Book Recommendations – Page 4 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 26, 2022

The grandmother of invention

I finished this book over the weekend. I thoroughly recommend it.

If I had to sum it up: “Whatever your problem, there’s a very good chance it’s been solved before, several times, both by other people and in nature. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but research is the grandmother.”

As usual, it’s given me more threads to follow – for example, a Russian called Genrcih Altshuller codified a Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) back in the 1940s. But I bet you’ve never heard of him.

And I learned that the most interesting problems are contradictions, such as “How do I ensure a consistent Customer Experience without losing the opportunity to delight?”; and that really inventive solutions resolve them.

September 16, 2022

Disorder

I’m fascinated by the tension between process and freedom, between order and chaos, between prescription and exploration. So naturally I couldn’t resist buying these books to find out how people working in a completely different discipline approach the same issue.

In the first book I’m reading, ‘The Uses of Disorder’, the author describes the difficult transition people have to make through adolescence – that stage where we have the ability to fully exercise our powers as human beings, but without any life-experience to guide us. We have to find our own identity, but identity is forged though experience – messy, uncomfortable and maybe even distressing. This prospect makes some people frame an identity for themselves in advance, as a way of avoiding experience.

Most of us ‘grow out’ of this stage as we are unavoidably exposed to otherness, but some people continue to close themselves off to anything that might undermine it. The author’s point is that this doesn’t just happen on an individual level, but also at the level of a group or community, which is where this starts to get interesting.

For these authors, a city is a framework that can be enabling or disabling. And what makes it enabling is a certain amount of disorder, because disorder enables people to encounter the different, the new and the alternative. In other words, disorder helps us to grow aand thrive as human beings by opening up possibilities. So if you want to city (or any community) to enable people to thrive, you want it to be somewhat disorderly. Not so disorderly that people get no chance to absorb change, but disorderly enough to allow people to find their own change.

Similarly if you want your business to help the people in and around it (including clients) to thrive, you want it to be a bit disorderly – not so disorderly that people don’t know what to do, but disorderly enough that people can find and create their own change. You want controlled disorder.

The good news is, I think, that you can design it in. Which is why I use the idea of a Customer Experience Score, rather than a process. With your Customer Experience Score as the floor, you can safely leave room for exploration and interpretation.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

August 19, 2022

Conservation

When there’s a heatwave on, the best thing for me to do is to sit still and read. Or colour in.

The reason I have such a big library is that I can’t help following threads from one book to another. Sometimes I keep on picking up new threads, often I go back on myself and revisit old favourites.

Eventually they all get darned in together, to make something new and familiar, well-worn and stronger, decorated by repairs.

Like a Pearly King’s suit, or my lovely old linen sheet, too fine and lovely to throw away, so kept just for heatwaves.

July 20, 2022

Connect the dots

Back in February, I got involved in a project called ‘Connect the Dots’, an ancillary to The Carbon Almanac.

The idea was to take the well-researched facts, issues and solutions from the Almanac and connect them together visually, so that someone can see how they interact. More importantly, so someone can see how a single action can have multiple impacts.

We started with Solutions, because in spite of what we see and hear, they are already out there. People are already taking practical, unheroic, collective steps to change the systems that we have turned into traps.

We’re having a rest for a week, and then we’ll come back to it, perhaps with more people joining in. So it will continue to grow.

Yesterday the project went live.

Find it under ‘Extras’ at The Carbon Almanac.

It’s not finished – it never will be.

It’s not perfect – it never will be.

Hopefully it is inspiring enough to prompt more people to take action.

Together.

Connecting the dots.

July 19, 2022

On a Friday

At the beginning of this year, I got involved in writing a book. With at least 26 other people and a brilliant designer. All of us members of the ‘Like Hearted Leaders’.

Every week, on a Friday, we LHL’ers share a laugh, or a tear, or an insight. In spaces where we can think, question and learn. Where we meet and make friends with some wonderful, inspiring people.

Where we are like-hearted, but not necessarily like-minded, which makes it one of the most stimulating groups I’ve ever had the good fortune to be part of.

You can see that in our book: ‘On a Friday’. Now available on Amazon.

Written by us, for like-hearted (but not necessarily like-minded) leaders like you.

July 12, 2022

Geography and geology

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

“Of course, each of us is literally made of the Earth, as is all life on the planet.

