Postcard from the Edge
Trajectories, Second Curves and Mycelium.
I get the impression that career trajectories used to be gentler.
By the time we get to our mid 40'‘s, if we work for others, we used to have a fairly clear understanding of where our career is going. A few made escape velocity and became stars, some failed at launch, but most went into low orbit, quietly doing their work until either retirement or terminal boredom brought them back to earth.
No more. We now have data, and being ignored is no longer a possibility. Performance is measured on a continual basis, and if it falls below the parameters that have been set, somewhere in the depths of administration, a red button is pushed. No more trajectories and measured descents; we find ourselves in vertical descent. Other, cheaper people or technology, with our “skillset”, take our place.
What intrigues me is what we measure. It is self-evident that the technical skillset we enter the workplace with becomes rapidly obsolescent. Skills maintenance and development operate on very tight budgets evaluated on performance more than potential, and that as we become more expensive over time, the threat of replacement becomes greater.
What we don’t measure, largely because we can’t, is experience and its nature. I accept that in many cases, those with twenty-five years of experience have one year’s experience on repeat for twenty-five years, but for others, twenty-five years reflects a web of connections and reflections that are part of an unmeasurable social and professional mycelium. When they get removed, a web of value unseen by data goes with them. This is not news, of course, but it does seem that at the moment, in a number of areas, not least of all “tech”, there is a frenzy of knee-jerk button-pushing going on, with the assumption that when things improve, what has been pulled up can be replanted. That assumption seems dangerous. When we rip up organisational mycelium, it dies. We can replace Trees and Plants, but a whole new web of connections takes time to build, and until it does, communication, awareness and resilience are weak.
Value lies in the mycelium, in the trust that has been built there, the conversations and insights it promotes, and the awareness it represents. That value lies unrecorded and unrecognised by data, letting the heuristics teams develop wither and disappear into the realms of “mystery”.
The personal mycelium, on the other hand, remains. Organisations are not the centre of the universe, much as they would like to think they are. In times of uncertainty such as we currently face, it is the personal mycelium we need to look after.
The reality is that, for the vast majority, the trajectory of our first careers will have fallen back to earth by the time we are in our early forties. Rather than fight it, we should welcome it and use the time we spend in corporate harness to build our mycelium, develop the skills we want to harness, and be ready to move outside the walls of corporate life by the gate rather than the parapet.
It is the mycelium that will resource us as we harness experience and marry our skills to increasing awareness and purpose to become far more selective in what we do. If we continue to work for organisations, it will be far more on our terms than as ever more senior “performance monkeys” forever looking over our shoulders at those, humans and technical, who are accelerating up the ladder behind us.
I used this graphic in Sunday’s “Outside the Walls” post and think it worth repeating here:
Our second (and third, fourth, fifth, maybe…) curve will not be a repeat of the first somewhere else. Each one will use more of who we are and our understanding of our craft. The skills we have will be taken as read and it will be what we bring to it as people that will matter and be the point of difference. We will not be filling some sterile job description measured in six-minute increments; we will be occupying and leveraging the space between the notes.
“Music is the space between the notes.”
―Claude Debussy
And those helping us write the music will be those we choose, not people allocated to roles.
How can I try to explain?
When I do, he turns away again
It's always been the same
Same old story
From the moment I could talk
I was ordered to listen
Now there's a way
And I know that I have to go away
I know, I have to go
Father and Son. Yusuf / Cat Stevens
For most of us, our first curves will be in some form of corporate entity.
It will be valuable, and serve a purpose, but it is not where we want to spend our lives.
It’s time to create Mycelium: Outside The Walls.
At Outside the Walls, we are aiming to create mycelium through conversations and connections focused on individual talent and purpose, not corporate performance.
Be good to see you there.
This … “What we don’t measure, largely because we can’t, is experience and its nature. I accept that in many cases, those with twenty-five years of experience have one year’s experience on repeat for twenty-five years, but for others, twenty-five years reflects a web of connections and reflections that are part of an unmeasurable social and professional mycelium.” … is changing because of people like Iain McGilchrist. The distinction he makes is between left brain analytics (data) and right brain embodied intuition (sensory experience). The beauty is that it is contained in stories, conversations, and relationships of respect and trust. The enterprise immediately becomes creative. We write a book, produce a film, record a song, or start doing a podcast. We first connect, then we join together. Not as workers, but as people with twenty-five years of pent-up creativity to express. Watch what happens over the next twenty five years. A Renaissance will emerge to replace the cold, dead data that has lost it’s explanatory power.