Reflections 30th November
Navigation When The Ground Moves
Last week I wrote about a quiet insurgency; not a revolution of barricades and manifestos, but a shift in how we might choose to learn and grow. How, looking from the outside, we might circumvent institutional bottlenecks to form starfish networks of small communities of practice.
It raises a question that has been on my mind for a while, brought to front of mind by recent experience. If conventional structures no longer serve as reliable guides for development, what compass do we insurgents use to navigate?
When the land moves beneath us, we need different tools. Our reaction has to move from the paralysis of “Oh S**t” to “that’s interesting,” and our attention must shift from looking for escape routes to noticing just what is changing around us.
When Maps Become Fiction
The maps we create are partial; they show us the topography, but not the geology. We may be aware of the tectonic plates we live on, but not where the earthquake will make a nonsense of the map. They do not show where sinkholes may occur or what the weather will be. Yet when we create plans, as individuals or businesses, we invest our confidence in the map as a source of truth about the future. We easily become wilfully blind.
In the middle of a civilisational cycle, after formation and before dissolution, they can help, but we are well past that, as current experiences demonstrate. The maps businesses created as they became successful and tinkered with every year to demonstrate rigour to shareholders are of little use at the moment, as the plates beneath us shift and buckle. Our maps display yesterday’s territory, and for all its capabilities, AI is a satnav that is of little use at the edges where change is emerging.
This is where interest becomes our seismograph, trembling at movements too subtle for metrics to detect. Unlike our strategic plans that break catastrophically when the territory shifts, interest bends and flows. It doesn’t just survive disorder; it feeds on it.
The Organic Architecture of Interest
How we experience disorder is unique to us. We have different histories, relationships, genetics and information. We use different languages and have different values. We bury them normally, shaping ourselves to what we think is needed by an employer, or what will make us more acceptable to people we do not know. BMW market themselves as ultimate driving machines, but in a world where exercising the capabilities of the machine will get you a prison sentence, the reality emerges; they are the ultimate gum shield in the executive car park. When disorder occurs, your BMW will not rescue you, but your interest might.
Interest is mycelial in nature. Merlin Sheldrake writes about mycelium as “ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.” If we made diagrams to portray ecosystems, one layer would show the fungal mycelium running through them, “sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil.” Interest works the same way in communities and good organisations.
An accountant or a marketing manager on an org chart is a box of words, sterile and inorganic. But an accountant and a marketing manager who share a common deep interest are a very different proposition from that which the org chart suggests. Interest joins things that org charts cannot see. It does to stale organisations what fungi do to dead wood: breaks them down, transforms them, creates new life from apparent endings.
The Craft of Following Fascination
Oliver Burkeman captures something essential when he writes about abandoning his “self-important inner judge” to follow his true interests. This resonates with a lesson I learnt from Tim Gallwey: just follow interest, because there’s always a part of us that knows more than our busy minds do.
There’s something deeper at work here than personal preference. In conditions of radical uncertainty, interest touches on what Robert Pirsig calls “dynamic quality,” the sense we have when pursuing something we cannot explain. As he observed: “There is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.”
Interest is the craft of fascination. It kicks in where the training stops. Our interest is as personal and unique to us as our uncertainty, and in many ways they are reflections of each other, like the Taijitu, the yin and yang symbol, where each element contains the other. Letting our interest loose is the best way to tame our uncertainty.
Though we don’t teach this on leadership courses (because interest is often heretical and insurgent inside businesses), interest is a form of professional intuition that becomes more honed the more we use it and the more experience we garner. Important problems drain us; interesting problems energise us. The difference lies in our relationship with the problem.
The Insurgent’s Advantage
My friend Steve Done would almost certainly have a metaphor involving horses, probably around building trust before trying to saddle up. Like an untamed horse, our interest does not wait for permission. It reacts to what it sees and senses, and we have to be ready for it and trust it when it decides to take us somewhere.
Interest doesn’t follow logic; it will pivot instantly and doesn’t need a board meeting. Organisations follow plans; entrepreneurs follow interest (until, of course, they become big enough to have board meetings). Interest has built in all those qualities we read about in leadership literature. It is agile and antifragile, with each surprise building muscle rather than fear.
Where goals are thrown into disarray, interest sits up and takes notice. It thrives on the unexpected. When disorder looks for an emergency exit, interest sees options. Interest harnesses our Apollo 13 capabilities, creating something vital out of what it finds lying around.
Those who think they lead us inside the walls normally derive their power from an ability to operate the machine, or closeness to power, and often both. They find themselves disorientated when the ground moves and their power dissipates, just as interest moves centre stage.
The Economic Paradox
This raises a troubling paradox. If interest is such a powerful, creative and adaptive force, why do our organisations, from early years schools to our largest corporations, systematically suppress it in favour of metrics?
The answer lies not in ignorance but in economics, the brutal mathematics of optimisation that makes perfect sense until the moment it doesn’t. Organisations know interest drives innovation (they say so constantly), yet they structurally suppress it. There’s an economic logic here that seems irrefutable: efficiency, predictability, scalability. These are the gods of the industrial age, and they demand sacrifice.
But as the ground moves beneath us, perhaps a new economic reality is emerging where the currency of interest may be more valuable than the efficiency of optimisation. If that were to be the case, it asks us as individuals to look after our ability to wonder, because of all the qualities organisations have at scale, their interest is encoded, not spontaneous. They can optimise what exists but struggle to discover what doesn’t yet exist.
Which leads us to examine this economic tension more closely. What is the actual cost of replacing interest with optimisation? And who pays the price when we choose predictable decline over interesting possibility? The answers, I suspect, reveal why the insurgency isn’t just personal preference but economic necessity.
When organisations pursuing efficiency and productivity meet a crisis, they are about as useful to us as a BMW in a traffic jam. When it happens, we can either choose to look good and polish our job title until we are sacrificed, or we can get out and walk to where our interest leads us and pay attention to what we notice around us on the journey.
I think there is something alchemical about the process, which is why I’ve started the experiment of The Athanor. A space where we can follow individual interests in the company of others doing the same, and help each other notice what is important, and where opportunity may lie.
On Monday, I’ll bring together what I’ve learned over the last two months and offer some thoughts on how we might move from conversation to conversation and movement. If the idea appeals, have a look at what we’ve been talking about.