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“To every rule there is an exception—and an idiot ready to demonstrate it. “

Vera Nazarian

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“Any fool can make a rule. And any fool will mind it.”

Henry David Thoreau

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Everyone, and I mean everyone, is tempted to break a rule or two. This includes even a normal <or quasi sensible> person. As I noted in my ‘pirate post’ the sane people in business get frustrated with not getting shit done and is tempted to become a pirate <raise the black flag> and kill <hopefully not literally> conformity, the status quo and those things that may dull the edges in business <and life>.

“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

H.L. Mencken

For today let’s call the well intended rule breakers <not the amoral actors> rebels. All businesses need a rebel or two.  Why? Rules encourage compromise and rebels hate compromising.

Rebels cannot.  It is about winning on their terms or losing on their terms – ‘terms’ most typically defined in a simple “do what is right’ mentality.

To be clear.

I am not suggesting cheating.

I am not suggesting lying.

I am not suggesting anything nefarious.

I am simply suggesting that some rules may need to be sacrificed, or adjusted, in order to do what is right. And sometimes it is a truth that there is a better, if not actually best, way of doing something. That said. This is where businesses run into some problems.

Business is a contradiction with regard to rules.

Business loves construct and process and best practices and ‘how people should do things’ and loves defining “how this company plays by the rules” <literally outlining rules> and, yet, they want people to think freely for themselves. Business actually thrives on people who don’t simply follow rules like a sheep, but rather look at rules with a discerning eye of ‘stupid or smart.’

Ah. Smart.

Smart people don’t encourage breaking rules. Smart people encourage breaking stupid rules.

Smart people don’t break rules for the sake of breaking rules. Smart people assess rules and break them when appropriate.

Look.

Being a rebel is tough mainly because there are some wacky rule definitions scattered throughout businesses. I do believe you can encourage individualism <rebellion> in some other way than ‘the world is full of rules. Be the exception.’ No. I KNOW you can encourage individualism and ‘smart behavior choice even in the face of rules.’

Valuing some sense of order thru rules, and personal accountability toward rules, is kind of what makes civilization run. Same with business. Smart rule breakers respect rules because they do offer order, but recognize stupid rules as order for order sake.

Look <part 1>.

Some rules are good. And rules intended to keep people safe <even if it is a stupid rule> and a business from running into a ditch is good. Telling a person that it is good to break the rules, no matter how seemingly small or stupid, is a bad lesson. Rebels need a discerning eye.

Look <part 2>.

Beyond society, in business I know breaking stupid rules is sometimes necessary to get things done. Excellent effective leadership actually seems to come with an unwritten responsibility to cut through rules that act as barriers to achieving what needs to be done <for the overall betterment of the organization>. I could argue that truly great leaders get where they are because they can do exactly that, legally of course, when the rules tell us otherwise.

Some people call this cutting through the red tape. I call it the ability to weave your way thru the organizational bullshit and get shit done. I can guarantee that if you look throughout any successful organization you will always find some ‘smart’ rule breakers who work diligently to overcome or circumvent the rules, regulations, and policies that unintentionally hinder progress and make it difficult to accomplish shit that needs to be done.

Anyway.

Business isn’t always a Dilbert scene and business SHOULDN’T always translate into some simplistic perspective. In organizations there is certainly individual responsibility, in behavior & decision making, but there is also a relationship with the greater good & greater organism. A person may actually be one of those professional ‘break stupid rules smartly’ people, but ‘managing’ people takes a different skill.

Uh oh.

I think I just suggested two sets of behavior rules.

Anyway.

Here is what I know about the art of breaking stupid rules: independence.

Independence in terms of viewing rules smartly, independent thinking, independent accountability and, well, a dependence upon others to independently agree that this is one of those situations in which there is a stupid rule creating an obstacle to doing the right thing.

I would suggest that great business leaders who embrace independence as an organizational concept are often like the great frigate captains of the old British navy <who were kind of like rebels within a larger organization>. They showcased an ability to effectively participate in the larger organizational activities when required and an ability to be effective taking off on independent campaigns.

I would say that if you do want Independence, well, you do have to be smart about it. Once again:

Smart people don’t encourage breaking rules. Smart people encourage breaking stupid rules. Smart people don’t break rules for the sake of breaking rules. Smart people assess rules and break them when appropriate

One last thing on the ‘smart’ aspect.

