Jigsaw.
Becoming a parent is like inheriting a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle.
Partially finished by our parents, their parents, and their parents’ parents.
If we’re fortunate, we receive a picture with the four edges finished, a large part of the sky completed, and all the pieces in good condition.
Some parents inherit a puzzle mostly unfinished. Pieces wrongly forced and jammed together. Hammered into place. Some with pieces chewed, broken, missing, or defaced. No box with a picture to follow. Nothing to guide them. At worst - a pile of shredded mess dumped at their feet.
Whatever condition we inherit - parenting is ensuring we gift our children a jigsaw in better condition than the one we received.
Causation = Meaning
Causation is what creates the appearance of meaning. - George Saunders
Asserting positional power to get things done denies us the meaning that comes from causation.
All that follows is therefore meaningless.
Including our work.
Workforce Preparation.
“One time we were looking at a picture of the pope and everybody bowing in front of him. My father said, “Now, look at those humans. Here’s one human standing here, and all these others are bowing in front of him. Now, what’s the difference? ....“This difference is the hat he’s wearing.” (If it was a general, it was the epaulets. It was always the costume, the uniform, the position.) “But,” he said, “this man has the same problems as everybody else: he eats dinner; he goes to the bathroom. He’s a human being.” - Richard Feynman”
You could earn 1% to a maximum of 5% towards your final Psychology 100 assessment by participating in research by the Honours students. It meant sitting in front of a computer for three hours hitting keys on command to measure response times to various stimuli. Or answering multi-choice questions. Regardless of the experiment, participants were left afterwards with at least a headache or feeling light-headed and mentally fatigued.
All for 1% of a final mark.
Good preparation for the workforce.
Sensible, intelligent, level-headed humans routinely choose to suffer being inflicted with nonsense and time-wasting and performance and tokenism and mind-numbing meetings and patronising speeches and dispiriting random behaviours by other human beings who put their pants or dress on the same way as we do - that in any other context would immediately cause us to walk out.
All for a salary.
With What We Have.
We do what we can with what we have.
The first job of a leader is to Define Reality.
To do a stocktake of what she has - including in her people.
The leader must get to know the competence and capacity of each person she intends to take where they otherwise will not go. She must spend time with them seeing them in action. She cannot rely on what her predecessor may have told her. She must identify any constraints on them she must remove to liberate them to achieve a potential that even they may not know they have.
Then she must get out of the way.
Only stepping in to repeat the above to identify how each person has grown.
Decisions Were Being Made.
‘Some mistakes were made along the way. And that’s good. Because it means that some decisions were being made.’ Steve Jobs
To maximise the learning and continuous improvement from a mistake, you must be able to find the errors in your working out.
A good decision making process such as the Five Steps allows us to do this.
Did we not Step Back long enough to allow us to shed emotion and bias?
Did we not Define the Issue correctly and get distracted by the Topic or an Agenda or Hype instead of Reality?
Did we not collect and Assess the Information thoroughly or accurately enough?
Did we not check for any Bias we may have and become distracted from our Widget?
Did we fail to Give a Hearing to anyone likely to be affected by our decision and deny ourselves the benefit of someone with skin in the game?
A Good Decision Making process gives us the benefit of a decision making autopsy. ‘Autopsy’ comes from the Greek ‘autopsia’ - to see with one’s own eyes.
Conductor.
The orchestra conductor isn’t the best musician in the orchestra.
The choir conductor isn’t the best singer in the choir.
Each is the person every musician and chorister looks to for direction and follows so each can play and sing to their potential.
The only real power of a manager is the authority to call a meeting.
What happens after that is out of their control.
The Leader Must Be a Realist.
The more unsure a team or organisation is about its competence, the higher the level of hype and cheer-leading about its virtues. The boss talks them up, whistling past the graveyard of failure and incompetence.
That’s why the first job of a leader is to define reality.
The leader must be a realist.
The leader must seek out and soberly look at the evidence both before them, and presented by others who the leader must reassure their frankness will be respected.
The leader will discover for themselves what the silent majority already knows.
