Responsible Autonomy – Page 40 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 8, 2021

Why justice must be blind.

I’m about halfway through John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. We’ve finally got to a statement of principles. Which can be informally summed up as something like this:

“All social primary goods – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured.”

That seems pretty obvious. Why has it taken 300 pages to get to here?

Because imagining a just system is a process.

We don’t choose where or when we’re born. We don’t choose our parents or our society or our status in that society. We don’t choose the talents or abilities we’re born with – any more than we choose our eye colour or complement of limbs. That’s all down to chance.

That doesn’t mean we have to accept what we’ve landed in. We can imagine a different kind of setup.

But to do that justly, and end up with something fair, we need a starting point that takes chance out of it. We have to take ourselves out of space and time, and imagine what we as individuals would accept if we didn’t know where we end up in the particular set-up we happen to be born in. We have to make ourselves blind, and build our picture of a just system from there.

That takes a lot of thought and empathy with all our possible selves.

It’s worth the effort, because then we can start to shape our societies to move ever closer to that ideal. Starting with what’s closest to us, our families and our businesses.

June 7, 2021

Learning from queens

We had some unexpected guests yesterday. The first I knew of it was the sound.

‘What on earth is that noise?’

I looked up from cleaning the floor, and there they were, a mass of bees madly buzzing across 3 neighbouring gardens. 15 minutes later, they were clumped together near the top of our hawthorn tree.

I looked up my nearest beekeeper on the British Beekeepers Association website, (try them before you call pest control, beekeepers will give bees a good home), and Andrew came over.

We agreed that it was too dangerous for him to try and collect the bees from the tree, so he set up a bait box, to entice them down.

While we waited over a cup of tea, he taught me a bit about bees.

A hive swarms in stages. First the queen leaves, taking half the bees with her, to set up a new colony somewhere. 10 days later, her brood of queens start to hatch, along with the other eggs she’s laid.

It used to be thought that the first queen out killed the others, but research has found that isn’t the case. As each new queen hatches they replicate the original queen’s behaviour – taking off with half the hive. Only each time the half is smaller, even though the hive grows each day as new bees hatch. So each ‘cast’ becomes progressively smaller until the last is about tennis ball sized, and will be lucky to form a viable colony that can get through the following winter.

This it makes perfect sense. The bees are all the old queen’s children. Why kill other queens when you only need half the available resources? There is no scarcity, and so no competition for them. And why kill queens when replicating a simple process maximises the chances that the colony will survive and spread?

We humans could learn a bit from bees.

PS, they’re still in our tree. If they don’t fancy the bait box, they’ll swarm again and find a new place. If you see them, remember to give them 15 minutes to settle down, then call your local beekeeper.

June 4, 2021

On kings and forgiveness.

Seth wrote a very interesting blog this week on Monarchists.

“As Sahlins and Graeber outline in their extraordinary (and dense) book on Kings, there’s often a pattern in the nature of monarchs. Royalty doesn’t have to play by the same cultural rules, and often ‘comes from away.’ Having someone from a different place and background allows the population to let themselves off the hook when it comes to creating the future.”

I agree, but I think the whole thing is more subtle and interesting than that.

Kings ‘from away’ could act in ways that were totally unacceptable to the native population – in order to create change. Sometimes, they were even asked in.

Beyond that though, those same Kings were contained and constrained into a purely formal role. They became figureheads, cherished, personally pampered but essentially powerless over the society they ‘ruled’. They didn’t administer the results of their change and they certainly didn’t take over resources. The original population carried on as custodians of the land, society and cuture, as before.

That was the point.

A stranger king enabled a system based on shared authority and collective, consensual decision making to radically change without breaking itself apart. You could almost call them a scapegoat rather than a king. Nowadays we’d call them a consultant.

The challenge then, is not merely to be prepared to ‘put yourself on the hook’ to lead change that will make the community uncomfortable, but also to forgive those of your peers who do it for you.

June 3, 2021

Desire lines

On my way to receive my second dose of the vaccine today, I used a well-worn but ‘unofficial’ route for part of my journey, at what is effectively an off-centre T-junction.

This desire-line shortened the distance by no more than 7 yards at most for people going in one direction. Interestingly, there was no desire line going in the other direction.

Why is this?

Well, when the path was built, it was obviously more efficient to build it as a single path. But using the path isn’t the same as building it.

For people going one way, the official path is close enough, even though it isn’t quite direct. It feels like you’re going in the right direction.

For the other way though, the official path feels completely wrong. You’re effectively going back on yourself before you can get in the rght direction. So it makes perfect sense to cut the corner, even though it saves very little.

There’s a nice lesson here for designing processes of all kinds. Obviously, you try and make the process as efficient as possible when you build it. Then look out for the desire lines and reconfigure as appropriate.

Not all short-cuts are are the right thing to build in, but nobody should have to go backwards in order to move forwards.

May 28, 2021

Shuhari

“It is known that, when we learn or train in something, we pass through the stages of shu, ha, and ri. These stages are explained as follows. In shu, we repeat the forms and discipline ourselves so that our bodies absorb the forms that our forebears created. We remain faithful to these forms with no deviation. Next, in the stage of ha, once we have disciplined ourselves to acquire the forms and movements, we make innovations. In this process the forms may be broken and discarded. Finally, in ri, we completely depart from the forms, open the door to creative technique, and arrive in a place where we act in accordance with what our heart/mind desires, unhindered while not overstepping laws.” Endō Seishirō

You want your entire team to get to ri.

That’s impossible while the shu is only in your head.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

HT to Carlos Saba for the thought. And to Claire Perry-Louise for creating the space where it can be shared.

May 24, 2021

Improvising

The last year or so has forced us all to improvise.

Faced with extreme uncertainty, this is a rational response. Improvisation enables us to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t in a rapidly shifting world. It helps us to try new things, change direction, discover new opportunities.

In effect, the last year turned us all back into new businesses.

If your new new business was able to improvise its way into growth, now might be a good time to pause, take stock and reconfigure it into something more intentional. Make the experiment that paid off repeatable and scaleable. So you can carry on growing on purpose.

Remember to leave some room for improvisation though – it’s how you’ll see the next challenge coming.

May 14, 2021

The monster in the office

There’s a monster in the office, and everyone’s afraid.

Everyone calls it ‘the Boss’.

The owner thinks it has many heads, eating the business out of house and home, and just not caring enough what they do and how they do it.

The team thinks they know exactly who it is – the control-freak micro-manager, constantly interfering, trying to do everyone’s job and never happy with the results.

Neither are right.

Every business owner I’ve met has a vision in their head for how their business makes promises to clients and keeps them. But there’s often a massive gap between that vision and what they’ve actually managed to communicate to the people whose help they need to achieve it.

That gap is the real monster.

Fortunately like most monsters, it disappears with daylight.

May 13, 2021

Everything’s a process

My grandmother was obsessed with spotlessness, which meant my mother grew up under an extreme housekeeping regime: shoes had to be taken off at the door; books weren’t allowed to be seen (too untidy); everything, from picture rail to chair rail had to be dusted every day. And of course at that time, as the only girl of three children, it was my mother’s job to do it.

When she had a family of her own (7 children), my mother had to come to an accommodation with housework. It was pointless spending all day dusting chair rails, when a horde arrived back every afternoon bearing a new cloud of dirt, but to leave it to a once a week blitz would mean living in what felt like squalor to her (and ruin a precious weekend day).

So every day, once we were out at school, she’d spend an hour on housework, using a weekly rota to keep on top of everything. That freed up the rest of her day to read, see friends, shop, whatever, knowing that if a visitor dropped by the house would be, if not spotless, respectable.

The thing that makes housework depressing (if you let it) is that it is never ‘done’. It’s a continuous process. For my mother, the answer wasn’t to avoid it, or even to outsource it. It was to embrace it as a process, enjoy it as part of life, without letting it take over. She knew her house would never be perfect, she preferred to enjoy living in it.

That’s an approach worth learning from.

After all, everything we do (and are) is a process. We’re never ‘done’.

So instead of fretting about a stasis that’s impossible to achieve, let’s make sure we all enjoy doing what might get us there.

May 11, 2021

Collective authenticity

If authenticity is doing, not being, it follows that for a company of more than one person, achieving corporate authenticity requires everyone to be ‘doing’ what is consistent with the company’s values and personality.

How can you ensure that?

Be crystal clear on the Promise you make as a business. Use that clarity to attract and recruit only those who share it. That way you can be confident that whatever work they produce ‘from within themselves’ will align with it.
Support them with a Customer Experience Score to make learning easy.

Then give them the responsibility to deliver, and the autonomy to do so.

As all master craftsmen know, practice never makes perfect, but it does make authentic.

And authentic is what clients really buy into.

May 10, 2021

Authenticity

Authenticity is a result of mastery.

Our word comes from the Greek roots ‘auto‘ – self and ‘hentes‘ – maker or doer. For the ancient Greeks it indicated someone who had mastered their craft to the point where they could produce work from within themselves, as opposed to copying from someone else.

What’s interesting to me about this is that authenticity isn’t so much about being as doing. We master our craft by interacting with the world, changing both sides of the equation in the process. Eventually, other people see us as authentic because we appear to have mastered our means of expression. Of course it never feels like that from the inside, which is why artists never give up.

You can’t be authentic, you can only do it, over and over again. In whatever field you’ve chosen to practice your art.

That’s how you leave your mark.