Reflections 14th July

Something about exercising the dog, and thoughts on "discovery".

Imagine, for a moment, that, by a strange quirk of fate, everybody in the world has access to the Internet, except you.

You have no phone.

However, you have twenty-five envelopes, fifty sheets of writing paper, a pen, and your contacts list.

Who are you going to write to, why them, and what are you going to ask them?

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LinkedIn has close to a billion users, around a third of whom are active (defined as interacting once a month). Around 0.2% of accounts are fake, usually taken down quickly. There are around one hundred and eighty million senior-level influencers, sixty-five million “decision makers,” and ten million C-level executives. There are between one and two million recruiters, which I guess leaves around three quarters of a million of us as the equivalent of advertising livestock.

There are around seventeen thousand writers here on Substack, supported by two million paid subscriptions out of a total of thirty-five million subscribers. The top ten authors earn twenty-five million dollars between them. I am not one of them. Sigh.

There are many more platforms before we even touch on short-form social media.

My point is that getting a message out has never been easier, even as being heard has rarely been more difficult, and making a recognisable impact is nigh on impossible.

And yet we do it. We put our AI-assisted advice, observations, and sometimes rants in front of millions of people we don’t know; why? In the hope of getting a “like”, a recruiter frothing at the mouth in anticipation, to see our own name with content against it? Or because, like the mimetic animals we are, everybody else is doing it?

Technology makes us lazy. This seems odd when so many people are working long hours in organisations that resemble a production of Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” written by Franz Kafka.

“There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I think what we “keep far from our remembrance” is the knowledge that the most valuable elements of us are those that never fit inside an organisation whose aim in life is infinite, continuous growth in service of shareholders. Very few of those shareholders are on LinkedIn, write here on Substack, or engage in the day-to-day business of creating things to trade, so who are we talking to?

When we create things to trade, from products to words to worlds, we risk rejection. If we are makers, we put part of ourselves on display and open ourselves to judgment. It is much easier, then, to process according to somebody else’s protocol and avoid responsibility.

And so what is needed when times are fluid stays submerged?

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

Watching a job market I am no longer part of offers me freedom and frustration. Distance from it lends clarity, age provides a modicum of wisdom, and the combination reveals its absurdity.

I once heard working for a corporation is like taking your dog to work. The dog is all the parts of you that you would like to use but cannot. People at work pat them on the head, give them biscuits, and smile at them even as they warn you not to let them shit on the carpet or bark at the boss.

Then, at the end of the day, you take them home unexercised and restless.

All of this is done with an awareness of the reality of a volatile market in which our tenure with organisations under pressure is fragile.

Many organisations struggle to adapt to changing markets. In a drive for efficiency and productivity, they combine outsourcing, automation, protocols and other measures and, in so doing, become increasingly sclerotic and slow to move.

Systems lack people's intuition and visceral connection to others. The more outsourcing increases the distance between those in the supply chain—geographically, temporally, and culturally—the more the human quality of insight and the care that prompts it becomes diluted.

I think we need an equivalent of rescue organisations for our “dogs.” Somewhere, they can be exercised, socialised, and cared for, not just patted on the head.

I have come to understand “rescue” as conversations - of the human, open, curious, joyful variety rather than the tame ones, performing tricks for goals, that find their home inside large organisations.

The ideas and insights that can rescue us are the product of conversations with those who can see and leverage our originality. Those who can “walk the dog”. They are the people to whom we would write those twenty-five letters.

Our task is to stop for long enough to consider who they might be, what they might offer us, and what, in turn, we might offer them. It has something to do with “discovery”; I’ll turn to this below for paid subscribers.

It requires that we find the time and inclination. The great people at the Better Conversations Foundation can help you structure conversations and offer short, powerful, and transformative free courses.

For paid subscribers to this Substack, our next OTW conversation is on Wednesday, July 17th, at 4:00pm (UK). Links and details are in the paid subscriber section below.

Have a great weekend.

Below, for paid subscribers, I’m moving on to think about the idea of “Discovery” and harnessing conversation to find the right people to talk with in a sea of possibilities.

I have always liked this ad; it seems a reasonable end piece. In changing times, we would do well to be more dog :-)