Through a glass darkly
Let’s Go Round Again
“Go back to the office if you want to get on” trumpeted the headlines of The Daily Telegraph and The Times, following an interview that Chancellor Rishi Sunak gave to LinkedIN News. He went on to explain that it was the relationships and networks he developed, and what he learnt from his seniors, during his internship that helped him develop his career in investment banking.
I mean, there’s so many shades of wrong with this I barely know where to start. But I’ll have a go.
Firstly, it’s a transparent attempt to get people back into the office because he wants to see people back in city centres to revive the pre-pandemic economy. The newspapers seized upon it to press the case, which is popular with their supporters and owners.
Secondly, a sample of one is not statistically significant. This is ‘anecdata’. It’s the trap that too many people in senior positions fall into. Your personal experience may be interesting but it’s not relevant. You had a particular experience, in a particular set of circumstances, at a particular moment in time. There is no reason to think there is any broadly-applicable conclusions to be drawn from that.
Thirdly, and related to the previous point, what has a middle-class, middle-aged former investment banker got to offer by way of advice to your average entrant to the job market today? Somewhat more relevant to his success might be that he went to Winchester College, a select private school, could afford to do an internship to start his career and married the daughter of a billionaire. Only 7% of the UK population go to private schools, an even smaller proportion of them work in Investment Banking and a minuscule percentage of those marry into a billionaire’s family. That is practically the definition of ‘elite’.
But here’s the most important point. The world has changed. It’s not the world that Sunak started his career in, it was changing before the pandemic but now it’s shifted hugely. Young people today see the world very differently, think differently and interact with it and each other very differently. Whilst that office experience was essential to him to learn and to build relationships (as it was to me and many others), that’s not the way things work today. It was the only option back then, today it’s not.
People entering the workplace have grown up making friends over gaming networks, finding partners through dating apps, learning from YouTube videos, managing their lives through their phones. That’s not to say that in-person interactions aren’t valuable and have a richness and immediacy that is not possible online, but they are no longer necessary.
Today, you don’t need to go to an office to get on. That’s not true in every industry (like, er, Investment Banking, perhaps) but IT IS TRUE. And it’s not just at the margins, it’s moving into the mainstream.
Black and White
I’ve written before about the ridiculous framing of the debate into a false dichotomy of ‘Office vs. Work from Home’, which mirrors the polarisation that infects so much of public discourse today and is turbo-charged by social media. The absence of nuance, the simple reduction of every question to two polar opposites, the flattening of debate, it’s beyond tedious. It’s also corrosive to our society and to progress.
It also failing. Some recent research shows that we a less divided than the it may appear from the media and online conversations (in the UK, France and Germany, at least). We don’t see the world as either or, we see it much more complex and messy than that.
A simple model applied to a complex environment. We know this black and white thinking is seductive but our lived experience tells us something different. It’s confining, constraining and doesn’t fit the observable facts, our daily reality.
In life, it’s either this AND that, black and white leads to shades of grey. We can hold two opposing views at the same time (and often do without even realising the contradiction).
So, the future of work is the office AND work from home - AND work from other spaces too. it’s physical AND virtual location that matters. It’s a continuum, in many dimensions.
This is where my head starts to hurt. My fellow Drinking Dialogues member, Twain Liu, tells us that it’s because of Aristotle and his concept of dualism, which has led to the reduction of everything to a simple binary (literally, in this digital age). The maths is wrong, it’s missing all the stuff in gaps. That’s where the knowledge is (I’ve probably mangled this terribly, so look at Twain’s post for yourself).
I’ve written about this before, that there is a lot we don’t know and can’t know. I call it magic, but you could call it anti-matter, something we know must exist but can’t detect or understand.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that we need to have humility and acknowledge the limits of what we perceive. When we’re getting deep into theory and designing solutions, remember that there’s much we don’t know. And that might just be where the best stuff is.
Or, to quote the great Rabbie Burns,
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy.
Big Yellow Taxi
I don’t know about you but I often feel like I don’t quite belong in groups. I’m in the group but I’m not as in as others. Somehow I have one foot outside. I can remember this from my junior school, I didn't have one group I played with like most kids, I had three or four that I would go between.
