I'm not sure whether, since I'm retiring soon, I'll be invited to
present at Knowledge Management conferences from now on. So if you're
able to make it to KMWorld 2009 in San Jose November 16-19 this year,
I'd love to see you. I'm running a half-day workshop, Introducing
Web 2.0 to Your Organization: A Practical Guide,
on Monday, November 16. Then on Tuesday November 17 I'm doing a
presentation on Risk
Management: A KM Approach, as
well as serving on a panel later in the day. The links above are to my
Slideshare presentation decks for the workshop and presentation, which
you can download if you want to assess whether they're worth attending.
Always the best part of these conferences is the networking between the
sessions, though. More on the conference here.
Full brochure here.
Earlier
this month I wrote
about the possibility of developing a Finding Your Sweet Spot
Workbook to accompany my book
Finding
the Sweet Spot. I proposed a
schema of nine types of what might be called Natural Work, that might
help people hone in on their Gifts (what they're uniquely good at
doing) and their Passions (what they love doing):
Explorers, whose work
is study and research, and whose work-product is discovery and insight
Interpreters, whose
work is mentoring and facilitation, and whose work-product is
understanding
Inventors, whose work
is imagining, and whose work-product is ideas
Designers, whose work
is crafting, and whose work-product is models
Generators, whose work
is creating and building, and whose work-product is 'goods' and services
Nurturers, whose work
is cultivating, and whose work-product is well-being
Menders, whose work is
sustaining, and whose work-product is regeneration
Actors, whose work is
re-creating, and whose work-product is fun
Connectors, whose work
is distributing, and whose work-product is cross-pollination
I also proposed to take the various published lists of 'green' jobs and
jobs that meet real needs of the 21st century, and classify them into
these nine categories, to help people identify their Purpose (what's
needed in the world that they care about).
Quite a few readers of the book have told me that, while they love the
concept of the three circles and the Sweet Spot where they
intersect, they have two practical problems using the model. First,
they say that the exercises in the book to help them find their Gifts,
Passions and Purpose don't 'work' for them -- they're too conceptual
and require more self-knowledge and more knowledge of what the world
needs than they, or the average person, can be expected to have.
Second, they assert that most of what they think fits in
their Sweet Spot (work that they love doing and are good at,
and which meets a real need) is not 'valued' highly enough for them to
make a decent living at it -- either it's something (art, literature,
software, music, design etc.) that so many people do (or which is so
easy to copy) that the market price for such work is nearly zero, or
it's something (e.g. legitimate, practical health, mental health, and
geriatric health products and services, and healthy, unpolluted foods)
that their desperate customers are too poor to afford.
As I thought of this, I began to realize two things that I should have
noticed earlier:
People learn
(including learning what they love doing and are good at doing) by doing things,
not by thinking or reading lists of ideas or types of jobs.
The entire economy is
shifting, fairly quickly and radically, from the unsustainable
Industrial Economy to a post-industrial Natural Economy characterized
by high prices for scarce materials and low prices for labour. [At a
conference of financial forecasters I attended yesterday, I heard that
this will be a long-term trend. That means lower prices (as in free)
for non-commodities and services, and hence an increasing struggle for
entrepreneurs (anyone who isn't subsidized by government handouts,
payoffs and bailouts)].
Learning-by-doing is in fact how most Natural Entrepreneurs I know
discovered their Sweet Spot. So, my workbook will be light on
intellectual exercises (like thinking about what tasks in your life
you've been most praised for, or most relished taking on) and heavy on
real-life adventures (like going and observing and talking with the
owner of a small, local business you admire, with a list of questions
to talk with them about, or taking up a new hobby or volunteer role
you've always wanted to do, or at least thought you did). My hope is
that, just as my friends Paul and Grace had their aha! moment about
their Sweet Spot (helping the world eat better) after they made an
excursion to Tibet, encouraging people to just get out and try stuff
they've never thought of doing, might help a lot of readers really
discover their Gifts and Passions, those they might never have
considered if they'd stayed inside the confines of their house and
workplace.
