normal is the bias

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Almost a decade ago Harvard Business Review featured Scott Berkun’s article on how Automattic, the parent company of WordPress, was able to function as a 100% distributed company.

“Culture is critical. Automattic has many policies designed to empower employees and remote work is just one of them. They believe individual workers know best how to be productive and that management’s job is to provide choices and get out of the way. If employees are self-motivated and empowered, remote work can accelerate productivity. However in autocratic or bureaucratic organizations the freedom of remote work runs against the culture. Of course remote workers will be less productive if they’re in environments that depend on centralized, rule-oriented, or committee heavy processes. But even then it can work if managers care more about results than pretense.” —HBR 2013-03-15

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countering the populist narrative

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Being a knowledge catalyst means taking the time to add value to your knowledge. One way is to simplify what you know. Make your work human understandable. Speak in non-geek terms. If experts do not do this they will become surrounded by less informed people over time. This has become evident over the course of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, now in its third year. We seem to be collectively getting more stupid. People are voting for bombastic populists and supporting policies that make all of us poorer or less free to pursue our goals.

One way out of this mess is to make our social networks, and our society, smarter. Leadership today is helping our networks make better decisions.

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coming full circle

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I started my freelance career quite suddenly. I was fired from a rather well-paying job and found myself in a small town in Atlantic Canada with few prospects. My wife, a registered nurse, was a stay-at-home mother for our two pre-teen children. If she went back to work it would mean retraining and then starting at the lowest level in our province, as her previous experience was in another province. This is one of the joys of Canada’s Constitution where provinces are responsible for health services, so skills are not transferable across provincial boundaries.

So I hung out my shingle in June 2003 and later started my blog in February 2004. The US dollar was strong against the Canadian ‘loonie’, so traveling south of the border for networking or professional development was an expensive endeavour. This was when I came across the concept of PKM. It was a framework to connect with other professionals and make sense of our digitally connected world. I embraced it, especially as the financial cost was low.

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leadership in chaos

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In our wake up call I wrote in mid-2020 that complexity and chaos are the new normal as climate change drives more crises our way — pandemics, refugees, environmental disasters, and the overall degradation of our environment. To prepare for chaos, we need people who can act. Identify these people and give them experiments or skunk-works to play with. We will need leaders who can also deal with complexity. They will have to be constantly experimenting and probing their ecosystems. Organizations who are serious about surviving any ‘post-covid’ normal will have to take a hard look at their leadership and management structures. The time to change is now, not when the next crisis strikes.

By early 2021 I identified our crisis in network leadership and asked how many organizational leaders today are in the same situation as the inadequate officers in the Canadian Army who were unfit for post-invasion reality in June 1944. By the end of August of that year, two brigade commanders and five commanding officers had been removed as they were deemed unsuitable for leadership.

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pause and think

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

I don’t like Covid on a plane,
I do not want it in my brain,
I don’t like Covid, breathed in my face,
I wear a mask, from place to place,
I don’t like Covid numbers hid,
I do not want to infect kids,
I don’t like Covid, and I don’t care,
I do not like it anywhere #DrSeuss
—@keetmuise

Becoming a robot, by @VMaryAbraham

“Your employer has a secret fantasy: they wish you were a robot. Why? Because robots are reliable employees. They work without bio breaks and need virtually no downtime. Robots don’t seek opportunities to foster personal relationships with colleagues. Robots don’t call in sick unexpectedly. Robots don’t have childcare emergencies. Robots don’t create HR issues. Robots don’t have emotions or sensitivities or prior experiences or health conditions that need to be accommodated.

Robots are easy.”

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better stories for a better world

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“Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following.” —The Atlantic 2022

A decade ago I saw three factors in the production of what is generally called social capital:

  1. Intellectual Capital (ability to collect, retain & share information
  2. Social Capital (ability of people to work together)
  3. Creative Capital (ability to combine diverse ideas)

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community sensemaking

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We had a great conversation today for our monthly Zoom call with the perpetual beta coffee club. We had folks on the call from Japan, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, USA, Canada, and Spain. The diversity of perspectives really adds to our collective understanding, especially since this is a trusted space amongst peers.

A couple of books were recommended in the conversation.

The World of Yesterday

Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy

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finding the wisdom of crowds

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“Opinions have never been formed in a vacuum. They’re infectious, as people copy one another. And when this process is made visible it sets off public opinion trends. As more of the public square has moved online, we’ve seen how these can grow monolithic and bitterly factionalised, stifling potentially important public deliberation: take, for example, the hysteria that shut down public discussion of lockdown trade-offs.” —The wisdom of crowds descends into meme wars

Is the print era irretrievably over and are we seeing the end of objective media, as described in the article above? But did print really give us objectivity? In Europe the printing press enabled individual interpretation of the bible and the Protestant Reformation which to this day keeps forking off new branches like a berserk open source software project. On the other hand, print enabled mass literacy, but also yellow journalism.

The rise of yellow journalism helped to create a climate conducive to the outbreak of international conflict and the expansion of U.S. influence overseas [1866-1898], but it did not by itself cause the war. In spite of Hearst’s often quoted statement—“You furnish the pictures, I’ll provide the war!”—other factors played a greater role in leading to the outbreak of war … The dramatic style of yellow journalism contributed to creating public support for the Spanish-American War, a war that would ultimately expand the global reach of the United States. —Office of the Historian archive

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stupidity — the new normal

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Two years ago I wrote about the new normal of work, citing a Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions report that had just been published. The major trends identified in the report included observations such as evidence that in cities more likely to vote for Donald Trump, there were fewer jobs that can be done remotely. Much of the focus was on the impact of working from anywhere and the decline in air travel. Citi’s Chief Learning Officer discussed the company’s investments in learning technologies, collaboration technologies, and improved meeting practices — the latter which I had discussed in bloody meetings.

I concluded that most people would like the option to work from home, most of the time. Many workers have tasted it, and in spite of the challenges of being forced into distributed work — they like it. Now that everyone is familiar with video conferencing we can also see that in many workplaces — zoom is not the problem, meetings are.

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