If you want to get there, you don’t want to be starting from here.

But here is where you are.

The NeverEnding Story

Are you going on a Hero’s Journey?

Are you the star of your own Movie?

Are you shooting for the stars?

No, me neither.

Although it’s not for want of people trying to persuade you to, is it? These trite exhortations are the stock-in-trade of wannabe influencers, life style gurus, success coaches and Z-list celebs plugging some tat. The internet is awash with aspirational memes along these lines.

They don’t inspire me. Actually, they make me feel a bit ick. They leave me cold.

For a while, I was taken in by them. After all, we all want to be heroes, don’t we? (Just for one day 🙂). We want to be the star of our own movie, even the most shy and introverted of us. These metaphors are very seductive.

But that’s not where most of are and that’s not how most of us live our lives, because most of us aren’t delusional, egocentric, dickheads with a god complex.

Most of us are just trying to deal with what life, in all it’s wonderful and unknowable mystery, throws at us. Whether it’s good or bad, we’re just dealing with it. Were not where we are through intention, we’re here through circumstance.

And the question we find ourselves asking is, “What the fuck do I do now?”

I have used the Hero’s Journey myself, as a way of understanding my situation and figuring out what to do next (I even created a mini-course based on it). It is a great structure for a narrative, which is why it is used in books, plays and films. The Lord of The Rings, Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe wouldn’t exist without it, to mention a few. But it doesn’t describe my life and my situation, so it’s not much help as a tool for navigating my way forward.

This week I was introduced to a better model, the Chinese or East Asian four-act story structure (the Japanese version is known as Kishōtenketsu).

It starts with a situation. It’s just where you are.

Then it develops. There is struggle, realisation.

There is a twist, an unexpected development.

Finally, there is a conclusion, often where the subject takes what they have learnt to help others.

When I think about my experience in corporate life, it wasn’t intentional. I wasn’t on a journey, I hadn’t set out to get somewhere, I just ended up there. As it developed, it became more difficult and I struggled to cope.

This is how it unfolds for a lot of people. It’s a common reality.

The there’s a twist, a crescendo. Redundancy. Burnout. Illness. A career change.(Often a coaching qualification, it would seem!).

People who leave corporate often take what they have learnt back into CorporateLand, either working with the organisations or with the individuals. As Consultants, coaches, therapists and other helping professions.

However, here’s the rub. Some can’t get out of the struggle. Even if the unexpected event happens to them (redundancy, burnout, illness), they go back into CorporateLand, back into struggle. Or they end up drifting, as I did.

Why is this?

I think it’s because what comes with the twist is uncertainty and we’re not very good at dealing with it. In fact we fear it, so we stay in struggle.

It’s not just that this is a normal human trait (uncertainty was bad news for us as cavemen, so an aversion to it is in our evolutionary biology), it’s that it is reinforced by corporate life.

We are primed for certainty, linearity, cause and effect. We are trained to see the world as predictable and controllable. We are trained in ways and tools to manage in a linear way, to optimise for predictability. We are taught that this is the way the world is.

But it’s not. It’s chaotic, messy, unpredictable, capricious. Uncertain.

So when the twist comes along, it is by definition a door to uncertainty. And because we fear it, we fear we can’t cope, and we believe we can find certainty, we refuse to go through it.

And we stay stuck in struggle and misery and get even more damaged, whilst missing out on what uncertainty could hold for us.

Let It Be

Another model I am fond of is William Bridges model of transition, which has three stages:

1. Letting Go

2. The Neutral Zone

3. New Beginnings

The Neutral Zone is all about sitting in uncertainty and ambiguity. Unsurprisingly, we quite often run away from it and go back to our past (which is why we end up repeating the same destructive patterns).

What’s more, the New Beginning can only emerge from this period of uncertainty, We have to try different things, many of which end in failure or peter out. The outcome of these experiments is uncertain, which, as I said, we’re not very good at dealing with.

Often, the thing that becomes the New Beginning is something that we didn’t really think much of at the beginning or was just incidental. It is an unexpected success.

That unexpected success can only emerge if we sit in the uncertainty. It’s on the other side of that door.

Instead of fearing uncertainty, we need to embrace it, to see it as an opening to new riches.

It’s a very different energy to setting out on a journey. It’s not a driving motion, which is what we are normally prompted to do. You’re not initiating. You are opening the door and allowing in whatever is there. It’s about receiving and accepting. It’s not about making things happen, it’s about allowing them to unfold.

It’s the opposite of the hustle culture.

As It Was

The surprise for me is just how bad I have been at this.

My early career was all about working in uncertainty and I thrived. It was very much seen as an opportunity. We were creating something new and breaking new ground. Surely it was perfect preparation for dealing with change and uncertainty when it happened to me?

However, in the second part of my career, uncertainty became a negative. It took away my agency, I felt I had lost control of my destiny (which was the intent of those who created the uncertainty). I also became more wedded to certainty as I had the responsibilities of a family and a mortgage.

So when I got made redundant, I found the uncertainty unsettling. I saw it as a threat, rather than an opportunity. And I have continued to regard it as such.

All the while I thought I was good at uncertainty, I was actually really crap at it.

