Force Multipliers.
Good policies are like glasses for the short sighted.
Like step ladders for the short of stature.
Like noise cancelling headphones.
They allow us to focus on our strengths and see beyond constraints lying outside our experience and expertise.
Good policies are force multipliers.
Reconnaissance.
A good book is a scout reporting in from reconnoitring the terrain of your potential futures.
Purity.
There’s a purity about being a consultant compared to an employee.
An employee turns up to a desk each day hoping to be engaged by work while their employer feels compelled to give them work of any kind - engaging or not.
A client only chooses a consultant when they know what, when, why, how, and how much.
And that the consultant fits all five.
Like a hand in a glove
Voyeur.
The Law is beautiful.
I marvel at the lucid, elegant lines of a well-written judgment.
The flow of reason and logic.
The appropriately blend of legal language and colourful turns of phrase.
Some the judge’s own - some borrowed from counsel’s palette.
I have this luxury of the voyeur.
I am like the art connoisseur roaming the gallery floor.
I am not the barrister artist - covered in paint splatters and reeking with the smell of turpentine with discarded canvases and upturned paint tins strewn around their chaotic studio.
Averted Vision.
The way the rods and cones in our eyes work means we see an object in the dark better by looking slightly either side of it.
This technique is called ‘averted vision’.
The way our workplaces work means we see the boss better by looking at the people either side of them.
Absenteeism. Turnover. Punctuality. Demeanour. Participation. Illness. Transfers.
Or we may choose to be wilfully blind.
The World Waits.
We speak and write and think and judge (ourselves and others) with the voice and words and rules of another.
A parent, a long ago teacher, a boss, or a corporate guru.
While our heart waits in the wings.
And the world waits for us.
Solo Fight.
If we don’t confront our fears, uncertainties, and self-doubts and wrestle with them - they will turn on those around us in the form of our damaging behaviours - and hold them hostage.
The ransom those emotions demand of us is that we fight them solo.
Every day.
Reinforced.
Bad bosses’ bad behaviour is reinforced because a bad boss assumes when everything works it it was because of their behaviour.
Not in spite of it.
We Revise.
We spend each day revising the draft we prepared the night before.
Publishing as our head hits the pillow.
Manipulation.
We hate being manipulated.
And thus we tell ourselves workplace stories.
‘I have a mortgage’. ‘I need that next promotion.’ ‘Once I finish my part time studies I’m out of here.’
Each story softens the humiliation.
Creativity & The Bad Boss.
A bad boss suppresses, deters, and even punishes creativity, innovation, imagination, and invention.
There are two reasons.
First, the bad boss has not practised any of these and therefore sees no value in them.
Second, the bad boss is invested in the status quo.
Change is a threat to the bad boss.
A Tell-Tale Sign.
A tell-tale sign that someone is not ready to manage or lead is their emphasis on personalities rather than issues.
Stepping up to the job of harnessing people and systems means having the skill and discipline to identify and harness the capability of collective capacity.
Whether a sporting coach or captain, a community leader, or a boss - we must leave behind our habit of judging people’s personality. We must cease being a pundit of the politics of relationships and trading in inside information. We must think of the sum total of the people we must direct, manage, or lead.
In your next meeting, listen to the way participants talk about other people. Do they rely on inside information about individual personalities? Do they amplify their personal histories, relationships, or networks? Do they stereotype them as ‘academics’ or ‘novices’ or ‘young’ or ‘old’ or ‘of another tribe’? Do they deploy pop psychology or ‘ my sister used to work with them’? These are the traits of people who lack the confidence and wisdom to seek out the potential in others. To get to know what they can contribute to a task or goal.
These are people unfit to lead.
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.