Decrapify Work or Die (it’s all made up really)
Human meets Pirate
I was recently interviewed by Mark LeBusque for the Simply Practically HUMAN podcast and, even though I say so myself, it’s well-worth a listen. Mark’s sharp questions and energetic style took us along at a decent lick and to some interesting places. Mark's mission is to make people be more human at work, so we’re very much of like-minds and it was a fun and interesting discussion.
I’ll leave it to Mark to set the scene
“Work's become cluttered with crap in the form of policies, bullshit jobs, outdated procedures, compliance based surveys etc. etc. This week's guest Colin Newlyn is on a mission to decrapify work, and shares why we need to be like the Pirates of old to do so.”
You can get it through Mark’s website, or from iTunes or Spotify.
Let me know what you think of it - and check out some of the other episodes, ‘cos they’re worth a listen too.
Fantasyland
One of the points that Mark picked up on was my comment that corporate life is a fantasyland. When we are in it, we believe in all these things that are just ridiculous, like being able to predict the future and making a five year plan, like the annual forecast and budget that is out of date before the year actually starts, like senior management know what they are doing (OK, now that always did sound a bit ridiculous).
When we leave, the scales fall from our eyes and we see it all for what it truly is. We go through a stage of disenchantment, as we realised that all the people we thought were our friends only had work stuff in common with us, that all the work we thought was vitally important and stayed late to finish was not really valued or meaningful and all the projects we sweated over were pointless and had minimal impact.
If you’ve left an organisation, this will be familiar to you. But to be disenchanted, you had to have been in an enchantment in the first place. When you leave, the spell is broken and you see it for what it is but when you are in it, you believe.
In many ways, it’s a necessary act of self-preservation. If you weren’t under the enchantment, you wouldn’t be able to put up with the nonsense. So you ‘allow yourself to be romanced’ by the story, as Mark puts it beautifully, you delude yourself into thinking there’s more there than there really is because you want there to be. You want the friendships to be real, the work to be meaningful, the organisation one you feel you belong to. So you make some shit up to persuade yourself.
But the dysfunction is all around you, the environment become ever more surreal and it’s not enough. And that’s where the irony comes in. Or taking the piss, as we used to call it. That’s the second line of defence, pointing out the absurdity, highlighting the gap between reality and what is believed and making a joke of it. This is the role of the Eiron, a character from Greek theatre, which Dr Richard Claydon talks about (more about RIchard’s insights in future missives). The only problem is that it doesn’t always end well for them - they get their heads cut off, exiled or generally abused. And I know that feeling …
So we need to recognise that it’s all mad, to point out that it’s a fantasy. And then work towards a more real (or as Mark would probably say, more human) workplace.
Catching lightening in a bottle
Through the weekly Drinking Dialogues I am learning about the many models of how individual teams and organisations behave, the research behind them and some of the sophisticated tools and approaches to encourage positive and effective outcomes. However, I think we must always bear in mind that when a team gels, when an organisation has a good feel, when great stuff happens, there’s a little bit of magic involved.
For all the analysis and thought, for all the brilliance of the techniques, you still need that elusive and indefinable spark. As much as we try to identify, measure and replicate the things that work, we are really trying to catch lightening in a bottle.
To stick with the theatre analogy, you can have the best writing and direction, magnificent scenery and costumes, great lighting and sound, peerless acting and stagecraft, and you still don’t know how it will work until you have and audience. What’s more, it will be different every night for every audience and every now and then it will move into another dimension altogether and you have no idea when or why.
So we need to be humble and remember that even when we think we’ve got it all figured out, we haven’t. We have to make sure we leave some space for the magic. In fact, that’s probably the most important bit.
Return to the office, sort of...
Every day there seems to be another clutch of announcements from organisations who are committing to a hybrid working model and starting to reconfigure their offices and put systems in place to enable it. They are also addressing some of the issues and challenges this type of working can create head-on, to make sure everyone is on a level playing field.
What's more, this is going mainstream. The tech companies were first out of the gate but now they are being followed by organisations from all industries, and ones that have not previously been known for their pioneering.
Goldman 'We're all going back to the office' Sachs are looking more and more like an outlier. And exhortations from the government to get back to the office sound increasingly shrill and desperate as they try, canute-like, to resist this sea-change in working patterns.
Which is also a change in living patterns and mostly for the good.