This is not intuition or instincts. This is rational, logically driven behavior. Intuition means different things to different people, but suffice it to say it is a horrible way to consistently manage a business & make business decisions. Intuition reflects biased views <usually based on personal experience>. Balancing logic & experience & speed & instincts is an incredibly tricky balancing act, but that balance is often the formula for success if you want to break a stupid rule with independent thinking.

All that said.

99% of the time rules are in place for a reason. Someone thought it made sense and offered some value. I say that to remind all the rebels out there you need to “step in” to a rule, understand it, untangle the stupid part, identify what guidelines are meaningful and then envision not only what you need to do <in breaking the stupid rule>, but also envision the consequences.

Hey. I didn’t say it is easy being a rebel. Rules, even stupid ones, should take some work before you break them. The best rebels do the work to insure breaking a rule offers real value <in other words, breaking this rule was valuable disobedience to the construct>. Ponder.

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“I’ve been injected with false hope so many fucking times I’ve lost count”

via concealthefeeling

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“We all suffer from dreams.”

Bernard Cornwell

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Well. I am unequivocally a hope guy.

I believe leaders should be dealers of hope.

I believe hope is stronger than … well … pretty much anything.

I believe no one should be empty of hope.

I believe everyone deserves someone to give them hope when hopelessness seems the only thing available.

That said.

While, technically, false hope is a simple definition, realistically, there are a couple kinds of false hope.

Ok. Actually a shitload of derivatives of false hope.

In my words there would be, on one end of the spectrum, the more heinous version of ‘offering a fantasy unrealistic thought’ all the way over to the other bookend of ‘grasping for some glimmer of a semi-impossible reality.”

And then everything in between.

Hope, in even a false way, has many dimensions. And within any and all dimensions I would suggest even a sliver of hope has an exponential value beyond its mere size. It is quite possible that is where false hope becomes a little dangerous – that exponential value beyond its actual size.

Even with a glimmer, hope can shine so bright it can blind you to the relentless onslaught of truths and realities. The truths which are more likely to showcase the horizon you are not only gonna be stuck looking at, but visiting at some point <which is not the horizon you had actually hoped for>. But false hope is maybe even slightly more dangerous than that <if anything could be more dangerous than be blinded by reality>.

It actually is more likely to blind you on the important little shit than the meaningless bigger shit. False hope inevitably drives someone to focus on the bigger more audacious, and less likely, objective. This translates into the fact that same someone is more likely to overlook the smaller more important shit that would actually have increased the odds of attaining the hopeful objective.

How does that most often happen?

You are more likely to make some smaller, more impactful, poor choices and decisions hanging on to the sliver of false hope like it is a security blanket from the dangers of the reality you know must be out there.

By the way. That is the main difference between real hope and false hope – in the nuts & bolts aspects.

Real hope. Real hope, which truly has aspects of reality embedded within, actually permits you to navigate reality’s obstacles as you pursue the real hope of something. The real truth is that real hope does not blind, it actually opens your eyes. That said. Contrary to belief the most dangerous false hope is not the one which is complete fantasy it is the type that actually has some reality embedded.

Yeah. False hope is not always some fantasy.

Yeah. False hope is not always something with “no knowable chance of coming to fruition.”

Yeah. As I stated in the beginning someone who purposefully propagates a true fantasy, something so unrealistic, well, that really isn’t false hope that is propagating a lie. And exploiting a lie is a heinous act <but that is NOT false hope>.

So, to be clear, false hope can be propagated not as some false promise or lie, but rather in a weird ‘well intended way.’ Say, for example, someone has been elevated to a position who is unqualified and untested … but has some tested competency. They sit down at their new desk with all the intentions to succeed and all the words to suggest everyone should believe they will figure it out and succeed.

Well. Let’s say they have strong well intended hope that they will do the job and deliver what they promise.

That is a trickier version of false hope. It is propagated from someone who quite possibly has some false beliefs with regard to their own capabilities, but true belief in a good objective.

Uhm. But what if they do figure it out?

Well. They have delivered on hopes therefore, in some weird equation of Life, a false hope has becomes a real hope delivered.

Look. My point is hope is hope.

