It Is What It Is #5

Welcome to the fifth one

?“It is what it is” is what this is.?

This is a thing from me, Tom Goodwin, and co-writer/curator Adriana Stan . It’s not sent at a set time or at a set interval or especially frequently. It’s not always the same format, nor the same length. It’s not necessarily newsy. It’s curated based on what feels interesting and worth sharing.?

Table of Contents:

• 5 Management & Leadership Imperatives for 2022 and Beyond?
• The Power of Now?
• Ideas & Explorations: The Logic of Time
• Some Inspiration & Provocation
• 3 Questions?
• Little Bits?
• Humor! (Sort of)?

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5 Leadership Imperatives We Live By?

One of the worst things we ever did in corporate America was to take the most vital part of any company–the people powering it–and label it so dismissively as “human resources.”?

As co-founders of All We Have Is Now, Adriana and I have been urging companies to rethink hiring and management practices years before the Great Resignation. There is a lot more work to be done. Companies can’t afford the continued exodus of great talent. People have had enough. Life is too short for bad management. The time to build a culture of change is now.???

These are the core principles–and tactical exercises–that guide the way we lead our team and grow our consultancy. Our hope is that they spark some feedback from other leaders and managers out there, and that the companies that need them feel free to copy or integrate them into their practices.?

Let us know what we’re missing. Adapt them around your needs and values. Make them into daily checklists if that’s helpful. Expand upon our prompts. Transformation can happen at every level.?

1. Nurture imagination: Spark new thinking and empower others to challenge assumptions and constraints and to uncover new possibilities.?

• What are three new possibilities I can create today??
• Picture the most exciting outcome. What do you see? Now what’s the first step we could take to get there??
• Constraints are the fuel for creativity. What are the given circumstances, what’s the objective, and what’s one thing that might be in the way? To get around that obstacle, what’s one idea we can try; how can we experiment??

2. Nurture empathetic candor: Communicate openly, transparently, and consistently. Your tone, choice of words, approach, and communications medium are all factors that matter. You can be both direct and compassionate . Understand each person’s needs, communication style, strengths, and inclinations, and actively apply this knowledge–your role is to make the most of people’s talent, to expand our potential. Empathy is our greatest resource: the more we tap into it, the more our capacity to connect expands, and the more we grow–individually and collectively.?

• What is one thing I can do to lift my team up today? What can I offer? One person at a time–how can I make them feel valued, seen and heard, right here, right now??
• Ask an open-ended question, listen, then mirror. Create safety and trust. Mirroring is the most vital skill to cultivate. Acknowledge, be sensitive to individual circumstances, and go a step beyond sympathy, toward empathy and compassion. Motivating and reframing around solutions is only helpful if it happens after people feel heard and understood, which only comes through listening and mirroring.?
• Share your appreciation–generously and regularly. Make it specific, both one-on-one and in group settings. You get to work with some amazing people–take every opportunity to tell them that they’re amazing.?

3. Nurture progress: Fearlessly tackle what hasn’t been possible before, one step at a time, and motivate others to achieve their highest potential.

• What is one thing I can do to better support you??
• Find out what brings meaning to each person on our team. What is the best praise you’ve ever received? Biggest wins this month, what you’re most proud of–the moments that really fulfilled you? The work that allowed you to be at your best this week? The most challenging part of today? One thing that gives you joy, comfort, or gratitude? (Beware of toxic positivity; to drive progress, we have to be truthful, accept difficulties, and genuinely feel well.)
• What is one action each of us can take today to get closer to our goals? If we’re not progressing, we’re regressing–nothing is static; we don’t maintain, we drive, we take action, we forge new paths with audacity and urgency.?

4. Nurture transformation: Invite change: it gives us the chance to continuously improve, which allows us to excel and innovate. Beware of complex systems/processes designed from scratch; focus on simplicity first, on what allows us to evolve. Often, before you can innovate, you have to be willing to transform first.?

• What’s one thing we should start doing? One that doesn't serve us well? One that’s working really well? What have you found helpful in other roles or at other organizations? What are some areas we can improve? Improvement can mean a higher level of impact or rigor, larger scale, radically different model, faster outcome with a more agile approach, and much more. If we’re pursuing transformation and its by-products–excellence and innovation–there is always an opportunity for improvement in every aspect of the business, and every person on the team is encouraged to share input.?
• What is one thing we can radically simplify or completely rethink??
• What would our group/company look like if we set it up today????

5. Nurture curiosity and diverse perspectives: Create an environment where learning and growing are prioritized. Champion new voices. Foster divergent thinking. Enable curiosity and ambition. Cultivate a beginner’s mind, because in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. Hire people who bring new perspectives, who are passionate about exploring new avenues and sharing their discoveries, whose backgrounds and skill sets complement ours, and people who more than anything, push us to see the world differently. Honor and support people’s need for autonomy, self-expression, and self-actualization. That will make us stronger as a collective. It’s remarkable what we can achieve when we break down barriers; when we come together as a team of distinct individuals.?

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The Power of Now

One of the best questions we can ask ourselves is: Where do we spend our time??

Do you tend to spend your time analyzing what happened, planning and projecting what can happen, or taking action to make things happen right now? How do you shift between each mode with all of its strengths and blindspots? Is there a dominant space your mind inhabits??

Much of the business world tends to focus on the past, on case studies, on best practices, on sales results from previous quarters. The fantasy it sells is that the future can be predicted, uncertainty contained. And there is an entire industry that thrives on this fantasy–rhapsodizing about the metaverse or drone deliveries and how they will impact the future.?

