#119: Curiosity And Connection

This week’s letter is one of those that assembled itself over a few months. It’s always fascinating to watch the process unfolding. It doesn’t always seem to involve me. Which is a little weird, but it is what it is.

I read something, then someone tells me something else, seemingly unrelated, and suddenly there’s an arc of electricity dancing back and forth. Then one of two things happen.

Sometimes, it sparks, splutters, and then fizzles out.

On other occasions, like this week, the arc strengthens and brightens, and then suddenly there are electric avenues enlivening the different fragments. The routes are clear. It’s all connected, beautiful, and crackling with energy.

Of course, I have to make sense of it and turn it into words. That’s not always easy, but I do always have to try.

Two weeks ago, a friend and I met at Culture Wine Bar. If you want to experience some of the world’s finest wines in one place, this is the place for you.

As we were about to enter someone greeted my friend. I didn’t know him but quickly learned that the man in yellow, was the supremely gifted photographer, Ignatius Mokone. He has this amazing work on show at Everard Read in Cape Town.

A Saturday night step into the world expanded my connections, my way of seeing, and my sense of what is possible.

Then, on Tuesday, a client of mine was in Cape Town. My clients are all over the country and the globe, so it’s always a special treat to meet them in person. We agreed to meet at Culture. After all, my first visit had been a lucky one.

He ordered the Mullineux Granite Syrah, without doubt, one of South Africa’s finest red wines. Well, in truth, he ordered the Mullineux Syrah, also a spectacular wine, but a communication glitch sent us up the price ladder.  In any event, a happy accident.

In ordering, he reminded me that Andrea Mullineux is one of South Africa’s finest winemakers and one of an increasing number of women reshaping the industry.

Mullineux and Leeu Family Wines have won the coveted Platter’s Winery of the Year on four occasions.

Thinking of Mullineux’s success brought Samantha O’Keefe of Lismore Wines to mind, whose Reserve Syrah is as highly acclaimed. And I can’t think about wine without being reminded of Tamboerswinkel’s sommelier, Sharrol Mukendi-Klaas, and Penelope Setti, proprietor of Penny Noire.

As I thought of how artists help us see the world anew and of female pioneers, the connections started to spark. Here we go. Let’s hope the words arrive.

/strategy

Last week, I introduced you to Morten Hansen’s Great at Work.

He identifies seven ‘work-smart’ habits that account for 66% of performance outcomes. One of those habits is ‘champion forcefully’.

This means winning support for a position by using data and inspiring others by appealing to their emotions. Sometimes though, this isn’t enough. The top performers are those that continue to persevere ‘deploying tailored tactics to overcome opposition to their efforts’.

Champion forcefully is a blend of logic, emotional appeal, and persistence.

Although this habit resulted in a greater uplift in performance for all participants, the impact was much greater for men. Why?

Hansen references a study that found that when “female employees asserted themselves by using tactics such as ‘deal forcefully with others when they hamper their ability to get their job done’ received lower performance ratings than women who didn’t use such tactics. Male colleagues, in contrast, received higher ratings when displaying the same behaviours.” He notes that “people regard female forceful champions as performing more poorly than their male counterparts when in reality they’re not”.

And so, the alchemy of Mokone and Mullineux’s creative brilliance together with Hansen’s research led to today’s strategy insight.

We must be conscious that what we think we see might not be reality. Our biases will distort our vision. They can cloud our insight, and lead to spurious conclusions.

Leadership requires that we reflect, we self-observe, we catch our blind spots, we open ourselves to other ways of seeing by connecting with others. We will always miss something. That’s being human. Strategy requires that we are alive to and correct our biases.

(If you want to read more on this topic, check out Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? And how to fix it)

/self

David Hockney is one of the world’s great artists.

Late last year, New Yorker art editor, Françoise Mouly, interviewed him about a recently completed project. Inevitably their conversation touched on how we see the world.

Hockney reflects on his time in art school saying “for four years we really just did life drawing, and that teaches you to look. That’s all drawing is. It’s teaching you to look and question things. A person would sit down next to my drawing, and then he’d draw a shoulder or something, and I could see he had seen more than I had. So, when I got back to mine, I looked harder”.

That is the joy of diversity. We can’t see everything. Other people see things that we can’t. If we watch, connect, listen and learn, we can expand what we see.

We’re not all artists, but we can train ourselves ‘to look and question things’ with intent.

Hockney comments that he is an 84-year-old smoker.

Mouly retorts that “maybe it’s curiosity that keeps you going”.

He responds “Yes. You can smoke, drink, and do what you want if you’ve got curiosity.”

Perhaps curiosity expands not only your vision but your life. It certainly enriches both.

Mouly asks him how the pandemic affected his work, and he says “The spring of 2020 was marvellous in northern Europe. It was a beautiful spring, and a lot of people noticed it, probably for the first time, because they were in one place. I mean, my friend Celia Birtwell, told me she never noticed the spring from beginning to end ever in her life before. She’s eighty years old.”

Do you remember that time? How quiet the world was? All those photographs of mountains breaking through smog, of animals tentatively creeping into city spaces. The glimmer of hope that we might do things differently.

Mouly closes the interview by asking Hockney what he thinks makes his paintings memorable. Here is the exchange.

“What do you think makes them memorable?
Nobody knows.

Not even you?
No, because if anyone knew, there’d be a lot more memorable pictures. [Laughs.] But you don’t know even when you paint them.”

It’s a beautiful antidote to a world that wants everything to be predicted.

/soul

n “The Strange and Secret Ways That Animals Perceive the World”, journalist Elisabeth Kolbert invites us to imagine the following scene, “You are in a room with an owl, a bat, a mouse, a spider, a mosquito, and a rattlesnake. Suddenly, all the lights go off. Instead of pulling out your phone to call an exterminator, you take a moment to ponder the situation. The bat, you realize, is having no trouble navigating, since it relies on echolocation. The owl has such good hearing that it can find the mouse in the dark. So can the rattlesnake, which detects the heat that the rodent is giving off. The spider is similarly unfazed by the blackout because it senses the world through vibrations. The mosquito follows the carbon dioxide you’re emitting and lands on your shin. You try to swat it away, but because you’re so dependent on vision you miss it and instead end up stepping on the rattler.”

Each animal has a different way of navigating the world and therefore perceives a different world.

Our world is not theirs. They ‘see’ a different reality. It’s a humbling thought.

Our planet contains an infinity. One that we can only begin to imagine. One that in our not-seeing, not-listening we are damaging, in many instances, have destroyed, to our detriment.

When a species disappears, so does its unique world.

When a person isn’t seen, their world is shrunk.

I wish you a week of connection, vision, of seeing, and being seen.

If this is the first time, you’re reading strategy, soul & self, welcome! You can subscribe here.

Please forward today’s letter to someone who has helped you see more.

All the best

Karl

PS: If you’re curious about my coaching practice, you can learn more here. I have some space for new clients from September.