And unless someone is lying just to get everyone’s unrealistic hopes up, any hope is better than no hope. You can either not have hope, or have false hope, or real hope <albeit ‘real’ and ‘hope’ is a tenuous relationship>.

To be clear … all actions should be determined by reason, logic and practicality within a construct of strategic hope. That is the main Hope equation.

But hope is, well, hope. And it is hope for a reason. You want something better and at exactly the same time you are not omniscient nor a future prognosticator therefore any and all hoe is fraught with some potential falseness an some potential truth.

Hope, in and of itself, is and has always been an abstract concept.

Fortune, luck, hard work & preparation can guide someone toward hope or away from hope.  Hope is never, and I mean NEVER, representative of certainty. Therefore to accept any hope, false of true, you have to accept the existence of possibilities – good and bad.

To me, in my pea like brain, all false hope implies is that the odds are against you and success is slim, yet, people believe they can overcome any and all obstacles. And, in that point, is where I could argue that false hope is as good as any hope out there.

For in that statement if that is what makes someone get out of bed in the morning and go out and try to do something good or even just try, well, that’s not false that is real.

Having led people I do not use hope flippantly even though I believe in hope as a leadership responsibility.

I do believe people want truth.

I do believe people want to feel safe.

I do believe people want someone to accept some of the burden of the bigger more visionary aspects of Life.

I do believe people want to contribute, personally, within progress toward a specific hope for something better.

I do believe Hope, false or true, is hope.

And we all deserve hope.

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“People aren’t interested in the truth.

They’re interested in what keeps them safe.

They’re interested in being looked after. They’re interested in a tale being spun… Mighty men have moments of great despair that common people do not want to know about.”

Melina Marchetta

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originally published December 2016

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“The universe has no single secret. It does not even hold a single nest of secrets to which some one study holds the key.”

Mary Midgley

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Many years ago, I wrote “The Secret ain’t really a Secret” after someone gave me a copy of The Secret suggesting I may like it. At the time I thought it was absurd that people would think there was “a” secret to life. I also thought “thank god the business world isn’t that stupid.” Well. The business world has become stupid. Or maybe the secret sellers have just become more clever. What I mean by that is while in the good ole days a trickster would candidly call something they were selling (the solution to whatever woes that kept you from the riches of business success), but now they don’t call them secrets. They call them ‘insights’ or ‘best practice’ or whatever snake oil solution they can make a buck from.

But the problem isn’t them, the problem is us. “I have met the enemy and it is I.”

Which leads me to people’s response to so much information.

Interestingly, the world wide web has made everything simultaneously less mysterious and more of a mystery at exactly the same time. We have more information available to us then we have ever had before. The mysteries of the past now have explanations. Yet. Each of those ‘explanations’ have chinks and often a little vagueness. And it is within that vagueness questions arise and the world wide web does a deep dive into often ludicrous depths in which the darkness smothers some relative ordinary truths. From that experience we, the enemy which is us, start feeling more and more uncertain and unstable on, well, what to do. So, we begin scavenging for secrets and there is no lack of trickster scavengers to peddle a secret for whatever uncertainty you have. I bring all of that up to suggest that our search for a single answer is a reflection of, or consequence of, the information overload we encounter.

Which leads me to the persistent allure of one dimensionality.

Linear is not only easier to visualize, but it is likeable because it communicates transparency (not uncertainty). Embracing dimensionality means you forfeit some, if not a lot, of transparency. This makes situations looks messy with not one defined solution that can be achieved. But in a business world increasingly complex AND increasingly less forgiving to mistakes or decisions that do not bear fruit immediately the desire for the correct solution, usually a short cut answer, almost encourages us to reduce things to, well, a search for a secret, i.e., a single answer. And, to be clear, business appears to have an insatiable appetite for ‘single answers to the universe.’ I remain baffled by this. I clearly understand how the desire occurs I just remain baffled by how easily business gets sucked into the newest ‘answer’ being peddled. If business seeks a single answer, I would suggest they rummage around within this framework:

• Self interest/self impact
• Collective interest/collective impact
• Value offered/value recognized/value impact

The ‘answer’ of any successful business resides in the cat’s cradle of “what I do”, “what we do together” and “is what we are doing valued and does the market value it”. Business is, inevitably, about value and impact. Business is, inevitably, about an intricate connection of people and things working in progress toward value generation and impact. I imagine some trickster may suggest that is “the secret”, I will not. There is no single answer for any universe. Ponder.

