Category: growth

Posted on

Avoiding the Straight Line

Did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? I didn’t.

I began my working life aged 9, doing a paper round on the weekend; getting up at 5am and finishing around 8am. Because we lived in a rural location, I was driven the 12-mile round trip by the newsagent. For each delivery I was dropped at the bottom of the drive. He’d sit, engine idling, while I scampered up to the door and posted the latest edition through snappy letterboxes. It didn’t define the job I did later in life. No one said, “Oh Simon. He’s a newsagent.”

I have a confession, though. I’ve never really known what I want to do for work. Still now. I have an eclectic work history, on the face of it. I’ve been careering, really. Bouncing from one role to another. While many of my roles have been in the creative industries, my longest stint in any single job is 18 months. I get bored of the routine. I move on.

If I were a musician, I would be lauded for this attitude. Not content to be stuck playing the same songs, I’d be hailed as an original artist always changing my sound and challenging my fans. Yet, in work this kind of attitude is frowned upon. But what if routine is what dulls your abilities? What if your interests span a wider range of subjects than those constrained within a job description or a department? Why isn’t there a need for a free-form jazz employee? One who zags and zigs, meanders and builds skills like kids build LEGO sculptures?

There is. I don’t know the name for it, but it’s the job I do now.

I occasionally run workshops to help people understand ‘how’ they work. I do this because I believe it’s good to know what excites you, what bores you, what makes you frustrated, and what combination of tasks might make you happy. I’ve run these for individuals, teams, departments, even whole organisations. One of the exercises helps participants find the thread that runs through their work, like the proverbial Blackpool through rock.

I’ve done this myself. I know that I love working with people but not so much the general public, which means retail is not for me. I learned that I like to have accountability and responsibility, to be able to choose the way in which I complete a task. And to do so in a place of my choosing (usually not an office).

Understanding how I work has revolutionised my output.

I’m a writer, a strategist, a facilitator, a creative, a problem solver, a mentor, a business advisor, a student. I do all of these things on a regular basis. I’m also a father, a husband, a coffee enthusiast and a wanderer. These don’t pay as well financially, but I’m richer for doing them.

The career as defined by the late industrialisation period is largely outmoded. That’s not to say it’s not possible to have a career, or even something to be celebrated if *that’s* what you want. It’s not about a career, or even a job. I believe it’s about what you can bring and what you get out of the bringing of it. Learning how you like to work means you’re not confined to a job title or a career. You can do many things because you know what your transferable skills are. It gives you the power to articulate ways in which you can be of use to people. It presents you as bringing value, not adding cost.

It scares people, though. Makes them nervous. But this post is not about them. It’s about taking control of your destiny. It’s not really about doing what you love, it’s about understanding what motivates you and finding ways to apply the skills you have to a variety of challenges. It’s this versatility and adaptability that will get you hired.

You could even call it a career, if you want. 

Posted on

Black Mood

I, like many around the world, have watched in horror as certain factions of American society act in ways that cannot be described as legal or moral.
I have felt helpless watching it all unfold.
Then I realised that I am not a passive bystander, that I cannot let the violent actions of a few go unmentioned.

Black Live Matter.

It’s important that we start registering the hurt and anger that over 400 years of suppression has been wrought on a people who we have much to thank for.
It’s not enough to be anti-fascist or anti-racist.
We have to stand up to be counted.
To elevate the people and amplify their voices.
To point out the perpetrators; those who live in bright, white houses and those whites in bright houses.
Shine the light on those who seek only to be seen as equal.
To be their allies.

As a white person, I did struggle with how to be an ally – to go beyond denouncing racists and behaving in a way that allows my BAME friends to be authentic around me.
I know I have a lot to learn, still.
And I’m open to learning more.
Which is why this article was most helpful when I read it over the weekend.
For Our White Friends Desiring To Be Allies.

I will continue to try my best.
I apologise for the times when I fall short.

Posted on

Knowing Your Unknowns

An activity for my latest Systems Thinking module has requested I start to list out some unknowns in my life.
Actions, behaviours, responses, emotions, events, activities, relationships that affect me, etc.

