Lessons in resilience from retired motorcyclists

Any motorcyclist who spends a good length of time in the saddle learns a lot about resilience. Most have an accident or two early on in their riding careers. With luck those accidents are minor enough to bounce back from, to take the lessons learned into how they ride into a long future.
Their first response may be to buy a better set of leathers, a higher quality crash helmet. But those are just symbols of safety (more often symbols of status, if truth be told). This kind of after-the-event protection is classic rear-view-mirror strategy - a too-late response to something that already happened.
The more important response is to build on the experience they have had, learn from it, perhaps seek out training, to give themselves more capacity to cope with the next random shock. This is classic forward-looking strategy.
They do so in a way that allows them to continue to move at pace - but with a greater capacity to recognise - and respond - to risk. Sounds useful today, right?

They learn:

• Read the road ahead. The further ahead you look, the faster you can go in (relative) safety. You will spot the hints about the direction the road is about to take (tree lines, power lines, signage, street lamps etc) and the bumps (literally, in it). The better you get at knowing what to look for, the better you will be prepared for what comes next.
• Use the whole road available to you: Within the constraints available, go right out to the gutter to get the best view around the next corner, preparing you to accelerate through the turn as you see the road open up. As the view opens up, you open the throttle.
• Acknowledge and compensate for your blind spots. Watch a biker regularly turn their head to ensure they are constantly gathering information. The 'life-saver' head-turn before a manoeuvre is a constant reminder of the blind spots we all have and the information-gathering from 'unexpected' sources we should consider to cover them - all the time.
• Don't target fixate: Once you recognise the risk you need to look away from it to swerve around it. Focusing on the pothole means you hit the pothole. So look for the smoother road you actually want to be on in to ensure you continuing making progress.
• Sometimes it's smarter to cross the lines: It's not part of Police System Advanced Motorcycle riding today, but when I was taught, the broken white lines down the centre of the road were simply 'hazard warning lines'. You were at liberty to cross them at any time to give yourself a better view. Be prepared to go where others don't.
• Ride defensively: Riding defensively is about recognising risk and taking appropriate action in response. Riding at speed is never without risk, but in your recognition of risk and your actions to ameliorate, you make yourself a lot less exposed to what may seem like the random acts of other road users. Examples: Car driver's not seeing you, pulling out of junctions, driveways, from the side of the road etc, as if you weren't there. The defensive rider reads the road ahead and, where there is a risk situation ahead, uses the full-width of the road to increase their distance from that risk and or slows a little to allow a little more time in which to respond.

Steve Jobs was a motorcyclist.

Photo by Harley-Davidson on Unsplash

Leadership Beyond The Crisis: Preview Video

Add the benefits of the workplace to those of distributed working

The post I published on Friday (May 1, 2020) prompted great conversations and questions which will help us build the benefits of the workplace into the distributed way of working we are experiencing now and seek to improve. Today, I'm asking for your help to take the next step on this journey.

In The Language of Lock-down is holding us back, I argued there was a risk of adding cost and cutting productivity in 'going back' to normal. Going back to the office, to the torturous commute - ramps up a heap of costs and negative impacts for us and our planet.

But - as pointed out by contributors to the Lock-Down discussion, there are benefits to office life: practical, social, creative, career, psychological, etc

What we need are solutions that enable us to distribute work across time/space/leadership but which acknowledge and seek to replicate, the benefits of being together in time and space and under traditional centralised leadership.

The first step is to capture those benefits:

I will start here - and build as your contributions (through comments/ other feedback) allow me to build it out. The intention is, as we near a complete list, to take each and either identify the counter from the positives of distributed work - or identify the need for a solution to be added to provisions for distributed work.

Benefits of the office:
Practical:
1. Economies of scale
2. Work stations
3. Meeting rooms
4. Power,
5. Technology (and internet access)

Social:
1. Time face-to-face with colleagues
2. Fun and laughter with colleagues
3. Relaxed lunches and after-work drinks
4. Build intimacy with peers
5. Build trust with peers, prospects and clients

Psychological:
1. Space to focus in without interruption
2. Escape from pressures and concerns of home life
3. Compartmentalise your life
4. Clarity of direction - set by centralised leadership

Creativity:
1. Opportunity to share, compare and collide ideas informally and very regularly
2. Spaces designed specifically for open ideation/ concept development
3. The water-cooler

Career Development:
1. Opportunity to be seen to be performing by bosses
2. Out of sight - out of mind: Physical proximity tends to positive bias at promotion time

Benefits of the commute:
1. Your time: Opportunity to disconnect - simply read, think, or listen to music etc
2. Fitness - you tend to walk more
3. Motivates early start to your day

Back to normal - or forward to a better world?