The water in your body once flowed down the Nile, fell as monsoon rain onto India, and swirled around the Pacific.

The carbon in the organic molecules of your cells was mined from the air by the plants that we eat.

The salt in your sweat and tears, the calcium of your bones, and the iron in your blood all eroded out of the rocks of Earth’s crust;

and the sulphur of the protein molecules in your hair and muscles was spewed out by volcanoes.“

Lewis Dartnell, Origins.

It’s time we really learned to see ourselves as we really are.

Sawubona.

June 21, 2022

Connections

Back in 1978, me and my family were entranced by this BBC series in which James Burke explained how rather than being a simple forward march of progress towards some future pinnacle, history was actually a web of connected accidents. People built new ideas and inventions on the ideas and inventions of others, who had created these things for completely different reasons. Connections made that were never ‘meant’ to be made leading to new connections, and new inventions. Often with what seemed like spookily appropriate timing.

Fast forward 50 years, and I’m enticed into a little online group called ‘Connect the Carbon Dots’ by a mention of this TV series.

In our group, we’re taking the facts, issues and solutions in the soon to be released Carbon Almanac, and connecting them to each other, in a visual, interactive web. So that someone interested in ‘how to store carbon in soil’ for example can see why that’s a good thing for global warming AND how it also impacts food security, erosion, and pollution.

Looking back, that documentary may have been the start of my life’s work!

Everything’s connected. Everyone is connected. Everything’s a process.

You never know what’s going to happen next, but there’ll be an interesting thread to follow.

And life is actually more joyful when you look at it that way.

PS it’s not too late to join in!

June 13, 2022

The latest batch

The latest batch of learning arrived over the weekend, courtesy of the real amazons.

There’s fiction here as well as fact. I find both illuminating.

Fiction allows us to imagine new possibilities, new solutions, to think the unthinkable.

Fact often shows us we’ve done all of those things before, actually, with success.

We just hid them, so we could forget, and stay on the hamster wheel.

One day we really will have to get off, whether we want it or not.

It’s better to be able to welcome it.

May 18, 2022

Letting go

Sometimes, groups of actors in a system have different goals, pulling them in different directions. These goals are perfectly reasonable from the perspective of each group, but a constant tug-of-war between groups prevents improvement.

We’re seeing a simple example of this kind of thing right now, with the ‘in the office’/’work from home’ debates and policy changes.

A firm wants people back in the office, so they decide to ban working from home. That ban just makes some people leave – to join a more accommodating competitor. The firm pulling hard in one direction hasn’t helped, it’s just made others pull harder in a different direction. The harder one side pulls, the harder the other does too.

These tugs of war can involve more than two parties – and frequently do. That makes fixing the system even more difficultr as each group pulls more and more strongly in its own preferred direction.

The answer, counterintuitively, is to let go. Stop pulling. When you do that everyone else will stop pulling too.

Then, look at everyone’s different, and from their perspective, perfectly reasonable goals.

Why do you want people in the office? Why do they want to work from home? What could you do to feel more confident that people are productive at home? How could you help them feel happier about coming back to the office.

My favourite example for this is the Swedish solution to a falling birth rate. Instead of banning abortions and birth control as Ceausescu did in Romania, which led to orphanages full of neglected and traumatised children, Sweden agreed on a higher goal of ‘every child being wanted and nurtured’, and implemented policies across the board to deliver that, that helped everyone work towards it.

What policies could you put in place that help everyone pull in the same direction?

May 16, 2022

Introducing systems thinking

We spend much of our time in business measuring quantities or stocks, when often what we should be looking at are flows – the processes that affect those quantities, for good or ill.

In fact, we’d learn more from looking at how those flows are changing – are they speeding up or slowing down? – and by asking why, create ourselves more options and opportunities to improve things.

We also tend to focus too much on stocks that are concrete (profit, inventory, capacity) and ignore the abstract (delight, autonomy, morale). Partly because the abstract is harder to measure, partly because we think they don’t matter.

As we all know, what gets measured, gets managed. The trouble is that managing the wrong things distorts the system. Until it no longer serves the purpose we originally envisaged. Or until it breaks.

If you’re looking for a different way of explaining – and re-designing – your world, this book is an excellent introduction to systems thinking.

This week I’ll be sharing some ideas from the book, as they apply to the systems we are all trying to create – our businesses.

You’ll recognise them.