Listing out my unknowns seemed like a task that would prove hard to do, but I could fill a page in my journal fairly quickly.
So quickly I stopped after the first ten flowed out of my pen and on to the page.
There is a lot I know nothing about, and plenty I know but don’t know enough about how it works.

Some of this is to do with accepted thinking, like what keeps aeroplanes in the air; other things are because of personal reasons: I know nothing about South America as I’ve never visited.
I could, obviously, use my knowledge from books and television documentaries, but that’s one view that has a specific context, and in a literal sense lens, through which to ‘know’ it.

There are also bigger things such as racism.
I’ve never experienced it, because I’m a middle-class white person.
I know what it is, but not what it means to live with the experience.
Therefore it’s an unknown, or a shadow of a known, like the dark side of the moon.

These nuances in what I know and don’t know are really interesting.
I realise that I know very little, which I suppose is the point.

What I came to in conclusion is that you can never know everything about something.
There will always be hidden facets of people, situations, actions, etc that we can never know.
Even if those people are ourselves, the situations are of our own making, and the actions are those we have taken.

Posted on

Conversations Are A Wheeze

…for reasons that the title of this podcast episode with the inimitable and infinitely talented Mark Shayler will demonstrate.

It’s 90-ish minutes of meandering around a variety of subjects, from tree climbing to using fear as a weapon and why that’s a terrible thing to do.
And how big events in your life can make you see why you’re doing that and take steps to change things.

I think over the past decade I’ve begun to let go of the things that perhaps defined me previously.
Things I used as a shield, but which didn’t serve me well.

I’m very happy to still be on the path to being a better person doing better work.

There is a tiny bit of swearing, some trigger points for people dealing with anxiety, as well as those who have dealt with, are dealing with, or know someone who has/had cancer.
I hope there are also lovely moments about music and how there are hidden depths to things that, at first glance appear shallow. Like pop music.

There is a lot about music in this. It’s a passion that Mark and I share.

I also understand that I’m a privileged person, a middle-aged white man living in relative comfort in a rich nation.
Yet it could have been so different.
In good ways as well as bad.
All I know if I’m now on the path I was meant to be on all along.
A huge thanks to my wife and daughter, and all the people who have nudged me in the right direction.

And a massive fuck you to the bullies.
I hope you find the right path for yourself before it’s too late, and that you don’t need to go through shit to get there.
The majority of you were using fear as a weapon, too.

Posted on

Switch Off

I have had a lot to get done today.
As I sat at my desk, I realised I had my phone in front of me.
It wasn’t being used, but it was there.
Because it was there, it was too much to ignore.
I kept finding myself looking down and tapping the screen to bring it to life, to see if there were any messages or notifications I needed.

I’ve been seeking a way to emulate previous behaviours, pre-Covid-19.
Behaviours such as finding time to read, without interruption.
It’s not that I’m terrible at managing my time (every week my screen time is dropping, after peaking in the first weeks of lockdown).
It’s just that I’ve found ways to take in information that make sense to my brain and that encourage me to learn more.
None of them involve a phone at the outset.
They involve paper, books, notepads and pens.
Artefact cards and the smell of Sharpies.
Buses and trains.
Coffee shop hopping.
Walking.
Random chats with strangers.

My phone has always been a device to take me away from thinking and put my mind into evaluation mode, so that I can make sense of the input before working through the output.
It’s proved very good at that over time.

So, having it there is not so much a distraction, it’s that I’m not allowing enough input before I go into evaluation mode.

And so I’m switching it off.
So it’s useless.
A brick, so to speak.
Less smart and more dumb.
Making me less dumb and more smart.
Smarter.

Then, when I need to switch off my brain and let it do the magic that is cognition and the crunching through ideas to come up with new ones, or ways to articulate what I’ve learned in context of my work, then I switch it on.

Switching off to switch on.
Switching on to switch off.

Posted on

A Question of Ethics

I was on the #Cardstock Zoom call today.
Matt Ballantine mentioned the difficultly in determining ethics within an organisation.
I said I could help.
Because ethics is something that comes up more than once within systems thinking.

The biggest problem with ethics is that people assume you mean morals.
While they share the same house, they are definitely in different rooms.
Morals are personal, whereas ethics are defined by the group.
And therein lies the problem.
It’s a group activity.

