I’m ready to do work that really matters

I turn 37 tomorrow, and I’m ready to go. I’ve been ready for a long time. Humans do, so let’s do.

Practical Self-Management Intensive Week 4 — Prototyping

“Whatever happened to just trying things out and learning from them? That is how we all learned to walk and talk. If we are changing to a new system, we need to give ourselves space for errors and learning.”(1)

Well, I’ll tell you what happened: Sales targets. Fixed budgets. Market promises. Linear process control. Corporate governance. Project deadlines. Classism and scorn for the worker. Scarcity mindset. Monopoly capitalism. Fear of missing out. The Peter Principle. I could go on forever, but luckily for you, I won’t. Lucky for me actually, since you’d stop reading.

I don’t like ‘understand-everything’ systems

Week 4 of the Practical Self Management Intensive course had us contemplating the importance of prototyping — we framed this using Cynefin to understand the particular domain of context or problem we are operating in. I’m well practised in using Cynefin since the agile community references it heavily. I’ve also done a course in Theory U — pfft I even have photographic evidence — but damn if I can remember much about it.

But at the risk of ruining my chances of ever working with the Sloane School of Management I will say that I enjoyed it at the time. I suppose that it’s the sociologist in me that feels uncomfortable with these models or meta-narratives or frameworks. They always remind me of Hegel and his teleology of history, that we are somehow magically going somewhere. I’m more of a materialist (in the correct sense) I suppose. There is the world, and there is action.

Innovation is not a specialisation

What I know I do love is the actual work of creative prototyping, which I often encourage in my work life but rarely get to participate in. But as I love complexity theory and the idea of ‘the art of the possible’ and teams at the edge of chaos, I always say the emergence of new ideas requires two things: transparency and equal voice. Innovation requires these things too. While everyone thinks they do innovation, the truth is barely any organisations emphasise equal voice, and they ‘delegate’ the work of innovation to ‘sufficiently-skilled’ specialist architects and designers. I mean, that’s best case scenario. Worst case is having people that can tell others what to do as it stops organic self-management in its tracks. Most organisations will never know how close they came to greatness by simply permitting self-organisation to occur, and innovation or emergence to take place, and be amazed at the results. In human systems, where we are sometimes able to define a general goal or purpose to self-organise around, we have a head-start.

Don’t forget: Self-Management is about getting shit done

I love the ‘soft’ side of self-management. I do heaps of it: coaching, workshops, education, facilitation, presentations. I love all of it. But it doesn’t thrill me as much as pushing something out into the world for real people to benefit from, and the satisfaction of saying we did it in spite of all the bullshit. That’s why I make this argument — self-management is simply emancipation from stupidity. It means people with talent doing work for people with a need. Self-management cuts through the noise, eliminates waste, allows people to take contextual leadership. But we can’t have it, because it’s not ‘common sense’. No it’s not common sense, but it’s the way things have happened since the dawn of time. It’s the way humans actually relate to each other to get shit done.

There is a quote that I love from Agile BOSSA Nova that encapsulates the way that, apart from all the soul-searching and soft-skills, really these methods are about doing things better. In discussing the values of self-organisation, transparency, constant customer focus, continuous learning, Eckstein and Buck write:

“Experience indicates that these values work in the real world. The values are a testimony to that experience and not a statement of a deeper belief system.”(2)

I think this is incredibly concise and lucid reasoning. We spend a lot of time talking about the theory, philosophy, morality, ethics of self-management. But what we sometimes forget is the simple fact that self-managing ways are simply more effective, especially in complex environments. And being that is the case, the reason that they are not adopted more widely says more about the fear of the loss of control and of chauvinistic ego, than it does about the ‘other’ scientific management being ‘better’ methods of structuring a business.

And I guess what I mean to say is that I turn 37 tomorrow, and I’m ready to go. I’ve been ready for a long time. Humans do, so let’s do.

What really matters

I have done enough projects in my life working 70-hour weeks to know that when it really comes down to the crunch, it’s the people there at the end that matter. And that has always meant me sitting with 2 or 3 actually knowledgeable people, at 10PM when it’s nice and quiet; when all the bosses and the bureaucrats have said their piece about what we need to do and where we went wrong. That’s when the actual important work happens. That’s when — waiting for a database to complete indexing, or for a build to compile — where we do the important work of giving each other moral support and keeping each other motivated. We know that we don’t get to keep our labour. It belongs to someone else. Wage employment sucks and it’s arguably one of the top 3 problems of our time. But hell if we don’t do it in solidarity and with love. And hell if we don’t do it better when it’s just the people with skin in the game that are doing it. Ask anyone working in Digital today and they’ll tell you it’s true.

And that’s what self-management means to me. We are better together when we are in an autonomous position based on the fact we are adults and we know what we’re doing. People ought to be able to associate freely and network without thought of offending the artifice of formal authority. People ought to be free to create value and not be held back by arbitrary paperwork. People ought to be able to answer the call to lead, or to consent to what their company does or who leads them. It’s almost a question of morality; by what right are we prevented from being everything that we are capable of? Why are systems created by humans unable to be changed by humans? How many toiling lives have gone wasted without an opportunity for free expression of the will and the awesome capacity it has to improve the world?

References:

1. Slade, Samantha. Going Horizontal
2. Eckstein, Jutta; Buck, John. Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy(p. 50)