Archive for the ‘Opportunity’ Category
Own Your Process
Ownership Sparks Creativity in Art & Work & Life
One key differentiator between working for the man (every night and day) and working for yourself is ownership. Working for yourself you own the beginning, the middle, and the outcome.
Especially the outcome.
Some of my favorite colleagues over the years—the very ones who advanced in whatever they worked at—found ways to own the process. These were the ones not content to follow orders. Instead they made the work their own, found their own way, employed their skill and imagination. I’ll argue that owning the work sparked their creativity to accomplish the task. And I’ll argue that ownership looked like responsibility for the outcome. So despite working for the man, they took ownership, made their own meaning and became, well, the man.
Over at Dumb Sketch Daily I’ve been producing a dumb sketch every day for the last 39 days. I was sorta proud of this dumb sketch:
Then a commenter suggested abstracting it, which I tried, given my limited art understanding and abilities (here):
You can see the result is…simple. But it is my own (not that anyone is lining up to take credit). The commenter’s comment helped me continue my odyssey toward learning to see.
My only point is that developing new skills requires a certain elasticity. We try new stuff and get it wrong again and again and again. And we keep failing until maybe, one fine day, it turns out sorta OK.
A lot happens when we take ownership for developing our own skills. And a lot of good can come from taking responsibility for our client/boss/friend’s desired outcome.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Stop On The Way
Ask: “What do you see from there?”
Mostly we hurry from this to that.
In this season we move from party to party. At work we move from meeting to meeting, hardly stopping to breathe, let alone reflect or appreciate the unique spot we’re in.
We do this because we are crazy-busy (always the right response in our culture). And sometimes reflection is uncomfortable, especially between things. No one really wants to dwell in the space between. But the space between has things to say as well. Things you would never hear otherwise.
Always “crazy-busy.”
We all know someone stepping between things. Maybe our friend has left a job or school or some relationship. Maybe we ourselves own some piece of life that has less than secure footing. All of us caught in between want the solid ground of the other side.
But we gain perspective by asking what we see from this liminal space. What does life look like from this uncomfortable, slippery place? What is important here—and should that thing be important when our footing is more secure?
Perhaps we do our friend a favor by asking what they see from that uncomfortable place—could it even be bit of mercy to ask that question?
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Kotter: Why do leaders fail at transmitting vision?
“a gallon of information…dumped in a river of routine communication”
John Kotter’s Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996) does an excellent job explaining the difficulty of vision moving through an organization. A guiding coalition may take hundreds of hours to study a situation and come to conclusions. But as they do this intellectual work, they are also doing the emotional work of “letting go of the status quo, letting go of further options, coming to grips with the sacrifices, coming to trust others….” (88)
This is all part of the process and when that guiding coalition finishes and forms their conclusion they naturally feel their work is done.
Their work is not done.
That’s because nobody outside the coalition has done any of this difficult intellectual and emotional rejiggering. In fact, most will be blindsided because they’ve been hard at the tasks they always do. They don’t have a clue what is coming.
This is typically the point of failure. Someone from the coalition gives a speech or authors an article in the company newsletter. Or maybe a series of three articles. Here’s Kotter, very bluntly:
So a gallon of information is dumped into a river of routine communication, where it is quickly diluted, lost, and forgotten.
John P. Kotter, Leading Change (89)
Compacting and condensing and boiling down the intellectual and emotional journey is essential before anyone else can or will sink their teeth into the vision. But who budgets time or money for that piece of the process?
Those who understand vision needs legs and motivation to run through an organization.
Transmitting vision must be an intentional invitation.
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Image credit: John Kotter, Leading Change (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996)
What Freelance Knows that You Don’t
For starters: Work is permanent while jobs come and go.
When I first considered life as a freelance copywriter, a friend said,
Welcome to the wonderful world of floating icebergs.
And it was so: projects fall off (the glacier of corporate planning) and float off to sea (so to speak, to the market) and you stand on them for a time, work on them, even as they melt under you. And then you step to the next iceberg. Or you tread water while another iceberg comes into view.
