I’m finding my corner of the world a tad confusing. Companies with healthy cash balances are making people redundant, apparently for lack of better ideas. The logic seems to be that if they continue to do the things that have always been done but with fewer people, all will be well in their world and that the answer to areas of the business that have become stale and lifeless is to get rid of those who are noticing. It’s much more fun to focus on the new and unproven, like artificial intelligence, because the stock markets like it; somebody has been to a conference that says it’s sound, and the consultants are confident.
Politicians, faced with more than a few intractable challenges, decide to focus on something secondary and noisy and short-term media-worthy, like the regulation of football, because answering equations on difficult stuff, like the NHS or how they are funded, is so tedious.
I’m currently enjoying Jeff Hawkins’ book “A Thousand Brains”, which has as its central thesis that our brains constantly update frames of reference to prepare for what is coming next. This is not yet proven, but it has a pleasing sense to it and aligns well with my own interest (OK, borderline obsession) with the power of the “Boyd Loop” (aka OODA) as a way of constantly updating our understanding of what is happening around us. Whatever it might not be, it is an excellent frame of reference through which to observe what is happening.
Or perhaps more to the point, what is not. Two companies in particular interest me at the moment, neither of which you are likely to have heard of, offer good examples. One is in tech, the other in marketing the stuff tech does. Both are, theoretically, on their way to being medium-sized, but almost certainly won’t make it because their frames of reference are hopelessly out of date. Both grew on the basis of the creativity and energy of founders and are now floundering because the world they operate in, the people in the business, and their clients have changed, but the founders have not. It’s as though, having ridden a wave of success, they now find themselves beached, shouting “faster, faster, more, more” even as they are about to be swamped by the wave that is arriving behind them.
It’s not as though it should be a surprise. Business lifecycles and pathologies have been known for decades, but for some reason, those riding the waves that are beaching seem blind to it, as though they are somehow exceptional.
However, I’m not interested in the businesses. They will have made their money, and whilst their egos may be bent out of shape by the coming failure, their personal bank accounts will cushion them. I’m much more interested in the debris they leave on the shore. Those who either believed in them or had little option other than to keep going and hope because they had bills to pay, and who now find themselves feeling like some form of human driftwood.
Yesterday, I received an email telling me that Warren Berger’s “A More Beautiful Question” has been updated for its ten-year anniversary. AMBQ is one of those books I keep close to hand as a reminder that tomorrow is made of today’s questions, not yesterday’s answers. Tomorrow’s frame of reference will be different from today’s, so I need to pay attention to it and make sure a part of my day is dedicated to tending to it.
So, as someone who spent far too long convincing myself that Life Inside the Walls was a sensible strategy because there were bills to be paid, and fortunately able to understand the fallacy of that, here are some beautiful questions this Wednesday morning for those who find themselves inside their own walls.
How has the company you work for honestly reframed its understanding of its place in the market since the Pandemic?
What new skills have you learned since the pandemic, and can you use them without constraint?
When you consider the work you have done so far this year, how easily could that have been done by somebody else, or by technology?
Does your work carry your signature or somebody else’s?
How much time can you spend not just wishing for a different future but preparing the foundations for one?
The business you work in is most likely either fast growing but not maturing, mature but not learning, or ready for hospice. The time lag between the first stage and the last is getting ever shorter, and is not a safe haven. It’s not because those in it are incompetent or malign, but are hostage to a business model they have not created. To borrow a term from the games sector, they are NPC’s - Non Player Characters - those without any real agency whose role is to behave as programmed. (There’s a great article by Gurwinder that considers this. You will recognise yourself. Sorry. )
If you ask the questions I have outlined above, you will probably realise that the value you are adding today is a tiny fraction of what you could be adding because it sits outside the walls of your job description and is guarded against by those whom it would frighten. Moreover, those same qualities will not be found inside any job description you look at, for much the same reasons.
Most organisations, despite the rhetoric, prefer NPC’s.
We all need to check our own frames of reference because the ones our companies are using may well be stale, and that’s when they get found out, gradually then suddenly, and we do not want to be the passengers left stranded by their surprise.
Rather sooner than I had anticipated, the two separate thought streams that started as New Artisans and Outside the Walls are converging into a focused exploration of how and where we derive meaning and security from the work we do.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll bring them together under Outside the Walls and will transfer both free and paid subscribers there as we develop the ideas, strategies and people who want to live and work outside the walls on their own terms.
If you can’t wait, though, you can subscribe here.
There is something compelling here. It often seems we are living our lives billboard to billboard, without noticing what is going in in the landscape between them. Our communication works in the same way, delivered in lumps and missing the texture that created them. Communication as fast food.
When things are changing in the way they are, there is no substitute for slow conversation in small groups of those we trust. It may seem hard work and inefficient, but it does shine a light on our temporary realities, and offers us a more meaningful menu of options for what we do next.....
Another frame of reference that has served me well and is one of my Guiding Principles is “We are all in transition. Every one of us. All the time.” Transition is the vehicle for constant reorientation (re: Boyd) and makes easier to abandon or discard dated frames of reference. I was impressed with Gurwinder’s frame of reference. The reason is because it is typical Inside The Walls thinking by the “Elites” in power. We characterize our opposition by giving them a label that we can now use to isolate and marginalize. We could and I suspect that you may agree, these are Peripheral groups who have broken off from the Center to form communities outside the walls. I’m referencing my thinking on Shils’ Center and Periphery “frame of reference” here - https://edbrenegar.substack.com/p/reality-and-the-culture-of-simulation