Another thing my Workbook will offer is a way to take some of the
research activities discussed later in my book, and apply them earlier
in the process of discovering your Purpose. Many people, I've
discovered, don't see unmet needs that are staring them in the face and
which offer wonderful entrepreneurial opportunities, because they don't
know how to look for them, recognize them, research them and ask the
right questions to surface them. As I explain in the book, you can't
just ask people what they need, because usually they don't know. (I
described a product much like an iPod to people in 1971 as part of my
university thesis work, and respondents looked at me as if I were from
Mars.) Surfacing needs that you can turn into entrepreneurial
opportunities is an iterative, emergent process that comes from
exploring and prompting and imagining possibilities with the people who
will become your customers. The same thing applies to discovering your
Purpose. You'll never discover it inside your own head, no matter how
knowledgeable and imaginative you may be. So the workbook will take a
much more externally-focused, conversational, research-based approach
to finding your Purpose, and hence ultimately your Sweet Spot.
The issue of how our economy is shifting, quietly but tectonically,
from an Industrial Growth economy that rewards wealth, size,
ruthlessness and political connections, to what I am calling a Natural
Economy characterized by much lower prices (except for scarce
resources), generosity, reciprocality, trust, modesty, responsiveness,
responsibility, sustainability and the importance of relationships, is
staggeringly important, and I'm kicking myself for not recognizing the
signs of its emergence earlier. Chris Anderson's book Free
demystifies the phenomenon that has delinked price from value and
obsolesced hoarding of intellectual capital. The proportion of a car's
'dealer cost' attributable to labour is expected to plummet from 70% to
30% within a decade. Generation Y is justifiably complaining that their
wages are subsistence with little hope of improvement, and the returns
for fledgling entrepreneurs, no matter how lucky or bright, don't look
much better to them.
This
is a world that no longer pays fair.
Unions will wail. Overpaid executives and fat financial industry
Ponzi-scheme artists, recently or soon to be laid off, will sell their
sports cars and buy taxi licenses. And the poor, working long hours in
multiple jobs for pathetic wages, will become even poorer. Not fair,
but it's here to stay. Five billion people vying for jobs means labour
supply is so much higher than demand that your work is worth next to
nothing.
What's good about this is that much of what we want and need now will
also soon cost next to nothing. Your income will keep dropping, but so
will a significant proportion of your costs of living. It's called
deflation, and while it's currently being hidden from consumers by
price-gouging corporatist oligopolies who are stealing the labour
savings as obscene profits and more obscene bonuses, it's only a matter
of time before wage-earners run out of money and stop buying products
with outrageous markups, opening the way for new providers who will
disintermediate the corporatists and offer their products and services
for next to nothing. For a short while these may well be Chinese
providers, but as oil and commodity and resultant transportation costs
soar, the providers will ultimately be mostly your neighbours. We are
headed for a relocalized, community-based Gift
Economy, with low prices for
most things, and low wages. Such an economy will not respond to
advertising or hype. It will be based on trust, generosity and
reciprocity, and those who try to exploit it will be quickly identified
and ostracized. It's already begun, as Chris' book explains.
Just as Generation Y has blurred the distinction between work and
non-work activities, they are learning that sustainable work is
inseparable from a sustainable life. With that worldview, the Sweet
Spot no longer identifies just the work you're meant to do, it identifies the way
you're meant to live. So,
instead of complaining that the work in their Sweet Spot (what they
love to do, and are good at doing, that meets a real need in the world)
doesn't pay enough, Generation Y is beginning to look at how much they need to
earn to do what is in their Sweet Spot,
essentially turning my whole model on its head. Some retirees with
inadequate pensions are doing the same thing. They are looking not only
to find work that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, but to find a
way of life that is sustainable, responsible and joyful, of which work
is an indistiguishable part. This is part of what Thomas Princen calls The Logic of Sufficiency,
and some of us now get it, and a lot more will soon have no choice but
to follow.
