Found Wanting

When you are thinking “I don’t deserve to be at this table”, “I don’t know enough to apply for this job”, or “I am really confused and feel incompetent”... you don’t know how the other people are (also) beating themselves up constantly. 

Even if people do open up, we only get the words they choose, and only in the way we interpret them. We are only exposed to projections. We are only exposed to how those projections land on our internal projections. 

Working on these interpretations is not something that is obvious. Good business ideas are things you can count, and deep work is often not countable. You may need to pragmatically focus on good business ideas to build the internal capacity for work that doesn’t have (obvious) payback. 

I avoided reading “How to win friends and influence people” because the title made me cringe. It seems manipulative. The books surprised me with the well-articulated truth that we are interested in people that are interested in us. 

Truth sits in a feedback loop, as an invited and trusted evolving conversation. 

Feedback is best received when we don’t feel like it is a tool of destruction. When it isn’t a disguise for being “weighed, measured, and found wanting.” When there is a long-term commitment to each other’s well-being. Where there is a foundation of respect and kindness. 

Then feeling incompetent and not enough is the only starting point in every new endeavour, rather than a fearful admission of permanent inadequacy.

Beautiful or Thorny

It can be dangerous to try count things that can’t be counted. Sometimes the answer is “we don’t, and can’t, know”. Sometimes the answer is qualitative. 

You can wrestle with beautiful or thorny questions through first-hand, on-the-ground, stories that don’t scale. You can soak, chew, listen, and be influenced but you cannot weigh, measure, rank, and sort. 

Many people will impose frameworks that have worked for them in one area, in another. Like the investment analyst who thinks you can apply an investment process to everything. Then ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) or Philanthropy come along, and instead of using wholly different tools... the spreadsheets get whipped out. 

In investing, the decision ultimately boils down to buy or sell. With a lot of issues that matter... it is vastly more complicated than that. The rules of money simply don’t apply to many of the decisions we want to make. 

Yet they often still require financing. They still require capital to be allocated to them. The temptation that needs to be resisted is to force everything to become a business. Where how something needs to be financed is the key driver of the identity of what something is. 

Instead of having the wisdom to sort between things that can (and should) make money, and things that make a meaningful life.

Devil's Thorn

Productive Performance

The deal most of us have is that we work to survive. Some of us get to do work that fulfils a deeper purpose than that, and some of us enjoy the benefits of paid work we really connect with. Most of us have to deal with being productive assets. Life as a job description. The first insurance I bought when I started working (my first post studies job was in Risk Product Development) was Disability Cover, Severe Illness Cover, and Future Cover (the ability to get cover I hadn’t thought of without medical tests). All these protected my ability to earn an income. If I was still alive, but was no longer “a productive asset”. I kept this cover until my Engine was bigger than the amount I would get if something went wrong. Part of my decision to stop working for money in 2014 was a distaste at being a productive asset. At being weighed, measured, and paid. Capital is far better suited to paid work than people. Not everything that counts can be counted. The biggest strength of Capital is empowering people to choose the nature of work that they do. Perhaps work that can’t be simplified into performance measures.

Means Testing

Welfare States provide a support net to catch people, should they fall. If able to look after themselves, they are not targeted. Tests are applied to see if people have the means. Support focuses on the young, old, sick and those who are supporting others (e.g. parents and care givers). This means testing itself costs money. One argument for a Universal Basic Income is that the cost of the infrastructure to decide if people deserve help may be more than the cost would be to help everyone unconditionally. The basic nature of the income means traditional incentives remain in place for people to aspire to more. Means Testing is the opposite of a Job Interview. You have to prove desperation. Unconditional security means all people can look towards a future beyond panic. Replacing a conditional safety net with permanent buffer is a catalyst. Don't just support people in weakness... see their strength.

Balanced Scorecards

Being able to quantify things makes them much easier to manage. You can compare them. You can say which ones you prefer. Which ones are more important? You can see if you are improving. You can prioritise. An ordered world helps you figure out what matters. What causes what? Then you can do more of the things that cause the results that you want. Boom. The world makes sense.

By quantifying things, you can use equations to create models of how the world works (aX = Y + e). If I have ‘a’ many Xs, I will get a Y plus some noise, the (e)rror. So, almost Y. Regression models let you build up complicated equations that explain things. Almost. Simple models let you test whether different things (an action and an outcome) are connected. They help the world make sense. You can plan.

The desire to quantify can be very powerful. It assumes there is an underlying order that we just need to understand, and we can bend things to our will. An underlying order plus some noise. Noise is the bit that makes results differ from what we expect. However we explain the world, it is more complicated than that.

There lies the problem. In reality, whenever we test something we are only seeing the results that occurs with that very specific set of conditions. I might prefer Apples to Oranges. But if it is half time at a rugby match I prefer Oranges. I might prefer waking up early to miss a horrible sardine style sweaty commute, but it depends how I feel at the exact moment my alarm goes. aX only equals Yish if there are no oranges, sardines, rugby etc. Then only if I feel like it. It depends.

A popular management tool in the workplace is the Balanced Scorecard. It takes all the aspects of your job and breaks them down into quantifiable targets, then assigns weights to each of the targets depending on their importance. Slowly but surely you add more and more things that are important, until even the very important thing end up getting weights of 10%. Something like getting along with your colleagues may get just a 1% weighting. If you don’t get on with your colleagues, the other 99% may not matter at all.

Balance Scorecards and Rock Balancing

Counter Balance by Leandro Inocencio

Balanced Scorecards give the illusion of manageability. In my experience the best managers I have come across are able to dispense with these tools. The problem is this is not scalable. The magic ingredients they added were time and trust. The very best manager I ever had wasn't even my manager. She managed a team alongside me, and we worked together. But I learnt more from her than from anyone else about how to get the best out of people. Her super power was listening, the occasional challenging question, a sense of humour and a genuine sense of empathy. I wasn't a cog in her eyes.

Knowledge comes from the front lines. It comes from a deep understanding of the specific set of conditions. It comes from the qualitative stuff that glues the quantitative stuff together. It comes from the stuff you can't quantify. The stuff you can't communicate. The main lesson I learnt from her is that the best way to manage is not for people to work for you, it is for them to work with you. Balanced Scorecards are an attempt to allow for distance between where decisions are made and where they are implemented. The truth may be that you can't do that.

It’s more complicated than that. Conditions matter. It’s simpler than that. Trust people.