“A map of the world that does not include Utopia in it is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a fairer country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
I don’t think we appreciate Oscar’s genius nearly as much is it deserves.
This is my 100th blog. Thank you.
No matter how beautiful the fabrics, or how exquisitely they are cut, they don’t become the end product until they’ve been joined together by a unifying framework.
In this case, its one with considerable give in it.
Quilts have often been made collaboratively, especially in America, where the idea of making a quilt in components (called blocks) really took off. This method meant a quilt top could be assembled very quickly, since the production of blocks was effectively parallelised. If you wanted a bigger quilt, you simply enlisted more friends.
Once the component blocks were completed, they were sewn together to make the top, which was then tacked together with the filling and backing layers. Then everyone got together again to quilt the 3 layers into a single unified whole – the finished quilt.
As well as speeding up the making, this block method allows considerable leeway to the individual contributors. In this Friendship quilt, each contributor has chosen their own block design, but they’ve clearly been given a colour scheme to work with, and at least some fabrics have been shared – its leeway, but not complete freedom.
The result is a bedcover that looks coherent, but is still lively and full of interest. An excellent example of balancing tight rules with interpretive latitude.
Those quiltmakers knew a lot about creative collaboration.
Seeing a case or project through from beginning to end is very satisfying – both for the person doing it, and for the client on the other side.
But how do you achieve that when you need to be flexible in how you assign resources?
By having a clear, high-level process for handling cases, then making sure everyone knows how to run it, and that all the information needed to move that case forward is accessible to anyone who needs it at any time.
Most of the time, one person can handle the whole thing. But when that isn’t possible (due to holidays or illness, or scheduling constraints), the client needn’t feel the difference.
And you’ve just created a more empowering division of labour.
You’ve put your heart and soul into building a remarkable business that does things differently.
Now you’re ready to scale.
But the last thing you want is to sell out to the same-old, same-old, corporate route to growth.
What if there were a new and different way to think about organising and growing your business, that takes the best bits of being small – your customer-focus, your agility, your meaningfulness – and scales the business around these properties, instead of suppressing them in favour of a traditional corporate approach?
What if you could structure your entire business around your own unique way of making and keeping your promise to customers?
What if your business had no management hierarchy, no silos, no ‘overhead’, only people enabled and empowered to share and keep your promise to your customer and to continuously improve how that works?
What if everyone in your business had roles that describe how they contribute to the customer experience, not where they fit into the hierarchy or the machine?
What if people were supported by technology to be more human, not straitjacketed into being less?
What if your business didn’t need you, because it is a living system, that not only works without you, but evolves without you to find new ways of delivering the promise it embodies?
It’s all possible.
You built a remarkable business, you can grow it remarkably too.
If you dare.
This fact is not as well-known as I think it should be:
The world’s first business computer was developed for J Lyons & Co. Ltd., to streamline and automate the analysis of the masses of data they collected every day, through which they could accurately predict demand in their chain of tea shops.
What is even less well known, is that the machine, installed in 1951, was the culmination of 20 years of business design by John Simmons and his team.
In other words, they didn’t just throw new technology at the business. They worked out what was the best way to do things, put those processes in place, tested and tweaked them and only then used LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) to automate parts of them.
It’s an approach worth reviving.
PS. If you’d like to find out more – “A computer called LEO” is a good read.
PPS. The ‘computers’ were the chains of female clerks who cumulatively added up the daily numbers received from tea shops. One of Simmons’ ambitions was to release people from this kind of mental drudgery.
It’s become a bit of an annual tradition in our house to watch ‘Earth Story’ from beginning to end between Christmas and New Year.
And every year, I find myself thinking about why I enjoy watching it so much.
I love the fact that many of the scientists involved including the presenter, Aubrey Manning, are middle-aged or old. There is wisdom here as well as adventure. Many of these ‘old’ scientists made these exciting discoveries in their youth, and now younger people are following on.
I love that they collaborate so much across the world, feeding off and building on each others’ discoveries (sometimes by accident) to build an incredibly comprehensive picture of how the earth works.
I love that the topic is huge and complex, and that the documentary brings everything together in a way that takes you through the various discoveries and processes involved, until you too say to yourself “So that’s how it works”.
I love that it is a clear, straightforward, scientific, scholarly presentation. There’s no faux jeopardy, no contrived drama, no patronising. The subject is wondrous and dramatic enough to stand on its own. There’s no agenda other than to educate.
And at the end of the 8 hours, I sit back every time and think 3 things:
First, Earth is an amazing place. It’s been going a lot longer than we have, and it will happily carry on for a long while without us.
Second, people are amazing. Look at what we can do – not just the thinking and hypothesising, but the technology that allows us to observe and prove our hypotheses.
Third, there’s nothing we can do about how the planet works. The status quo will not hold forever. Whether we are speeding it up or not, the planet is going to get hotter or colder and cause us enormous difficulties.
So if we want our human story to be part of the earth story for a little longer, the answer has to lie in changing the things we can change – our societies, our priorities, our ways of living together, our ways of living on the planet – we made all these things, we can remake them.
Perhaps we could practise on smaller problems first – hunger, poverty, exploitation, how to enable anyone and everyone to live well, wherever on earth they happen to be?
Here’s to 2019.
We humans have a tendency to assume that everyone else is the same as us – the same age, the same level of fitness; the same abilities; the same knowledge – until proven otherwise.
Usually, we design our systems and processes around these assumptions, and get heavy doors, high kerbs, long-ways-round walking routes, short crossing times; interfaces that require precise and accurate finger-control, or clear eyesight, or sharp hearing.
We’ll all get old.
I suspect that if we designed for that, things would be a lot easier for everyone, right now.
One of my favourite books as a child, and still a favourite today, is T.H. White’s “The Once and Future King”.
Some of the most striking episodes in the novel are when the young Arthur is turned into various different animals, to learn about people and different ways of organising society.
The ant colony is metaphor for totalitarianism, based on hierarchy, blind loyalty and complete control, whereas the goose colony represents a liberal society based on nuclear families, mutual respect and emergent leadership.
The ants are completely bound by rules and regulations, the geese are bound by a common purpose and philosophy.
Of course these are metaphors, but when I read of things like Amazon’s patents for a wristband that tracks workers’ hand movements and ‘nudges’ them in the right direction, I do worry that we’re veering too far towards anthood.
This week I caught a few minutes of an interesting conversation on the radio.
The speaker was Dr Vivienne Ming, and the snippet I caught was about the age-old problem of IT, now a problem of AI – namely, that in order to find the best solution to a problem, you have to truly understand the problem first.
More than that, you have to work out the best solution before you apply technology to automate it. And that’s the really hard part, as Amazon found out.
Process is great, but only if it augments our humanity – and like AI, the goal of process should be to as Dr Ming says, to “take the best of what people can do and make it even better by leveraging what machines can do” – to make processes that “challenge us to be better people.”
We could start by recognising ourselves and others as people first.