The Quiet Game

Welcome to the new, fresh, relaunched version of?Rolling Bottlenecks Downhill, the newsletter of Clarke Ching, the self-proclaimed "Bottleneck Guy".

When my two daughters were little, way back when we lived in Scotland, we would often go for day trips.?

My wife and I would sit in the front of the car.?

The girls would sit in the back.?

And, after a while, inevitably, we would end up playing what we called the?"quiet game".

The Quiet Game

It’s a game, I imagine, that every parent invents eventually - out of necessity.

The rules are simple:?

• The girls have a competition to see who can not talk for the longest time
• Whichever child speaks first loses
• Repeat (if possible)

A clever little game where everyone wins:

- The kids think it's fun.

- The parents have a few minutes rest and recuperation.

Such fun.?

…

Which brings me back to racoons.?

(Yes, I know,?in my last note?I said I was gonna switch topics this week but – speaking as the founding member of the?Racoons Guild?– I changed my mind.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a client who I will call Z.

Z is an executive in a large company.??

We started chatting about one of Z’s colleagues - an incredibly valuable, creative, clever problem solver, who I will call “R”.

It turns out that Z reads my newsletter. I know this because:

• Z said, “R is a bit of a Racoon”.
• “Oh? A racoon!”
• “Yes, and he really needs a little more Architect in his life.”
• “Oh?”
• “Yeah, but, well, R is a clever Racoon, and he acts like Architects - managers - are his natural enemy. It’s like he can smell them, and he runs a mile if they get too close.”
• Silence …

And then … a minor breakthrough.

I said, “What do Racoons LOVE and are especially good at?”

• Z said, “I’m not sure”.
• And nor was I really, because I live in New Zealand. And Z lives in Australia, so neither of us had seen a real raccoon before, except on TV.
• I said, “Stereotypically … they like rummaging around in stinky bins, looking for food.”
• More silence.

And then:

• Z said, “I’ve got a whole lot of stinky bins that need cleaning up - nice smelly bins, full of old takeaways.”
• Z came up with a simple plan which focused R the raccoon on doing good old-fashioned raccoon stuff - stuff he is inherently brilliant at - and distracted him away from doing the damaging stuff that bored raccoons tend to do.

Does that make sense?

It’s a bit like the “quiet game” because everyone wins:

- The kids/raccoon think it's fun.

- The parents/architects have a few minutes to rest and recuperate.

And it’s valuable - a win-win for everyone.

The good news is: Raccoons and Architects are?valuable,?just in different ways.

They can peacefully (and profitably) coexist.

* This is the LinkedIn version of this newsletter. It lags behind the email by a couple of weeks. Prefer the email letter? You can?sign up here.