Humans spend 93% of their time indoors. Ok. Actually, they spend 87% indoors and another 5%ish in cars (transportation). The % split is dancing on the head of a pin compared to the astronomically high 90%ish number in the scheme of things.

So. Let’s just say 90% of our time indoors. That seems like a crazy high number to me. That said, let me speculate a bit. Let’s say 300 years ago people spent 50% of their time indoors (I’m trying to find a spot before Industrial Age and maybe during agricultural Age). Let’s say 1000 years ago people spent 25% of their time indoors. You can see where I am going with this. This has to affect us. While all this indoor time certainly doesn’t mean that business (civilization) isn’t extracting the shit of the outside (we don’t need to be outside to actually harm the outside), but it has to effect, well, us, as people, inside (like inside our heads & psyche).

But it’s possible I have a larger point to make.

Affect versus effect. Affect is a verb and means to influence something. Effect is a noun and means the result. While I believe, over time, spending more time indoors does create an effect, that affect takes time to create the effect(s). Change is layered.

As we run around this crazy world we tend to stare at effects (which are actually simple behaviors of the moment) and drive ourselves nuts on whether Armageddon is upon us in some way.

Kids watching too much tv, addicted to smartphones, even decline in organized religion, are examples of how we stare at our navels worrying over what we see as effects and tying ourselves into knots declaring some affect as the evil doer.

Most of the big change stuff, how we think, molecular, civilization, is slow moving stuff. Driven by some tectonic shift in the nature infrastructure of Life. That doesn’t mean things like smartphone technology can’t create change, because it does, but rather it most likely amplified an effect of a tectonic affect which occurred years ago.

Do I believe a shift from spending more time outdoors to more time indoors created an effect? Sure. And it most likely had cascading consequences – both positively and negatively. That’s the thing between affects and effects. It is often not some simplistic balance sheet entry but rather, because of pace layering, a nature affect ripples out and has multiple, if not infinite, effects.

Do I believe shifting from an agrarian society to an industrial one affected us? Sure.

Do I believe shifting into a world in which knowledge, truth & lies, became available 24/7 affected us? Sure.

Do I believe automation will affect us? Sure.

What I am less sure of are the effects. Well. Some of the older affects allow us to examine the layers, ripples, of consequences. But that said, in general, I am unsure of the effects. And maybe that is what makes science fiction so interesting versus some of the futurist nonsense we see and hear in business. Science fiction makes no claims of effect predictions, simply effect possibilities. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that not all science fiction, or fantasy, is all dystopian – or utopian. They reflect possibilities of both good, and bad, consequences. I would also be remiss if I didn’t point out this is how you can assess business ‘futurists.’ The ones who predict anything are charlatans, tricksters, and the ones who are unsure and express possibilities and probabilities pose the most interesting thinking.

Lastly.

Not all affects are created equal in term of their effects. I say that because we often seem to treat all affects in equal terms – especially if one embraces a dystopian view of things. I encourage everyone who has any desire to ponder the consequences of an affect to sit and think through the layers and where it resides. A ‘fad affect’ is just that – a momentary glimpse of nonsense (and, yet, it will have an effect). A ‘nature affect’ is just that – a tectonic shift in the structure of all that stands upon it.

I’ll end with the fact about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is water–covered, and the oceans hold about 96.5 percent of all Earth’s water. If earth’s surface became 82% water covered, that affect would certainly create not just an effect, but cascading effects. Just as if 90% of a workforce was in offices and it shifted to 70% of a workforce was in offices is an affect, with cascading effects. Nothing linear in what I stated, but causal, and it should make everyone spend a bit more time thinking about affects because, well, in the end I am unsure of what any effect will be but I surely would like to be aware of an affect.

** note: to be clear, I am relatively sure I mangled affect versus effect somewhere within this piece, that said, I stand by the thinking.

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“You’ll have to help yourself.”

Lemony Snicket

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“It may be the wrong decision, but fuck it, it’s mine.”

Mark Z. Danielewski

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“More than anything, to me, he was dad. And what a dad. He loved us with the passion and the devotion that encompassed his life. He taught us to believe in ourselves, to stand up for ourselves, to know ourselves and to accept responsibility for ourselves.

