Balancing on the Board : Why unlike my three previous attempts, in 2023 we need to plant our feet firmly either side of the centre of business gravity

Is 2022 gone already? Phew. Oh hang on, it’s 2023. Bugger.

As I sit here at my kitchen table, sans train to get to the office, sans heating due to energy security stupidity [thank goodness for Christmas slippers], and unfortunately sans Gin and Tonic with three cherries [it’s an attempt at dry January again] the world doesn’t feel like it is going to be sans chaos anytime soon.

I was watching the Netflix documentary on the late Bernie Madoff this week, the man who stole the odd $64billion from investors in the largest Ponzi scheme in history; well the largest private sector one anyway, as politicians and governments make billions of our tax payers investment disappear with what seems like little or no return.

Madoff, who had become the master of duplicity in dealing in defrauded dollars, pleaded guilty to this gargantuan theft after finally being caught out by the financial crash of 2008.?On sentencing his lawyer begged for leniency, and the judge took kindly on him and only sentenced the 71 year old to a maximum of 150 years in prison; not a bad 200% return if he had made it all the way to ripe old age of 221.

The documentary told the story of one man’s theft but also the build up to the madness of the money markets prior to their undoing in 2008.?But, when you look back at that time, and it wasn’t that long ago, it is sometimes difficult to forget how turbulent the world had become.?Since then, in the main, we have experienced a decade of near zero interest rates and near zero economic turbulence.?After the world regained its financial footing post-crash, well it’s all been rather benign. When the cold winds of COVID blew from the east in 2020 of course all of that changed.

As I sit hear listening in the UK to day time talk radio it can feel some days as if our country has lost its collective mind.?Thankfully life isn’t a talk radio show, although lets see what our next caller Ted from Poole things about that.

Thanks Ted, and yes the world does feel like your inebriated uncle shaping some moves on the dance floor on New Year’s Eve, seriously out of balance.

Earlier, as I was being productive at my kitchen table, the radio presenter said the UK feels like it was in the 1970s; inflation, strikes, ?tank tops. ?Tom Karen?the inventor of iconic 1970s Chopper bike died this week.?One hated child owned one in our street.?I can still see him weaving his way around piles of bin bags used as a putrefying playground slalom course.?The Chopper feels like the world today.?Every single element looks like it was designed by a man in a blindfold, but somehow, it all connects together and as long as you peddle and keep your balance right in the middle, you can still move forward.

Balance has never been my strong point.

We were too poor for a Raleigh Chopper, but my brother did managed to save up enough birthday money in the 1980s to buy one of the new icons of the playground.?A skateboard.?It was hard plastic, 2 ft long, and bright yellow.?It was about as wide as your shoe and it had a centre of gravity that measured around one square inch.?

He was of course very protective of it, but after continual cajoling from his younger brother, who had watched him push it along the flat long pavement outside our house, he relented and said you can have a few goes on it.?Grabbing the skateboard I headed two streets over, a friends street with a beautifully steep incline, found 4 bricks and a plank of wood, built a skateboard limbo obstacle and attempted my first ever skateboard trick on my first ever go on a skateboard.?The idea was to elevate myself from said board, as it traversed its way under the plank and land on it perfectly on the other side.

?I failed on the first run, and I remember a small crowd of children gathering to watch my second attempt, but then nothing until I woke up in hospital some hours later after landing two inches behind the skateboard balance sweet spot and upending myself onto the rather hard Welsh concrete. I was kept in overnight due to the seriousness of my head injury but released the next day to find the skateboard locked away with strict orders that nobody in the house would ever use such a dangerous item again. My brother was sans humour.

Some years later, on holiday, I convinced myself that enough time had passed to have my second attempt at balancing on what I considered to be a much larger but similarly shaped board, this time on safer water, and I headed to the Wind Surfing cabin to avail myself of a rather simple to operate contraption. Asked if I had done this before, and never having done so, but not wishing to seem like a novice [why do men do this] I suggested that while not making the British Olympic squad, I had a reasonable level of experience and would be fine on my own.

I am still unsure how a Wind Surfer works, but I assumed it would be relatively simple to hold onto an upright sail while planting my feet somewhere on either side of the middle bit, and hold on while I was whisked across the bay from side to side.?In my mind as I walked confidently into the water I would be doing tricks, maybe spins within the hour.

