Writing

One of the more popular post on this blog is my effort at five productivity tips. The post is popular mainly because Tanmay Vora rendered it into the wonderful sketchnote above. I have mocked the top five format, so this is a next seven. In my work and experience since writing that post, I have learned more. Now I need to add to my list (one of the many dangers of a top five). So here is my list of seven more ways to work more effectively.

Remember as you take these forward they are suggestions, not rules. Your work, your organisation and your mileage may vary. Productivity tips are just tips. Everyone needs to evolve their own system to suit their unique preferences, skills and work.

Manage energy, not time

We are taught to not waste time. Supposedly, it is all we have. However, it doesn’t take much life experience to realise that not every moment is equal. Some times we have the energy to move fast. Some times we don’t. Persistence matters but grind is pointless. Take breaks. Manage your energy. You will get more done working when you are productive than staring at the screen for the point of it.

Manage goals & priority, not tasks

Anyone can fill a to do list. It’s much harder to do the most important and most valuable things first. We often confuse the urgent, the mundane and the easy for the most valuable things we can do. You don’t need to micromanage yourself. Put your energy against the highest priority. Make sure you can see the goals of the work. Do the administrivia when you are barely there.

Hire future peers

You don’t want people to work for you. The best people work with you and may some day replace or surpass you. Hire people who are or can be peers to work for you. Develop your people to do all you can do and more. The only way to multiply our effectiveness is through growing the talents of a team.

Delegate goals

Micromanagement sucks. Don’t delegate tasks. They are demeaning and put both of you at risk of irrelevant goalless work. If you manage your work by priority and value, allow your team to do the same. Allow them to create new ways to work and surprise you. Giving over the whole goal, lets people play to their strengths, not yours. Delegate the whole goal and then coach your team to achieve it.

Work outside-in

A lot of organisational politics is devoid of an external reality. A lot of time wasting tasks have no value to customers, the community, shareholders and other stakeholders. Work problems from outside your organisation back in. It’s amazing how many issues and problems disappear when you have external stakeholders on your side.

Asynchronous Work

We have more tools to work asynchronously than ever. As much as we love our real-time chat and video conferencing asynchronous work is the great productivity gain. Calendars don’t always align. Energy doesn’t always align. Let people make their contributions to work when they can and how they want. Asynchronous sharing, commenting, editing and more can be a powerful way to get more done with more people. The first simple step is to gather the feedback before the meeting. That way any meeting can be deciding what to do with the feedback.

Weave. Don’t multi-task

Nobody is as effective at multitasking as they think. There are real costs of task switching. At a minimum we need to understand each task in its context. However tasks have different cycle times and all tasks have big and little gaps. Not everything is real time and synchronous. If you plan your work to do other things in the inevitable gaps, you can get more done. Allow blocks of time for high value creation, problem solving and synchronous interactions. Weave other activities around these blocks. Phone calls, follow-ups, status checks and re-prioritisation are all great in-between tasks.

So that’s my next seven for now. I’ll keep learning, experimenting and adding to my practice. Maybe you can see a not-so-hidden theme emerging of working in a more human way with a focus on human relationships, talents, value and the up and down of energy. All these tips are pointless if the systems we work in don’t let us do that work.

I’m sure there will be more tips and themes. I’m keen to learn from others. What works for you to make your work more effective?

How clever are you, my dear! You never mean a single word you say!

Oscar Wilde

Five point plans, three word slogans, infographics, buzzwords and thought leadership. We are drowning in cleverness.

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain

The cleverness gets in the way of our ability to consider complex solutions, to persist with difficult problems and to connect with others. Why do the long hard work in community to create real change when there is a simple clever solution? We would be all better to embrace the foolishness of effort, understanding and slow shared creation.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.

Oscar Wilde

The on-rush of cleverness also creates chatter, distraction and entertainment. We don’t have time to be present. We don’t have time to consider. We don’t have time to understand, share, & solve together. We need to ‘get the right people on the bus’, ‘start with why’, ‘embrace the problem’ ‘recognise what gets measured gets done’, ‘eat strategy for breakfast’, ‘eat our own dog food’ and by the time we add another dozen or so smart snaps the time to do work has passed.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

Gimmicks

I wrote recently about a recent definition of gimmicks is that they strain too hard to earn our attention. In the outrage economy, we are stuck in battles between gimmicks each demanding our time and attention and none particularly concerned about effectiveness. All that matters is the cleverness and the attention it brings.

Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Cornel West

We need to start questioning the clever. Much of this cleverness is so shallow that nothing lies below the surface. The more a thought leader vehemently defends their cleverness, the weaker I consider their proposition. Absolutism works for ideologies but not valuable programs of work. Ideas that matter are rarely clever on their face, but they are tested and capable of robust and deep exposition when required. If your cleverness feels like it is supported by ‘turtles all the way down’, it is mere trumpery.

I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

Oscar Wilde

Humans aren’t always clever. They aren’t neatly packaged. They aren’t always rational. Let’s lean into that messy dumb and engaging life of community. For all it’s tosses, turns and silences we will be better for the work.

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.

Albert Szent-Gyorgi

Life in itself Is nothing,
An empty cup,
a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St Vincent Millay, Spring

In Melbourne, it is spring. Green shoots are breaking out all over the garden. Nature is reminding us that we can move beyond survival. This is a time to thrive.

For many, it may feel odd to talk about thriving. Unequivocally, we live in a time of overlapping crises – climate, income inequality, authoritarianism, pandemics and more. However dark the circumstances, we can still focus on our individual and collective potential. Making steps to realise potential however tentative and however small is still progress. We can’t rely on nature, history or others to bring us a better world. We must go make it.

Making a Thriving World

Almost always new growth, development and potential starts small, just like those shoots on the branches of the trees. By summer, those shoots might be a new branch. Now they are just a tentative green bud. We can only continue to do the little things individually and collectively that move us towards a richer and more vibrant thriving. If we work on our individual and collective potential together in the darkest times we will recover eventually. We can only to take one step after another.

Small actions accumulate over time. Some times transformational change needs to be fostered in small actions in small groups away from the wreckage of the main systems, as the Berkana two loops change model highlights. As it begins to thrive at a smaller scale, it can refine, strengthen and ultimately attract a wider community. Individual development is the same, we need to persist through the difficulties of new skills and new starts learning as we practice on a path to a new and wider mastery.

The time to prepare is now. The time to work on growth is now. Now is the time that we thrive. Together.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time is now

traditional saying

You don’t need 5 tips on how to manage remote/#wfh employees: Talk to your employees and ask them what they need to succeed. We call this radical new real-time performance support technique, conversation.

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) September 29, 2020

We don’t talk enough. Not text or chat. Talk. The kind of conversation that fosters relationships and deepens understanding. The conversations that explore assumptions and remove misunderstanding.

These conversations don’t have to be long. Usually it is preferable that they aren’t. Short but engaged conversations with active listening can make a lot more progress than a long broadcast conversation or a formal meeting.

A consistent schedule of conversations enables people to pick up and build on previous discussions. Context changes so more conversations enables better currency of understanding. Making these conversations predictable enables people to prioritise urgent issues for immediate discussion and leave the other issues for a regular update.

The biggest gain in your working strategy is more conversation. You don’t need a new tool. You have plenty of phones, videoconference options or if you are lucky enough to be outside lockdown then you can chat face-to-face. A short conversation will achieve far more than an email, a survey or an expensive employee engagement project will ever address.

If you are worried that employees may not be prepared to talk, then you have a much bigger problem, We know that a lack of psychological safety directly impacts quality, effectiveness and performance of teams. It might well be that new conversations are the only way to solve that problem.

Sadly, your little bird has many insights. However, a conversation supported by action is one simple way to start to change that. The more fear the more conversations and action. I’d suggest conversations are more effective and relevant than 5 tips you found on the internet.

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) September 29, 2020

The conversations are rarely as hard as you expect. Especially, if you engage one human to another. There’s all sorts of human experiences like shared purpose, connection, compassion, empathy and forgiveness that make even the toughest conversations productive and far more valuable. If the conversation is tougher than you expect, it is often better to know now and be able to address issues, rather than leave those discussions until later.

Talk. It’s surprisingly easy. Talk. There’s no better productivity tool.

As days drag into months there is a relentless nature to 2020. For me, escaping that experience involves a rediscovery and recreation of my boundaries.

