus instead on reinforcing the norms that matter and those that facilitate an effective civil society to the benefit of all and the ongoing dialogue about where we want to go next:
Recognise the right of people to have an opinion but ask them to support that opinion with evidence.
Look for opportunities to make connection between people at the higher order of goals and values.
Make the small changes you can make. We need to avoid freeze or flight as responses too.
Treat everyone with respect, even where they may be extreme differences. Othering adds nothing to the chance to make the changes required.
Oppose intolerance, abuse, bullying and personal criticism.
Work to sustain hope and optimism that change is possible. Defeatist and threat language is the heart of extremism, not change.
Societies rise and fall together. We can’t rely on the few. Ultimately, it is up to us collectively to shape the future in ways that matter to us all.
You may be entertained to hear how much we find to say about so little. Among these other mediocrities, Your mediocre servant gets a glimpse of how his slow and meager worship might appear from where You endlessly attend our dreariness. Holy One, forgive, forgo and, if You will, fend off from this my heart the sense that I am drowning here amid the motions, the discussions, the several questions endlessly recast, our paper ballots.
Mediocrity reduces us to a mere shadow of ourselves. You can’t demonstrate your potential safe in the middle of the pack of grey.
Take a minute and consider the advice that surrounds us, especially in social channels. 90%+ of it is advice to play safe, to fit in the pack, to do the usual, to be like others and ultimately to fade to greige. It is advice on how to be mediocre.
Why are we surrounded by advice that encourages mediocrity? It is safe. For an effective viral piece of content you want an emotional hook, connection to something that feels evident like a platitude, and a memorable line or story. All safe comfortable and predictable territory on which to run in an age of networked relationships. That is the territory that most advice runs. It is the territory where most people feel safe, comfortable and secure. Nothing wrong with it, if you want mediocrity. This advice is shared but making it more grey it is rarely ever acted on.
Ever notice that the children’s stories we inherited from folklore aren’t safe. They are scary. People die. Our folklore understands that the path out of the mediocre is something scary. It is the entry to dark woods. You can’t see the path ahead. Everyone tells you not to go ahead because there are monsters in there. You aren’t sure you can make it, not because of the monsters but because you aren’t sure you can beat your own fear and inadequacy. So Little Red Riding Hood, what’s it going to be?
The advice everyone else follows make you grey. That advice isn’t tailored to your skills and potential. That advice doesn’t reflect your circumstances or opportunities. What generally suits everyone is generally safe and generally ok. That is the shadowland of the generally grey. That shadowland is somewhere we pass through once or twice. Don’t try to live there.
Success and differentiation takes risks. Realising your potential means going where you will mostly fail. As the old adage goes, ‘unless you stretch, how do you know where the edge is?’ To get to the bright spots, where you have realised potential and grown to a better version of you, you have to go through the dark. As much as we all want to be recognised for our inner talents, that is not how the world works. We are recognised for our inner talents when they become something that differentiates us in action in the world.
Step out of the grey. Go deep into the dark. Somewhere the other side of that is the brighter lights you desire.
‘What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?’ Lila Abu-Lughod
When we describe something as public, it is a reminder that we live in community. Things that are public are of or for the community as a whole. This list includes public interest, public rights and most relevant at present, public health.
Working as a community comes with enormous benefits, humans didn’t dominate this planet because of their physical aptitudes. If anything, our success is much more about our social successes in producing food at scale, sharing learning and knowledge, adapting and innovating and creating social systems in which we don’t kill each other at least most of the time. The fact that our life is not ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, to borrow Hobbes’ phrase, is much to do with our shared connection in community. Our ability to conceive and manage the public domain is our advantage.
We haven’t got this right everywhere in the planet in every age. Mostly, we have got it murderously wrong to the benefit of a few and, for embarrassingly long periods, to the detriment of millions. However, at its broadest sweep we can argue that public administration follows Martin Luther King Jr’s dictum that
the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice
Martin Luther King Jr.
That arc doesn’t bend itself. There’s no natural order or divine hand at work in bending towards justice. People took the public interest to heart and campaigned for change for thousands of years in big ways and small. Each contributing a little change, some even temporary, and yet each contributing a lot to our public knowledge of what we need to do and how we can improve.
Private Within Public
All the private rights and freedoms we enjoy exist within the public realm of our chosen communities. Those rights and freedoms aren’t independent of the public realm. They depend on it for recognition, protection and support. The rights and freedoms have been won by battles over public institutions and structures that enable the exercise of private freedoms. That public realm is also where the consequences of many freedoms play out.
