🌞
Last week I wrote a little about the importance of getting out of your own way; more a willingness to focus less on things are not adding value, allowing space for other opportunities to emerge. This needs to be coupled with some other recent thoughts on developing a willingness to let whatever gets in your way become an opportunity to move forward. Rather than avoiding being hit by a bus, become the bus 😊
Following my own advice (always a good test), I agreed to present to a group of strangers this week, most in tech leadership roles more lofty than my own, on the topic of building and scaling high performing teams. I approached it from a dual perspective, both the human psychology behind performance and how that shows up in a team, as well as the infrastructure and leadership philosophy needed to support scaling, as the organization grows. My belief here, is that culture (good or bad), is the by-product of experimenting with systems (both social and technical), rather than attempting to direct and control people.
Whether I am right or wrong is difficult to answer – it’s a constant series of experiments after all. Whether the audience loved it not, agreed or nor, is mostly irrelevant (aiming to be of service has value, but trying to measure yourself through the opinion others alone does not). What I was able to take, both by volunteering for the opportunity and being present and curious about the space I was in, was energising. Being unconcerned with what success or failure might look like, and just showing up – expecting that I could learn as much from others (or more) as they might from me, that was easily worth the effort expended on the experiment.
If you read my thoughts from last week, or are reading this now – where are you challenging yourself, this moment, to get out of your own way; to put something down without immediately picking something else up; to let the universe push you in a direction – following the flow of that river to see where it leads? If it hasn’t happened yet, how will you make that happen?
What I’m reading this week about buses (metaphorically):
“I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.” - Michel de Montaigne, Essays
“If you aren’t free of yourself
how will you ever become yourself?
Give up self-reflection
and you’re soon enlightened.
Give up self-definition
and you’re soon apparent.
Knowing not-knowing is lofty.
Not knowing not-knowing is affliction.
The Tao of heaven…
never speaks
and so answers perfectly.” – Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Finally, I hope that you remember to make time for yourself, try to take care of others, and search for joy in whatever you’re doing. Don’t worry if you don’t find it every day; just keep looking, just do the work – it’ll come.
Cheers,
Kyle
My thinking on culture and the culture of experimentation