What Future Do You Want?

Good morning

I have been overwhelmed by the response to last week’s letter. Many of you shared it with people that you care about and they, in turn, shared it.

Thank you for all the messages I received. Many of you told me that I was able to give expression to your experience, that in reading my words, you felt a little less lonely and a little more understood. That is a blessing.

Your messages to me have reflected back the hopes that I bring to this work – that it is authentic, meaningful, honest, and thoughtful.

Thank you for taking the time to reach out to me. It has been a tremendous gift, one that has given me joy and peace that I am doing what I must.
I posted last week’s letter here. I would appreciate if you would take a moment to like and comment on the post. I need your help in spreading it a little further.
One hundred and three years ago today, Nelson Mandela was born.

In recent years I have tired of the white washing of his legacy. The deletion of the torture, abuse, and violence that he faced. The forgetting of the fact that, in face of apartheid’s refusal to equality, he founded Umkhonto we Sizwe. That he, and his government, wrestled our country back from the precipice of a moral and financial bankruptcy. The caricature of Hallmark platitudes does an injustice to the complexity and courage that it took to bring (and maintain) democracy.

Realist painter John Meyer has created what gallerist Mark Read calls a ‘poem of paintings’ to celebrate and honour Mandela. They are spectacular works that, thankfully, do not hide the hardship.

Gather the family and put aside eleven minutes to watch this film. The last few minutes is a conversation between academic Ashraf Jamal and Meyer. It is gracious and respectful. As it ends, Jamal thanks Meyer for time and Meyer reciprocates saying, “it gives me a chance to find meaning”.

I hope in our conversation today you find meaning. I hope in your conversations this week that you give others the opportunity to find meaning.

/ STRATEGY

Last week we started to explore James Suzman’s book Work.

It is a 400-page wedge of a book that covers the full arc of our relationship to work. He moves from hunter-gatherer societies through the puzzle of the Kathu Pan hand-axe, to the architectural wonder of the Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, to the Roman Empire (that before our present world was the most unequal known to the world and we know how that ended), through the Industrial Revolution and ending in our current late capitalism. It’s a big book, a big story.

At its heart is a perplexing conundrum, that we seem compelled to move towards ways of organizing that don’t really serve us in living rich, meaningful, connected lives.

Our move into agriculture and cities yielded profoundly less comfortable lives than that of hunting and gathering. At the start of the Industrial Revolution and indeed in late nineteenth century as capitalism emerged properly, there was much hope that the productivity revolution would liberate humanity from the drudgery of much work.

To be fair, there is much evidence of steadily improving standards of living across the world. And yet, we have inequality like never before. Well, except for those Romans.

The majority of the world’s workforce are not engaged at work and lest you think ‘not engaged’ isn’t too bad, think of the times in your life when you’ve had to do something for hours, days, years on end that you don’t really care about with no end in sight. It is, quite literally, soul destroying.

Although we have the resources to ensure an end to poverty, millions live and die in poverty.

We are currently scrambling to roll-out alternate forms of power generation whilst simultaneously inventing new power-hungry technologies that mean demand outstrips supply, in turn creating a demand for very particular rare metals, that in turn opens up that possibility of deep ocean mining, which surely is a bad idea.

We need to pause and think very clearly about what future we want to live in.

In the latter part of his book, Suzman introduces us to the Japanese concepts of “karoshi”, “karo-jisatsu” and “kacho-byo”. They apply across all societies.
Karoshi means death by overwork. The heart attacks and the strokes that follow periods of protracted and intense overtime. The continual weeks of 16-hour days clocked up and expected in many parts of the professional world – law firms, banks, consulting companies, advertising agencies – and, of course, in manufacturing settings.

Karo-jisatsu painfully is the taking of one’s own life because of overwork. That moment in which the pressures tear you from your soul, and you feel that you can’t continue.

Last, kacho-byo “translates to ‘manager’s disease’ and was coined to describe the overwhelming stress felt by middle managers over promotions, letting down their team, shaming themselves and their families, or, worse still, disappointing their bosses and weakening the company”.

The pandemic has brought a welcome focus on mental health and resilience, and to be sure these are critical. Yet, I worry that it makes the burden of coping entirely, or mostly, that of the individual – the expectation is that YOU are resilient, but what if the conditions in which you find yourself are impossible?

I was bemused to read this HBR article authored by two McKinsey consultants entitled 5 Ways Employers Can Support Womens Mental Health. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with their recommendations – they are solid and would have meaningful impact. What perturbed, actually angered me, was the silences. There is nothing about how organisations could change their structures and their ways of engaging with working women that would make a difference. How about assisted childcare? How about the explicit acknowledgement of the impact of home-schooling and so reducing working hours?