Justin Trudeau at his father’s funeral

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Personal responsibility is hard. Much much harder than conceptually it sounds like it should be.

I do not have any research today to show how people who have a strong sense of personal responsibility attained that character trait <although if you google it there are gobs of people with an opinion on it>.

For everyone who had great parents who taught them, I can give you a dozen examples of people with crappy parents who have a strong sense of personal responsibility.

For every victim mentality person, I can show different contextual situations that got them into that state of mind and, just as well, the path to a strong sense of personal responsibility is numerous and rarely a straight path.

But, even without research I will suggest a couple of things:

1. Personal acceptance.

To have personal responsibility you almost have to have a strong foundation of personal acceptance.

I imagine I could suggest that if it doesn’t than you are simply ‘posing’ in an attempt to look like you are responsible <and that rarely can stand the test of time>.

Regardless. Somehow, someway people with a strong sense of personal responsibility have developed a strong sense of self. Not necessarily confidence, just self. They recognize ‘they is what they is’ and accept the flaws <and try to improve in some way> and accept their strengths <but never take them for granted>.

In their personal acceptance we, around them, see ‘solid.’ We love these people on our business teams and friend teams, as peers or as leaders, because regardless of their IQ or leadership skills or professional skills they are lighthouse people in their own right.

These people can also be baffling to the perfectionists in the world because part of ‘personal acceptance’ is understanding, if not embracing, imperfections. Ponder.

2. Lucky to be here but many others are just as deserving.

Let me suggest that people with an incredibly strong sense of personal responsibility will also most likely be the people who suggest they had a little luck along the way – lucky in life situations, lucky with mentors, lucky in opportunities – and, even though they had worked hard with integrity, they had done nothing to actually deserve the luck.

As a corollary to this thinking, they would also believe, as part of the luck aspect, that there are many others just as deserving. This attitude creates a sense of responsibility for actions, behavior and attitudes. Mistakes are owned and successes are shared.

Some people may suggest that personal responsibility and accountability is a reflection of integrity or humility.

Well.

It may be.

But I rather believe it is more a sense of understanding that successes are more often than not a reflection of just hard work, but also circumstances. And, to that point, inherently someone with a strong sense of accountability balances success with the understanding that a portion of success is luck – luck of circumstance & luck of being the one where many were just as deserving if provided the opportunity. Ponder.

Like I said in the beginning. This is not based on research and you can toss this into your ‘Bruce bullshit bin’ if you want. But I do not need research to state that personal responsibility and personal acceptance takes work. Lots of work and lots of fortitude.

It is the kind of thing you spend your entire life working hard to not only ‘be’, but to live up to the character standard you have set for yourself. A standard which you will never measure others against because, well, it is personal. You are accountable to your own standard and responsible to meet it. And everyone not only has the ability to set their own, but they also have an unequivocal right to do so without anyone else telling them “how to be accountable.”

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“It was instead something that we would have to spend the rest of our lives to work very hard to live up to.”

Spike Lee

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Personal responsibility is actually one of Life’s lightest burdens if you choose to accept it. That is why I am so often surprised by how many people actually do not accept this burden.

But, in the end, personal responsibility is a personal choice. No one can convince you to do it or be that way. You have to help yourself on this one because no one else can.

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‘Rather than simply work within existing parameters of operational excellence (incrementally optimising your business model to meet customer needs), pioneering leadership sees you embarking upon quests. Such quests allow us to systematically explore complex and uncertain futures. We don’t set goals in the hopes that a particular future will manifest — rather, we explore multiple possible futures, and prepare proactive stratagems to capitalise on each.’

Dr. Jason Fox

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“We find the true person only through group organization. The potentialities of the individual remain potentialities until they are released by group life. Thus, the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.”

Marly Parker Follett, The New State

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Research shows time and time again smaller teams are more effective at getting things done. The typical business response to this is to, well, build small teams. Simplistically all they have really done is create mini departments within larger departments – silos within silos as you wish. Yes. Some of the teams may be interdepartmental but whether you call them squads, teal dots, whatever, eventually they become a static group of people working together.

