297: No sooner do we make sense of the world than that sense is out of date
Dear friends
Let us start today with some whimsy. These occasional starting segues may seem like a distraction, but, in truth, they’re an expression of an important truth: everything is easier when we intentionally add beauty and joy to our lives.
To start: this caracal kitten visited a Cape Town home. In a similar ‘smile-spontaneously’ zone, I love designer Chiaro Catalina’s pop-art clothing. She describes them as paintings not to hang but to wear. If anyone is feeling generous, I’d be quite happy with this Peanuts-inspired coat or this blazer featuring one of my favourite critters, the Pink Panther. To end on a more cerebral note, listen to this snippet of Rebeca Omordia bringing Igbo drumming techniques to her piano-playing (Her album, African Pianism, accompanied me whilst I wrote this letter).
/strategy
You’re aware that Volkswagen is undertaking the biggest restructure in its history. It is likely to cost 100,000 people their jobs. In a recent FT piece, Andrew Hill has framed VW’s, and the business world’s, challenge as one of sense-making. Quite simply, how do we make sense of all that is happening?
It seems so obvious as to be trite. Yet, it is not. The pause to, and comfort with, holding the truth that we don’t fully understand the complexity of what we face, nor do we have easy answers, is discombobulating in this ‘take a pill and all will be well’ world.
Drawing organisational theorist, Karl Weick’s work, Hill comments, “One key attribute of well-run organisations is mindfulness: not regular meditation sessions, but an unusual attention to any signals that may presage problems” and, quoting Weick, “no sooner do people make sense of the world than that sense is out of date”.
We want it to be different. Simpler. But it is not. And to be able to pay “unusual attention to any signals that may presage problems” we must have cultivated the capability for complexity: an exceptionally hard thing to do in a world that reads less, where our attention is fragmented and eroded, and yet, it is what we need.
Today’s letter is written in that spirit, not resolving anything, but rather presenting ideas in tension with each other. The reality is that there is rarely one right path. Invariably we are managing polarities, integrating ideas that, at least superficially, are in tension.
Staying with FT: Japan’s ice-cream manufacturers are facing a price-fixing investigation. Journalist Leo Lewis writes, “It has been plausible for Japanese companies to raise prices with a tone of powerless regret, helpful in their efforts to appear permanently on the side of consumers” and that executives find this time having been “conditioned to practise a form of capitalism that coddled consumers and preserved jobs”.
It is a view of what business should be.
Daniel Pink ends his book To Sell is Human with these two questions:
- “If the person you’re selling to agrees to buy, will their life improve?
- When your interaction is over, will the world be a better place than when you began?”
//self
Author, poet and Beat Generation pioneer, Jack Kerouac reflecting on his creative process said, “When they come, I write them; when they don’t come, I don’t”.
Nobel-winning novelist, Toni Morrison, comments dryly, “I don’t wait to be struck by lightning and don’t need certain slants of light in order to write”.
///soul
Mosab Abu Toha’s poem Ibrahim Abu Lughod and Brother in Yaffa reminds us that loss is often invisible.
The two walk toward the beach,
barefoot.
With his soft
index finger,
Ibrahim starts to draw a map
of what
used to be
their home.
‘No Ibrahim, the kitchen
is a little farther to the north.
Oh, don’t step over there,
Dad was sleeping there on the couch.’
Tourist kids run by,
flying kites
The waves hit
the beach,
shaded with cloud cover.
The mosque on the hilltop
calls for
prayer.
Ibrahim and his brother
still argue about where their kitchen was.
They both sit on the sand. Ibrahim
takes out a lighter, wishes he could make tea in their kitchen for everyone on the beach.
Ibrahim looks upward to what used to be their kitchen window.
The mint no longer grows.
Karl
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