We had barely escaped the summer bushfires and their hunt of climate crisis when the pandemic surfaced. The pandemic led to ever tighter lockdowns, economic upheaval and working from home. It also provoked a series of mini crises, projects and responses. On top of these challenges we have had cause to reflect on devastating illness and death, racism, poverty and discrimination of many kinds. Meanwhile here and around the world our discourse and community began to feel fractured. 2020 has become a year of relentless shocks and relentless doing in a state of relentless liminality. This environment tires the soul.

Liminality exists because boundaries exist. As I have noted before 2020 has drawn some boundaries ever so close. It has also drawn into starker relief two boundaries that I consider less often.

Between Doing and Agency

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 Gallagher, from Choices

We do a lot. However not all of our doing is our choice of goal, approach, team or timing.

Agency is how we demonstrate and realise our potential. Not everyone has the privilege of making choices. In a year full of consequences, having choices without consequences has been a rare luxury. However it a luxury that feeds the soul.

I have leaned into writing in new ways, reading poetry and other small acts of creation to clarify the realms of agency. At the same time I have embraced the idea of needful work. Doing that is neither needful, a purposeful contribution to others, nor an exercise of my agency must be questioned. Work for distraction’s sake is a temptation in bleak times but contributes rather than relieves pressure.

Focusing on purpose and agency has been helpful. Seeing more clearly the boundary between mere doing and what I choose is a key way to shape a new boundary in the uncertainty and relentless efforts.

You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It’s clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it’s too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven’s light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.

Joseph Brodsky, from 1 January 1965

Between Doing and Being

Reflecting on agency has also led me to reflect on the boundary between doing and being. The smaller and more pressured my world in 2020, the more urgent has been the need to have presence in it for me and for others.

Our busy busy lives can mean being gets lost in the day-to-day. We can distract from work doing and other doing like exercise, reading or more. We need to recreate the space to just be. One benefit of the restrictions of Melbourne’s lockdown has been time to walk each day. I have used that time to get out of my house and my head, appreciate my world within 5 kms and move to more presence.

Always on, always working and always connected presents challenges for us to find the boundary between doing and being. We need to treasure this boundary and find time to uncloud the mind. Just as agency helps realise our potential so does the clarity of who we are that comes with presence.

So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Edna St Vincent Millay

Darkness comes early
This time of year
Making it hard
To recognize familiar faces
In those of strangers.

Charles Simic, Hide and Seek

Isolated in a pandemic, we are both hiding and exposed.

We join videoconferences, but don’t turn on our cameras. We hide behind digital identities, but we are tracked extensively by the platforms that support those identities. We silently and secretly navigate our shopping purchases in digital marketing pathways that influence our choices and behaviour. We go out in public briefly for exercise or shopping or protest, but we are wearing masks. We have never been so hidden. We are totally exposed.

One teacher,
One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man
May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.
You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It can be
     important
To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

Kenneth Koch, One Train May Hide Another

No matter how much we hide or we isolate, we are not the hermits of old scratching out an existence in a remote wilderness. We are part of community. Even if we went out into a wilderness today to live alone, our digital communities, our relationship connections and the community infrastructure of support would follow us. We may not want to be found but drones will find us, devices will track us and should we need it an air ambulance could come airlift us out. We may want to hide but our world leaves us still exposed.

Never before has it been so clear to us that our risks and opportunities depend on working as a community together, rather than as individuals alone.

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) September 16, 2020

Like many, I had always assumed toddlers hid their eyes to hide because they were egocentric. The theory went that they assumed that their lack of sight applied to all. However, recent psychological research suggests that toddlers base that behaviour in reciprocity and mutuality. Perhaps we are more deeply engrained in the elements of community than we realise. There may yet be hope for humanity.

Be kind—love what you see—or go
To sleep and stop dreaming you’re one of us.

Gary Lemons, Nowhere to Hide

There is comfort and protection in the hidden, especially in times of trauma and of loss. I have days where pulling the covers over my head and waiting things out seem like wise strategies. However, ignoring the world and hiding from connection is only a deferral. The answer is in the work of community, not in perfecting invisibility. The joy we seek is out there with others, not hidden away. Even if we run for it, that life will come find us and make us work to earn it.

today if ever
to say the joy of trying
to say the joy.

Philip Booth, Saying It

Remember handshakes? They were an archaic work and social practice which disappeared in early 2020. Signalling respect, offering a peaceful intent and acknowledging agreement, they formed a peaceful symbol of connection in a busy world.