My workbook then, will not just help readers discover the work that is
in their Sweet Spot, but help them to determine how much they need to
earn, and what they need to do in their non-work lives, to "afford"
that work. It will explore, for example, the paradox that often an
extra dollar of income can actually 'cost' (in taxes, higher clothing,
transportation, child-care, late night fast-food meals, etc.) more than
a dollar, and that conversely accepting a lower income can actually
increase both your quality of life and your net wealth.
The workbook will be, in short, not only a more practical guide to
discovering how we can discover the work we're meant to do; it will be
a guide to discovering the life we're meant to live.
A
couple of years ago I
posted some mid-year and year-end "intentions", to distinguish them
from "resolutions". Intentions are not aspirations; they are things we
are in the process of doing, achieving, or becoming. They are what
we're meant
to do, and who
we're meant
to be. We have already begun to
realize them.
They are, as the word's etymology implies, what we are "stretching
towards".
I later shifted from intentions that are results-oriented
(goals) to
intentions that are process-oriented
(practices), because I realized
that all of the things that are worth doing for a lifetime are complex,
and can never really be completed. There is no mastery, there is only
the practice.
More recently, I described the importance of aligning our
long-term intentions (what we are meant to do and be for what's left
of our lives) and our short-term intentions (what we
are
meant to do and be right now, today, this week). Until they are
aligned, we will continue to live in this unreal space, in the knowing/doing disconnect
-- we know we should be doing X (we are good
at it, we love doing it, and it is needed in the world), but we keep on
doing Y. We do Y because it is urgent, because it is easy, because it
is fun, or because we don't think we have any choice. Things are the
way they are for a reason, and until we understand what that reason is,
we will not be able to change it, or adapt ourselves to it. We will
keep on doing Y, and X will never get done.
If our long-term intentions are X-stuff, then when we identify
short-term intentions that are also X-stuff, that are "stretching
toward" the same place, we will see starkly the disconnect between it
and the Y-stuff we're actually doing. Something then has to shift.
Either we stop doing (some of) the Y-stuff to make time and space for
the X-stuff, or we acknowledge that we don't actually intend
to do X at
all. We're merely dreaming about it, or hoping it will happen
magically. Recipe for unhappiness, self-dissatisfaction and a life
wasted. If we were able to hear our future
obituary, and it was all
Y-stuff, would we see it as a life well-spent? And if not, what's
holding us back from doing the X-stuff? And if it's lack of time or
money holding us back, are we really
intending to do X?
Example: One of my long-term intentions is to create working models of
a better way to live and make a living. I've written a book about how
to create sustainable, responsible enterprises. I'm working on a
novel/screenplay that depicts what life in a sustainable world 200
years from now might look like, to help us imagine possibilities. Right
now I have James Kunstler's book World
Made by Hand
sitting beside me -- airplane reading as I make my way to visit my
father for the Thanksgiving weekend. In this, my long-term and
short-term intentions are aligned.
Second example: Another of my long-term intentions is to work with
others
to stop the Alberta Tar Sands. I have a book, Andrew Nikiforuk's Tar
Sands sitting
beside Kunstler's, but beyond the vague idea of some kind of Open Space
event, to brainstorm with others creative ways to disrupt and close
down
this ecological nightmare, I have no short-term intention stretching
towards that longer-term one. Worse, I'm anxious about the longer-term
intention: I have no passion for this kind of work (though I have great
passion for helping others do it), and I know people
whose lives have been devastated as a result of having been arrested,
for nothing. No
question this is holding me back, and that my intentions in this area,
if that's
what they are, are out of alignment.
This brings me back to practices. It occurs to me that, when I retire
(soon), I will be best able to align and stretch toward both my
short-term and long-term intentions by allocating specific time blocks
to
three kinds of practices every day (though I recognize I'll have to be
flexible on the times): (a) Reconnecting practices, (b)
Capacity-building, activism and model-building practices, and (c)
Reflecting practices. Or, put more simply, sensing (mornings), doing
(afternoons) and thinking and playing (evenings).
Starting with these three blocks of time, I developed the chart below
that shows my long-term intentions, the long-term practices that
"stretch toward" those intentions, and the short-term, daily intentions
(exercises) in alignment with the longer-term ones. The long-term
practices tie into the nine steps in my What You Can Do graphic above,
and the colour (red, yellow, green) is from my 'scorecard' and shows
how much work I have to do on each.