What I found out rapidly was that if standing up on a Wind Surfer is incredibly hard and falling off is easy, doing those two things over and over again while being watched by hundreds of holiday makers is not only incredibly tiring but also acutely embarrassing.?Doing this in a wind pushing you further offshore at every attempt at standing makes it more difficult although it does make it harder to hear the laughter emanating from the beach.?After about 30 minutes the laughing had stopped, as I was so far away it was inaudible, and the man whose offer of a lesson I had dismissively declined wandered lazily to the rescue boat and headed out in my direction, just before I left the calm waters of the bay and caught the Gulfstream back to blighty. Graciously he hauled me onto his craft and let me lie gasping for breath like an upturned turtle after being caught out by an errant wave while laying my eggs.

Now, I had watched similarly unsure Wind Surfers be rescued all week, and I already knew that after an SOS craft had been sent, the life boat operator instead of returning his catch back to the quiet part of the beach near his hut, would bring them to the centre of the action of holidays makers to ensure his kind gesture of rescue ended with howls of laughter as one after another his survivors were made to drag their kit back through a sandy wall of shame.

I had all week watched this closely, and imagined that if I was ever in a position to need assistance I would not clamber out of the flat bottomed boat in ignominy, but saw that if you stood near the front you could be ready to put one foot on the sand and as the boat grounded walk gracefully off for a cold beer .?Daniel Craig sans six pack in surfing shorts.

So I readied myself at the front of the boat.

The boat driver had clearly not been washed ashore the day before, spotted my plan with a hundred feet to go, and as we neared the waterline and I began my seamless motion of embarkation, slammed the propellor into reverse, and propelled me over the front of the boat and head first into the white sandy beach.?I will be eternally thankfully I was thrown overboard before the age of TikTok.

I have never been Wind Surfing again.

I did however heal my vertebrae and mind, and many years later and at the urging of a daughter and brother in law, booked into Surfing lessons at the height of the summer season in Cornwall.

I had body boarded and it was a doddle, and yes I had failed to stand up on two similar arrows shaped surfaces in the past, but surely the only different between body boarding and actual surfing was a quick jump up from knees to feet and wiggle your hips a few times as you found a breaker and rode the barrel of a rip curl, or something like that.?Patrick Swayze in Point Break but sans hips.

We turned up late,?booked in, ignored the smirks from the 19 year old sun kissed surf school staff as they directed us to the wetsuit rails to pick a second skin.?Unfortunately the only second skin in a size approximate to my impressively rotund middle was all pink.?Now I love a pink shirt, probably my favourite colour, but I tend to buy shirts that provide an air gap between my epidermis and the material. After many thousands of years of human evolution I have a body that has become accustomed to clothing.

A wet suit is clothing, but clothing that provides onlookers with what in my case resembled a 3D puce coloured relief map of the Beacon Beacons.

I grabbed the largest board I could, to hide my curves from the crowds, and headed to the waters edge to be given a rudimentary lesson in lying, kneeling and standing, and as fast as the oncoming waves would allow headed into the water as deep as possible.?I forgot I had a daughter as my only inclination was to immerse myself away from the howling laughter of what I recognised not to be strangers, but my nearest and dearest family.

I had made two mistakes.?A very large board on a man with very short legs and absolutely no track record in balancing on anything narrower than a road.

It was forty five minutes of utter carnage.?I loved body boarding.?I would rather be waterboarded than ever attempting surfboarding again.

Like a man praying to be put out of his misery, I got to my knees a few times, only to be thrown like a sinner back into the frothing wrath of the Cornish sea.?Poseidon was clearly on lifeguard duty that day.

So it is with those memories that I ponder 2023 and of course it got me thinking about digital transformation.

Like all of my failed negligent negotiations with these boards, 2023 and whatever it throws at us means it is vital that businesses seek balance.

Balance between continuing to build resilience across all parts of their organisation, and a boldness to reimagine and reinvent the areas of their business that are being held back by the tides of change and uncertainty that buffet our boards every day.

Balance though doesn’t mean boring.

If you have ever seen Tony Hawk, Sarah Quita Offringa, or Stephanie Gilmore do their stuff it is their ability to balance that allows them to do some amazing things us mere mortals can only watch on YouTube and revel at.

We can see from Gartner that Enterprise Software is set to see 11% growth in 2023 as businesses double down on the operational software that creates the momentum to not just cope with the breakers of people, supply chain, or economic disruption, but help them ride the halfpipe of opportunity that we need to push our boards towards.

Whether your balance is finding a new ERP platform or implementing automation around your existing one, reimaging some of the applications that can unlock your people or unlocking the data you have been storing for years but not using for business value, take your IT and Digital budgets and make sure you create a business that can yes ride out the current storms but is also navigate itself digitally into brighter waters.

As 1980s pop legends Depeche Mode said;

Don't tend this way

Don't tend that way

Straight down the middle until next Thursday

First to the left

Back to the right

Twist and turn until you got it right

Get the balance right

Right I am off to book Water Skiing lessons.?How hard can that be.