Yet little time is spent on what matters now. Can we honestly look at the world and conclude that we’ve made the most of the technology that exists today? That we’re doing everything we can to apply new tech to help people get access to life-saving resources, or to better healthcare, diagnostics, or quality of life? To teach kids vital skills? To navigate rules–employment, tax, renting a home, and so much more–that ignore the complexities of modern living? To improve urban planning or transportation–when many airports are still struck by the decade-old dilemma of how to handle car sharing apps? Have retailers mastered buy-online-pickup-in-store? Are mobile ads delightful experiences that seduce us into seamlessly buying? How many grocery stores or hotels or airlines are proof that companies are unleashing the opportunities of now??

We live in an era where the most advanced technologies we’ve ever known and the most profound tools we’ve ever had can be deployed across the world, across demographics and across industries. Our role is not to ignore trends, but to focus on what we can do now, with what we have.?

Now is the time for action. Let’s focus on fast, abundant connectivity, on the vast implications of automation, on the brilliant devices in everyone’s hands, on new consumer behaviors created by them, and on delighting people. What new products can we make? In what ways can we simplify or solve real problems? The skill of today is knowing what matters.?

The past teaches us about how the world works and gives us crucial context that aids our decision-making. It’s there to be learned from, not worshipped. The future beams with possibilities that thrill and inspire. But now is when we can make a difference.??

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Ideas and Explorations?

“Strangely, although we feel as if we sweep through time on the knife-edge between the fixed past and the open future, that edge — the present — appears nowhere in the existing laws of physics,” writes Natalie Walchover in this fascinating exploration prompting us to rethink the logic of time.?

Some things merely are, but most things are changing and becoming. This article presents a view of the world where indeterminism in physics is intimately connected with intuitionistic math. It’s a world of choice sequences, of bits coming into existence one after the other as time passes. A world where the continuum can’t be neatly cut in two, where the present is “thick” – it can’t be infinitely squeezed between past and future. A world in which processes build and develop, the state of “becoming” is central, and the future is open. A world where we become what we are, and where there is immense value in the power of now.?

For all the talk about change coming faster than ever, here’s a compelling argument for what’s actually happening. It may be less about the unique time or culture we’re in and more about our perception of time, how we process information as we get older, and how we try to assign objective meaning to subjective experiences in a way that adds up to a unified theory.?

And speaking of unified theories, here’s an interesting one being used to explain everything from air flow to societal structure.?

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Some Inspiration & Provocation

Life as a classroom: “To me the classroom continues to be a place where paradise can be realized, a place of passion and possibility, a place where spirit matters, where all that we learn and know leads us into greater connection, into greater understanding of life lived in community.” – bell hooks on the classroom as a radical space

Something to aspire to : “Working in the danger zone between sensibility and objectivity: to be receptive to a passing feeling, a change in cast, and then to bear down, with unsparing rigor, in the work of understanding why.”?

“Today, there is no design for everybody. Design is primarily for those who can afford it and/or the people who are taught to think about aesthetics. There is an everyday pedagogy of design in our culture. Its lessons are brought to those of us with class privilege who know the right magazines to look at, the right stores to go to, the best designers to hire.” - bell hooks, whose essay on the power of design reflects on a? “call to search for the beauty that is beyond that which can be made most easily apparent, to find beauty in the everyday. When life is happening, design has meaning. In such a world every design that we encounter strengthens our recognition of the value of being alive.”

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A Gentle Reminder + 3 Questions

As we reach peak prediction and trend deck season, let’s remember to separate hype from what matters.?

The most significant progress has often come from the most under-recognized technologies. The opener to this piece highlights a compelling example.?

Can we get better at identifying value and imagining its implications? What are some inventions we should pay attention to–and some ways to apply them in a wider context? How do we create a world where we use what is newly possible to transform the lives of many??

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Little Bits?

We need a major redesign of life .?

Why “careerist” as a slur only gets deployed against working class people who move up .??

Ambition in the workplace and the difference between being instrumentally vs. malignantly difficult.?

A simple plan to solve all of America’s problems.?

Why isn’t the future here yet ?

How do we get the goal post to stop moving ??

What is the wealthiest generation ??

The philosophy of SimCity.?

On spatial justice.?

A finite social network where you get 100 posts—for life.??

You can make time for things that matter , or you can make time for more email.

The state of Wyoming has two escalators .

Japanese homes aren’t built to last--and that's the point .

The rise and fall of the bank robbery capital of the world.?

Why we’re so exhausted: the connections between psychological hibernation, socialization, emotional resilience, and cognitive energy.?

“Burbclaves .”

The fake freeway sign that became a real public service. ?

Turning CO2 to stone and growing carbon-negative food in Iceland .?

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A New Section: Humor!?

While driving down the highway, physicist Werner Heisenberg is stopped by a police officer, the physics joke begins.?

“Do you know how fast you were going?” the officer demands.

When Heisenberg shakes his head, the officer tells him: “You were doing 90.”

“Great,” Heisenberg complains. “Now I don’t know where I am.”?

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This newsletter is commercially useless (except for one shamelessly self-promotional link–see if you can spot it!) and editorially ambitious.??

Please feel free to share it if you find it interesting, send things our way for next time, and give us feedback (not in number form): [email protected] and [email protected]?

It’s likely that the next one of these will come into your life in better circumstances. Let’s be excited about that idea.?

Tom & Adriana