The language of lock-down is preventing progress in economically and environmentally damaging ways.
When we talk about 'getting back to normal' we skew the conversation towards returning to a pre-crisis status quo that was both inefficient and ineffective.
When we talk about lock-down, we fool ourselves that we are less free now than we were before. But that's not true, is it?
Certainly not in the service sector which makes up 81% of economic output and 84% of UK jobs. We were locked-down in an unproductive, high-cost, low-benefit, presenteeist, shiney-edifice office culture.
UK productivity is (on average) around 16% lower per person than our G7 competitors (we are 27% behind the US...).  Is it coincidence that we have Europe's longest commute times (an average of 1.5 hours a day, rising to 2 hours for London). Turning up is not effective.
And commuting is not fun. It means we often don't get enough sleep, we have additional stress at both ends of the day, we have increased personal costs, our free time is massively reduced. Our choices constrained and our environment damaged.
How free is that? How much are you looking forward to going back to that?
The smart and progressive thing to do is respond to what you have learned about how to work these past few weeks. Already Barclays are concluding big offices may be a thing of the past. They have a network of branches which they plan on repurposing to enable their Canary Wharf workers to change their lives for the better by working closer to home.
That's just one of the dimensions of distribution required in a new and better way of working I raised yesterday - The Space one. In itself it will force acceleration of distribution along the other dimensions - of Leadership and of Time.
The language - used by UK Government and other small 'c' conservatives - is always about returning to the past. This is not only backward-thinking - it is high risk.
It is high risk because going back risks going backwards to all the high cost of maintaining large offices, the impact on productivity of soul-sapping, stress-laden, time-claiming commutes, the business costs of running huge buildings to park people's butts in.
The old ways of working in the old places of working are less productive, less flexible, less resilient, less responsive, a psychological drag on our creativity and leave less space for our well being across the board.
Why plan to add all that to the cost already sustained from COVID-19? That's one risk you could - and should - avoid.

I am grateful to my friend - the very visionary Rory Yates - for the conversation that inspired this post.

Image via (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/commuting-is-as-stressful-as-moving-house-survey-of-european-cities-finds-10210051.html)

The future of work is distributed: leadership, space - and time

In building the modern, responsive, antifragile organisation, we have adopted models in which leadership is distributed (think agile, to lean start-up, to holocracy etc). But the accelerating impact of COVID-19 identifies two other ways in which distribution is the key to understanding the future of work.
Distributed across space, has become a given. Many of us have been asked to work from home, accelerating our understanding of the tools which allow us to work in teams operating across distributed space.
And as we consider how we may emerge from lock-down in a pre-vaccine world, we find ourselves rapidly coming to terms with work having to be distributed across time.
The time constraints of traditional working; 9-5; 5 days-a-week; 25 days holiday; bank holidays etc are likely to be a problem to be overcome as we build a new normal.
Imagine, for example, the challenge of mass transit commuting. Could we see regulations limiting our travel to specified and immutable times - eg You are issued with a start and finish time so that there are no commuting peaks. Your start time may be 6am. Mine 7am, my colleagues 8am, etc through to folk starting at 5am 23 hours later. To make that more effective we may have to break that down to 15 minute slots. All to avoid being closer than 2m from the next person on your commute.
Imagine working in manufacture; 24-hour working with reduced numbers 'on' per shift may have to replace a one or two shift models across 'daytime'.
It's a monumental task, which will accelerate distributed leadership, too. The boss can't be there 24/7. A decision maker will have to be. So the pressure to distribute decision making power to those 'on the job' will inevitably build.
It will accelerate distribution through space too - you may only be allowed to travel on certain days, so the push to get still better at working across space, usually from home, will only get harder.
Making the organisation flexible requires that people are flexible too. Cultural norms around 'time off' that everyone can share (weekends, bank holidays, evenings) will inevitably be challenged.
In the next few months all of us will be involved in rapidly innovating new models of distributed work - through leadership, space and time.
The lessons we learn from this crisis will help us create more antifragile organisations, better able to cope with the shocks that are yet to come.
How ready are you?

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash