Artisans and Fragility

Beyond Resilience

Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash

I noticed an interesting piece in the news about how the Governments of Sweden and Finland are priming their citizens for resilience in the event of war. Simple precautions such as tinned food and bottled water for a week and thinking about how they would cope without energy in a -20 degrees winter. It got me thinking.

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An industrial mindset prefers to think about defence in terms of what they can sell us to do to other people. I like to think of it in terms of what we can do for each other.

Nassim Taleb identified the three deadliest addictions as crack cocaine, carbohydrates, and a regular monthly salary. He has a point. Salaries can stop in a moment; debt has a half-life of nuclear waste, and we find ourselves treading the path between them with increasing trepidation.

For many organisations, a defence posture means unloading responsibility and prioritising near-term survival over long-term health. Unload people, stock up on Lawyers and go to the barricades. This is not a rant - it’s common sense. Organisations are not incentivised on societal health.

So what about us?

Back to Taleb and “anti-fragility”. He defines it as a positive response to stress, going beyond mere resilience or robustness. While resilient systems resist shocks and remain unchanged, antifragile systems improve and grow stronger when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, mistakes, attacks and failures.

That covers this morning’s news then, and in a world characterised by a “get stuff done” mentality, rather than wondering whether the stuff we’re getting done is of any realistic use other than as stories, how do we stock up our career cupboards with the equivalent of baked beans, soup and toilet rolls?

LinkedIn is a response machine; nobody accuses it of developing strategies on behalf of its consumers ahead of its sponsors. We are consumables, so nobody there is going to rescue us.

The first thing is to get our act together and stop hyperventilating. The markets will be fine, even if many organisations may not, and the capabilities and skills they will need are already here, even if, as Ray Kurzweil says of the future, they are not evenly distributed.

What might those skills be in a world that is changing on many fronts? Geopolitically, environmentally, ecologically and socially? A world where algorithms based on data will be frequently surprised by a future on which there is no data?

The answer, of course, is you and me, and those messy, unquantifiable properties of intuition, compassion, insight and all the other right hemisphere qualities that our left hemisphere underestimates.

First, like our organisations, we need to unload the unnecessary. Focus on separating objective facts from subjective truths. The objective facts are hard enough as we develop our knowledge and realise that facts come with different half-lives.

What we were taught as truth only a short time ago may no longer hold, and we must keep abreast of that. Then, of course, are the subjective truths manufactured by malevolence and fuelled by media that thrive on the conflict they can extract from them and promote to attract fear-filled and consumption-ready eyeballs.

Going beyond resilience to readiness requires a sophisticated bullshit filter, and that is what we are going to prototype here and at Outside the Walls. A small, varied but beautifully formed group who will meet regularly to share what they are noticing and experiencing, filter out the bullshit to which we are exposed, and consider what is needed. As I mentioned in the last OTW blog on Sunday, to do what Buckminster Fuller advised a ten-year-old Michael to do:

“The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it.

Small groups bump into other small groups doing similar work without an organisation in sight. They pick up the opportunities, one small piece at a time, and carry them to where they are needed. In the end, meaning is not something we find; it is something we construct, and that requires us to do the work.

Fragility, like helplessness, is something we learn if we shape ourselves according to the stories we are told as truth. Going beyond fragility requires us to have our own story. Our story and an employer’s story may mesh for a while, and everybody wins. Eventually, and inevitably, though, these stories start to part ways, and we need to be ready for that. Forcing ourselves into a shape that isn’t ours for an employer will never end well.

If we take our professional development seriously, we learn faster than any organisation. Organisations crave certainty and the ability to become ever more efficient and productive at what they already know how to do. The world we live in, however, doesn’t care. Thomas Kuhn pointed out that organisations (and maybe generations) don’t adopt new paradigms; they die out to be replaced by new ones, and if we only learn at the organisation's pace, we are likely to pay the price.

To achieve resilience, we must perform inside organisations that are becoming obsolescent whilst learning at a pace that enables us to move beyond them.

We need a strategy.

It was captured beautifully for me in something a Nun said on Ben Fogles “Sacred Islands” programme":

“I don’t think it’s connected to being marginal, but it’s going to the limit, and I think it’s so important to have edge spaces, that are spaces, that are spaces, that they sort of define the centre, the cities. You need both. You need open edge spaces to breathe in, really.”

That’s what we want to develop here, and at “Outside the Walls”. Strategies for the space between inside and outside the walls, that we can bring to bear when needed.

So I’m going to start as simply and lightly as I can. I’ll put up a dedicated Site for those interested in creating a small group, or perhaps if needed, a number of small groups, and who are prepared to put in the work of creativity and connection to create a community to help each other find those dots and follow them to the work they want to do.

It will be for those here on New Artisans, and at Outside the Walls, and will be by invitation only. First invitations will go to those who were on the call on Wednesday, and we’ll go from there, and if you’re reading this but weren’t on the call, and want to be included, mail me: richard@richardmerrick.co.uk

Details to follow when I’ve worked them out.

I don’t think this period of volatility is an “episode”, I thinks it’s a period of transition, and we need to think accordingly.

I’ll leave the last word to Tony Schwarz; founder of the energy project.

“Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.”