For as long as there’s been recorded history, kings and queens have ruled and been celebrated by their subjects. Not everywhere, not all the time, but widely.
Not simply the royalty of nations, but of organizations as well.
It’s worth noting that in addition to monarchs, there are monarchists, citizens and employees and followers who prefer the certainty that comes from someone else.
Royalty offers something to some of those who are ruled. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t exist.
As Sahlins and Graeber outline in their extraordinary (and dense) book on Kings, there’s often a pattern in the nature of monarchs. Royalty doesn’t have to play by the same cultural rules, and often ‘comes from away.’ Having someone from a different place and background allows the population to let themselves off the hook when it comes to creating the future.
If your participation in leadership is not required, then you’re free to simply be a spectator.
When we industrialized the world over the last century, we defaulted to this structure. Many Western industrial organizations began as founder-celebrated and founder-driven. CEOs could, apparently, do no wrong. Until the world their business operated in changed.
In large corporations, the autocratic, well-paid chieftain has the trappings of a monarch. A private air force, minions and the automatic benefit of the doubt. Working in this setting requires obedience and effort from employees more than agency or independence.
A well-functioning constitutional monarchy is surprisingly effective. That’s not the problem. The problem is what happens when it stops to function well. The problem can happen when royalty becomes selfish, shortsighted or impatient. Or the problem could be a pattern of employees or members or citizens failing to participate. Resilience disappears and the system becomes brittle.
When the world changes, and it does, faster than ever, it’s community and connection that moves us forward.
Modern organizations are discovering that all of us know more than any of us, and that engaged individuals ready to not only speak up but to eagerly take responsibility for the work they do is an effective, resilient and equitable way to show up in the world.
June 3, 2021
Post-production.
The most expensive way to adjust a movie is at the end, in the editing room.
The most expensive way to please a customer is after they call customer service with a complaint.
The most expensive way to make a beautiful piece of furniture is with sandpaper…
Better motto: “Let’s try to skip post.” And then, after acting like you could, don’t.
Important clarification: It turns out, of course, that if you can easily fix something in ‘post’, then you should do exactly that. Too often, we get confused about when and where the best place to improve the work is. One mark of the professional is that they understand that a reshoot might cost way more than an edit…
June 2, 2021
Actually, it’s every day. We talk about graduation as if it’s the end of some journey, but it’s the beginning of one. The chance to see the world differently, to contribute, to understand.
I hope you’ll get a chance to check out what my friends at Akimbo are doing. They’re persistently, consistently and generously showing up to create learning cohorts that actually cause real and long-lasting change. (They’re hiring.)
The altMBA has already demonstrated its impact. More than five years, 70 countries and 5,000 graduates so far. The First Priority Deadline for applications is today, June 1st, for altMBA’s October 2021 session
Bernadette Jiwa’s Story Skills Workshop is back for its seventh session. You’ll discover that while reading one of her bestselling books will open your eyes, it’s the work done with others that’s remarkable. People are often surprised by the mutual support and feedback that they can find online. It begins tomorrow.
If you’re on your own and feeling the stress between freelancing and entrepreneurship, it may be that you’re actually a bootstrapper. Bootstrapping is a different way to look at your work, the chance to build an organization of some scale without going to a bank or finding a rich aunt to back your project. The Bootstrapper’s Workshop is back for its sixth session. You can enroll today and it begins on the 15th of June.
Also open for enrollment today is Alex DiPalma’s breakthrough podcasting workshop. The ninth session begins in about six weeks. Check out the details here.
Make something that matters. It’s easier when we do it together.
June 1, 2021
Here are two policies it might be fun to try for a week:
Meeting abstention: Anyone invited to an internal meeting has the power to opt-out. “Send me the summary, please.” If someone abstains, they give up their ability to have a say in the meeting, but most meetings these days don’t actually give people a platform to have a say. And then that person can leave the Zoom room and get back to whatever it is they were doing that was actually productive.
Meeting nullification: If anyone in an internal meeting announces that the meeting is a pointless waste of time, it’s over. The meeting organizer is obligated to send everyone the memo that they probably should have sent in the first place.
If you discover that you’re calling meetings where people abstain, or worse, call for nullification, perhaps you should be more careful about which meetings you call and who you invite.
Does your organization have the guts to try this out? Do you, as an attendee, care enough to abstain?
The fact that even discussing this idea is stressful helps us understand status roles and power.