Long-Term
Intention
Long-Term
Practices
Short-Term
Intentions (Exercises & Projects)
Hrs/day
now
Hrs/day
intended
Reconnecting
with All Life on
Earth, Instincts & Emotions
Appreciation
(1) Presence/Paying
Attention (2) Heart-Opening/Letting
Go (3)
What I discovered in putting this chart together was that (a) many of
the things I do today, things which take up most of my day, really
don't contribute at all to my intentions, and (b) when I reallocated
time in my day to these three blocks of time (right column), it
required a lot of thought, imagination and work to come up with a list
of short-term intentions (exercises and projects) with which to
usefully fill that time -- exercises and projects that would stretch
toward the long-term intentions. And even with retirement, I suspect
"freeing up" six additional hours a day for intentional work will be a
challenge -- it will mean
less time on e-mail and casual reading, for example (i.e. getting away
more often from this computer).
The third column of this chart is new and tentative and incomplete, but
it's also for me a personal breakthrough. I am not sure whether this is
the solution, for me, to the knowing/doing disconnect and the tyranny
of the urgent over the important -- the real formula for Getting Things
Done.
Since
my book Finding
the Sweet Spot was
published, I've been thinking about how to make it more useful. I did
set up a companion website,
but I was far too ambitious in its design, and was naive in the
expectation that people could/would actually compare ideas, Gifts,
Passions and Purposes with others online, and that there would be
anough traffic on the site to create a self-organized 'market' of ideas
and potential partners.
Lately I've wondered whether it might be possible to create an online
workbook to accompany the book, one that would include exercises to
discover your Gifts, Passions and Purpose, and find the Sweet Spot at
their intersection. Rather than starting with the industrial
classifications, the way most career counselling guides do, I thought
it might be more appropriate to start with the types of activities that
go on in a Natural Economy and Natural Society. My first attempt to
delineate these (which was part of the research for my novel) is
illustrated above. Nine "meta-careers" are identified:
Explorers, whose work
is study and research, and whose
work-product is discovery and insight
Interpreters, whose
work is mentoring and facilitation, and
whose work-product is understanding
Inventors, whose work
is imagining, and whose work-product
is ideas
Designers, whose work
is crafting, and whose work-product
is models
Generators, whose work
is creating and building, and whose
work-product is 'goods' and services
Nurturers, whose work
is cultivating, and whose
work-product is well-being
Menders, whose work is
sustaining, and whose work-product
is regeneration
Actors, whose work is
re-creating, and whose work-product
is fun
Connectors, whose work
is distributing, and whose
work-product is cross-pollination
I developed this framework in the context of essential work of a
post-civilization society. These are all things that are needed in a
community, and which we offer to others (because no individual
is self-sufficient), to
make the community
self-sufficient. They cut across all of the modern, specialized
'disciplines' that have become our modern economy's strait-jacket: we
think of disciplines like 'sales representative' or 'engineer' or
'musician' or 'athlete' as the only way collective effort can be
divvied up and parsed, because it is the only way we have ever seen
work categorized. So, for example, the work of a scientist can entail
all nine of the work categories listed above, as can the work of an
artist or a programmer.
My belief is that our natural affinity is more for one or a few of
these nine work categories, than it is to a modern 'specialty': People
who are good at designing could be as useful designing shirts as
designing recipes. People who are good at mending people (e.g. doctors)
could be as useful and passionate about mending trains (e.g.
mechanics). So I think it might be useful to think about what we are
meant to do using these nine meta-ways of being of use, that draw on
similar natural Gifts and similar Passions.
In thinking about my own Sweet Spot, I generally identify "reflecting"
and "imagining possibilities" (category 3 activities) and "writing" (a
category 4 activity) as being what I'm meant to do. I am passionate but
not especially gifted at facilitation, conversing and demonstrating
(category 2 and 9
activities). I am competent but not especially passionate about
research (category1 activity). And I am neither competent nor
passionate about category 5-8 work, though I recognize their great
value and would not start an enterprise that didn't have partners who
were both gifted and passionate about such work.
