#205: Your 2024 Survival Guide
Dear Friends
Just four years ago, most of the world was in lockdown. In the next twenty-four months many of us lost loved ones, and some of us were grievously ill.
In February 2021, I turned to physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis’s Apollo’s Arrow to give us context. He cautioned that the pandemic’s socio-economic effects would continue to be felt this year.
Every edition of this letter emerges from my conversations with clients who hold various positions in the world’s economy. Their concerns direct my reading, reflection and what I write here.
It is no surprise then, that much of this year’s theme has been about increasing effectiveness. Every organisation I work with faces pressure.
Today’s letter organises the first four months’ into a structure that I hope helps you see the wood from the trees.
/ strategy
First, change requires that we confront ‘disagreeable knowledge’. A.E. Housman’s 1892 lecture at University College, London reminds us of that.
In response, we tend to look externally, focussing on systems, processes, cost centres and forget about our own effectiveness. Yet, it is the foundation of sustained success. Any systemic change requires us to change. If we don’t, the system can’t.
So, we started the year with Peter Drucker’s work on effectiveness.
Change makes us insecure. We become defensive and don’t make the best decisions from that place. The risk is we lose humanity and compromise ethics and connection.
The British Post Office case is a cautionary tale. It reminds us of how change can come to trump ethics. The Wells Fargo case recounted in How Fear Causes Failure tells a similar story. Professor Barney Pityana, in the foreword to KPMG Chairman Wiseman Nkhulu’s book, Enabler or Victim? KPMG SA and State Capture reminds us, “Morality… is no longer just a matter of individual conduct, it is also about how institutions are organized so as to engender a moral accountability.”
Constance Hadley’s work on loneliness at work is essential reading.
For guidance on how to manage it all, we turned our attention to Leading Change, which built on Getting People Ready, Willing and Able to Change.
Knowing that our default response is to add processes, we reminded ourselves simplification and catalytic mechanisms can have exponential impacts and, in the last month, we focused on mechanisms to improve coordination.
In busyness, we cancel critical one-on-one coaching sessions with our direct reports (read more in How You Can Build Sustained Performance), we cut short team meetings, we have team meetings, but are all on our laptops, or have multiple windows open on our screens. Yet, an effective meeting rhythm is the heartbeat of any business.
In one sentence, surviving 2024 requires confronting the facts as they are, investing in our own effectiveness, remaining focussed on growing and enabling others, removing impediments to their success, and ensuring a strong flow of communication, to reduce complexity and safeguard ethics and connection.
Above are links to thirteen letters.
Dedicate ninety minutes. You’ll be able to read them all. If you’ve read them once, read them again.
Pick your favourites and share them with colleagues. Put aside fifteen minutes at the start of a team meeting to read and discuss one. It will make the second half of the year much easier.
//self
Harvard professor, Arthur Brooks’ column How To Build A Life is a constant source of useful insight.
In Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life, Brooks assesses Jung’s insights against contemporary research and concludes his “ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly to modern research findings”.
Jung believed that building a better life required good physical and mental health, good personal and intimate relations, seeing beauty in art and nature, a reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work and a philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience.
For the most part, Brooks’ review of the research endorses Jung’s conclusions, with one exception – “if we can upgrade ‘satisfactory work’ in Jung’s list to ‘meaningful work,’ then positive gains in happiness do come into play. The two elements that make work meaningful for most people are earned success (a sense of accomplishing something valuable) and service to others”.
This ties beautifully to our strategy summary. Navigating 2024 requires that we grow the people around us.
Two dimensions of earned success – growth and recognition – both result in higher performance. Leaders who grow their people are more trusted that those that don’t. Teams with high trust perform better. Teams in which accomplishments are recognised perform better than those were that doesn’t happen (or only negatives are noted).
Being of service to others increases the chance that they’ll thank you, and receiving someone’s gratitude has an outsize positive impact on mental and physical health. It also means that your colleagues feel that you ‘have their back’ – one of the key components of a high-performing team.
It’s a beautiful design, creating opportunities for meaningful work and strong relationships delivers the effectiveness we need in tough circumstances.
///soul
Hisham Matar’s My Friends (thank you Gladys Ryan for the gift) is many things. It is a story of the brutal futility of dictatorships and the horrors they wreak to no avail, it is the pain of exile and the bravery to stitch together a new life from the scraps that blow past, it is beauty and loss and hope and persistence, it is of being transformed by fear, trapped in it but persisting anyway. I’ve run out of space to tell you more; I’ll leave you with this passage…
The narrator, Khaled, returns home after decades in exile and sees his mother aged and momentarily feels pity.
Later, she confronts him, “No man should seek to see his family objectively. Not only because of the sheer impossibility of the task, but because such an ambition alone breaks the covenant between kin. The whole point, silly child, is to love unfathomably. Where hate and affection, bewilderment and clarity, are braided so tightly that they form an unbreakable cord, a rope fit to lift a nation. That’s what your forebearers did. And you – it’s not your games with the truth, your disregard for God and tradition, but this, this above all else lights the fire in my veins: you sit, as a stranger would, as a member of the audience, observing, affording yourself the space created by that objectivity of yours, which is nothing but a cold and empty schoolyard at night, a sad and abandoned place, in order to watch from a distance. Watch, then, as we lift our loads, as if you were a master and we the slaves. For the point about this life, my boy, is not to be good or wise but to be human, not to show the rest of us up”.
With love
Karl
PS: I post this letter on my LinkedIn profile. Please share it and tell me what you enjoyed (or didn’t). I appreciate the support and the feedback.