There are obvious environmental benefits to repairing things, people and processes in your business, instead of throwing them away.
But the biggest benefit is that by repairing them you learn so much more about how your business could and should work better.
Especially when everyone gets involved.
Your business is attracting more clients, so you take on more people to help you serve those clients. But those new people aren’t up to speed with how your business works. So they falter, and when they do, you step in and take over.
Gradually, over time, you find the faltering happens sooner, the taking over starts earlier, until one day, you wake up and ask yourself ‘Why am I doing everone else’s job?‘.
Because you’ve allowed your team to shift the burden of getting things done ‘the way we do them round here‘ to you. You’ve more than allowed them, you’ve positively encouraged them:
Stop fixing the faltering, and fix the reasons why they falter instead.
If your team falters it’s because they don’t know what you know, they don’t believe what you believe, they don’t know what you value, and they don’t have your muscle-memory of how your business works.
So, get the music of how your business works out of your head and into a shareable, updateable format. Share it with your team. Train them in it. Let them practice it.
Before you know it, they’ll be playing your music better than you.
It’s not often I think that Seth Godin is being ungenerous. But I think he is in this post.
Of course Seth is writing for his tribe, those with what Shelle Rose Charvet would call an ‘Options’ preference. Who love uncertainty, exploration, overshooting boundaries and blank sheets of paper.
But not everyone works like that. A few like to slavishly follow a process step-by-step. Most of us like to have a map. Or a score we can interpret in our own way.
That doesn’t make us want to be a cog in a machine without responsibility or accountability. It just means we like to see where we are, where the destination is and what the possible routes are. We are perfectly willing to take responsibility, be on the hook, initiate action. It’s just that like children, we play more freely when we can see the boundaries.
Industrial control was never the answer to human flourishing, but neither is a void.
A little bit of discipline makes a lot of daring possible.
As I get older, I am more conscious that I am not immortal. It’s quite hard to imagine my life 20 or 30 years from now.
But then, I never did think that far ahead – not even when I could reasonably expect to have another 30, 40 or even 70 years ahead of me.
Would I have made different decisions if I had?
It is of course impossible to foresee the future, so the question would have to be about impact and ripple effects rather than concrete, specific results, but ancestor questions are well worth asking, of one’s self and one’s business:
“What impact do I want to make on my generation?”
“What impact do I want to make on the next generation?”
“What impact do I want to make on the generation after that?;
“And the one after that?”
“And the one after that?”
“And the one after that?”
“And the one after that?”
…
We can’t know how they’ll live.
We can know whether we have made living harder or easier for them.
And it’s not too late to change what we do. Especially if we change together.
For a long time, paid-for journalism has been in trouble.
It has relied on a model of change that it no longer monopolises. That model is based in acting as a fire alarm: find smoke, shout ‘Fire!‘ and let the outrage build until those in power do something to put the fire out.
The trouble is, anyone can shout ‘Fire‘ on social media. Plus those in power often start fires of their own, as a distraction from the big fire everyone’s worried about. The result is that there’s a lot of outrage out there, and very few fire extinguishers.
There is an alternative. Some call it Solutions Journalism, others Constructive Journalism.
This journalism says it’s no longer valuable enough to simply shout ‘Fire!‘ and expect the problem to be solved, this journalism seeks out people and places who have solved the problem already, finds out how they did it and shares that knowledge with their audience.
This journalism uses knowledge transfer to move the audience “from urgency to agency“.
Why am I telling you this?
One, because The Carbon Almanac is an excellent example of this kind of journalism. Sign up for a Daily Difference newsletter.
Two, because I think this is an excellent model of change for small, purposeful businesses to adopt too.
If you’re struggling to change, instead of shouting ‘Fire!‘ and waiting for the consultancy fire engines to arrive with the usual solution, why not seek out people and places who’ve already done what you seek to achieve, and share that learning with your team?
Even better, why not encourage your team to be the journalists and do the seeking out? Once everyone knows something is possible, it’s easier to see how you can make it happen in line with your own Promise of Value.
This post is mostly a paraphrase of this excellent speech by Professor Jay Rosen. I recommend a read of it.
Meanwhile, here are some questions I’ve extracted for you to assign to your investigative journalists:
Go beyond urgency. Construct agency.
There’s been a lot of talk about leaving Twitter over the last few days. To be honest, I’ve contemplated it myself.
Yes, it’s increasingly shaped to serve the agenda of those with money and power, but Twitter, like all social media, is a tool, like any other. We don’t have to use it the way others want us to.
Perfectly illustrated this weekend:
On Saturday, we ventured into unknown parts of London in search of roads that share our surnames. Boxall Road is in North Dulwich, not far from the Picture Gallery, while the much more impressive-sounding Gibbs Avenue is in Upper Norwood. An interesting day’s walk, that just left us with the question ‘Why?‘
A quick post on Twitter, and sure enough, the answer came back in seconds. A certain Robert Boxall kept the old ‘Greyhound Inn’ nearby, and having made a bit of money, decided to go into property development.
Thanks Dulwich Society!
The point of this story?
Social media is a tool like any other. You choose how you want to use it. And the best way turns out to be the way we use any other means of communication – to have real conversations with real people – to make connections, not break them.
A quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead today:
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Imagine what we could do if we all got together?
Today’s image is NASA’s ‘global selfie’ for Earth Day 2014.
It’s a reminder that we are all part of a global ecosystem. We affect it as individuals. Even more so, we affect it through the social systems we build on top – some of which take on a life of their own.
Some of our effects are benign, or at least harmless. Others are malign – diminishing, depleting and damaging. Making the planet a less hospitable place for others and ourselves.
It’s not too late to switch to having only benign effects.
Any difference we can make individually, will help. But we’ll make a bigger difference when we get together.
Our social systems are just that – social. We made them up. We can make up new ones, different ones, better ones. That enrich and nurture people and planet.
But where do I start?
With yourself, your family, your friends, your workplace, your street, your block, your town, your county, your country. You get the idea.
Find the others.
Then do something together.
Happy Earth Day.
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber.
Listening to ‘In our time’ this morning, I heard that one of the reasons our ancestor Homo Erectus emerged could be that the Rift Valley environment around them started to change relatively rapidly and unpredictably as a result of volcanic activity.
This created a new evolutionary ‘niche’ – for a species that was able to efficiently switch between environments rather than adapt efficiently to just one. Walking upright, sociality and speech are just some of the outcomes.
In other words, we’ve evolved to live in the midst of change.
To be sure, most of us prefer our change to be evolutionary rather than sudden and drastic, but I bet there’s hardly anyone you know that hasn’t undergone some sort of major shift (changed job, changed marital or parental status, moved house) in the last five years. We are programmed to explore possibilities, see opportunities, to talk about new things, to try them out – with others if we can.
Why then do corporates have such a problem with change management?
Because we’re human. We love change but we prefer to do it ourselves, than have it done to us.
What do your people really want?
The same things you do:
If you escaped corporate life to set up on your own, you’ve almost certainly found that having these things at work didn’t just make you happier, it made your work better too.
Pass it on. It will be worth it.