When I look at wild creatures, I see evidence of learning and practice
of all nine of these categories of essential work. The need for us to
be social, to associate and collaborate and, together, to do all nine
types of work effectively, transcends history, geography and species.
Another thing I like about this categorization of essential work is
that it demonstrates the uselessness of a lot of the work that is being
done today by millions of highly-paid people, and hence might give
pause to young people drawn to these 'professions' simply because
they're easy and lucrative. Lawyers, stock-brokers and insurance agents
come to mind, for example. None of these professions produce anything
of essential value. They are parasites of the current, unsustainable
and dysfunctional industrial economy. The post-civilization world will
not need
anyone to do these things.
So if I were to develop a Finding the Sweet Spot
workbook, to help people discover the work they're meant to do, I would
be strongly tempted to use this nine-category classification of
essential work as the basis for doing so, and to re-cast the exercises
about discovering your Gifts, your Passions, your Purpose and your
Partners (those with complementary Gifts who share your Purpose)
accordingly. So, for example, in listing the dozens of possible and
needed 'green' careers in Roberts and Brandum's book Get a Life!
I would reorganize them into the nine categories above.
I'd welcome your thoughts on this plan. Is this way of discovering what
you're meant to do too conceptual for most people? Does it require a
degree of self-knowledge and the workings of an economy (Natural or
Industrial) that is beyond most people's capabilities? Is it
counter-intuitive?
Although the book has not been a popular success, I still think it
could be very valuable to young people about to embark on their
careers, boomers about to 'retire' from their first careers,
and frustrated and underemployed workers of all ages. I'm just
trying to figure out how to make it accessible and useful enough that
it gets
the attention it deserves.
BLOG Resilience is Futile
(Adapt and Improvise Instead)
I've
been using the word resilience to
describe the capacity -- of individuals, communities and organizations
-- to improvise, to respond well in the moment. But I
think resilience is the wrong word -- it is from the Latin
meaning "springing back".
Humans try to be resilient, acting as if everything is temporary, or
cyclical, and as if it will always eventually possible to go back to
the way things were before a challenge arose. That's why so many of us
live in misery, in false hope. While we aspire to move back to the way
things once were -- after the desertification, after the forests and
fish have gone -- the rest of all-life-on-Earth is moving on,
forward.
What we try to do instead of adapting to the changes in our
environment, is to try to change the environment to suit us. We've
become very good at this, but it's unsustainable. What we've created in
human-made environments is fragile, shabby, and ineffective. Much of
human employment today is fixing all the human-made things that
constantly break, and break down. Much future employment will be
cleaning up the mess we've created with the human-made,
non-biodegradable broken stuff we've thrown away.
We try to be resilient, and to force changes in our environment,
because, after learning that our cultural "software" can adapt very
quickly (in as little as a generation), we discovered too late that our
biological "hardware" adapts over millions of years, not decades. Today
we're racked with epidemic rates of diseases of maladaptation --
notably immune system diseases, cancers, and mental illnesses. Our
bodies just can't adapt to stress, the malnutrition of the modern
processed monoculture food system, and the toxins in our air, water,
soils and foods. They're still designed for life in the uncrowded,
abundant and unpolluted rainforest.
Alas, there's nothing we can do about our bodies, nor is there anything
sustainable we can do to
our environment. Resilience is, in fact, futile -- we cannot expect
things to change back to what they were so that we can bounce back to
what we were. And in Darwin's sense we cannot evolve either -- at best
we can unschool our descendants to acquire the capacities that we lost,
or never had -- like the ones depicted in the charts above. We're
probably too late, those of us over 30, to learn them all effectively
ourselves now.
What we can do, however, is adapt and improvise.