Recognising this interderpendence isn’t curtailing freedom, but rather better understanding how the complexity of interdependence is to be expressed and what institutions and structures we need as a community moving forward. As others have expressed more eloquently, your ‘freedom to’ can impact another’s ‘freedom from’. Debates over the appropriate balance of these elements has occupied political philosophers for centuries and formed the foundation and ongoing evolution of most global political systems. This is not a new problem. What is clear is that absolutism, extremism and denial are not answers. The path forward is not a toddler’s insistence on personal autonomy. Nobody is an island. It is an open debate about the appropriate levels of interdependence in a society to the benefit of all.
What is unique about our current circumstances is that the tradeoffs between private and public have been brought closer in to the every day. Mostly, the public is off doing its thing over there and we get on with our private lives unaware. The challenges we are facing in a global pandemic, global warming, racism, sexism, and so on mean that there is ever more pressure for consideration of the public in private actions on a daily and hourly basis. That brings the inconvenience of being part of a wider public into stark relief for some. For the vast majority of people, this is a non-issue. People have willingly changed behaviour in the interests of the wider community. They know that they live and benefit from that community and its protections. A call to serve the public interest has been widely embraced in lots of small, simple, low risk ways – keep distance, wear a mask, vaccinate, reuse, recycle, reduce, changing to inclusive and respectful language, and so on.
The darkness of daily wanderings resumed, the day’s sweet darkness, the darkness of the voice that counts and measures, remembers and forgets.
Adam Zagjewski, Balance
This behaviour in the public interest is critical because it is important to recognise whatever your political affiliation, your stance on vaccines or global warming that as a community we share some currently limited public resources – healthcare, education, an environment, etc. Most directly, in our current circumstances, our ambulance and intensive care hospital services are constrained. Even if we could as a society, or a market, choose to build more beds, we are at the limits of our trained healthcare professionals, in number and also the physical and emotional limits of 18 months of work in crisis conditions. Allocating all this precious capability to saving the lives of an influx of covid patients means that others will miss out on the care that is their private right. Defining a new hierarchy of freedoms doesn’t end the conflicts or the consequences, it just shifts them around. The outcome is usually that the consequences fall on those least involved in the debate, the most vulnerable.
Most people understand that their private enjoyment depends on recognition of a wider community. Rather than focus solely on the private risks and rights, we need to continue the conversations about the interdependencies and the public benefits. Without the shared realm of the public, the private benefits we seek would become largely meaningless.
Say something. I’m here, waiting, scrolling the radio.
On every frequency, someone hushes me. Is it you? Twentieth Century, are you there? I thought you were
a simpler time. I thought we’d live on a mountain together, drinking melted snow, carving hawk totems
from downed pines. We’d never come back. Twentieth Century, I was in so deep, I couldn’t see an end to you.
The pressures of work are different. We need different conversations to engage people more deeply, manage stresses and leverage their potential. New questions start new conversations.
Here are the five questions that are creating great value for me in my work at present.
I am endeavouring to use variants of these questions consistently in all kinds of meetings and interactions in my work. These questions flowed from the recognition that Working From Home in a Deadly Global Pandemic is a different work experience that has new and different demands. In particularly, we need to work against the isolation and the narrow bandwidth of our current work arrangements. We also need to give people greater autonomy so that they can get more done in their day, without having to stop for meetings, approvals or input of others. Questions lead to learning. Using questions helps us to foster a culture of learning within our teams.
Five Questions
How are you?
This is a question we routinely ask and flippantly answer. At this time there is value in going deeper and sharing more of our personal experiences. From checking that people are really OK to allowing time for deeper discussion of personal circumstances, it is important to spend the time and show interest in our colleagues and connections. The insights of spending the time understanding how others is travelling will underpin how we care better.
What do you think?
When it can be exciting to talk to others, we sometimes forget to gather all the opinions around us. Showing genuine interest in others’ views and perspectives will improve the quality of the feedback, suggestions and help you get. The question leads to better collaboration and understanding. Those around us can be great at filling our blindspots and powering our understanding of how to do better or different.
What help do you need from me?
The help people need is the subtext of a lot of conversation. Bringing the subtext to the surface makes it easier and more safe for people to ask for help or share their challenges. When we are busy and stressed, some of these challenges may be no issue at all to another person with another perspective. Whether it is perspective, insights, assistance or connection, asking what someone needs helps tailor the value in the relationship to their needs.
What do you need to do that yourself?
Autonomy is rarely an accident. People need to feel authorised and supported to take additional responsibilities and get on with the work. Ask them what they need. The question puts forward the idea that the responsibility to tackle challenges is in their court. Together you will learn what people need to be more comfortable to exercise their power and autonomy.
What do we need to learn?
We might like to pretend our expertise makes us all knowing and perfect. Reality is that there is a lot to learn. Consistently bringing up learning as a goal of the work embeds an openness to new inputs and a willingness to experiment. We are all better when we are learning together.
If we all ask these questions consistently the people in and around our work will learn the questions. The more we ask questions that go to care, support, collaboration, learning and empowerment the more human our work will be.
