#Linkybrains superpowers and not-so-superpowers
A view from the inside
My own #LinkyBrain confession takes the form of two lists. The superpowers that my flavour of LinkyBrain gives me, and the challenges.
TL/DR: Superpowers are: Networking, Right-goal Focusing, Linky Sixth Sense. Challenges: Knowing When To Stop, Not Being a Completer-Finisher, Not Toeing The Line. TL/DR included as this gets a bit #9 Wordy.
Both of these lists I am only beginning to ‘see’ for myself, although people who know me will have know many of these things for years. And I am working on understanding more about both of these lists and how they impact how I show up in the world. ‘Not everyone is like this’ is still a revelation that hits me with surprising frequency.
I have uncovered more of this stuff in the past fourteen months as a startup founder than in fourteen years of corporate career. The rapid, real and raw self-appraisal routine that gets kicked off everytime you have an ‘oh shit the wheels are so close to coming off all this’ moment (and we know how often those happen in startup land) has pushed my discovery of myself and discovery about the world further and faster than I ever thought possible.
Superpowers
- Networking — I don’t mean the schmoozy crappy vaguely-passes-for-a-business-activity card exchange that is 99% of business networking. I mean going into a new sector, geography, role, whatever and building valuable relationships in that landscape. I think this comes from seeing potential in everyone, in each interaction or exchange combined with the need to understand ‘the big picture’ of why people do what they do, what drives them, and what worries them. Because if you understand that you can understand how you can help. Linkiness, for me, is a giving framework. I have done this twice now — in construction and in tech. It doesn’t phase me, it is my first move when I think ‘right how do we get started in this new world then?’. My gut answer is to go and meet people and really listen to them.
- Right-goal focussing — I always need to know what is the point of what we are doing? What change is this going to make? I have to know the goal, and I have to understand why this is the right goal, and why these are the right steps (or at least our best guess) to achieving it. And I don’t just have to know, I have to agree. I ask ‘why are we doing this?’. A lot. So far so not-so-LinkyBrain perhaps. But where I think this comes into it’s own is when there isn’t a clear goal, but there is definitely a problem, and that problem needs sorting. And problems, especially in startups, can be HARD. The non-obvious, urgent, risky and complex kind of hard. This superpower means my approach is to work back down through problems to really understand underlying root causes, and then work back up through actionable steps towards goals. I think this comes from the need to ‘see’ maps of actions, of cause and effect, and make those pure, beautiful links between the two, free of noise, bias and distraction.
- Listening to my Linky sixth sense — I make more decisions by gut than I probably care to admit. I’ll have a gut instinct about the way we should go on something, and then I’ll chew it over, canvass opinion and advice. Having an engineering background I can have a tendency to need to deduce answers. Sometimes that’s just not possible. And I am becoming more comfortable with that as I am gradually realising that these are the times my Linky inner workings, the thoughts, patterns and links that I am not even aware of having made, are coming to the fore. I dabble with journalling, particularly about learnings around people and how we interact. But I’m learning to internalise more, embed more, take more implicit action, and trust that Linky muscle memory.
Challenges
- Knowing when to stop — Coming at any new piece of information, article, news, personal introduction or interaction with the perspective that there’s going to be some gem of information in there that could lead to an unexpected insight is flat out exhausting. Because I love making those leaping connections between the disparate or non-obvious, I need constant feeding with new opportunity. But it can feel like I have no filter, because I never pre-judge anything on face value to determine if it is worthy of attention. This makes no business sense for me currently as the main impact this has is the ability to lose heaps of time on stuff that ultimately appears to give me nothing back. But maybe it does, I just don’t know it yet? (Linkybrain says). At a macro-scale all this rolled up into a burnout two years ago, and it’s something I’m much more acutely aware of now. Aware but far from 100% in control of.
- Not a completer-finisher — This one’s easy. I want to know the dashboard headlines, and I want to know the inner workings of the model, test it, stretch it, feel it so I can trust it. But I very much don’t want to be the person formatting the spreadsheet and writing up the version notes. I very much want it done, but not by me. If you are that person and can’t answer the ‘what if…’ or the ‘how about…’ that I am about to ask then I will likely not be happy. I like a complete picture, one that’s as understood as it can be and if there’s fuzziness or gaps or assumptions (when isn’t there?) I want to know where they are, and what potential impact they have. Knowing this has been a huge help in building teams around me. But it can frustrate others, and be mis-construed as lack of attention to detail and/or mistrust of others’ handling of the details.
- Not toeing the line — I am absolutely never the person you will hear say ‘that’s just the way we do it’. I am far more likely to be the person saying ‘but why on earth is it like that?’ or ‘that makes no sense’ or ‘wouldn’t this be much better?’ In various personality profile test I always score minimum (literally) on Adheres to Convention, or Rule Following. But high on Consistency. So at least I am consistent in my challenging behaviour. In my corporate life this has meant always feeling like you’re going against the grain. And sometimes that’s fine but mostly, over time, it just grinds you down. Putting aside being a female saying these things in male dominated industries I think this has been the biggest frustration of my professional career; that typical structures (no-matter what the glossy blurb says) do not value radical ways of thinking, and do not reward people who contribute through bringing diversity of opinion and challenging the status quo.
In broader terms these challenges have meant I have struggled to consolidate a personal brand — that nice snappy definition of who I am, what I do, what difference I make. And I’ve little chance of ‘finding my tribe’, because I feel more like a lone ping pong ball batted around by different flicks and spins in an arcade machine rather than a wandering traveller discovering their native homeland. And now I’m finally, professionally, happy with that. I really believe the diversity of Linky thought processes is a differentiating strength and I plan on continuing to use it.
I have been successful in a broad range of roles, and flex myself a lot to communicate in a lot of different landscapes. But
When you can ‘make’ yourself fit in anywhere, where do you fit in?
Reading others’ LinkyBrain perspectives has started to feel like I might have a chance of answering this one.