In order to be truly emergent, and ensure a business brings forth its best “team” against an emergent opportunity, the teams themselves cannot remain static, they must be malleable. This doesn’t mean I am suggesting no teams stay together nor does this mean breaking up all teams all the time. What it does mean is that the organization, and the teams, are malleable to adapt to contextual opportunities. The organization becomes molecular.

This is an environmental, attitudinal, organizational idea which, if embraced, enables the conceptual thinking, autonomy and emergent abilities. To slightly paraphrase “The Individualized Corporation”:

Companies cannot renew their business unless they first revitalize their people. This will not happen thru workshops, inspiring corporate commitments or powerful incentives if the internal environment is like an oppressive, energy sapping environment of downtown Calcutta in midsummer. This environment either created mentally by the people themselves or by poor leadership, saps all initiative, creativity, commitment & belief/hope. That said.

I believe all innovation & creativity already resides within an organization, therefore, any transformation objective should be to create an environment from which that potential emerges. No inspirational speech will motivate & energize in Calcutta in midsummer.

Rather than focusing on individual’s behaviors, the more important challenge is to change that internal environment, the behavioral context, that in turn influences people’s behaviors. To reshape these behaviors, a business must transform their behavioral context. Instead of Calcutta in the summer they must transform to a forest in spring.

Therefore, I would argue one needs to think about the model, the environment, in which the people will work.

Despite the binary discussions which occur in business, what makes a business work is the marriage of collective and individual intelligence, in other words, complex and dynamic (not binary). One of the typical issues business faces is, over time, a sentimentality toward what they have done in the past (systems) which reinforce perceptions of what makes them successful; and what makes people successful. Unfortunately, correspondingly, those perceptions diverge farther and farther away from reality. Regardless. I would argue that as long as a business keeps cloud knowledge distinct from institutional knowledge & wisdom the system will maintain a design resilience to standardization and commoditization of behavior, attitudes and institutional practice.

This actually leads me to the past, Alvin Toffler in 1985, to define this environment.

 

THE CORPORATION OF THE FUTURE

“.. the bigger the world economy, the more powerful will be the smaller players. This is because they are more flexible, faster and more economical – not burdened by layers of bureaucracy. Computers and telecommunications, now affordable to small companies, allow them to compete globally, and deregulation and globalization of financial markets gives them access to capital. Computer-driven technology also makes it possible to produce small runs of customized “higher value-added” products aimed at niche markets. Products produced “just in time” save money on inventory, and they can be quickly improved to compete with rapidly changing technology and tastes. Big companies will break up into confederations of small, entrepreneurial units. Small interacting firms will form themselves into temporary mosaics to be more adaptive and productive.”

Alvin Toffler

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• ** note: while “corporation” implies this concept is only for larger organizations, I would argue that this concept is applicable to all size businesses. In fact. I would argue many smaller businesses, without really thinking about it, do a smaller version of this idea simply out of necessity – limited resources demand using all of what you have; people potential included.

By 1985 Toffler had, at least conceptually, defined aspects of the corporation of the future (Future Shock, Third Wave & culminating in The Adaptive Corporation). He recognized that business success resided in emergent skills to adapt (have the agility) to a constantly morphing complex business world.

It became a command/control leader’s headache that knowledge could slink into any office space and anyone smart enough to use it could become smarter than the person they reported to. It is easy to see that this organization fragmentation driven by real/actual knowledge could easily become chaos unless leaders begin showcasing a different ability than maybe we have valued up until today.

This means today’s leaders need to be assimilators of fragments and creators of concepts.

They need to encourage empowered individuals and groups to accumulate knowledge and then redirecting or gathering disparate pieces of knowledge into new forms in which the organizations, and ultimately, the tribes/teams/molecules benefit from. The control of knowledge is the crux of an organization’s struggle for power, and more importantly, effectiveness. It is also then a leader’s biggest challenge in tomorrow’s businesses.

Compounding the issue is that the speed in today’s world is making facts, and differentiation/products, obsolete faster.

Therefore, knowledge built upon certain facts becomes less durable. This has 2 key impacts:

• –              truth is fleeting <and decision making has small windows of opportunity>
• –              business has become more abstract <as knowledge streams non stop into and within an organization>.