The first gift the leader gives her followers is sharing the unvarnished, and often painful reality with them.
This is a practical sign of her trust and reliance on them. Many will not be worthy of one or both. But that’s why leaders are brave. She only needs a few to hear her call and respond to it.
The leader can then authentically applaud the virtues of truth and trust she has witnessed in the team or organisation, rather than manufacture fake ‘positives’.
Leader or Manager?
Here’s a test to identify whether you are a manager or a leader.
Highly value predictability?
Manager.
The Foundation of Children’s Education.
Chatting to my 11 year old.
‘Thank you for joining me on the walk today.’
‘I didn’t have a choice.’
‘That’s true. I still wanted to acknowledge it, though. I suppose there’s not a lot of things a child your age has a choice in what to do … What DO you have a choice about in your life, Darcey?’
She thought for about five seconds.
‘Whether to pay attention in class.’
Beyond Recognition.
If we met the person many people think we are - we’d never recognise us.
I’ve Never Lived This Day.
What I’m going to write must be the most obvious yet overlooked profound statement one could make.
I have never lived this day.
I have never experienced 59 years and 158 days old.
I have never experienced being married for 18 years and 267 days.
I have never co-parented a 14 years and 148 day old daughter. (Although I have once co-parented a 11 years, 3 months, and 15 days old daughter.)
I have absolutely no experience in what I’m doing.
A total novice.
Today.
Like disembarking from a train in a foreign city. Enough familiarity for me to function.
Otherwise - I’m making it all up as I go along.
Everybody’s bluffing.
Their Little Ledge.
They plant their flag and pitch their tent.
Settle onto their narrow little ledge and a smug sense of achievement.
Gaze down upon those of us, beginning our ascent.
Toss down advice, along with showers of pebbles.
Oblivious they are miles below the summit.
Lawyering.
In the movie ‘The Hurt Locker’ there is a scene where the Army bomb disposal expert thinks he’s defused a bomb, only to tug on a cable, that joins to six other cables, each attached to a bomb buried just below the surface.
That’s what lawyering can be like.
Spring.
With the unimportant, our life is a line stretching behind us. The trivia of a minute, hour, day or week ago quickly disappears, never to be recalled.
With the important, our life is like a tightly coiled spring. Our mother’s touch, our father’s grin, kind words from a childhood friend, first praise from a teacher. Though distant in time, they are recalled instantly to mind and heart.
Once Told.
To the boss or their minions it’s a fib. A white lie. A protection of privacy or confidentiality. An avoidance of having to explain context to those who don’t have a need to know.
The ends justifies the means.
To you and me who know the Truth - it’s a Lie.
Once told - the boss can never be trusted about anything.
Worse - once told and never challenged - the boss learns she can lie about anything.
And Therefore.
We don’t say ‘She’s black, and therefore …’. Or ‘He’s Greek, and therefore …’. Or ‘She’s a woman, and therefore…’.
Yet we still regularly hear in meetings ‘He doesn’t like conflict, and therefore …’. ‘She’s new, and therefore …’. ‘He’s never worked in a school, and therefore …’. ‘She’s an introvert, and therefore …’.
The binary ‘therefore’ shuts down any nuance or rich gifts of insight that often come from difference.
It’s not political correctness.
It’s smart.
Zip Up Our Sleeping Bag.
The first step … is to forget about cracking the case or displaying your intellectual acuity. Try instead to see yourself modestly and realistically, as one of the fallible human creatures depicted throughout serious history and literature, as well as in contemporary social science. This will help you avoid mistakes and clear the way for the second step. - Joseph L. Badaracco, Managing in the Gray – 5 Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work
The First Step in the Five Steps to a Good Decision is - Step Back.
When we step back - we surrender to our humanity. We submit to the weight of the decision before us. To the height and gradient and difficulty of the mountain. We set up our base camp and crawl into our tent, zip up our sleeping bag and do nothing.
Confessing to our humanity only makes the heroism of the next four steps more magnificent.
Flipping and Flopping.
Making decisions without a Widget progresses organisation and self as a landed fish flipping and flopping on the beach.