I’m betting that most of us think we are better at dealing with uncertainty than we really are.

Time for a reality check.

Who Am I ?

So I had this image of being someone good at this stuff when the reality was I was a bit rubbish. This not only left me stuck, it also caused further pain because of the dissonance between my perception of myself and the reality. I was constantly receiving feedback from my experiences that I was bad at this, which I resolutely ignored because it didn’t match my self-image. Being constantly reminded you are not who you think you are is like having chronic pain, only it’s psychological rather than physical.

This is a state I was familiar with but the other way around. When I was in CorporateLand, I often had the experience of being told by my management that I was not very good and a problem, whilst I was well-regarded elsewhere and sought out for my subject expertise and my abilities. So was I a problem or was I a star?

This echoes an email I got from a reader following last week’s missive, in which they asked whether they were the person who got head-hunted on a higher salary, promoted and awarded bonuses or the person who was made redundant and wasn’t considered good enough to get hired by several companies? This dissonance was not only causing them pain but creating an existential crisis. They were not sure who they were anymore, they felt they didn’t know themselves.

That’s a position I can entirely empathise with. It’s exactly how I felt after leaving CorporateLand. I was completely lost and didn’t know who I was anymore. I’ve spent several years ‘getting back to me’. What I didn’t realise was that I was prolonging that journey by staying in fear of the uncertainty rather than accepting it.

But embracing uncertainty isn’t easy, otherwise we’d all do it, right? And it’s harder when you’ve been psychologically damaged by your experiences in CorporateLand, as many people are.

So, in the Chinese story structure, we’re at the conclusion. This is the bit where I use what I have learnt to help others. I’m working on it.

Watch this space.

You Couldn’t Make This Up

A new section that may be occasional (but I suspect will be reasonably regular) in which I summarise the most eye-wateringly stupid developments in CorporateLand that I’ve come across this week.

First up, a study has shown ‘The Curse of the MBAs’ in stark detail. Studying companies that switched to MBA-holding CEOs (in the US and Denmark), it shows that after 5 years workers’ wages have been suppressed whilst any resulting profits have been mostly directed to shareholders, rather than reinvested or shared with employees.

I mean, we all knew this, right? MBAs see people as an expendable resources, a cost-line to be minimised, rather than the lifeblood of the company. That’s why they are all slavering like hungry dogs at the prospect of using AI to replace most of them. And we know they see their role as maximising shareholder returns (and, consequently, their pay) during their brief tenure, before they dance away to screw up some other company. But now there is proof.

Michel Zanini posted about this on Linked In under the title “Do MBAs make better managers?”. Stowe Boyd pointed out that this is wrong question. We should ask “Are MBA CEOs good for employees?”. And the answer is a strong NO!

Next up, Adam Grant talking about the ‘Babble effect’. Apparently, men dominate conversations and interrupt women, which damages the latter’s promotion prospects. No shit, Sherlock!

Geoff Marlow calls this episode of unintentional self-parody “The Twaddle Effect”, although I think it also an example of the SOBO effect (Statement Of the Bleeding Obvious).

What do you reckon?

In with a bullet, this week McKinsey’s have inadvertently advertised why no-one should hire them by showing a stunning ability to mis-diagnose their own problem of decline.

As the chicken’s come home to roost from their previous misdemeanours, there is dissatisfaction amongst partners about how the firm’s senior management are managing ‘external perceptions’ and the resultant layoffs. I mean, they could be concerned about the ethical collapse that has caused it but, no, it’s obviously a PR and communication issue.

Anyway, the CEO decided they needed a bit of gingering up, so he laid on a playlist of rap and rock at a recent company gathering. Embarrassing wedding dance music, that should do the trick!

Showing all the self-awareness and attention to detail of a slug on mogadon, it included “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba, presumably due to its signature lyrics:

“I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down.”

Lyrics which celebrate the resilience and tenacity of working-class folk who keep fighting when the chips are down, especially in relation to what neoliberalism (strongly promoted by McKinsey’s) has done to their lives and communities.
#ironyfail (and h/t to Dr. Richard Claydon, who I stole this from)

Chumbawamba were an anarchist punk band, which I was going to point out as being inappropriate for McKinsey’s image. However, reflecting on the chaos McKinsey’s have wrought on society over the past few years, they’ve probably done more to promote the cause of anarchy than anything these punk rockers managed to do.

And finally, in an admirable effort to be even more tin-eared and stupid than McKinsey’s (perhaps they are their advisors?), Dell have introduced a colour-coding system for employees, according to their level of attendance in the office.

There are four levels from Blue, down through Green and Yellow to Red. If you have a Red Flag (yes, they are calling them Flags), you have to stay behind after assembly and see the headmaster. You will not be allowed out at playtime and you’ll have to stay for detention after school. Repeated offending will result in more severe punishment, even expulsion.

As we speak, Dell employees are desperately stuffing exercise books down their trousers and forging notes from their parents to excuse their absence. Reports of some feeding their homework to the dog or ‘accidentally’ dropping it into the fire have not yet been confirmed.

There’s nothing like treating your employees as adults, is there? And this is nothing like it.