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Remaining unmanaged

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

For me, there’s a sweet spot between working in a permanent role within an organisation, and working as a consultant on a short-term basis with many different organisations. Some call this ‘contracting’, but I prefer the term ‘remaining unmanaged’.

Venkatesh Rao riffed on this in a recent (subscriber-only) post:

In the gig economy, freedom is primarily freedom from being managed. It’s a freedom that can seem like a curse to those who either enjoy being managed, or are too inexperienced to have learned adequate self-management behaviors. But like it or not, this is the freedom you have in the gig economy, and there is an art to thriving under this freedom you must learn, or it turns into a burden.

Venkatesh Rao, The Art of Gig

He goes on to explain that the reason traditional organisations have people managers is to prevent failure. They exist to prevent employees:

  1. Doing the wrong thing (misdirect effort)
  2. Doing the thing wrong (make mistakes)
  3. Cutting corners and do poor work out of laziness
  4. Working too slowly, creating delays
  5. Gaming incentives and work to minimal standards
  6. Acting maliciously due to unresolved resentments
  7. Acting unreliably due to personal life issues
  8. Lying or cheating in reporting on work
  9. Failing to resolve conflict with other employees
  10. Becoming unable to work due to illness
  11. Failing due to lack the right resources to succeed
  12. Failing due to essential tools or systems failing

If you work outside a regular organisation, as I do as a member of a worker-owned co-op, then you have to learn how to self-manage. Interestingly, if you do this well enough, then you and your crack team can perform a better job than an entire traditional department.

The pandemic has shown what we already knew: it’s entirely possible to work from home and co-ordinate your activities with other talented, self-directed, emotionally mature people. Perhaps we no longer need managers?

Instead, what we need are process people; emotionally-intelligent, tech-savvy conveners of people across organisations. They can’t rely on hierarchy to get things done, so they have to navigate their networks, assembling and dismantling fluid teams.

To some extent, we’re already getting to this scenario in some sectors and for particular projects. For example, our co-op has helped form part of a couple of Catalyst digital teams, helping charities respond to the implications of COVID-19.

There are many things that won’t go back to the ‘normal’ after the pandemic. Hopefully there will be collective desire to self-manage a lot more, forming nimble teams to work with like-minded people on stuff we find valuable.

This post is Day 34 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

The auto-suggested life is not worth living

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

If you use Google products such as Android, Google Docs, or Gmail, you may have noticed more suggestions recently.

On the other hand, suggestions made while I’m composing an email or writing in a Google Doc are a bit different. I find this as annoying as someone else trying to finish my sentences during a conversation. That’s not what I was going to say.

Some of these can be helpful, for example when replying to questions posed via messenging services. There are definitely times when I’m in a hurry and just need to say ‘Okay’ or give a thumbs-up to my wife.

In a recent article for The Art of Manliness, Brett and Kate McKay point out the potential toll of these nudges:

Some of society’s options for living represent time-tested traditions — distillations of centuries of experiments in the art of human flourishing. Many of our mores, however, owe their existence to expediency, conformity, laziness. Practices born from once salient but no longer relevant circumstances are continued from sheer inertia, from that flimsiest of rationalizations: “That’s the way it’s always been done.”

Brett and Kate McKay

The suggestions in Google’s products come from machine learning which is, by definition, looking to the past to predict the future. One way to think about this is as a subtle pressure to conform.

Back in December last year, I was in NYC presenting on surveillance capitalism for a talk entitled Truth, Lies, and Digital Fluency. Riffing on Shoshana Zuboff’s book, I explained that surveillance capitalists want to be able to predict your next move and sell this to advertisers, insurers, and the like.

It’s an approach rooted in behaviourism, the idea that a particular stimulus always leads to a particular response. The closer they can get to that, the more money they can make. It’s true what Aral Balkan has been pointing out for years: we’re being farmed by surveillance capitalists.

Who wants to live this kind of life? But it’s not just the explicit auto-suggestions that we need to be of. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter feed off, and monetise through advertising, the emotions we feel about certain subjects. They are rage machines.

Stimulus: response. Let’s not lose our ability to think, to reason, and (above all) be rational.

This post is Day 33 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

Strengths and schooling

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

In a recent short post Seth Godin talks about amplifying your strengths rather than focusing on your weaknesses:

People don’t hire you, buy from you or recommend you because you’re indifferently average and well rounded.

Seth Godin

He’s talking about things from a business standpoint, but as a parent and former teacher, I can’t help but think about developing strengths from a learning and developmental point of view.

These things seem obvious to me:

  1. There is a baseline that societies can and should expect most people to achieve.
  2. People are born with different innate interests and tendencies.
  3. The context and environment in which people are raised affects what they find interesting.

As a result, it appears to me that following a broad and balanced curriculum up to a certain baseline would seem like the best approach for educational institutions. Beyond that, it makes sense for people to specialise based on their interests.

People develop at varying rates in different areas due to the three points listed above. That’s why I think we should allow young people to mix between year groups for different subjects, using an approach some people call “stage, not age”.

Imagine if we truly allowed people to follow their interests? Wouldn’t the ability to do so motivate young people more than the current system? Right now, educational authorities’ focus on exam results leads to the narrowing of curricula and the limiting of options.

It’s fashionable to say that we have a industrial education system for a post-industrial economy. That’s confusing means with ends. My argument would instead be that we have an education system focused mainly on the priorities of politicians and employers. What would a more community-centered vision for education look like?

Writing in 1971, Ivan Illich discussed in Deschooling Society the importance of learners finding others who share their interests so they can learn together and solve problems:

Creative, exploratory learning requires peers currently puzzled about the same terms or problems. Large universities make the futile attempt to match them by multiplying their courses, and they generally fail since they are bound to curriculum, course structure, and bureaucratic administration. In schools, including universities, most resources are spent to purchase the time and motivation of a limited number of people to take up predetermined problems in a ritually defined setting. The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

Now that we have the internet, of course, the ability to find like-minded people is easier than ever before. Nevertheless, there is something immensely powerful about working within a shared geographical context.

This is why I return time and again to Chapter 8 of Keri Facer’s 2011 book Learning Futures, where she outlines what the ‘future-building school’ of the future might look like. I love the way that it manages to respect the specialist pedagogical skills available through schools, with the latent knowledge and talent available through communities:

Although half of the children’s time is scheduled in advance with master classes, tutorials or group learning programmes, one-fifth of their time, even from the youngest age, is dedicated to working on their own projects. The remainder is dedicated to collaborative and community projects where children seek out areas they want to work on together – whether this is exploring a new form of material that has just been developed in one of the labs upstairs, or in solving the problems of a particular group of local residents. Conversations with mentors at the beginning of each week allow the children to discuss their progress and their plans and to manage the different demands of projects and learning programmes. In these conversations, each child’s resource map comes into play. This rich map of their experiences, progress, interests and aspirations, as well as the resources that they have to draw upon at home, in the community and in their family, acts as a basis for identifying both where additional support might be needed and where the child and their family may have particular strengths and interests to share with collaborators or the wider school.

Keri Facer, Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change

Given that the pandemic has put the lie to parents needing to travel to work every day, I think mass remote working in future could lead to this kind of situation happening in the next decade. We just need the will to change the system.

This post is Day 32 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com

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