Evolution and adaptation are not about springing back, but rather
springing forward. Evolution
is from the Latin meaning "rolling out",
but it is worth noting that Darwin avoided the term he is now so
associated with, and instead in his books used the term "descent with
modification" (descent in the sense of 'descendants' --
change only
occurred with the passing of genes 'down' from one generation to the
next). Adaptation
comes from the Latin meaning "fitting in" (hence to
Darwin "survival of the fittest" was not about strength or intelligence
but about adaptability). Improvisation
comes from the Latin meaning "[responding to the] unexpected". These
are the only effective responses to change in complex systems.
Wild creatures have this ability to adapt and improvise: to fight, to
flee, to change what
they eat, where they live, what they do. They migrate, they hibernate,
they adapt to different foods, neighbours and environments, as well as
changes to members of their own community. Evolution helps them do
this,
by selectively favouring that capacity -- those that can't adapt and
improvise,
perish.
So
how do we, poor maladaptive and conservative creatures that we are,
learn to adapt ("fit in") and improvise ("respond to the unexpected"),
and can we help our communities and organizations do so as well?
Last week I visited with one of the most adaptive and improvisational
organizations I know, one that I profile in my book, called Mountain
Equipment Co-op. It's a true one-person-one-vote cooperative, that
began with 6 members and which now has millions. Only a tiny proportion
actually participate in MEC's decisions, but it's enough to know that
if they started doing things the members didn't like, that could change
very quickly. They generate only enough 'profit' to cushion them
through economic downturns -- any other surplus is returned as a cash
refund to members based on their annual purchases. The people I've met
like working there, and they really do care about being of service,
offering excellent products (made in Canada whenever possible), and
doing excellent work.
As I spoke with and visited them it occurred to me that, compared to
other, profit-for-shareholders companies that sell sporting goods, MEC
is culturally
more adaptive and resilient in 18 ways:
Less
dependence on growth: they
would thrive in a steady-state economy, because there are no external
shareholders looking for revenue growth and 'share appreciation' (each
member gets one voting share, which is always worth $5)
Fewer
levels of hierarchy to
connect and move: MEC is a very flat organization, so when something
needs to be changed, everyone knows and everyone works on it
More
distributed decision making:
customer-facing workers have the authority to satisfy customers and
improve processes without having to go through approval policies
Built-in
job/supply redundancy: less
efficient but more effective: you never hear "that's not my department"
at MEC; their people know a lot about everything in the store, so if
someone's away there's someone else who knows what they do, and so
people get variety in their work and a chance to learn what others do;
and if a supplier fails or is unable to meet demand, there's another
available to take up the slack
Less
debt: big corporations take
on debt to provide leverage that allows profits to rise faster than
revenues (and exposes them to commensurate drops); MEC is not in the
business to make profits, so it doesn't acquire needless debts
More
autonomy in decisions: less
dependence on outside investors; the members own the company, and no
outsiders have a say in what gets done, or doesn't get done
Less
need to create demand: MEC
responds to real customer demands, rather than advertising and
marketing to create artificial ones
More
connected to members/customers/suppliers:
you'll find MEC people on the slopes, on bike excursions, and in
campgrounds, where customers show them what they need and they show
customers what they have to offer
More
connected to community: MEC
invests extensively in community activities, because it makes sense to
do so; for example, a percentage of sales from bike products go for
advocacy for more bicycle lanes and facilities in the cities the
company is located in
Less
vulnerable to downturns: when
sales drop, the refund to members drops, but everything else continues
Less
dependent on government largesse:
MEC needs no big corporate subsidies or bailouts like the auto makers,
the banks, the steel companies, the energy companies, the agribusiness
industry, and all the other big, unadaptable,
unimprovising profit-for-shareholder giants feeding at the
government trough
More
diverse people: MEC has one
of the youngest and most diverse workforces I've seen
More
collaborative, less
competitive: the people I saw there work in teams and are always
talking and consulting with each other
More
"safe-fail" innovation: they
test a lot of products with small customer groups first, so they can,
as Dave Snowden puts it, "safe-fail" instead of having new products be
"fail-safe"
More
socially responsive and responsible:
MEC's decision to pull its popular bisphenol-A laden
polycarbonite Nalgene water bottles off the shelves shook the Canadian
government and the industry into reviewing all the toxins in plastic
