A little while ago, I mused on what might make a good recovery process:
I’ve been thinking about this again, and with a simple addition, this becomes something much more sustainable – a process for evolution as well as recovery:
Maybe we’re always recovering?
Yesterday, I caught a repeat of “The Spark” on BBC Radio 4. A conversation with Margaret Heffernan on preparedness.
There was far too much in this 30-minute programme to summarise here. I recommend a listen, but here are some of Margaret’s brilliant thoughts on preparing for various eventualities rather than trying to predict which will happen:
And if you want to take preparedness even further, I recommend “Antifragile: things that gain from disorder”, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
If there is one thing that human beings like better than making their own individual dent in the universe, it’s being part of something that promises to ma
Humans love learning to the point of mastery, where we can start to pass that learning on to others.
We can’t help ourselves. If we don’t get the opportunity in school or at work we make our own opportunities.
Don’t believe me?
I challenge you to pick anybody in your circle who has not mastered something well enough to be able to teach you what they know.
You may not think it a skill worth mastering, but it is mastery nonetheless.
Maybe we’ve got work all wrong? We’re making people seek mastery outside work instead of helping them to find it in their work.
Why is that?
Now go.
Get started.
Move faster than you feel you should. Faster than you thought you could.
Not because you’ll get there quicker, not even because you’ll get there.
Because it’s the running, the doing, the moving forward, with others, with people like us, that is the real reward.
This is what it means to be human.
The world has changed since the last time you did this.
Before you get going again, take another look.
Knowing what you do now about the resources you have to deliver what you really want; what the people you serve really want and what the people you work with really want, which version of better are you aiming for this time?
Once you’ve accepted what is, it’s time to take stock of the resources you have available to you.
Obviously, the physical resources – cash; credit; working capital; stock; work in progress, the available working hours of your team.
Also the intangibles – your Promise of Value, your ‘way we do things round here’; your know-how and expertise; the willingness/ability of your team, clients and suppliers to support you through changes.
Less obviously perhaps, its time to take stock of what matters. Because that will almost certainly have changed, for you, your clients and your team. And that may open up whole new futures, and close some you thought you had available.
Possible futures are resources too. It’s worth taking stock of them before you decide which ones to explore.
Over the weekend, as well as reading, I listened to wise words from Scott Perry, of Creative on Purpose:
“Acceptance of what is opens the door to what is possible.”
It’s difficult to avoid grieving over what you’ve lost, which includes the future you thought you were going to have.
It is lost. There is nothing we can do about that.
But other futures are open to you. Different futures. Better futures. Because you can make them so. At least, you can do your best to make them so.
The first step in a process of recovery is to accept what is, now.
When, towards the end of last year, I decided to publish a book, I had an idea in my mind, a mental picture if you like, of what it would be like.
I envisaged something like a Ladybird book. A small format, portrait, made up of double-page spreads, with text on the left hand page, and an accompanying photograph on the facing page. Simple, easy to read, slightly nostalgic (for people of a certain age), and perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek.
I knew I couldn’t put this together myself, so I asked Rob Key at Studio Change to help.
Rob had a different mental model. Still small, still two-page spreads, still text plus illustration, but completely different.
He showed me what my book would look like according to his model and I was blown away.
The thing about models, is that they are all approximations, they are all wrong.
But some models are much more useful than others. And you’re unlikely to come up with all of them yourself. So you need to share your models, be open to new ones and be willing to improve your own.
Model interactions is how we learn to do better.
Why do I need process if I have good people?
Because making good people reinvent the wheel over and over again is a shocking waste of talent.
Talent that could be used to invent better wheels, or more interesting uses for them.