Ethics can’t be rushed, either.
They should not be provided as a static way of being.
Instead, ethics should be malleable, almost as if they were a start-up within an organisation.
This allows for new worldviews to be brought to the table for discussion.
We’ve seen how this might play out with the current Covid-19 pandemic and the dilemmas that doctors are finding themselves in with regards to who gets treatment and who doesn’t.
It’s not as cut and dried as it might seem.

Morally, it should be everyone.
Ethically, the choice is not binary.
This is why hospitals have ethics committees, so that one person’s morals don’t override what is best for all parties involved.
It also means difficult decisions need to be made.
But it also means that as new data are made, so that committee can shift their ethical policy.

Heinz von Foerster (1992; Ethics and second-order cybernetics. Cybern Hum Knowing 1:9–19) states that ethics are “desirable and undesirable conditions inherent in any action and in the consequences of the action.”
The conditions of our ethics are not abstract, but are a core part of a form of action. This is clear in the example above about our current medical situation.

So, how do you go about creating ethics?
Discussion.
Reflection.
Knowing, and accepting, each other’s worldviews (which will include morals).
And a big bucket of compromise.

Because ethics are emergent.
They are not static and solid.
Despite what we think.

Those practices that we can agree upon, as a group, are what make up our ethics.
As Ray Ison points out in his excellent book, How to Act (Ison, 2010, pages 108-109), it is the working on the code of ethics (or conduct) that is important, not the code itself.

If that all sounds like it’s obscuring the obvious, it’s not meant to. What it means is: we need to have the difficult conversations in order to determine where we are willing to draw our boundaries.
That’s where the ethics are.

Posted on

Where next?

About a year ago, I was in a quandary.
I was stuck.
I was lost.
I wrote the following, but didn’t publish it.
It’s sat in my drafts since.
Today, I decided to finish it.

I don’t watch a lot of television.
However, recently I’ve been drawn to programmes that focus on people wanting to change – what they do, who they date, etc.
It’s surely related to that age-old question people like to ask: if you could do any job, what would you do?
Or if you could live anywhere, where would that be?

Of course, there are a lot of unknowns that, when you scrape beneath the surface, demonstrate that as a question it’s not actually that easy to answer.

And, if you’ve already worked out what it is that you want to do, why would you consider stepping backwards, or changing direction?

The longer I stay working how I want, the distance I put between myself and my old working life.
I often wonder where I’d fit in these days, or what job I could conceivably do.

The question I’ve been posing internally is: what would you hire someone like me to do?

I’ll admit, this was originally because I was considering a move back into the corporate fold, or even a move away from anything I’ve done before – perhaps even to what I began describing as a ‘car park attendant’, by which I mean a job that requires little responsibility.
However, that could be short-sighted.

And short-sighted it was.
One of the best things I’ve ever done is be open to change, to accept that nothing remains the same and to take the opportunities this brings.
I good friend, Benita of Create Radical Love, said to me: when you feel lost it’s when you grow the most.
She is so right.

Shortly after that conversation, I re-evaluated where I was.
And I realised that I wasn’t finding intellectual stimulation in my work, or in my everyday life.
It was an easy decision to take: go study.
That’s how I found myself signed up for an MSc in Systems Thinking in Practice.
It got me far out of the comfort zone I’d nestled myself in.

Because the safe space I’d created for myself was incredibly comfortable.
It felt wrong, though.
I’d allowed my past health issues to hold me back, to define me, to take the wheel and determine my direction.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.

While I can’t change the past, I know I don’t have to accept the future.
I can’t be sure that I actually have any control over what happens, but I know that if I’m not happy I can create the action that shifts that.
It wasn’t my work that was wrong, it was how I approached it that was wrong.
I hadn’t been clear, with myself or anyone who wanted to work with me.

I’m taking steps all the time to change that, to make my point clearer.
It’s paying off.
I know I’m back at square one again.
Yet, the past five years hasn’t been a waste.
I’ve learned a lot.
I’ve got lost and I’ve grown as a person.
I have a better idea of the path I want to take, and while I’m nervous of the mistakes I’ll invariably make, I know that being wrong is the way to be right.
I can’t pretend to have the answers if what I’m helping my clients with is learning how to learn as they themselves learn.

