From the monologue of experts to the hospitality of dialogue
It all started out of frustration in the early days of the pandemic. We wrote our first Provocation emails in the third week of our British and Australian lockdowns, and asked people to subscribe.
We’d been told these lockdowns would only last for two weeks.
With that misplaced optimism, people were not rushing to innovate and transform their ways of working (the folklore around that ‘overnight’ shift in mentality is just that: myth). But by the third week, the fourth week, the tenth week, some brilliant optimistic educators started to realise there might be some ways we could transform the world around us.
And yet, in spite of the opportunity to do things differently, a large segment in the education world were hankering for the ‘old ways’.
There were new ways opening up everywhere, silver linings from a traumatic time.
And some people just couldn’t see those silver linings.
Some people didn’t want to see them.
All they could see from that harrowing time was tarnished brass, when there was gold just behind.
In The Provocation, we’ve tried to help you see gold.
In 200 emails, written by Jeremy, Malie, Chantelle, Brad, Tim and me, we’ve done our best not to tell you how to do your job. We’ve tried not to offer advice. All we want to do is show the kind of stuff that we read and watch, the fuel that feeds our own ideas when we’re at work.
Some people might think of this as a service, or being of service to the community. It’s free, after all. The cynics will think it’s all for marketing and money-making.
We see it as hospitality. The same hospitality that’s driven our team since 2009.
Understanding the distinction between “providing a service” and “being hospitable” has been at the foundation of our success from day one.
Service is the technical delivery of a product. It’s shipping what the customer asked for, giving them what they expect. When I created a firm called NoTosh (no tosh, no nonsense) it was not to ship whatever people asked for. It was to open up a dialogue about what people — specifically in the world of learning — really needed. Those two things are not always the same.
Service is a monologue held by ‘experts’. They talk most of the time. They use the first person singular far too often. They talk about trendy topics like student agency and agility while forcing thousands through the sausage factory of learning they’ve defined in advance (with intellectual mystery meat as the main ingredient).
Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. It’s what we strive for every day. We want to welcome guests through our digital door, and from the get-go we listen to them with every sense we have. How we follow up, how we respond, is what this newsletter has become. It’s a dialogue between everyone our team meets every week, the conversation we have amongst our team, and then shared with a few thousand other guests who’ve joined us for a while. (That’s you).
Danny Meyer, the restauranteur extraordinaire, sums up hospitality and service like this:
“To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious, appropriate response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.
“Hospitality exists when you believe the other person is on your side. Hospitality is present when something happens for you. It is absent when something happens to you. Those two simple prepositions-for and to-express it all.”
Here’s to doing more for you and, in so many cases, with you, through into 2023.
This originally appeared on November 28 as the 200th email in NoTosh’s newsletter, TheProvocation. It’s subscriber only (for this special one we made an exception!), and it’s free. So make sure you don’t miss the next 200 gems to inspire you and save you time: subscribe now.