containers; they did it without fanfare, and they did it because the
members told them it was the right thing to do
Less
vulnerable to disruptive innovations:
the company is so close to its members, who have their pulse on what's
happening, what's new and what's needed in their industry, they're
unlikely to be caught off guard by competing innovations
More
risk-adapting than risk-mitigating:
big corporations try to mitigate risks by playing it safe with new
products, by selling a wide range of different quality products at
different prices, by offshoring etc.; MEC constantly monitors what's in
demand and what isn't and uses lower more frequent order quantities to
adapt to changes, even though this means not taking advantage of volume
discounts
Better
reputation: the company's
products are not cheap, since they insist on quality, and they are
astonishingly candid (their blog confesses that it's a constant
struggle to manufacture in Canada because if manufacturing plants pay
generous wages to assemblers and sewers, customers complain that the
product prices -- and remember these have no profit margin -- are
unaffordable)
Here are 10 other things that organizations can do to be adaptive and
improvisational, that I've seen some Natural Enterprises (especially
cooperatives) do (I don't know whether MEC does any of these, but it
would be interesting to find out):
Contingency
planning: be aware of and
assess the risks and sensitivities of the organization, and discuss
with everyone what you would do if and when these issues arose
Scenario
planning: imagine the
longer-term scenarios that the organization might face, and explore
strategies that will work under multiple scenarios or which can be
implemented as soon as there is evidence an unexpected scenario is
beginning to come to pass
Simulations:
run computer or "table-top" simulations or organization-wide "practice
runs" that can help you imagine and anticipate unexpected occurrences
($200/barrel oil, 10% inflation or 4% deflation, a collapse in the
$US), their impact on your customers and employees and hence on your
organization, and how you might respond to them
Analyze
narrow escapes: the swine flu
was, fortunately, not virulent, but studying it can help you understand
what would happen if it has been, and what to do if the next one is;
what other narrow escapes have you had that you can learn from?
Recruit
emotional intelligence: find
people who have the ability to live comfortably with ambiguity and
anxiety, and who know how to achieve consensus and resolve conflicts
amicably
Study
nature's improvisational ability:
have someone in your organization who understands how natural
ecosystems work and how to use biomimicry to advantage in
your organization
Stay
ahead of the curve:
understand and constantly reassess what differentiates you from other
organizations in your industry; never stop innovating your processes,
products and tools
Self-manage:
encourage everyone in the organization to self-assess their "sweet
spot" (what they do well for the organization that they love doing and
which meets a need they care about), their intentions, and their own
performance and success on their own terms, and share that candidly
with others
Early-warning
pattern-recognition:
encourage your people to be constantly thinking about "what might come
next", and what the early indicators of each major change might be;
track those early indicators
Manage
"on principle": since
decisions aren't made on the basis of "maximizing shareholder value",
what are the principles that guide you instead when you have to make
quick decisions in response to changing circumstances?
So much for organizations
wanting to be adaptable and improvisational. What about communities and
individuals?
Communities (small towns, villages, intentional communities and
neighbourhoods within cities) are a form of co-operative organization,
the only difference being that they have a wider and more essential set
of products and services, and have members instead of customers. But
many the same principles of adaptation and improvision apply: autonomy,
steady-state, diversity, built-in redundancy, non-indebtedness,
collaboration, non-hierarchical connection, risk awareness,
self-management "on principle", emotional intelligence, biomimicry,
contingency planning (including scenarios and simulations),
candour and
responsiveness. The town I
live in tries hard, but they're zero for fourteen on these measures.
Individuals are of course part of communities and organizations, but
there are also some things we can each do as individuals to be more
adaptive and improvisational in our lives: be
autonomous (not dependent on those outside
your community), live within your means (a life of sufficiency and
comfort, not one dependent on tomorrow's income being more than
today's), get debt-free, self-manage, build emotional intelligence and
other personal capacity, collaborate, plan for contingencies, always be
honest, stay healthy, be good to yourself, and be open,
attentive and responsive.
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I connect with in real time, f2f, via IM, Skype or SL chat.]
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content
Blog writers
want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs