Category: Writing

Volunteering affords an interesting learning experience. Your skills are gratefully accepted. Your time is well invested. Your relationships strengthened.

Persuading people to hold organisational purpose above their personal ones, particularly after their long involvement is an interesting learning experience. While I do not have to do that, observing how these are navigated has been truly relevatory.
My style of engagement is coaching, not directing. I’m in awe of how my colleagues engage with strong personalities who don’t respond well to coaching. I get to see both sides as a confidante, and I learn from both.
I have spent several hours today with a grant application. I wrote most of it, while a volunteer is collating the documents required. Deadlines have appeared, and our collating volunteer is struggling to keep up. It’s disappointing to have to stay up late when all the information was with them two weeks ago. Ah, well!

Hemingway readability: Grade 7

I don’t feel like writing. No words or ideas. Nothing worth sharing. How on earth am I going to write a hundred words, let alone 250? In fact, why do I even bother writing today at all? Was there anything I learnt today? Did I meet some new people? Take a few chances? Share my burden with othes? Shock them with my frankness? Annoy them with my pessimism? Alarm them with my hope and wild ideas? Express my frustration? Complain? Smile? Laugh? Draw? Do calligraphy and write out a quote? Help someone? Help my wife? or kids? Do chores around the house? Imagine something? Do yoga? Read a page? Get angry at the kids, and drive twice to the station because the young fella dropped his card? A constant stream of consciousness pouring out, and nothing to make sense of.

How we spend our days, after all, is how we spend our lives. How did I spend my day? And my week? Two months into the year, has there been any progress in my growth? In my life? Have I built any new relationships? Deepened any existing ones? Asked for help? Offered help? Did something meaningful, even if no one acknowledged it, or even saw me do it? Worried about world affairs? Had a friend drop off yummy cake? Think about how life would be without work? Or meaningful work? Or volunteering work? Inspire people? Express gratitude? Receive gratitude with grace? Listen to heavenly music? Play some music, even if it sounded the opposite of divine? Tidied up? Remembered to do taxes and finances?

Yeah, it’s pretty hard to write because I don’t feel like writing today. Tomorrow might be a new day, to begin it well and with serenity.

Hemingway readability Grade 2

Some days are diamonds, some days are stone.
– John Denver

Some days are both.

The speakers at the 2022 premier of my internal talks were sensational. Nearly a hundred people, listened to in rapt attention, and with gratitude. One speaker couldn’t make it – an accident requiring a hospital visit.

I’ve gone from being in two minds about ever doing them, to having an eager audience that dialled in well before the talks began. Is there merit in turning these into a late evening session?

The stones today were discoveries that signal how rigged corporate appointments are. It’s all ‘jobs for the boys’, but not all boys. Some of the most inspiring people I know have pulled stumps from the race, some voluntarily, others being explicitly told.

There must be other ways to eke out a living, surely?

 

Is it possible to get a group of people with common purpose and common incentives aligned?

Is it possible to get a group of people to a common purpose even if their current incentives are not aligned?

Is it possible to get a group of people excited and inspired to work on a common purpose even if they have little else in common but being able to bring their strengths?

I have to grapple with these questions every day. They aren’t profound questions.  They are vexing to the point of exhaustion. Every day I see individual egos climbing imaginary hierarchical towers with almost unbridled power over other people’s lives, pretending to care under “our values”.

The last question is the one that’s most on my mind. I fail often at it. I find it dispiriting at times at the effort I have to put in, just to fail.  I keep at it though, and after two years, I am seeing how this can be more successful than the other sticks and carrots ideas that keep showing up in corporatedom.

I have slowly come to accept – even occasionally celebrate – that I have strengths in this weird combination of skills. Being invited today to talk to a bunch of marketers and strategists on how to improve their presentation and persuasion skils came out of the blue. Enthusiasm and inspiration, apparently, is not a common currency.

Hemingway Readability Grade 8

“I am at my most powerful when… ”

Reflecting on that statement is a useful exercise to do often. Particularly on days when you don’t necessary feel like that. Life throws bottles at you that shatter under your bare feet. Dragging yourself through that mess isn’t a ‘powerful’ thing.

I was witness today to an incredible rehearsal of a talk by a colleague. She’s owned her story, nothing the audience says or does will affect how she feels about it. While many people will be aghast at the challenges she’s talking about, she sees it as a way of inspiring others, even one person, to think about their own life differently.

When do I feel most powerful? The way she tackled the subject, prepared her talk, and has rehearsed gives me goosebumps. I hope she writes more often – even on days she doesn’t feel like it. She has a way with words that connect at a deeply human level.