It’s a refreshing cycle—in a painful, polar-dip, take-this-horrid-medicine-it’s-good-for-you—kind of way.
Ice sheet, not iceberg. Don’t step on it.
I like to tell my copywriting students that the freelancer goes into it knowing this is how the game works. Then I tell them this knowing is in sharp contrast to nine-to-fiver’s who instinctually trust their jobs will remain, and are too often deeply surprised to find themselves waiting for the bus one day at 11am holding a cardboard box containing their office posters and mug.
But students typically have no mortgage or kids to feed or insurance to buy. So I’m pretty sure the comment doesn’t register until five years later, when all those conditions are true.
Recognizing the impermanence of today’s job is a great benefit, because it means one must always—always—be thinking about what’s next. The freelancer understands this in her bones. The smart nine-to-fiver rehearses this bit of knowledge every time she crosses the corporate threshold and enters the air-locked doors.
One thing that happens while I tread water is I make contact with dozens of old colleagues. I am no longer surprised by how often people change jobs, get laid off, start their own business or agency. Not to sound like an old guy, but way back when, people expected to stay at a single company for an entire career. Today I could count on one hand the number friends who have done that.
Friends often ask about work. I typically say, I’m busy and I’m looking. Always looking. In fact, this way of working has two benefits I cherish:
- Vision is no esoteric word for me. It is a hard-edge guide to what’s next. And I can never not pursue it. If I neglect to think ahead, those icebergs will float by without me ever noticing.
- The work itself become the focus. I get to burrow down into communication and copy and the telling of stories. The craft itself is a never-ending wonderland that shape-shifts as it leaps between clients and industries. The work, and the process toward the work, become the marathoner’s stroke for swimming toward the next iceberg.
In fact, faith, hope, and love remain as essential ingredients to this way of working. There is no space for taking-for-granted.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Writers at Work: “How do you imagine that will unfold?”
Seeing Need and the Power of Imagination
The leader’s peculiar gift is to help followers imagine how their work makes meaning. The leader makes personal how the organization’s work helps others, solves a human problem, makes the world better/more beautiful/safer, for starters. From that position of ownership (note that leaders may appear anywhere in an organization, position does not equal leadership) the leader imagines the next steps needed to move the organization forward. The leader acts on that vision and invites others in.
If you accept that the writer’s art is at least partly a reimagining or reordering of life, then you may be willing to consider the work of writing in business. Can writers in business look forward to how next steps unfold and then follow that thread backward to make those steps happen?
I say, “Yes.”
But not just because I do this for a living. [Full disclosure: I do this for a living]
It’s because writers in training are blind to this side of the life/work/art equation.
That’s a premise I’m toying with as I consider how entrepreneurship and professional writing fit together. I’m working through an entrepreneurial focus to the next Freelance Copywriting class at the University of Northwestern—Saint Paul, and I want to help English students see beyond self-focused essays and creative writing. A necessary starting point is inviting them to use their writerly tools to imagine life from that leadership/ownership/need perspective. I believe this can shift ownership to the writer and provide useful insight for right now.
Julian Sanchez’s tweet as the Senate report on CIA torture was released gets at this very concept:
Imagine forward and trace backward to locate solid actions. That is the leader’s gift—and possibly the writer’s.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
Dormant Versus a Bias Toward Action
The Shroud of Tuesday
What if your work stopped—on purpose?
We celebrate and expect constant productivity gains in our culture. Wall Street rewards those gains as they decrease the expense line of any business. We congratulate those people in constant motion who have momentum and trajectory.
But is constant forward motion sustainable?
Sure: looking back over the arc of our life we can cobble together a story about how we were always moving toward this invention or position or conclusion or achievement. That bit of personal cinema we learned from the biographer’s art.
In the moment, however, there are dormant times: work goes south, dries up, gets boring. There are times when it is not at all clear what to do next, which way to go, or even if this work will succeed at all. Doubts interfere. Even if you have a boss telling you what to do, there can be internal fallow times where you silently rethink your commitment to this job or that project or that leader.
We hate those times when work goes dormant.
