Sweet and Smart
In this day and age of instant gratification and social media shorts, I’m admittedly a fan of highlights reels.
(Editor’s note: They don’t call him Graeme TL;DR Lipschitz for nothing.)
Aside from the Google brainteaser red flag, one of the highlights of a recent job interview was being asked what mental models I use when it comes to digital transformation.
Whilst I grudgingly read business books (I highly recommend Blinkist as a way to hack this) the best non-fiction I’ve read relates to mental models. and the authority so far has been Farnam Street.
Aside from the usual Thought Experiments and First Principles concepts, I’ve grown fond of a couple of interesting new ways of looking at challenges:
Inversion: The idea that we can turn things upside down or back to front in order to change our perspective and way of addressing challenges. My favourite form of inversion is backcasting: starting from the victory clause of the challenge and moving backwards to create achievable milestones or OKRs. Whilst backcasting is practical, it is also psychological: it places users in a victory-state before they’ve begun and it sets the tone for what is to come. It is cliche for a reason: having the vision puts us in a place to achieve it.
Avoiding Stupidity: Often when we’re looking to shoot the lights out, we lose track of the fundamentals associated with our current position. In other words: what did we do well to get here? Recently, the world became fascinated by the story of the billionaire who invented a ticking time bomb submarine which would take other stupid historian tourists to see the Titanic. In a move that proves you don’t have to be smart to be rich, he flouted scientific laws and regulation he instantly killed everyone aboard.
“When OceanGate was founded, the goal was to pursue the highest reasonable level of innovation in the design and operation of manned submersibles,” the company wrote. By being innovative and successful in previous endeavours, Stockton Rush thought that he could flout regulation which was intended to keep ocean-farers safe. It ended his life and the lives of four others. The key takeaway? Sometimes on your road to glory, you need to avoid the potholes of stupidity en route.
How else do we avoid stupidity? Spotting idiots:
Idiocy comes in so many forms that it sometimes looks like intelligence: misinformation, for example, often has a valid conclusion but the premise behind it is a bit muddled. I’ve found that smart people suffer from acts of idiocy too, no one - even this humble writer - is immune. Systems aren’t immune to idiocy either: sometimes a lucky idiot has devised one which hasn’t perished, or the actors inside it flourish despite large displays of it.
In the theme of practical-and-psychological, how do we spot idiots? Quite simply: they’re cruel. Governer JB Pritzker illuminates us:
How does cruelty play out in the workplace? As JB says, fear and judgement take hold. When we judge, our ego forces us come from a place of supposed intellectual, moral or physical superiority. We look downward and often we miss blind spots. By being empathetic, fearless and open to the diversity of culture, thinking and experience in front of us, we show an evolved sense of thinking that allows personal and professional growth. The world is small, and it gets smaller for every act of cruelty and judgement we impose on our colleagues.
Empathy and kindness not only promotes a broadened horizon of intellectual interaction, it also greases the wheels when the tyres hit the tarmac. Aside from the metaphors, when the S hits the F, having people being kind and understanding is the difference between a meltdown and overcoming a hurdle for good. The world of business becomes larger for the colleague who is kind.
So I ask you, dear reader, to imagine your business built intentionally upon kindness, one where we encounter things that are different to the status quo and where they are not only tolerated but encouraged to flourish, if not for capitalism’s sake then because it just makes sense.