The reality of any complex business is that it is a quivering mass of vulnerabilities. In a Conceptual Age this can actually become a strength. The natural tendency of business is to ‘even up’ things and put constraints on anything they view as chaos. In other words, “we feel like we are at our best if we do the same things day after day.” The Conceptual Age organization should actually seek to exploit unevenness and exploit their vulnerabilities. If a business believes technology augments humans to maximize potential (productivity, innovation, imagination, ideation, etc.) that business should reflect on, well, human-ness (the characteristics that come along with humans). None are alike, each has potential to maximize and they are inherently imperfect. What that means is if you augment them, without constricting, you will not have consistent behavior, attitudes or even outcomes. Instead, should you empower the individual, you will create unevenness organizationally. In other words, expansion is not linear and unevenness represents geometric, or multiplicative, growth opportunities.

Which leads me to De-standardization and Molecules and Managing Complexity

             Destandardization.

De-standardization is the “anti-evenness” business idea. Toffler dedicated a chapter in The Adaptative Corporation on de-standardization. Somewhere along the way since 1985 this simply smart concept got bastardized into a lazy person’s version of it – personalization. They are different. Chasms apart in fact.

• De-standardize reflects the fact the world has become increasingly complex and context drives business outlooks, therefore, mass production (of anything) is more likely to miss relevancy than to meet relevancy.
• Personalization, in its most simplistic form, is order taking. Business cannot exist solely on order taking, it must be constructed to adapt to market shifts.

Regardless. Standardization, at minimum, suffocates complexity. Organizations, simplistically, relentlessly pursue consistency (replication) with the objective of maximizing efficiency and, as a consequence, pursues what is a potentially (mostly) reductionist strategy. Counterintuitively, over-standardization actually complicates complex systems. Therefore, in order to make complexity expansive a business has to be in the business of optimizing de-standardization.

I will note that in a utopian ‘de-standardized’ business, everything COULD be de-standardized, but only embraces its de-standardized qualities situationally. That’s not practical. The business of the future will know how to destandardize effective to maximize its complexity potential.

• ** Note: automation/robots/technology: What a crisis/pandemic has certainly done is make sure businesses examine resilience & redundancy aspects. Automation/robots/blockchain technology will benefit and, most importantly, will be overemphasized ‘standardization’ feature solutions to meet resilience objectives. In other words, the majority of businesses will confuse resilience with fragility.

             molecules

A molecular organization structure is a nuanced version of teams, organizations as organisms, teal, etc. it offers a more scientific aspect in that through alchemy, chemistry & science molecules are constantly created in new formations so their different elements emerge. It’s an emergent structural idea.

Molecular is not ecosystem, it’s a morphing of molecules to address specific needs – they can be ongoing needs (accounting, process, etc.) or situational needs, yet, because of its adaptability even the ‘consistent efficiency’ aspects can collect different ideas and evolve.

A molecular organizational structure is a derivation of the Brand Molecule (Grant; The Brand Innovation Manifesto) where we can see a malleable organizations as a collection of ideas, and people with ideas using machines/technology stored with idea fodder, working in a coherent fashion. Grant made tangible what Toffler offered us, a polymalleable organization in 1985 in intangible form.

I will also suggest that molecules thrive within complexity. It is difficult to talk about 100% emergent, and a molecular structure, without at least mentioning complexity.

• Complexity and emergent

The concept of a totally emergent organization in which the organization itself (grounded in an AI structure) always offers lily pads of the complexity, or optimal certainty, to grasp. It is possibly chaos-proof yet inherently emergent.

Navigating, or managing within, complexity is multidimensional. Its remote work, and its not, its autonomy, and it’s not. Its disconnected, yet connected. Its adaptability, yet, its consistency. It’s the optimal mix of standardization and destandardization.

I would argue that a conceptual organization, while certainly seeking concepts, is constantly scanning about for insights. I say this because I believe complexity is expansive and to unlock it’s potential one must seek to either relieve a complication (this can come to life as an external emergent opportunity or relief of an internal emergent issue) or release the potential of an emergent opportunity through some smaller “fractal” (what I envision as smaller more causal relationship which leverages velocity in some way) which can be exploited to the benefit of the business  and not at the expense of society (this is addressed in the Part about “in & of society’). this is where we circle back to algorithms, data, data fitting and data literacy.

