If you sit down to watch a documentary and realize, about ten minutes in, that it’s actually a feature film, everything about it feels off until you shift into a different mode.
Walk into a new doctor’s office, and it might take a few minutes to realize they’re not the kind of doctor you’re used to. Perhaps they focus on selling procedures or pills or treatments–the sort of remedies you might have been comfortable buying in a different setting, but right here, right now, it doesn’t feel right.
A hotel without a lobby might have rooms that are sufficiently quiet, clean and convenient, but because they skipped a signalling device, it takes a second to switch gears… In fact, we might never get settled in this new place.
When we create a product or service, we have the chance to invest in our genre signals. The interactions, sounds and tropes that let our customers know what to expect. Many of them are dated or seem to have low utility, but we ignore their value at our own risk. Confusing your customers can be expensive.
Genre can be a generous signalling device. When you invest in telling us what to expect, you get a chance to keep a promise.
And, unrelated to that, sometimes bad luck happens.
The real problem kicks in after that.
One bad decision after another. Choices that compound the problem instead of solving it. Digging a deeper hole, amplifying the damage and spreading the effects through space and time.
We often try to justify previous errors by making them again.
We defend sunk costs.
We choose the path of the victim.
We misunderstand the bad luck that came before or decide to teach the universe a lesson.
It might be that we overreact and run away from good options merely because we stumbled last time. Or we could fail to see the pattern and choose to repeat it.
Every decision is a new event. We have new information, new options and most of all, we’re smarter than we were last time.
We all need to feed our family, find shelter and contribute to the community.
Finding useful work is a key part of the human condition.
But that doesn’t mean the thing you’re being asked to do right now is required. In fact, it’s optional. It might come with this particular gig, but it’s still a choice. In the short run, most of it is not up to us, in the long run, it all is.
Once we voluntarily engage with our choice of project, things get easier.
Maps are easy to sell. If you know where you are and where you’d like to go, the map solves your problem. Maps are all around us: how-to, what-to, step-by-step.
The compass is more resilient but less descriptive. It shines a light, gives us clarity, but the next steps are up to us.
In an age of ubiquitous AI, answers are no longer in short supply. But questions are more valuable than ever.
Twenty years ago, I published my scariest book, The Dip. It frightened my publisher and the booksellers because it was about a topic rarely written about (quitting) and it deliberately did not contain much in the way of answers or procedures. The book was designed to give people clarity about something they’d been avoiding, and to provoke the difficult questions that can transform the path we are on.
Decades later, I still get earnest questions about quitting. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee, which is the point of this sort of work. The existence of a compass helps us realize that it might help to know which way is north.
This fall, I’m back with The Knot. It’s not a sequel, but it rhymes.
Because sometimes, the question isn’t whether to push through or to quit. Sometimes, you’ve already decided the work matters. You’ve already decided the problem is worth solving. And still, we’re stuck.
A knot happens when we want two things that can’t both be true. We want to make a change, but we don’t want to risk disapproval. We want to ship the work, but we want a guarantee it will work. We want to move forward, but we’re carrying a commitment, a scorecard, a fear, or a story from the past.
The book is a compass with a simple north star: Problems can be solved. Our work has a purpose, intent, the change we seek to make. If we can name the baggage that’s holding us back or confusing us, progress is possible.
It ships next week.
The people who have read it can’t stop talking about it, because it helps us realize that better is possible. I hope you can share a copy with someone who needs it.
Let’s imagine the airline you run had to cancel just one flight a year. You have three days notice. How would you go about it?
You might begin by considering the travelers with the tightest itineraries, and explore which options exist and prioritize them.
Then, this being late-stage capitalism, you might look at the passengers who are paying you the most, or are the highest-value customers. You’d prepare alternative plans for them, and, in clear language, make it easy for them to switch with just one click.
And you’d expand your staff, just a bit, so the dozen or so people who can’t be served by your well-designed self-service model would be able to call or text in real time.
Add it all up, and the overhead you’d need to create a layer of customer-service around a cancelled flight (with $180,000 in revenue) isn’t that much.
With tech tools and training, your team could save long-planned-for trips and salvage customer loyalty.
Multiply it by the 3,000 or so flights that KLM cancels every year and it seems like a big number. Which is why it’s the accountants, not the marketers, that create so much chaos.
At some point, we shift from interaction to performance–but the people are the same people, the very ones that were happy to simply sit and have lunch with us.
Bring in some cameras and it goes from a lecture to a broadcast. And that brings all sorts of other requirements, anxiety and noise.
The office worker has learned to dread the annual review. For many good reasons.
It’s going away.
Now, like workers on the factory floor, it’s likely that the metrics will be exposed and the system will be contributing a review, not just the boss. AI will show up with your score, once a day, or even more often.
It will read your email, watch your clicks and listen to your calls. The relentless deskilling pursued by bosses is pushing each of us to work for an AI.
The better alternative is to have an AI work for you. Upskilling is the best response to the race to the bottom–leadership and projects, not tasks. We can start now before it’s too late.