We rarely do or say something intentionally that surprises us. That’s because we are in intimate contact with the noise in our heads–we spend our days looking in the mirror, listening to our inner voice and defining our point of view. “That’s not the sort of thing I would say or do…”
We call this internal familiarity our ‘identity.’ If it gets lost (when someone joins a cult, for example), it’s noteworthy and can be tragic.
If our ideas are equated to our identity, then talking about ideas is very much the act of talking about yourself.
And thus the tension is created. Our culture and our economy are built on ideas. Many of our society’s ideas get better over time (you don’t go to the barber for bloodletting any longer–it’s what probably killed George Washington) and yet some of them get stuck. Often, we need a generation to step away before an entrenched idea begins to fade, because the people who have been embracing that toxic or outlived idea see it as part of their identity.
As the media realizes that they can improve profits by narrowcasting ideas to people who embrace them as part of who they are, it gets increasingly difficult to have a constructive conversation about many ideas–because while people are able and sometimes eager to change some of their less personal ideas, we rarely seek to change our identity.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
If you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle and a piece you thought fit in a spot where it doesn’t actually fit, that missed fit is viewed as useful information. Go ahead and try the piece in a different spot–that’s not a threat to your identity as a puzzle solver. In fact, your identity as a puzzle solver is tied up in the idea that if the evidence shows a piece didn’t fit, you simply try a new spot, you don’t feel threatened or disrespected.
The most successful problem solvers are people who have embraced this simple method–your current idea isn’t your identity, it’s simply a step closer to a solution to the problem in front of you.
One way to define our identity is to fall in love with an idea (often one that was handed to us by a chosen authority). Another is to refuse to believe our identity is embodied in an idea, and instead embrace a method for continually finding and improving our ideas.
May 31, 2021
Books are written almost a year before they come out.
Tweets take about 24 seconds to launch.
Which world would you like to live in, book-world or twitter-world?
If you were designing an ad campaign for your project that would run in three years, what would it say? Can you write the resume or Linkedin profile you’d like to have in seven years? Seven months?
Long lead times force us to focus on the destination itself, not the bumps or the detours.
The deadline for submitting your long lead time announcement is midnight tonight. A chance to hurry up and then stick with it.
May 30, 2021
It means two very different things.
When a person or a marketer takes your time, they’re stealing. Something irretrievable is gone. If your time is taken for selfish reasons, if it’s wasted, there’s no good way to get it back.
On the other hand, when you have enough confidence to take your own time, to take your time to be present, to do the work, to engage with what’s in front of you right now, it’s a gift.
This is precisely what time is for.
We’re not in a race to check off as many boxes as we possibly can before we are out of time. Instead, we have the chance to use the time to create moments that matter. Because they connect us, because they open doors, because the moments, added up, create a life.
May 29, 2021
In my earlier post, I opened a discussion about how to avoid missing a deadline.
But what happens if you can’t avoid it?
Projects are always on the frontier, combining elements and ideas and effort to do something that’s not been done before, not quite the way we’re doing it here and now.
And so, bold projects sometimes fail to make their deadline. Even if we build systems and use buffers, sometimes it doesn’t work.
Some thoughts:
- Don’t wait until the last minute. Wishful thinking is sometimes confused with optimism, but you probably knew more than four days before the deadline that you weren’t going to meet expectations. If people are building dependencies around your promises, then waiting until you have no choice simply makes the miss worse. Because not only are you late, but you were hiding it.
- Don’t minimize the problem. You’re late. Clearly. So say it. Loud and (not quite) proud. By owning the original promise and then being clear that you’re aware of the miss, you help the people who were counting on you feel seen and respected.
- Create alternatives. This isn’t always possible, but when it is, it usually leads to better relationships. If an airline can’t have a plane in a certain spot at a certain time, it goes a long way if they do the work of finding all 100 people inconvenienced a new plan, instead of putting that on them, one at a time.
- There’s a difference between seeing the damage (and working to ameliorate it) and accepting shame and blame. It’s clear that the future is unclear, and that things happen. If you can clearly outline what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned, it doesn’t make your clients feel better if you also fall on a sword–because if it’s not your fault, the sword is meaningless theater. And if it is your fault, it’s worth telling us that as well.
- In short, there’s no good way to make a missed deadline meaningless to the person who was counting on you. Being counted on is a gift. If you want to be counted on next time, best to invest early and often in making that deadline, and then, in the rare cases when it’s not enough, treating your clients with the respect that you’d like to receive in a similar situation.
[Even better, check out out my previous post and create approaches so you don’t miss the deadline in the first place.]
May 28, 2021
Deadlines are valuable, and deadlines are expensive.