Connection matters

The handshake may be gone (forever) along with physical offices, indoor meetings and conferences, but connection between people remains important. We wave on our video conferences in an effort to signal similar recognition of others and to create the same sense of closure that handshakes offered.

My approach to collaboration and future of work practices begins with connection because it is a step that is surprisingly often overlooked. People assume that gathering people creates connection. Nothing could be further from the truth. Connection is what breaks down the barriers to people working together. Until we help teams address misalignment, fear, distrust and lack of shared norms, there will be no effective progress. Technology or wondrous adoption approaches will never overcome interpersonal group dysfunction.

The Connection in a Handshake

Reflect for a minute on what a handshake offers:

• Respect: Recognition of the other as an individual
• Sign of peace: No reason to fear an open hand offered in peace
• Alignment: confirming agreements. We are in this together with shared intent.
• Norms: the handshake itself sits in a context of social norms and practising a handshake reinforces shared group norms. These norms were why we all ended up in accidental handshakes back in February when we weren’t locked down

When we want to establish a new group, new project, new collaboration or any other form of shared work, we need to start with the elements of a handshake.

• Respect: Is the environment one that will recognise individuals, respect their differences and allow them to share their potential? Are the people chosen with this respect?
• Psychological Safety: Have we removed unnecessary and unhelpful fear and uncertainty that we can so that people can contribute freely?
• Alignment: Does everyone understand why the group and they are there? Have they agreed to participate for those goals? Is there shared visions of success?
• Norms and Governance: Are the ground rules of the work as a group clear and agreed by all involved.

There is a strong theme of participation, agency and agreement in these elements. Each individual must choose and acknowledge the shared efforts. We need to align the collective and the individual. If you have ever tried to shake an unwilling hand, you will know it is a clunky and uncomfortable experience that does nobody any good.

Many people seek to skip over the stages of forming connection. Some don’t respect the participants and see them merely as widgets in a larger plan. Some fear the storming and norming phases of team building and establishment of norms. Others prefer to retain an absolute say over goals, or to retain fear and control. Far too many organisations take norms for granted or assume that they can be imposed as ‘standard ground rules’ without explanation or practice. Any time saved skipping these ‘soft & messy’ steps leads to significantly larger delay, confusion and failure later.

We may not shake hands again soon. However, ensure that every collaboration, project or new future of work practice considers the value of connection up front. Your work will be better and more valuable for the time invested.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time, plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

If you are too busy to lead, then you are not a leader. Leadership is work, not a status. If you don’t do the work those who have given you authority and influence will offer that work to others.

The Work Of Leadership

Our leadership has become focused on performative not functional tasks. Leadership is work, not theatre. If our leaders do not focus on their work, they will loose their influence and their power.

Before I continue let’s define leadership. Leadership is the ability to influence individual or collective action. Leadership is not a status or a title. It is not for show. Leadership is granted by communities, not appointed by organisations or bosses.

Leadership is the work in groups of people come together to align and choose their actions. The foundation of leadership is the work of influence and the authority that others grant to leaders to have influence because of the work that they do.

We all recognise the theatre of leadership: the stage, the lofty pronouncements, the adulation, the email banner & more. Some leaders become so focused on this theatre as the role that they seek to outsource it to communications professions. The demand for ‘post on behalf of’ features in communication and community platforms is one inisidious example. Sure someone can write your emails or make your post, fixing the grammar and the sweeping rhetoric, but remember they are the one’s influencing others, not you. This feature may have a role when the risks are high, but it is limited role, not an outsourcing opportunity.

This focus on the theatre of leadership leaves many employees and community members heads scratching. There are real community problems to solve. They aren’t solved by stages, banners, slogans, messages or fancy rhetoric. The more time invested in those things the more disengaged the community that is looking for personal work to solve problems together. No wonder leaders of all forms are grappling with lack of engagement and authority. The answer is not more communications packaging to cut through. The answer is human connection, sharing, problem solving and learning together.

The theatre of leadership exists only to make the leader feel better. Performance satisfies the ego. Performance keeps up appearances. Performance lulls people into a dangerous complacency. Meanwhile the real work is forgotten or being directed elsewhere.

Communities make Leaders

Communities make leaders. They grant them the authority and the influence to help the community come together in action. If a person is too busy to exercise that authority and influence, it goes to another. Nobody chooses to delegate authority and influence. The community decides who to follow, based on who best does the work.