Life is messy, and you can still find joy.

It’s easy to mistake activity for accomplishment.

Today has been a day of activity. Lots of it.

Instant gratitificaton. Immediate results. Goal oriented. None of my activities today delivered on any of those. I spent hours talking to people. Every one of them today were grateful for the time I spent with them.  They think I was generous.

The truth is that I got a lot out of those conversations too. Inspiration from their life stories. Ideas to communicate my message effectively. Nudges to consider points of view I would not have on my own. Connections they helped make in my mind, or those they made for me in the real world.

Did I accomplish anything with those activities? I think the answer for today is yes. I helped someone find their voice. I helped someone write their story. I helped someone take their mind off their worries, and look to the future. I helped someone break through a mental block with a couple of new ideas.

Hemingway readability index: Grade 4

A recent conversation with a corporate executive triggered this question. The person suggested that people at the grassroots didn’t know enough about the organisation’s strategy so the ideas they propose are a non-starter.  In the moment, I felt viscerally that the person lacked self-awareness yet had an oversized ego, had forgotten the two primary facets* of their job. I want to explore this person’s perspective, and build their argument for that statement.

Explicit:

1. 1. The organisation (the executive leadership specifically) is grappling with the changes in the marketplace. There are multiple dimensions to the problem. For fast response, a small group of highly qualified management professionals are working hard on understanding the problem.  People at the grassroots are unaware of these multi-dimensional problems. Therefore any ideas they have, while important to them, may not be relevant to the problem
   2. Good ideas do come from the grassroots, but they do not take an enterprise view of their implications. You need a much higher level perspective, and that awareness is only accessible to senior execs. It is impossible to convey these implications, so staff have to trust executive judgement on this.
   3. Being an executive who has deep history of the technical details, and the bird-eye view of the enterprise problem, I am aware of the problems that this idea will create for the rest of the system. Again, staff have to trust my judgement because I have got this right on multiple occasions previously. I don’t have the time to explain this at length to every person, and will exercise my decision-making authority.

Implicit: (Of course I can never know this for sure so entirely my assumptions)

1. 1. There’s no evidence that this idea is workable. The risk is way too much to accept.
   2. The evidence that is provided goes counter to my prior experience.
   3. If the idea works, it will make someone else look good
   4. If I have not objected to the idea in the first instance, and the idea fails, my credibility among my peers will be diminished
   5. This is not my idea
   6. This is your idea and I don’t like you/your higher-ups etc
   7. There are other ways this can be done
   8. Our competitors will use this to their advantage

Doing this exercise is illuminating – there are more implicit than explicit arguments that I can think of. If I asked the person how much of my list is valid, would I get an honest answer? Would the answer be different in a different circumstance?

* My current belief is that an exec needs to:  a. articulate the org strategy clearly so that the experts – the people actually doing the job – knew what they were aiming at; and b. use their hierarchical heft to negotiate the removal of obstacles in the path of the experts.

 

I invested all day in building a strategy document for the radio station, and I’m mentally drained.  I ought to write about the process, and the few things I’ve been able to accomplish today, and how frustrated I feel with the output. Yet, when someone else reads it, they think it’s fantastic. Am I underestimating myself?

Rest and resurrection, that’s what it should be called. I need it tonight.

Ideas are easy, execution is hard.

I agree with that sentiment, with a slight modification: executing alone is hard. Having a group of people who love the idea, have the skills to execute on them, and won’t sleep until they’ve figured out how, is useful .

I’ve seen it in action repeatedly, and this week has been another stellar demonstration of this principle. Over 70 people have now gotten involved actively in making an idea that 4 people had cooked up a few months ago. Trust, transparency, communication, purpose, a desire to prove the detractors wrong. Dozens of mavericks, that’s what I’ve managed to bring together. I’m grateful that I can see the pattern in the dots, join them, and occasionally create a ripple, if not a movement.

I’ve spent hours now with 4 humans to help them craft their individual, `10 minute stories at the next Talks session I’m hosting. It’s been a joy to help them express their message, and to find their voice.

I found myself using the word ‘powerful’ multiple times while re-stating what I was hearing from those conversations. I unearthed the rawest of emotion when I probed a little. My questions and paraphrasing what I heard helped them reveal what lay dormant. Buried under social niceties or years of anguish or forgotten with the passage of time.

Finding one’s voice is not easy. Being able to do this with them is a gift, and I’m lucky to be able to do it as often as I choose to do. Powerful is what it makes each one of them feel, I hope. Helping someone find their voice is deeply satisfying, and helps me find inspiration for my own life.

Hemingway Readability Score: Grade 7