I finished Monday’s post thinking about divergence, about when it’s time to leave the organisation we are with, and when we notice that learning is being overwhelmed by repetition.
Conversations since then have moved me on to wondering why we stay in places we know are unhealthy for as long as we do.
Despite the rhetoric, most businesses have little interest in being “learning organisations”. The endpoint of learning is evolution, which is experimental, messy, and unpredictable. Learning is inefficient and populated by failure along the way, and it is certainly no respecter of plans. The last thing shareholders and senior management want is a learning organisation; they want a predictable and productive one. There are many business maturity models, all around some form of initial, managed, defined, quantitatively managed, and optimized, and what they share is the destination. Optimized.
Nature doesn’t do optimised. When we’re dealing with people, in all their variety and technology, with all its complexity, optimised is the stage at which learning gives way to profitability and is a pretty good signal of impending failure.
We stay because we’re afraid. David Rock’s SCARF model is a useful reference when it comes to workplace engagement. C is king - Certainty. We really value our Status, want a sense of Certainty when we have a mortgage to pay and are often willing to trade in Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness in order to do it, even as it eats away at our soul. Maslow understood it well and is still the go-to thinker in my view, and I like Scott Barry Kaufman’s revisitation of Maslow’s work in his book “Transcend”, in which he used this graphic:
We have become so obsessed with security that we have relegated growth to an option for when we have time. We are sheltering in a lifeboat, hoping somebody will rescue us rather than raise the sail and risk the consequences.
If you only have to deal with known quantities, strict organization is efficient. But if you have to deal with a lot of change and uncertainty, messiness is efficient.
| François Chollet, via twitter, in
blog yesterdayBeing organised is the boat; messiness is the wind.
Right now, it’s breezy rather than windy, but the squalls are just beginning to build.
So here’s a question. If you were to map your network of those who know how to create value rather than just follow the process, how big is your personal network versus the one you have at work? If your work one is bigger and better than your personal one, you have work to do, because most of your work network will stay with work when you leave.
Operating in a sea of uncertainty is messy, although there is real consensus on what we need to do. This is my favourite, from Meg Wheatley, for its simplicity, although I could have used many others:
Start something and see what happens
Expect unintended consequences
Reflect. A lot.
Seek out different interpretations of what is happening.
Try that in a business you don’t own, even as a CEO, and you are likely to find yourself suddenly outside the walls. It is far better to journey outside walls while you can still get back in and try it out of sight. It doesn’t have to be big; it just has to be something you do for yourself and with others. It might be a blog, a project, or voluntary work; the thing is to do things with those who are not the usual suspects. Some, you might already know, some might be crazy, but most will be people like you, from workplaces far, far away, with different perspectives and experiences that will help you turn a mental map into a landscape.
Paying attention to our connections matters. Some are strong, others weak, and all matter because insight can come from anywhere, but execution relies on trust. Some connections give us logic and knowledge “reach”, others emotional and spiritual, and help us weave an understanding of what is going on denser and deeper than the necessarily partial and shallow one that we get from an employer. Paying attention to “bandwidth” is important, as well as avoiding the unnecessary friction of politics and throttled language and expression. Data is only a tiny part of what matters in understanding, and keeping our senses sharp and intuition practised gives us well-rounded information that can turn uncertainty from threat to opportunity.
I think all this matters because it feels as though the nature of “employment” is changing from local to global and from social contract to purely transactional and opportunist. As I’m writing this, Spotify is Optimising, announcing record profits while continuing a sequence of laying off significant tranches of staff, and the share price is surging.
We can also be confident that this trend will be tidal, even as we do not know what will happen as the tide turns. Meg Wheatley’s rules 2-4 apply: expect unintended consequences, reflect and seek alternative interpretations. For us, I think rule 1 applies - start something outside of the workplace to strengthen, deepen and add variety to our personal networks. Practice conversation for its own sake - become fluent in multi-dimensional communication using all forms, from writing to sculpture. Give our creativity the opportunity to escape the confines of employment contracts and job descriptions and connect to where it can be leveraged.
Venture Outside The Walls and find others doing the same. What you find may surprise and delight you and improve your readiness when you become sacrificed to optimization.
I believe the answer to interconnection lies in conversation with others asking themselves the same question: somewhere quiet, Outside the Walls of conventional business thinking and practice.
From the end of this month, New Artisans will move over and be included in my substack, “Outside the Walls” (OTW). I am moving those already registered here over to OTW and extending current paid subscriptions to April 2025 as a thank you for being here.
If you’re not there yet, it would be wonderful to have you along as we explore the space outside the walls. Heretics, Poachers, Pirates and Wanderers very welcome…
Talking of Meg Wheatley, I found this extract from her work on "being ready to be disturbed". Follows on beautifully from this post.....
https://ncs.uchicago.edu/sites/ncs.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/tools/NCs_PS_Toolkit_DPL_Set_B_WillingDisturbed.pdf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email