If you don’t do the work, you won’t be a leader. When the focus is on leadership theatre, people leave communities or they go looking for authority elsewhere in the community. It can be a tough conversation to explain to senior management that the reason they aren’t the most followed, most liked or most influential in their community is that others have done more work, won more trust and built stronger relationships. A ‘post on behalf of’ feature will increase activity from that leader. It does nothing for influence and authority. Communities reward humanity, openness, alignment, transparency, trust given and work done.

The work in question is to improve the functioning of the community. Community managers, champions and change agents are doing this work every day. The influence and authority is to help others to connect, share, solve problems and learn together to achieve individual and shared goals. If you aren’t working for the community, they aren’t working for you. If you are too busy to do that work, then why call yourself a leader? Cancel a few meetings and sessions of self-praise and go find your community again. You might want to start by enabling the community managers, champions and change agents to be more effective with a few degrees of freedom.

The praise that rings out to those in power standing on a stage is empty and hollow. Step off the stage and go to work. Do the hard work of connecting, sharing, solving and learning in the community. Enable others to succeed and let the trappings of theatre and ego fall away. There’s much more to be gained as communities and individuals achieve their potential. That is the work, not the theatre.

The problem with imposter syndrome is not the doubt. We all can doubt our capabilities. The problem is how best we recognise our own changing capabilities and validate our own intrinsic motivations. Imposter syndrome can be a warning that our perceptions or our expectations are misaligned.

I saw a recent post on social media that suggested 70% of people experience imposter syndrome. That ‘fact’ seems to be sourced to unspecified research. This figure also relates to an experience ‘at least once in their life’. One would question if 70% of us suffer imposter syndrome at least once that perhaps the syndrome is never doubting one’s own capability. Who is so bulletproof on their own capabilities as to never doubt their ability to achieve?

Doubt is Everywhere

Our doubt is hardly surprising. We are taught from a young age to measure ourselves against external and often opaque standards. We focus on our competencies and not our capabilities. In a corporate world that makes a fetish of standardisation, we feel like a round peg in a square hole, always uncomfortable at the gaps, the squishing and bumps required in our work.

Our doubt is often tied to our success. In a hierarchical world, where few progress and fewer are recognised, it is easy to doubt one’s own progress, attributing it to luck, privilege or mistake. In many cases, the selection processes are sufficiently random that luck, privilege and mistake clearly can play a role. The moments after selection for a new role or opportunity bring on the worst feelings of doubt as the step up in expectation can appear greater, the unknown greatest and the merit most doubtful.

Doubt is a natural expectation when taking on new roles, challenges and learning is our work. We see the obstacles and the shortcomings. We easily lose sight of the sand we have shifted already. All the dynamic change around us reminds us that we need to learn and do more. Our performance management systems make us feel like hamsters on a hamster wheel running to get nowhere, finishing one project, one year or one role only to dive into the next sprint. We are often alienated not only from the outcomes of our work but even our contribution to its success.

This doubt is only likely to increase as the capabilities of AI and automation continue to encroach on our roles. The more we are judged for our insights, our creativity, our handling of complexity and our relationship management the more we will struggle to assess against objective standards. The more routine tasks that are automated the more we might fear that we are not unique enough to add value to the machine.

Beyond Doubt

Two things seem beyond doubt:

• we each have unique & growing capabilities
• we each have intrinsic & evolving motivations

Ignoring these two certainties to fit ourselves into a standardised world and a fixed external motivation structure is alienating. That alienation is a cause of dissatisfaction and doubt when combined with the stress of the new, the changing and the challenging. If we live with a disconnect between out intrinsic feelings and our extrinsic circumstances something is going to give.

We need to do a better job to own our own strengths and our own achievements. This means being realistic and having your own standards for progress. Peers, colleagues, mentors and family can act as important checks on unrealistic expectations and unacknowledged progress. Leverage them to receive feedback on your work. Share your work with them. Celebrate your successes however small.

Own your own development. Nobody is perfect and it should not feel like a burden to learn and to grow. The standard isn’t 100% or 110% success. The standard is your growth and development towards your goals. The standard is how well you are statisfying the drivers of your motivation. It’s easy to feel like a fraud when you don’t want to be doing something and everyone else seems effortlessly motivated. Remember also that everyone else is performing and you only see their surface behaviours. They may be struggling too and worrying that they can’t keep up with you.

