Parallel Lines

The virtual and the real

In The Flesh

Last Thursday I went up to that there London to see some friends I’d never met before. Well, not met IRL.

I know them because we have spent many hours in conversation in Drinking Dialogues, a weekly online event held on Zoom. We’ve had lots of deep, rich and rewarding dialogue and have learnt loads from each other. We’ve already connected, not just on LinkedIn but in a profound and human way. So to be able to do the actual 3D human bit was wonderful.

Drinking Dialogues (DD) happened because of COVID. Richard and Oscar had been running in-person events in Hong Kong and, when that became impossible (and illegal!), they went online. What’s resulted is a community that spans the globe and an example of what Richard calls ‘Extended Intelligence’. (He’s a clever fella, I recommend you follow him on LinkedIn).

The opportunity to meet up arose because Richard was over in the UK for the first time since DD (Hong Kong having only recently lifted travel restrictions). We’ll probably do a few more 3D meet-ups in the future but our home is, and always will be, in those little zoom boxes, every Tuesday.

This is how the world works these days. Virtual first. I still puzzle over why so many ‘leaders’ can’t see that. Or maybe they don’t want to.

(I’m Always Touched By Your) Prescence, Dear

Sometimes my views on the future of work get interpreted as anti-office and against in-person working. I’m not against either of those but I am against them being the defaults. I’m even more against them being presented as the only proper way, or the best way, to work.

I love meeting people and spending time getting to know them. There are some things that just work better when you get everyone in the room, too. However, those times are now the minor part of work. Most work does not require in-person, synchronous presence with everyone else. In fact, it requires the opposite, it requires solo, uninterrupted time for deep focus and concentration.

As a rule of thumb, I’d say about 15-20% of work requires us to be physically in the same place at the same time. The rest of the work can be done from anywhere (and at any time, if asynchronous working practices have been implemented). So how can it make sense to configure the working environment for a minority of the time spent working?

Fade Away And Radiate

I finally got around to watching an interview with Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitHub, that’s been sitting in my browser window for months. GitHub has been a remote-first company since inception and he had a lot of common sense to share about how to work in a remote environment. (They also document and share everything they’ve done as open-source).

Two things that he said struck me.

Firstly, he said that it was really important to document everything because you could not assume tacit knowledge would get passed on, as it does in an office when you can observe what others do. This is a benefit because it means that tacit knowledge gets captured and then can be refined and shared. However, it does require people have the necessary writing skills and many companies are investing in training in this area.

Secondly, he said you have to be more intentional about everything you do. You can’t rely on the chance conversations, on serendipity, on connections forming over the lunch table. You have to make sure the right stuff happens.

What was more, he pointed out that these are not unique burdens to remote working, these are the things that well-run organisations are doing anyway.

Working remotely (or in a distributed way) is not a challenge for good leaders, it’s an opportunity. It’s the poor leaders that will, and are, struggling and risk being left behind.

What’s more, it will make organisations work better and more effectively, because fudging it and leaving it down to luck are no longer viable options.

Rapture

How could I let the week pass without commenting on the ongoing car-crash that is Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Musk seems determined to make exactly the wrong choices on absolutely everything, operating in a chaotic and quixotic fashion that defies any logic and seems to have no over-arching strategy or philosophy, other than the support of Musk’s humungous ego (I reckon he built those spaceships just so it could get far enough away to be able to see all of it).

This is something that is going to feature in Leadership books for years to come as an exemplar, but not in a good way. Maybe he’s trying to finish off he ‘Leadership Development’ industry by breaking all the leadership models in one go, as well as crashing Twitter. He’s such a hard worker, that Elon, isn’t he?

Musk is being cast as the ‘heroic leader’, who will singlehandedly save Twitter. Only he is obscenely wealthy enough to take it into private control and establish himself as the CEO, removing the board entirely and running it by himself. Jack Dorsey, Twitter  co-founder and ex-CEO, endorsed him as the "singular solution I trust”. How’s that going, Jack? Oh, well enough for you to issue an apology to Twitter staff after your ‘singular solution’ sacked half of them at the drop of a hat. Or rather, the drop of an email.

I don’t know what is worse, Musk’s appalling attitude towards Twitter staff and cavalier approach to making changes to Twitter; or the continued support of his approach by his many ‘fan boys’ in tech, who are still convinced he is going to turn it around even though he is making all the moves that would sink any other business, let alone one that has been saddled with $1bn year of debt repayment (arguably a lesser burden than being saddled with Musk’s ego).

As part of the legal action by Twitter to make Musk buy it after he said he didn’t want to (who could have possible thought things would go so badly after such a promising beginning?), a slew of messages between Musk and other ‘Titans of Tech’ provided hilarity and incredulity in equal part. Instead of high-flown discussion and sagacious comments on the situation, we were treated to desperate willy-waving as the vie for status and sycophantic hero-worship. It sounded more like a bunch of Essex wide-boys down the pub on Friday night trying to out-blag each other.

Imagine a scene from ‘Only Fools and Tweeters’. The boys gather at the bar of the The Nags Head.

El-Boy: OK, boys, who’s in on my latest bash? I’ve got this consignment of Blue Ticks, genuine article, straight from the factory in China. I’m going to knock ‘em out at 8 folding-ones a go, they’ll go like hot-cakes. We’ll be rolling in it, I can’t fail. Only I need to raise a few more quid to get them in.

Lozza: Go on, I’ll put in a score.

El-Boy: Jacko, you in?

Jacko: What about Lozza?

El-Boy: He’s in for a score.

Jacko: A score? Tight bastard. I’ll go a pony.

Wazza: Come on boys, El-boy’s got this well sorted. I’m going large. Put me down for a monkey.

Lozza: Yeah, he is a stone-cold genius, after all.

Jacko: Blindin’.

El-Boy. Cushty. Lovely jubbley!

Maybe, by this time next year, Elon will be a millionaire.

(For my non-UK readers, the above is a cultural reference to “Only Fools And Horses”, the peerless BBC comedy show written by John Sullivan)

X-Offender

This week’s newsletter got a bit delayed due to me having a heavy cold, Canva helpfully losing all my images, a bedroom ceiling deciding to collapse, being on dog-sitting duty and the arrival of our first grandchild. Still, it started as a weekly-ish newsletter without a specific release day, so it’s actually bang on time.

Given the tenuous grip we have on reality in the face of the torrent of madness that passes for the every day now as we enter the age of the ongoing catastrof*ck, that should surprise no-one. It makes more sense than what’s happening at Twitter, for a start. And let’s not even mention Zuck’s metaverse. Until next week, anyway

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