Rock the Boat.
If you’re going to innovate, you’ll end up rocking the boat.
Just make sure the captain is okay with that.
Matter and Manner
“I take issue with the decision you made to cancel my membership.”
The ‘matter’ on which we disagree.
“I take issue with the decision you made to cancel my membership - you idiot.’
The ‘manner’ in which we disagree.
Survivor’s Guilt.
Bad bosses must cope with survivor’s guilt.
‘I am a bad boss, and yet I’m The Boss, so I had to make those decisions affecting Good People.
So they tell themselves a story:
‘Someone had to do it. I did. Even though I know I’m a Bad Boss, I still made those decisions.’
‘I am a brave Hero.’
Sitting in Tranquil Truth.
Oh, the sweet, peaceful feeling of keeping a virtuous act to yourself.
Watching as the bus of external praise, acknowledgement, and validation closes its doors and pulls away.
Leaving you sitting in tranquil truth.
The Any and the Few.
Anyone can trumpet their organisation’s virtues on their webpage.
Few can practise them when put to the test.
The Drowning Man.
Empathy is watching a drowning man and feeling his pain of gasping for air.
Sympathy is standing on the shore, shaking your head, and saying, “That must be hard.”
Compassion is diving in to save him.
Stupidity is refusing to dive in because that would be judgemental.
Nobody Has Got a Crystal Ball.
We all deal with uncertainty and judges, just as doctors, or parents, or teachers - all walks of life - have to make decisions where there is uncertainty involved. Nobody has got a crystal ball into the future. Indeed, often we don't have a crystal ball into the past to determine what happened. And when you make decisions based on uncertainty, it can turn out that the prediction isn't that which you made as best you could with the information at hand.
Fear about making decisions … can lead to bad decisions.
Every time there's a catastrophe or a disaster arises, naturally, people will ask, ‘Who got this wrong?’, or ‘Why was it wrong?’ And sometimes there is something that has genuinely been missed that ought not have been missed. And of course, it's natural to look at that.
When a disaster happens, and you look back at those 100 cases, you can't find any difference between the one that went into a disaster and the 99 that didn't. Now, one answer to that may be, well, then we should just never make decisions. The problem with that is the system would grind to an absolute halt. Tens of thousands of these decisions are made every year, and we don't hear about the tens of thousands of decisions that are made each year in which nothing goes wrong.
Now that's not to say that you can't learn from situations where something does go seriously wrong. But it would, as I say, grind our system to a halt if everybody approached every decision to say, ‘I'm not going to make the decision. Because even if there's only 1% chance that I'm wrong … I'm going to be pilloried, and so the only way I can avoid it is to not make a decision at all’.
And that's a real risk. It's not just for judges and magistrates. - The Hon. Peter Quinlan, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia
Like a Kite.
Some people are like a kite caught in a tree.
All colour and flutter and bobbing and flapping.
Going nowhere.
Transparent.
The transparency of an organisation is inversely proportional to how often it says it’s transparent.
Because if an organisation is transparent - it doesn’t have to tell us what we can’t see.
A Simple Misunderstanding.
It was a simple misunderstanding.
Almost comical.
The kind where if two good people were involved, they would warily eye each other off, until one and then both would burst into laughter as they realised the absurdity that had them at serious odds.
The kind where the one who thinks the other is out to get them, is shocked, then embarrassed, then delighted to realise it was the opposite and they were working towards the same goal.
But in this case, one was a bad boss.
Who felt no curiosity, only threat.
So the bad boss did what bad bosses do and did not inquire because the bad boss did not have the courage nor the desire to serve the common good.
The bad boss flexed their positional power.
Pity. For the other. For the bad boss. For the common good.
It was a simple misunderstanding.
Obstacles.
It’s good to be forced to prove what we believe.
To have the ideas and opinions we have juggled in our brain or kicked along the road - come up against an obstacle.
Otherwise we might spend the rest of our lives as catching our own ideas or kicking down a wrong path.
And So We Dance.
We assume that Step 1: Step Back is an artificial imposition of a pause.
As if the world and all the circumstances we have identified as relevant to our decision have frozen, awaiting our direction on how to deal with them.
Or that by not pausing - by being ‘decisive’, we arrest the descent into anarchy by our intervention.
The pause is a recognition of the inherent and natural movement of events onward.
The pause allows us to observe the path of events, and for those events to sort themselves out - whatever that looks like.
It addresses our temptation, to paraphrase Vaclav Havel, be like a child that ‘pulls on a plant to make it grow more quickly’.
By stepping back, we recognise that delay is part of the rhythm of the Universe.
And so we dance.
Chesterton’s Fence.
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’” - G.K. Chesterton
One of the many challenges of Leadership is navigating Chesterton’s Fences.
What is the purpose of this custom or practice?
Why are Things Done This Way Around Here?
Why does this role exist?
Why is this person doing this role?
By definition, Leadership requires clearing away fences.
As Chesterton advises, don’t clear it until you know why it’s there.
What’s in it?
A bad boss asks: ‘What’s in it for me?’
A good boss asks: ‘What’s in it for us?’
A leader asks: ‘What’s in it for our future?’
That’s why real leaders are rare.
The White Couch.
A white leather couch won’t hide the dirt, marks, and evidence of use.
‘We shouldn’t have bought that white couch,’ you lament.
While the red couch sits nearby, hiding its dirt, marks and evidence of use.