Organized systems and societies need deadlines. It would be impossible to efficiently build a house if the subcontractors could deliver their goods or services whenever it were convenient for them. Movie studios and book publishers schedule their releases months in advance to allow distribution teams to plan their work. Software is dependent on subsystems that have to be in place before the entire program can work.
Along with the value that synchronized deliverables create, there are also real costs. Not simply the organizational cost of a missed deadline, but the significant damage to a reputation or brand that happens when a promise isn’t kept. And there’s a human cost–the stress and strain that comes from working to keep a promise that we might not have personally made, or that might be more difficult because someone else didn’t perform their part of the dance.
In the wide-open race for attention and commitments, the standards of deadlines have been wavering. For forty years, Saturday Night Live has gone on at 11:30. Not, as its creator says, because it’s ready, but because it’s 11:30. That’s the deal.
On Kickstarter, this sort of sacrosanct deadline is rare indeed. “This charger will ship in six weeks!” they say, when actually, it’s been more than a year with no shipment date in sight. Or with venture capitalists and other backers. “We’re going to beat the competition to market by three months.” Sometimes it feels like if the company doesn’t bring wishful thinking to the table, they won’t get funded. Given that choice, it’s no wonder that people get desperate. Wishful thinking might not be called lying, but it is. We should know better.
Earning the reputation as someone (a freelancer, a marketer, a company, a leader) who doesn’t miss a deadline is valuable. And it doesn’t happen simply because you avoid sleeping and work like a dog. That’s the last resort of someone who isn’t good at planning.
Here are some basic principles that might help with the planning part:
- If you’re competing in an industry where the only way to ‘win’ is to lie about deadlines, realize that competing in that industry is a choice, and accept that you’re going to miss deadlines and have to deal with the emotional overhead that comes with that.
- Knowing that it’s a choice, consider picking a different industry, one where keeping deadlines is expected and where you can gain satisfaction in creating value for others by keeping your promises.
- Don’t rely on false deadlines as a form of incentive. It won’t work the same on everyone, which means that some people will take you at your word and actually deliver on time, while others will assume that it was simply a guideline. It’s more efficient to be clear and to help people understand from the outset what you mean by a deadline. The boy cried wolf but the villagers didn’t come.
- At the same time, don’t use internal deadlines as a guaranteed component of your external promises. A project with no buffers is certain to be late. Not just likely to be late, but certain. Better buffers make better deadlines.
- Embrace the fact that delivering something on a certain date costs more than delivering it whenever it’s ready. As a result, you should charge more, perhaps a great deal more, for the value that your promise of a deadline creates. And then spend that money to make sure the deadline isn’t missed.
- Deadlines aren’t kept by people ‘doing their best.’ Keeping a deadline requires a systemic approach to dependencies and buffers and scenario planning. If you’re regularly cutting corners or burning out to meet deadlines, you have a systems problem.
- The antidote to feature creep isn’t occasional pruning. That’s emotionally draining and a losing battle. The answer is to actively restructure the spec, removing or adding entire blocks of work. “That will be in the next version,” is a totally acceptable answer, particularly when people are depending on this version to ship on time.
- A single deadline is a deadline that will certainly not be met. But if you can break down your big deadline into ten or fifteen intermediate milestones, you will know about your progress long before it’s too late to do something about it.
- The Mythical Person-Month is a serious trap. Nine people, working together in perfect harmony, cannot figure out how to have a baby in one month. Throwing more people at a project often does not speed it up. By the time you start to solve a deadline problem this way, it might be too late. The alternative is to staff each component of your project with the right number of people, and to have as many components running in parallel as possible.
- Bottlenecks are useful, until they aren’t. If you need just one person to approve every element of your project, it’s unlikely you can run as many things in parallel as you could. The alternative is to have a rigorous spec created in advance, in which many standards are approved before you even begin the work.
- Discussions about timing often devolve into issues of trust, shame and effort. That’s not nearly as helpful as separating conversations about system structure and data from the ones about commitment and oomph.
- Hidden problems don’t get better. In a hyper-connected world, there’s no technical reason why the project manager can’t know what the team in the field knows about the state of the project.
Like most things that matter, keeping deadlines is a skill, and since it’s a skill, we can learn it.
[More on this in my next post on what to do if you can’t avoid breaking your promise.]
This is very different from “someday.”
Choose any date you like, as far in the future as you like. But a date, circled on the calendar.
By that date, what will you have implemented? What will be in place? Where will you be, what will you be doing?
Way more powerful than someday.
May 27, 2021