We love movement and purpose, followed by lots more movement.
But dormant is not the same as death, despite how being laid-off feels like a mini-death. And when a work-stoppage happens it is hard to believe the rejuvenating effects of a release from movement. And yet, most of us do make it out the other side. And typically we have a new grasp of where we need to go and what we need to do.
I’ve always wondered how any living thing survives the bitter cold of the northern United States. Every winter I am amazed that cars start and water flows and life continues at 20 degrees below zero (F). Then March and April bring thaws and by May that dead-looking Maple blooms all over again.
Every year.
Maybe the cycles outside my window are a better analogy for work: there are ebbs and flows. And maybe it is worth building up a bit of patience with slower times, and even to embrace them and allow them to do their hidden work.
Even on a Tuesday.
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Image credit: Kirk Livingston
What skill will you grow in 2015?
I write and I want to draw and take photos. And write.
I’ve been trying to sketch lately. My son and I started a blog called Dumb Sketch December where we try to produce one sketch a day (inspired by OneDrawingDaily). I enjoy sketching more and more and I am less and less happy with the results. Unlike writing where I have a growing sense of being able to say what I need to say, sketching seems to have plateaued at capturing very little of real life.
I’m at the point where I don’t even know what I don’t even know.
My stapler rocks. My people don’t.
Other kindly sketchers and drawists chime in with encouragements like “Keep going!” and “Huh.” Of course, I’m committed to the dumb sketch approach to life, and I can find a bit of joy in a well-capture shoulder, or when I drew something very similar to that woman’s posture or her pony-tail. I am increasingly drawn to the very black carbon laid down to hint at a clear edge. I’m trying to take lessons from Edward Hopper, though I think he would have given up on me long ago:
I think we can guess what fascinated Edward Hopper.
But all this to wonder aloud at skill-building. There is something about the intentional action—committed in public—that has a way of squeezing us forward. NaNoWriMo used that force, our more successful diets use that force, weddings are a celebration of the force of intentional actions publicly committed.
What skill do you want to grow in 2015?
How will you make it public so we all can take courage from your actions?
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Kirk Livingston, Edward Hopper via The Walker Art Center
The Cost of the Silver Hand
In versus out—does it even matter?
It does in Minnesota. It’s 33°F right now—not so cold—but in less than 30 days we’ll plunge well below 0°F and stay there for a month or two. Being inside matters when the outside temperature is cold.
About “inside,” you remember high school, yes? Being an insider seemed to matter there: being part of the groovy clique seemed to say a lot about your identity. But it turned out that the cost paid for being an insider was higher than we realized.
You get inside by exploiting insider behaviors: hang with other insiders, use insider words, allow the insider frame of reference to settle on you and gradually think insider thoughts. There is a certain warmth to being inside. Sometimes it’s safe and cozy. Sometimes staying inside means forming alliances and battling for diminishing territories. A friend recently used those words to describe his years inside a large retailer based in Minneapolis—he left when the cost of alliances and battles was greater than his paycheck.
The classic insider mistake is to think inside is all there is. And that mistake is murder when the layoff discussion happens in the HR office on a bright, cold Friday afternoon. Or when you graduate high school.
But being on the inside is good when you also recognize voices from the fringe. That sort of consciousness allows new thoughts to infect the inside, possibly even countermanding the inbred thinking of insiders talking to insiders.
Lately I’ve been stimulated by reading The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, by Hagel, Brown and Davison (NY: Basic Books, 2010). In particular, their talk about what the edge person brings to the discussion seems fitting. The edge person is working at something different than the insider. The edge person is trying to accomplish something in a different way and so is asking different questions. The edge person asks questions the insider doesn’t even consider. And it turns out those questions are sometimes the very questions the leaders of the insiders wish they were asking.
My favorite scene in Canal Digital’s “Silver Hand” is at the bar when our hero tries to casually drop the Silver Hand reference.
What a lovely fail.
The smart insider acquaints herself with the habitat and questions of the edge person.
And vice versa.
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Via Canal digital
conversation is an engine 