Sometimes, small things collide and bring our attention to something bigger altogether. This week has been like that. The conversation about “threads” on our Zoom call left half-formed thoughts in a place that gently collided with other discussions and reading, leaving me with a moment of clarity I am still working to capture.
This week, there was a moment when, instead of journalling, I found myself sketching out a plan for my work for the rest of the week. It stopped me in my tracks, a moment of awareness of something wrong. Not, of course, that planning our work is bad if we are on a schedule or in a position where we have to be “productive” on other people’s terms, but I don’t. For some time now, by dint of age and luck, I have been able to work at my own unforced pace - and this reminded me that old habits never die; they just go into hiding until we give them an opportunity.
I now spend much of my time working with those who find themselves disoriented by the speed at which their world is changing. Driven by cultures that think speed is analogous to productivity and efficiency, they stare forever at the speedometer without a clear idea of where they are going. They are like stokers in the steamships of the last century, breaking their backs and building up a sweat, but instead of shovelling coal, they are shovelling data with no idea of what is happening above decks.
Those who sell us data tell us that we always need more data. We don’t; we require more imagination about the data we have.
One factor is that, in general, human beings tend to prefer cognitive comfort, the reinforcement of the familiar, to an encounter with the unknown. Learning may disrupt our cognitive comfort; it displaces us. Education requires us to revise or abandon our routines, recipes, and rituals—life as we know it—and to do so we must overcome a kind of natural cognitive inertia. A place of ignorance can be a sturdy nest of cognitive comfort for those who dwell within.
.....The work and play of imagination and creativity are ventures into the unknown. They are inimical to the repetition of facts, the regurgitation of knowledge. Ingenuity, inventiveness, originality, spontaneity—they all require forays into the unknown.
John Dewey
Making and sustaining the connections that will nurture us at speed is difficult. There’s no time for exploration, chemistry or serendipity. At speed, the only connections we make are those that have been preplanned in pursuit of what we hoped would be needed instead of what might be the case.
The challenge with strategy - a way of behaving - is that it is light years away from strategic planning, a comforting but mostly futile selling exercise devised by those who will be far away when the ship hits the rocks the plan has not allowed for.
Connection is a powerful quality: to ourselves, those around us, the weather, seasons, landscape, ideas and all the messages they carry for us.
Connection is the fuel of imagination.
In our search for something illusory, we’ve lost touch with the reality of the raw material and what it is trying to tell us. Rather like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we’ve lost the love of creating something in our manic pursuit of having what we are given charge of “perform.”
When I hit the point mentioned at the start, when I found myself falling back into habits I thought I’d thrown overboard, it was like those children’s cartoons when the donkey’s head appears on the fooled character; it was pretty visceral.
The paradox is that since I reached the point where I could do work I loved, with people I liked, doing things that matter, I developed a strategy of “unmarketing”. No social media, no “networking”, or any of those things we are told we are supposed to do to scale our presence. I just took the time to do the best, most creative, most connected work I could. And yet, it turns out that the difference between doing the work I love and marketing the work I can do is the quality of the client I get. The more clients, the less personal and connected the work, and the less connected I become.
And so the challenge has been to recognise “enough”. If I have to start planning my work, it’s a signal. (it’s also a privilege - if I still had a mortgage to pay and children to get through school, it would be different). The lesson is one of balance. Making time to be fully and creatively connected is not slack time, unproductive, or inefficient; it’s the source of good work. Perhaps others get it much earlier than me, and I’m a (very) late developer.
Whatever, I’m grateful.
It’s about creating the space for people to see their own threads.
Gail Boennig, on our Zoom call.
Thinking about connection was the trigger that caused me to stop and read another of
’s excellent posts - this time, touching on one of my favourite ideas of “The Adjacent Possible”. I first bumped into it in Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From”, and the idea has remained close to the surface for me ever since. The principle that ideas come less from planning, “innovation sessions”, or any other form of deliberately designed provocation and more from serendipity, as those exploring the edges of their world encounter others doing the same in theirs. Great ideas are not creatures of the left brain; they are synthesised - not created - by the right.Ideas have a life of their own and will wander around until they find a host to care for them - and that won’t happen when we’re flat-out stoking the boilers.