Now, it may be that I have commitment issues but, as I’ve been married for over 35 years, maybe not. I think it’s more to do with finding it interesting to take things from one group to another, to experience the variety. I do the same with areas of knowledge, I like to flit across things, see where the crossovers and connections are, synthesise something new (to me, at least!) from the bits I find.
These are liminal spaces and I feel drawn to them, I am comfortable in them. It seems to me that’s where the interesting things happen, the exciting collisions of ideas and personalities and perspectives. It’s what us pirates call ‘going to the edges of the map’. We’re looking for treasure, of course.
There are liminal spaces in organisations, too. The chat between meetings, the serendipitous meeting that leads to the ‘corridor conference’, the wait at the coffee machine - plus the ones outside the building, including the pub (of course). It turns out these are where the treasure is too, the exchanges that lead to little breakthroughs or kick off innovations. These have been largely missing over the past 17 months and it’s starting to show, as creativity and collaboration are falling away and affecting collective performance.
It’s not just the things we can’t see that we need to bear in mind, it’s also these things that we routinely overlook. These liminal spaces (that exist in time as well as physically) have been being squeezed over the past several years, as organisations have pressed remorselessly for ‘efficiency’ and driven people even harder. COVID has pretty much obliterated them, which has made their importance apparent. You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone, right?
We need to put this liminality back into the new workplace, into the distributed working approach. Can the people who didn’t really notice it before do that, though? Or does it need those of us who like to inhabit the liminal spaces to reimagine them in this new environment?
I would always end up in the kitchen at parties. It’s the perfect liminal space, informal, dynamic, random and it has beer. Perhaps it’s time for all of us in the kitchen to come out and take over the dance floor.
Let’s go and Booooogie!
Round and Round
Whilst we’re talking about what here that we don’t know , the gaps in-between what we know and the in-between gaps that we do know, let’s have a look at linearity.
The industrial view of the organisation is an essentially linear one. We have inputs, we have processes, we have outputs. It is also unidirectional. This is a model we are familiar with.
We have many other models that are represented as linear. Most ‘success’ programmes on the internet are linear - your ‘Ten steps to a six-figure income’ and so on. A lot of training is done in a linear fashion, one step at a time as you build your skill and knowledge.
However, not all linear models are what they appear to be.
One of the models I often refer to is Bridges’ model of Transition, in which there are three stages.
Ending, Losing, Letting Go
The Neutral Zone
The New Beginning
I like the model because it is simple and also because it matches my personal experience (if only I had come across it sooner, it would have saved me so much time …). However, we should not make the mistake that we progress through in a nice linear way, from Letting Go, through the Neutral Zone, to New Beginnings. That’s not how it works at all.
Bridges makes clear that we may go through these stages several times, and in any order, during the period of our transition. In fact, we may be in all three stages at the same time. It’s not a linear process, it’s more of a map on which to orientate ourselves and figure out what direction we need to go in. This is clear when we see how he represents it visually (and even this is imperfect) but still we tend to see a linear relationship.
The Kubler Ross model of Grief is similar. Whilst we often talk about ‘going through the stages of grief’, we are actually IN the stages of grief, and often several of them at the same time. We can go back and forth through the five stages, we can jump between them.
So let’s be careful when we are talking about ‘linear models’. Often, they are not linear other than in presentation. It is useful to think of them as linear, at least initially, to understand the concepts. Applying them as linear, however, is less than useful. In fact, it’s more likely to be disastrous.
Walk on the wild side
OK, so that felt like a trip through the hall of mirrors for me. All is not what it seems. The truth is out there (I loved The X-Files. I still have a soft spot for Gillian Anderson, which why I could NOT watch her play Margaret Thatcher. But I digress). I’ll try and get back on firmer ground for next week! But hey, I’m just sailing to the edges of the map, looking for treasure … and hoping I don’t fall off the edge the world or get eaten by dragons.
If you think any of this is nonsense and have been shouting at your screen (no? is that only me, then?) then get in touch because you may well be right.