With our Wednesday Zoom approaching (link at end), my last OTW post about our threads has stayed with me all week. Weaving as a craft is tactile, requiring an understanding of and relationship with the threads being brought together. An obsession with efficiency and productivity changes that- threads become anonymous raw materials to be processed.
Yet, the threads that make up the stories of our individual lives are the stuff of society and vibrant, socially meaningful businesses. Efficiency and productivity in pursuit of profit are finite stories. There are other stories to be told.
Some opening thoughts:
Threads
The Way it is. William Stafford
There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.
Tapestries
Late 14th Century tapiestre: a fabric on which coloured threads of wool, silk, gold or silver are fixed to produce a pattern.
Collective Intelligence
“Think about lawyers. If you think about the best lawyer in the United States, this person is, in a way, an idiot savant. This person can be extremely knowledgeable and intelligent in a very, very narrow field, like corporate tax law, but can’t bake a cookie and can’t produce shoes. If you take this lawyer and drop him or her in the savannah, they are helpless. They are weaker than any elephant or any lion.”
Tapestries are a good metaphor for our social structures, whether organisations, businesses, communities or wider society. Something created from individual threads brought together to tell a story of where we come from, who we are, and what we might yet become. Something that reflects the strength of the threads and the artistry in the way they have been brought together.
If every one of us is a thread in a tapestry. Many of us notice a real sense of unravelling in the air. It’s often difficult to be precise, but frayed feels like a resonant word to describe many of the organisations we work for, the people in them, and the cultures that entwine them. We find ourselves being pulled away from a story we thought we were part of.
At the same time, it is difficult to determine any pattern or artistry in the design and construction of what is replacing them. They increasingly resemble Potemkin structures put together to impress visiting investors—something that will hold together just long enough to sell a story and allow the storytellers to make a swift exit to avoid the realities of what they have sold.
Being part of this may be acceptable if we’re an itinerant selling cheap machine-made tapestries, though less so if we’re one of the gold or silver threads or an artisan longing to bring them together into something that resonates with notions of long-term, residency, community, beauty and legacy.
And, of course, we are all gold and silver threads, just looking to be part of a story in a tapestry that matters.
John Kay’s “The Corporation in the 21st Century” is a compelling, if somewhat dispiriting read, not helped by also reading Nick Cohen’s latest post. Many of us still retain the idea that corporations own resources and create products and services. In reality, it seems like a quaint notion. Just about everything that can be monetised has been fragmented into countless pieces and reassembled into the Potemkin structures I mentioned earlier. Belonging to one of these now seems a ridiculous and slightly embarrassing wish that leaves us open to being scammed.
Today’s large organisations may not be something to which we would want to belong. Still, reality dictates that most of us will have an uncomfortable and unhealthy dependence on them, particularly if we have those skills that have been “in demand” for a while. If we have these skills, large organisations pay well, even as they extract every ounce of value from us, until they inevitably find an alternative that is more recently trained, cheaper, or both.
It’s not that they are intentionally malign. The reality that when fragmented capital moves around like the contents of a kaleidoscope to form new patterns, there are few places where experience matters. The drive is to create something that can be moved on, not looked after and serviced.
A good understanding of a pattern of operations is unimportant when the pattern changes so frequently. If we don’t operate the kaleidoscope, what matters is performance. Modern piecework in a connected global economy.
It is though a choice. The whole point about not building things that last is that they don’t, and at some point, the widening gap that lends us that sense of fraying will result in a change that, whilst challenging to predict, will bring us back to human values and away from performance for its own sake.
New tapestries to be woven tell stories of different games for the artisan, the heretic, or any of the myriad others who can thrive in the space outside the walls.
“It is hard to survive in the jungle when you have been trained in a zoo.”
Sonja Blignaut
Howard Gardner identified eight types of intelligence, and we have identified a few more since then. Most of our organisations focus on one or two strip mining for them at the expense of the others that do not yield short-term performance. Whether it is business, sport, science or education, we specialise. We have created intelligence monocultures that can be grown and harvested without regard to the societies in which they have grown. It becomes all about the sale, not the soil.
There is no bigger picture in tapestries made from standardised thread.
I often reflect on the idea that we have taken the explosion of collective intelligence that powered the Industrial Revolution and somehow frozen it in order to extract every last ounce of value from it. Instead of paying attention to the bigger ecological picture that we first noticed in the middle of the last century, we ignored it as inconvenient, and that then is when our economic tapestry began to fray at the edges.
The tapestries of what we might become involve many different threads of ideas, perspectives, and values. Weaving them together to create something beautiful will manifest our new collective intelligence. But only, of course, if we can be bothered….
I wonder what our collective intelligence might produce if we let it escape from inside the walls of the profit motive.
We need different looms, and weavers who take their craft seriously.
Where do we take those parts of us, those intelligences that the organisations we work for do not recognise or want? Where do we go to grow?
Outside the Walls.
We are all weavers of the stories that matter. If we create our looms through conversation, the tapestries will take care of themselves.
Weaving our stories is a practice; one that requires a rhythm of conversation, small rituals and ceremonies of recognition within communities of practice.
We do not need to be taught; we already know how to do it, and practice is about a path to whatever mastery means for each of us.
We can start such a rhythm this Wednesday, October 16th, at 5:00 pm UK. I’ll open Zoom, begin with a conversation about threads, and see where it takes us. It will be good to see you there.
Some closing thoughts.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
Charles Dickens. Tale of Two Cities.
Dickens's Tale of Two Cities starts in 1775, two hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a couple of months.
The Industrial Revolution is generally agreed to have started in 1760.
The United States was founded in 1776.
Thomas Paine wrote “The Rights of Man” between 1791 and 1792.
Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776.
Studies on the lifespan of states and empires cluster at around 250-330 years.
Interesting things, clusters.
Just saying.
Have a great week.
If the business structure of the past was a tapestry with beautiful, colorful images of a medieval world, today’s structure is more like a Jackson Pollock, chaos without a meaningful connection of images the resembles reality.
This one really resonated with me. You must be aware of Joanna Macy's metaphor of a Great Unravelling which speaks to this idea of threads coming apart.