battling elves and building civilizations

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Why do we follow others? Because we trust them for their knowledge, advice, support, vision, etc.

“We follow others for various reasons, some because of their knowledge, some because of their vision, some because of their inspiration, and all for the confidence we place in them. No trust, no follower-ship. Without confidence from others, a person can not effectively lead. No follower-ship, no leadership.” —Valdis Krebs 2014-12-11

As this pandemic becomes endemic, many organizations are returning to the office. But the past 18 months have showed most of us that we don’t have to work in an office to be effective. As remote, distributed work takes hold across many industries, what kind of leaders will be trusted?

In a long thread on Twitter, Simon Wardley describes where these new leaders — those who can organize distributed teams — will come from.

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it’s science

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

@A_AMilne — “My father used to say that the third-rate brain thought with the majority, the second-rate brain thought with the minority and the first-rate brain thought for itself. Where there was uncertainty, where opinions differed, I would have to decide for myself.”

COVID19 original coronavirus + variants of interest & concern so far + country where they were first found:

– SARS‑CoV‑2 (China)
– Alpha (UK)
– Beta (South Africa)
– Gamma (Brazil)
– Delta (India)
– Theta (Philippines)
– Iota (US)
– Kappa (India)
The pandemic is not over yet.
—@NRGomes

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a unique opportunity

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“The spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas.” —Nicholas Christakis

Many people want a return to normal. But normal is what got us into this pandemic — mass air travel, global supply chains, constant expansion, pollution, biological weapons research, etc. What we have is a unique opportunity for significant change and a 21st century Renaissance.

“The Black Death upended the world of the Florentines and mightily reduced their numbers. And how did the Florentines respond to mass death and a shortage of hands? With great creativity and new visions. They opened their society to change and filled the ranks of the dead with new faces. You called it the Renaissance.

My COVID-19, on the other hand, is a minor pandemic, a small disrupter. A rupture to be sure, but nothing like my Black Death. But do you think that I have stopped your world so you can daily complain about lockdowns and shortages of toilet paper and computer chips? No. I am here, present and alive, so you can take stock, make amends, and pay attention to what matters.

Whether there will be a renaissance in your future depends not on how much knowledge your society has manufactured. Rather, it rests on how much wisdom you have cultivated.” —The Pandemic Speaks

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we don’t need no stinking jobs

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Last month I wrote that if you are wondering why work is not getting done as desired, then focus on the system. As we see people returning to offices and workplaces (hopefully post-pandemic) we should reflect on what this past year of remote working has really accomplished. Remote, or distributed, work has even been empowering, as stated by some Apple employees in an open letter to the CEO.

“For many of us at Apple, we have succeeded not despite working from home, but in large part because of being able to work outside the office. The last year has felt like we have truly been able to do the best work of our lives for the first time, unconstrained by the challenges that daily commutes to offices and in-person co-located offices themselves inevitably impose; all while still being able to take better care of ourselves and the people around us.” —The Verge 2021-06-04

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driving blind

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I do admin exactly like I clean vomit: Hold breath, enter without looking, do something, retreat, retch, wipe eyes, breathe, repeat.” —@ChristoMove

“Most doctors are rather good with healthcare of individuals, but not that good with mathematics & large scale human behaviour analysis.” —@autiomaa

“You catch highly contagious new-variant Covid-19 when you INHALE air that an infected person has EXHALED. This is more likely with CLOSE CONTACT, CROWDED PLACES, and CLOSED SPACES (3Cs).” —@TrishGreenhagh

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not remotely working

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Watching the return-to-office efforts starting around the world is a fascinating exercise. Not everyone wants a return to the old normal.

“But as office returns accelerate, some employees may want different options. A May survey of 1,000 U.S. adults showed that 39% would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about remote work. The generational difference is clear: Among millennials and Gen Z, that figure was 49%, according to the poll by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News.” —Bloomberg 2021-06-01

Some people are quitting rather than going back to work in the office full-time.

“When you average out some of the bigger surveys you discover that 39% of an organization’s employees say they will consider quitting rather than returning to the office full time. Companies that have been among the first to attempt returning their people back to full time office work are discovering that half of that 39% are doing more than considering, they are in fact quitting.” —Steve Keating 2021-06-06

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finds for focusing

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Every fortnight I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“If you focus on sickness, you’re going to end up with doctors as the key actors. If you focus on well-being, you’re going to end up with communities as key actors.” —@CormacRussell

“Collaboration is a necessary technique to master the unknown. Academics are slow to explore and understand the process. For now, practitioners provide the best laboratory to learn the complexity of collaboration.” —@EdMorrison

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connections trump expertise

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A recent research paper — Orthodoxy, illusio, and playing the scientific game — looks at why it took so long for the mainstream medical community to accept that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is predominantly spread as an aerosol and not through surface transmissions.

Three fields—political, state (policy and regulatory), and scientific—were particularly relevant to our analysis. Political and policy actors at international, national, and regional level aligned—predominantly though not invariably—with medical scientific orthodoxy which promoted the droplet theory of transmission and considered aerosol transmission unproven or of doubtful relevance. This dominant scientific sub-field centred around the clinical discipline of infectious disease control, in which leading actors were hospital clinicians aligned with the evidence-based medicine movement. Aerosol scientists—typically, chemists, and engineers—representing the heterodoxy were systematically excluded from key decision-making networks and committees. Dominant discourses defined these scientists’ ideas and methodologies as weak, their empirical findings as untrustworthy or insignificant, and their contributions to debate as unhelpful. —Wellcome Open Research 2021-05-24

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addressing wicked problems

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Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and author of the popular book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, has recently published a new book — Noise: A flaw in human judgment.

Noise in general is unwanted variability. That is, when there is a judgment or a measurement or a decision, and there is variability, and the variability can be across occasions. When the same person judges the same object many times and reaches different conclusions, that’s one kind of noise. And the other kind of noise is what we call system noise. So we have the judicial system, and it passes sentences on defendants and criminals. And you want it to function so that the same crime should be punished the same way by different judges and not be affected. And it’s not, it’s affected by the judge’s tastes, by the judge’s ideological position, by the weather. —NYT 2021-05-17

I came across an interesting counter perspective from Ed Morrison, author of Strategic Doing.

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the worst of both worlds

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Continued from — distributed work

Some countries are slowly emerging into a post-pandemic mode. The nature of work, or at least where it is done, has changed for many people. Zoom, like Google before, has become a verb. The video conferencing company commissioned a report on the future of video communications.

“Most countries heavily favored a hybrid business environment, with about two-thirds of survey takers preferring a mix of virtual and in-person working environments. Many cited the fact that they didn’t have to leave their homes and could stay safer virtually, but the main downsides were the lack of a personal connection as well as a poor technical connection or other tech issue. When asked about the future of business travel, most countries expect to travel for business purposes about the same or less than they did before the pandemic.” —Qualtrics Report 2021

The term ‘hybrid work’ is increasing in usage. It seems this is what many people prefer — an optimal mix of commuting, office camaraderie, and working from anywhere. But is hybrid the best way to organize work in the network era?

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