Ideas wait in quiet places—in the equivalents of the forest's understorey or outside the corporation's walls, out of the way of the heavy traffic delivering productivity and efficiency, waiting to be noticed by those with the time, inclination and interest.
Philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche on the power of making a lot and choosing the best:
"Artists have an interest in ... so-called inspirations; as if the idea of a work of art, of poetry, the fundamental thought of a philosophy shines down like a merciful light from heaven.
In truth, the good artist's or thinker's imagination is continually producing things good, mediocre, and bad, but his power of judgment, highly sharpened and practiced, rejects, selects, joins together; thus we now see from Beethoven's notebooks that he gradually assembled the most glorious melodies and, to a degree, selected them out of disparate beginnings.
The artist who separates less rigorously, liking to rely on his imitative memory, can in some circumstances become a great improviser; but artistic improvisation stands low in relation to artistic thoughts earnestly and laboriously chosen. All great men were great workers, untiring not only in invention but also in rejecting, sifting, reforming, arranging."
Source: Human, All Too Human (via Mark Easdown - an observer of the first order)
So, where do we find the time and space to slow down, observe what matters, and work on it?
I suggest not in large organisations, where we are observed digitally and socially and where slowing down is not a good career move. We are better off delivering acceptable, on-time, on-cost mediocrity.
One of the enormous privileges of working with smart people across different domains is seeing what really happens, as opposed to what those running the organisation think happens, when it comes to ideas. At the top of the tower, those within the walls expend colossal energy and vast amounts of money on corporate lawyers trying to keep ideas from straying outside the walls.
The trouble is that it only works for the ideas they know about, not the ones lurking in the understorey, the ones that come out to play when those who love what they do meet outside the walls. The ones harbouring the energy of the adjacent possible, searching for others to bump into, waiting for those with the inclination to observe them to take care of them
Ideas being developed in large organisations are the safe ones that make it past the risk assessments, the politics and the egos of those whose ideas, now going stale, got them to where they are. The really interesting ideas are outside the walls, mixing in the company of angels (of the financial variety). They may have, statistically, a low chance of survival, but I have yet to see those working on them with anything other than smiles on their faces, even as they run around with their hair on fire.
Corporations, of course, would rather pay lots of money for the successful ones, rather than risk visible failure by doing it themselves, which is perhaps why so many workplaces are miserable.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,
All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.”
Maria Edgeworth in her book Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825)
The fun and the future lie in the creative companionship of good company, those happy to be with each other, doing something that enthuses them even if it might not work.
Now, we think, is the time to 'retreat' into the real work of reclamation, to re-member again our humanity through the intimacy of our relationships. The time is very urgent – we must slow down.
Bayo Akomolafe
There’s a great deal of wisdom in this.
We know the world is changing; we can sense it. We can feel large organisations grasping for ever more while involving fewer people. We know that tenancies inside the walls are becoming ever shorter, and "no-fault evictions” are on the rise.
We also know there will be cracks in models and plans, and as Leonard Cohen tells us, it’s where the light gets in.
The cracks offer exciting opportunities to make a decent living and do good work in good company. It requires enough of us to work differently together to create a tiny start.
Working alone can be difficult and lonely, but we don’t have to be when we can find company and connection outside the Walls…
For the next month until our next meeting, here and at New Artisans, that is where I will focus my writing attention - connection.
And then, on Wednesday, November 14th, at 5:00 pm UK, we can discuss it together and see what the understorey has to say….
I used to think that ideas came from working hard at thinking, like a Rodin statue with muscles tensed and furrowed brow. Now I see that they come when I allow space for them to flow. The work of thinking then becomes more a task of curation than one of creation. It also helps to let go of seeing them as "my" ideas.
In Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert she puts forth that ideas look for willing collaborators… if one comes knocking and we don’t open the door, it moves on to somebody else. Then she goes on to supports her hypothesis with an example from her own life.
I’ve heard that the keys to a magical life are found in imagination and paying close attention— making connections that many overlook.
Thanks for hosting the call Richard.,I really appreciate the open mindset(s) of those who attend.