Resilience and mental wellness resources are undoubtedly part of the puzzle, but if we are truly to address the nature and impact of work, we need to look at how it is structured. Working hours, e-mail free blocks of time, meeting-less days – I am sure you can add to the list. The length of the working week may be beyond your authority, but you can conspire with your colleagues to create meeting-free zones, you can lobby for policies regarding e-mail expectations. Change almost always comes from us.

Kacho-byo is far trickier to deal with. I know how often I have driven myself far beyond the stated expectation of my employer, and certainly well beyond my contracted 40-hour workweek. Indeed I was blessed to work with and for Colleen Louw for many years, who knew I would drive myself into a space that was no longer useful to myself or anyone else. She would walk into my office and say “Get out of here. Go to a coffee shop. Read. Write. Rejuvenate.” Who could you do that for in your organisation? Could you make it part of the culture? Could you do it for yourself?

Part of reorienting our relationship to work is reorienting our relationship to ourselves. Part of it is consciously modelling and creating the kinds of organisation that help people thrive.

I am blessed to work with a number of founders. Some are starting out; others now employ hundreds of people. They are, to a person, compassionate and caring. As they grow, they confront what is best called ideologies of organisation, what Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall bluntly call Lies About Work. They confront ‘must-have ideas’ from consultants and human resource practitioners that don’t gel with their lived experience of leading people and growing their businesses. Much of our work together is figuring out how one scales a business whilst remaining true to the founder’s compassion and desire to impact positively on the world.

Suzman captures the contradiction between the ideologies of work and what really works in this way, “What is perhaps most strange about the invocation of competition as the primary driver of our economies is that behind the masculine bluster of ruthlessness, most businesses and businesspeople operate in a manner far more similar to real ecosystems. This is why all big organizations, for instance, have ambitions to function with the cooperative efficiency of termite mounds; why most business leaders work to establish mutually beneficial, “win–win” relationships with their suppliers, service providers, and customers; and why, even in the countries that most enthusiastically embrace the theology of free markets, a whole battery of antitrust laws exist to prevent excessive cooperation in the form of collusion between businesses, the creation of cartels, and other “anti-competitive behaviors.”

Ultimately, in exploring how our journey has unfolded, Suzman is asking us two powerful questions. “

• What happens if we simply make do with less?
• What happens if we make connections with each other, living rich and meaningful lives, the primary measure of success?

/ SELF

What can we do? Well, perhaps start by reducing complexity.

In an article published in Nature, engineer Leidy Klotz and social psychologist, Gabrielle Adams investigated why it is that when we’re confronted with a challenge, we tend to add complexity rather than seek simplicity.

Ironically, although removing elements from one’s worklife, from the design of an organisation, from overly complex processes can often increase their effectiveness and ease, the research shows that we tend to add complexity. It is our default. And even worse, when we’re juggling other tasks, we default even more frequently to adding more complexity.

That’s downright mind-boggling. Because we are busy, we tend to make ourselves busy, until we and our organisations are one big one tangle of complexity that is too mind-numbing to navigate.

As we look for new ways of living and new ways of organising work, know that simplification is a powerful option. Know to get there, the first step is to slow down, and then get curious, and then experiment.

Remember, most organisations are resistant to change. Actually, organisations are resistant because we’re resistant. To get the space to explore, try experiments. It need not be a wholescale policy change, it could just be, “How about we try this for a week and see what we learn?”

/ SOUL

I am a third of the way through Nancy Kline’s latest book, The Promise That Changes Everything: I Won’t Interrupt You. It was a gift from the amazing, wise, and wonderful coach, Maryse Barak.

Kline writes about the power of appreciation.

She says, “Praise, appreciation, expressions of respect – all develop human thinking. They unwrap confidence and let it saturate talent and will and buds of ability. You know this. Every time someone mentions a quality they admire in you, you do ever better at just about everything for a while. And you feel good. And you think better” and “Appreciate someone and… the hormones in their brain change. Oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine dash around their cortex; and before they know it, they think better and better”.

Building a better world for ourselves and for all life on it, requires better thinking. You can help make that happen by taking the time to appreciate someone today. Watch the magic happen. Do it consistently and your world will transform. If you appreciate this sentiment and would like to share it, you can do so from here.

If this is the first time you’ve read my letter, you can subscribe here.

Karl

PS: I invest 600 hours a year in reading and learning to support my clients. Some of that makes it’s way into this letter and I share snippets on Instagram and LinkedIn.

PPS: I work with people who want to have a significant impact, live joyful lives, and build a humane world. If you are asking yourself how you might do that more effectively, you might enjoy working with me. Reach out and let’s have a conversation.

(This letter was first published on 18 July 2021)