The response to feelings of being an imposter is not to lower your aim but to better direct it. Nobody ever taps you on the shoulder to say ‘You are a fraud. We finally caught you.’ The only person who will do that is you. Give yourself a break and focus on your strengths, your progress and your goals too.

The narrower our world, the more we must be curious. In a time of transactions and digital interactions, we must dig beneath the surface of appearances, tease the loose threads and explore hard questions.

The Lost Art of Curiosity.

Type curious into an image search engine and you will get an array of images of kittens, puppies and babies. We know the very young are learning and are supremely curious creatures. Spending time around young children and you discover that they are fans of Simon Sinek. They always start with why. For adults, curiosity is no longer an expectation. The loss of that expectation is the loss of learning.

I am old enough to have grown up before the internet when not knowing was a moment to moment experience. We didn’t know a lot always. One got used to being curious. Sports results, political discussion, historical facts, how to explanations, the locations and activities of friends and family, and scientific information were not always to hand. Some you would know later, if you put in the effort to look it up in a library, an encyclopedia or an almanac. Other answers came if you found and asked the right person. Some you never did know and just remained forever curious. We did not have the world on hand to answer our queries.

All that not knowing and the attendant curiosity began to decline with “Just Google it”. Suddenly there was a ready answer. Curiosity became less an energising, sustained and difficult quest and more like the dopamine hit of online betting. That findability of information didn’t mean the answers were worth the effort. Some answers just depend on your bubble. Finding answers just meant that there were always answers available. The reward for the second and third wave questions of curiousity ameliorated. If you investigate your curiosity, there are always many others already there, many far ahead of you. We lived in a digital equivalent of the response to every question being ‘asked and answered’.

Below the Surface

The work for the truly curious remained. The modern internet delivers most common answers to most common questions, whether at a large scale or in a bubble. This transactional delivery of information starts and stops at the surface of things. Top 5 simplicity wins. Transaction information wins over systemic and relationship-based knowledge. Long reads, ambiguity, multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted depth are left lower rungs on the search engine results because they do not win the power law of validation game.

Our future depends on the long, hard, ambiguous, multi-disciplinary and multi-faceted response to systemic problems. Our future belongs to the curious who ask questions below the surface of things. The Coronavirus pandemic is a simple example. When it began many of the western public health heuristics were based on simple rules from previous flu epidemics: focus on lungs, the symptomatic, handwashing, 1.5m separation, etc. Only as the curious have dug into the superspreader events, the data and the anecdotes have we come to realise that this pandemic is more complex, involving whole of body responses, asymptomatic spread, the indoor/outdoor transmission, the impact of different strains, need for masks, role of comorbidities and population effects and so on. The curious have led us from simple rules to much more effective targeted efforts to manage the mortality and control the spread of a deadly virus. We laugh about armchair epidemiologists but hypotheses can be sourced from anywhere and guide new research and testing.

In my everyday concern of how we work in more human and more effective ways, we need to go below the surface of things too. Yes videoconferencing, messaging and other tools deliver a simalcrum of our working lives remotely. However, we now need to consider the risks of this transition and ask ourselves deeper questions about work, relationships and autonomy in the digital age. We need to get beyond simple answers and be curious about how and why we work the way we do.

Working out loud is not just a tactic. It is a new relationship with our work, our networks and the challenges before us. Working out loud shares our curiosities and invites others to join in. Working out loud invites others with different perspectives to help us get beneath the surface, the symptom and the immediate. With that intent, I am curious about the following questions:

• Why do organisations exist? and how can we best leverage the collective potential of people?
• How do we shape and manage the creation of value through strategy in a distributed networked and dynamic world?
• What can we do to better realise the potential of a diverse community of contributors?
• How can we learn faster and build the capabilities we need to succeed more effectively by rethinking our models of learning?
• What does autonomy mean? How do we best support it? How do we unravel centuries of thinking around political, social, and commercial models of control to free ourselves for the next wave of innovation?
• Why do we have different expectations of relationships in our personal, political and commercial lives?
• How can we better support individuals and organisations to work on systems not symptoms?
• What does collaboration become when we recognise we work with both machines and humans on every task?

There is much to be gained by sharing the questions that make us curious. What is intriguing you?

I think every organisation needs a couple of eight year-olds to wander about asking the questions that desperately need to be asked, and answered.

— White Owl (@white_owly) September 13, 2020