Soft reset

I’ve been struggling to keep the newsletter going and for a good part of the last year, I couldn’t really put my finger on why.

Undulating pulse¹

Making mistakes on the internet

I dropped social media over Lockdown: partly fatigue, partly blacking-out in doomscroll, partly performance anxiety over what to front, partly feeling like a lurker who’s arrived to every party a little too late.

I do miss it as a means to discover new things that I’m likely to like. I don’t miss the decade-long feed of my personal history determining what happens next.

In defense of lists

Al: I love this time of year for the end-of-year lists … Me (to myself): Really Al? REALLY? Wait … maybe he’s on to something. – Creative Mornings, London, December 2022

I’ve changed my mind about lists.

Receiving yet another low-quality listicle in my inbox. Immediate block. The bait-and-switch of a promising post to a bare list with no context like some kind of error message. Immediate mute. A copy-and-paste stock response to a thoughtful question as condescending as ‘let me Google that for you’. Jilted. A travel guide that’s just tourist traps. Shortchanged. Automated shuffle playing the same songs at single-level album depth. Uninspired. A bibliography without a syllabus. Why bother? Getting to page 12 of the search results. Hair-pulling frustration. Greatest Hits of a 2-album band. Moneygrab. A bar puts on the Top 40. I’m done.

You’ve heard of Design Thinking, here’s Private Equity Thinking

Received wisdom on organisations over the last few decades is heavily influenced by “core competency” – that organisations of every kind (business, non-profit, government) should stay in their lane and only do the things that they are good at. Anyone who has taken a strategy course in the last 70 years, or in its trickle down, will be exposed to this due to the ideological allegiance of Michael Porter, Peter Drucker and Harry Igor Ansoff.

It’s a seductive narrative that commingles with the ideas of liberalisation – selling/renting public assets or taking a company public – and meritocracy – that ‘if we were only good enough at this thing then everything will come our way’ – and if we are the best, we are wholly deserving of taking the market for ourselves. The truth is neither meritocracy, liberalisation nor core competency translate to organisational/individual performance or intelligence.

How do we do that?

ILANA: What lies in the shadow of the statue?
RICHARD: Ille qui nos omnes servabit (the one who will save us all).

Idolatry casts a long shadow over the field of organisational insight – how people work together. The hope is to glean some kind of system divined from science to ‘get the most out of people’, ‘near perfect knowledge transfer capacity’ and ‘scale without limits and complexity’ by every favourite metric from profit to delivery time to psychometric tests. The general trend is that organising gets harder as the number of people increases with greater inefficiencies and redundancies, factions – sometimes much earlier than you’d think – and strategy diluted by the very channels and org chart used to disseminate information mono-directionally as bureaucracy grows and back-channels thrive like wild grasses. This is not limited to one sector, with private, public and informal organisations all suffering from the same ‘scale issues’.

Not actual game footage

I don’t know about you, but the “Web3” (née Crypto) propaganda engine seems to be in overdrive. Seemingly overnight everyone on Twitter/LinkedIn with a passing interest in Blockchain has agreed to the discursive capture that this is the future.

What makes a trap a trap

Unstructured time

I can’t do much but acknowledge the war in Ukraine and how much it occupies my attention. The doublespeak in my feed is getting more weird now that China has picked a side after a week of non-reporting.

Appeal to Reason

⚠️ Trigger Warning

I didn’t expect to play a political overture this early in the season. This one will touch on war, corruption, coercion, manipulation and clientelism. Nothing graphic. It’s totally okay if this is not your vibe.

Maintain or refrain?

This week I’m gardening the bylaws and business plan for mito.coop, what I’m building right now.¹ It’s an exercise in care and patience where I’m not trying to rush into things while I open up every part of my process to scrutiny.

Starting something new again feels like tracing the same textures with your fingertips, like the banister of a childhood home or stone you’ve leant against while waiting for a lift. It’s familiar, grounding terrain but also distracting.

Propositions, plural

Value propositions are speculative statements of what something is worth to someone.¹ They come in different flavours by discipline. Marketing will dress it up in the language that the audience speaks, Management as the incremental change from existing circumstances in pains/gains, Politicians will link it to promises made to a citizenry, Activists will link it to a mission, NGOs impact, Designers will choose minimum function to influence favourable behaviour.

Stakeholder 1 helps Stakeholder 2 with Valuable X via Interface Y.
Stakeholder 2 helps Stakeholder 1 for Valuable Y via Interface Y.