I need to get writing more.
To get the ideas out of my head.
To work out loud and be wrong (and I will be).
To pay more attention to demonstrating my way of thinking.

My next module on my MSc is about strategy and systems.
It’s perfect timing.

Posted on

Silence, Please

About 5 minutes ago, I sat in silence with 35 other people on a Zoom call.

This was part of Steve Chapman‘s ongoing anti-podcast, Sound of Silence, in which he shares two minutes of silence with a special guest.

It sounds like the worst thing you could listen to, but if you think that you’re wrong.
It’s actually the opposite.
There’s a real human connection that happens, and it’s very much like a meditative exercise.

We were paired up, three times, with a random person, so that we could also experience silence with someone on a one-to-one basis.
I had met all three of my pairings before, yet I don’t think we had ever previously shared silence.
It was anything but uncomfortable.
And it wasn’t as hard not to utter a word as I thought it might be.

I heard birds tweeting in the background.
Monastic silence in another.
The sounds of children playing, wood being mechanically sawn, coughs, sniffing, shuffling and cars whizzing past.

Yet between us, nothing passed.
Nothing audible, that is.

Something definitely passed between us, though.
A sense of connection.
A sense of shared experiences.
A sense of our humanity.

Thanks Steve.

Posted on

A Review That’s Present. And Correct.

I took yesterday off.
I’ve spent too much time staring at a screen again, as I try to type my thoughts into something coherent to demonstrate that I’ve learned something and can apply it for my MSc.

So instead, I grabbed a book that dropped through my letterbox recently.
It’s called Do Present.
It’s by Mark Shayler and it’s about presenting.

Except it’s not. Although, of course, it is.

The book is really about finding yourself, your voice, the person you really are.
It’s about putting yourself front and centre, being authentic and not trying to be someone you’re not, or someone you think everyone else wants you to be.

It’s about finding your story and then telling it from a position of confident vulnerability. That’s how I would best describe it.
Confident vulnerability.

What’s really lovely, having gone on Mark’s presentation workshop, is that it’s just like having Mark there with you.

I’ve not known Mark for very long, but in the short time I have done I’ve discovered he’s always rooting for you to be the best version of yourself.
Whether that’s in general conversation, or when he’s introducing you to someone else.
He makes you authentic.
He makes you start to understand who you are.
He gives you your voice without even trying (or so it seems).

And now he’s done that in book form.
It’s a fantastic read.
Except it’s not a read.
It’s a manual.
So when you need to fix something, or tune up your authenticity engine, you’ll have it to hand.

Consider it an investment.
It’ll be the best £10 you’ll spend this week.
I guarantee it.

Posted on

Putting Myself Out Of Business

I’ve always tried to not work with people longer than necessary.
I often find myself saying that I want to make myself redundant.
Cue nervous laughter.
However, in the end, all my business relationships end for the same reason: I’ve taught them what they need along the way.

I learn if they learn. So, we learn together.
I’ve since discovered that this is called Social Learning. Some of you may know it as a Community of Practice, others as a Critical Social Learning System; some may just know that working things out together brings the best results for everyone.
Each of us grow more.
Everyone of us is richer.

It’s my job to make my clients a success, not to be seen as successful.
The credit goes to them, the money comes to me.
Although, I don’t like to consider it a cost.
If people learn along the way then I am adding value, bucketloads of it.
Things that stick, get passed on and up; things that become visible pieces of the organisation.

It can be a three-word phrase (or two) as happened with a technical company I worked with.

It can be a reframing of a problem so that it becomes multiple opportunities, as I did for a management accountant membership organisation.

It can be helping them see how to find the best path forward, and to move as one in the right direction. That’s what I did for one of the world’s best built environment organisations.

It can be developing a simple structure for meeting new people, or bringing in outsiders to help you understand your next steps. It can simply be helping people see their own value.
I’ve done all of those.
Many times.

What all of these examples have in common is they are shifts.
Real changes that you can measure.
They all give the organisations and individuals the momentum they need.
They are all about looking forward towards a destination (even if that changes as the journey progresses) rather than looking back on what worked before and repeating it.

They are about the formation of new ideas, new ways of working, new beliefs that are not limiting.

Most importantly, they put a smile on people’s faces.
Including mine.