When Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue with his sextet, they spent a total of four days in the recording studio. They created one of the bestselling and most important jazz albums of all time in less than a week.
Of course, they’d been exploring for months. In clubs, in front of an audience, trading fours and taking risks.
Studio time is expensive. Studio time should be de-risked.
You’ll need to find a place to noodle. A place to take risks and do things that might not work, where the stakes are real but the stakes aren’t so high that you forget why you’re doing this work in the first place.
The story is a good one: put some tea bags in a mason jar filled with fresh, cold water. Put it in the sun. Four hours later, smooth and delicious tea is waiting for you. The photons from the sun go through the clear glass and the water, strike the leaves and transfer radiant energy to the tea.
This isn’t actually what happens.
It turns out that the sun simply warms the water a bit, and tea happens. You can make cold water tea in the fridge more safely, because it keeps the water cold (though it takes much longer).
Of course, the lesson has nothing to do with tea. Or even beverages.
It’s that I was enamored with the story and stopped being curious. It would have been easy to set up the experiment. Worse, I never bothered to look it up. It was better, apparently, to feel right than to know what was actually happening.
If a jacket is made by Patagonia or a piece of hardware is made by Teenage Engineering, you can probably tell who made it the first time you see it, even without a logo. A painting by Sonia Delaunay doesn’t need to be signed to know who it’s by.
On the other hand, AppleTV streams shows that could have come from any streaming service.
When your brand has fingerprints, don’t do things that require you to wear gloves.
Doing math problems in your head is a skill. No one is born knowing the answer to, “You have 35 coins in nickels and quarters. They add up to $4.15. How many quarters do you have?” but we can learn. And some people find it easier than others, but yes, we can learn.
The same is true for analogies and relationships of words.
If someone says, “A baseball manager is like the conductor of an orchestra,” they don’t mean that the manager wears a tuxedo and waves a stick. Understanding context and being willing to look for what the purpose of the analogy is takes a bit of effort.
As we encounter complex ideas, they’re often explained with a form of semantic algebra. You understand X, and this is a bit like that, but different…
It’s easy to see a complaint as simple whining, the narcissistic impatience of someone who has enough insulation from the real world that they can share their dissatisfaction over just about anything.
But a complaint unheard gives us no way to improve.
In our current medical system, doctors can seek to minimize complaints, to explain them away with a negative test or a shrug of the shoulders. But the purpose of medicine isn’t to pass a test, it’s to improve the well-being of the patient.
We’re under no obligation to embrace or even listen to a complaint. We can always help the complainant by sending them to another vendor or professional who is eager to try to help.
But if we choose to engage, then the complaint is a gift. It’s a clue about what might be at the root of the problem.
A few hundred years ago, small towns in New England embraced the idea of the town hall. Citizens (at the time, just the white men) came together and worked through the town’s agenda. Each person could speak, each person could vote, it was direct and sometimes effective.
Part of the innovation was the idea that each vote was equal, regardless of how much land you owned or wealth or status you had acquired. (Conveniently ignoring all the souls left out of the meeting.)
When there’s no representative to blame, the responsibility feels different. When everyone in the room can speak, there’s also an expectation that people will listen as they wait their turn. The entire endeavor only works if people are willing to engage and seek mutual success.
We agree to speak with care, to listen to others, to change our minds when useful and to abide by the will of the majority. That’s a lot.
It’s not unusual for companies to have an event, as often as weekly, that they call a town hall. But this is different. It’s largely a performance, not a conversation among peers. Everyone very much doesn’t get a vote. This is a feature of the corporation, not a bug. We label the roles with power, and clearly put them on a chart.
Traditional Town Halls require each participant to understand their responsibility as well as the power of their vote. They use cultural cohesion and the permanence of real estate in a small town to create civility and mutual respect. It’s not surprising that they don’t scale very well.
When a company actually wants the opinions of those who work there, there are far more effective ways to have a productive conversation around the insights and desires that we each bring to the organization. Asynchronous and structured, these interactions are vital sources of connection and wisdom.
I’m all in favor of a well-run company meeting. When bosses have the guts and energy to describe their vision for the future, it can make a difference. But it’s not a town hall.
When we do something nice for someone, a ‘thank you’ and a smile is nice to receive. And, in many parts of human culture, it’s a bit expected.
But when something goes wrong, if we drop a plate or miss a turn or make someone late, it’s particularly delightful and memorable if we are greeted warmly instead of stomped on.
The moments when it’s the most difficult to be kind are the moments where it matters the most.
We can agree that Isaac Newton didn’t invent gravity. It was here all along, but he gets some credit for naming it and describing it.
And Columbus definitely didn’t discover North America. There had been people living here for tens of thousands of years before he arrived.
After Niels Bohr began describing quantum mechanics, the atomic bomb became inevitable. The laws of physics combined with the game theory of competitive sovereign nations meant that sooner or later, it would be discovered.
On the other hand, pizza, rap music and bean-to-bar chocolate are all inventions. The novelty, cultural insight and persistence it took to craft and share these ideas weren’t inevitable at all.
Scientists mostly discover, engineers and artists invent.
Peeves make lousy pets. They undermine us and put us on edge.
But quirks?
Little eccentricities we see in the world that offer a cost-free smile. Habits or interactions that always make us a little lighter on our feet and open the door to better…
They’re easy to find, not hard to adopt and don’t take much maintenance.
Where are yours?
May 13, 2024
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