• ** note: What many businesses have failed to recognize (mostly because they tend to focus on skills not potential, features not benefits & technologies not behaviors) is that everyone is actually a nomad now which expands the possibilities, and capabilities, of people.

Being emergent DOES demand structure, but a structure that allows people (and organizations) the freedom to try new approaches and react to changing market conditions. Suffice it to say molecular without adaptability tied to data, or intelligence driven software, is a waste of time. The potential of molecular attitude is right people, right resources, right knowledge, right ‘synergy’ at the right time. Let’s call it ‘emergent efficacy’ which is the ability to proportionately, not as a formula or a balance, apply appropriate knowledge, resources and adaptability to specific contexts.

• ** note: this will demand a business become comfortable with ‘not neat team’ structure

As noted elsewhere, this idea is messy, untidy, and businesses abhor untidiness. It will demand a different attitude, and skill, within leadership, a different way of viewing HR department responsibilities and a heightened level of human conversation within an organization. I make that last point because while it may appear at the core of this business model idea that technology bears the greatest burden of ‘conversation’ (the sharing of knowledge through technology) the real value is generated in the conversations and interactions between human beings. People working together to craft concepts and “do” what needs to be done to exploit emergent topics.

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“To be in a state of self-control, a person must know: what he/she is supposed to do, what he [or she] is actually doing, what choices he/she has to improve results wherever necessary. If any of these three conditions are not met, a person cannot be held responsible.”

JM Juran

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“As automation and artificial intelligence increasingly replace algorithmic and analytical tasks, the economy of The Conceptual Age will favour workers adept in areas that favour creativity, empathy and meaning (‘human’ concepts that are otherwise difficult to replicate by machine).”

Dr Jason Fox

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There is a lot of bullshit being written about “The 4^th Industrial Revolution” tying it to technology, renewed business moral awareness, inequality, automation, whatever. I wrote this, and that last sentence, in 2018 and still believe it. I hate labels and I hate trying to attach change to anything specific when it is more likely a confluence of factors.  I will say whatever is happening feels like a seismic shift in business ideology. That said. Whenever I scribble something about the Future of Business I keep coming back to Dr Jason Fox’s Conceptual Age idea he discussed with Mike Walsh in a podcast.

It seems to be the axis mundi for, well, everything we talk about. Purpose, distributed leadership organizational models, data/digital, thinking, innovation, etc.

Well crafted conceptual thinking.

In about 2010 I first wrote about something called “deconstruction thinking” wherein I suggested the future business model will reflect more of a “do, deconstruct & re-do” mentality. At the core of a successful deconstruction thinking model is the ability to think conceptually or in terms of concepts not rigid constructs. It was kind of a bastardized  mosh pit of scenario planning, ‘teal’, Toffler ‘polymalleable organizations’ and a desire to see effectiveness emphasized over efficiency.

I believe at the core of any future success is the coalescing of prioritized fragments into a conceptual whole in a timely fashion. This will demand not only critical thinking, but also the ability to envision how that thinking can exist in a future state.

Simplistically, concepts are about networked value creation which can occur structurally or transactionally.

Structural conceptual thinking, implemented as networked value creation, is not that difficult and has been done for decades.

Transactional conceptual thinking, combined with the actual networked value creation, is hard – very difficult. It’s about envisioning opportunities/issues, envisioning resources/ideas/abilities and envisioning how to put it into action. In other words, its difficult.

I continue to believe the future of business (in any industry) will lie in the hands of people who can not only envision THE work (present & future) as concepts in combination with the ability to articulate it in ways that make it tangible enough to be understood and acted upon (this, generally, is an idea Dr. Jason Fox has discussed).

This will demand one to embrace paradox & contradictions and dismiss either/or choices as too simplistic in a more complex conceptual world of thinking. No one should confuse this with speed or ‘faster world.’ It’s not. It is simply about moving parts of which some move fast, some tectonically slow and the majority somewhere in between.

It will take a combination of accessing ‘black box’ output (which demands some level of trust & learning) and judgement and embracing a conceptual framework of synthesizing paradoxical tensions.

The new decision making Concept world, one enabled by technology and the ‘black boxes’ of knowledge computers offer in terms of knowledge, is ultimately a deconstructive thinking world. A world in which it is understood that a stimulus can create desired, and sometimes undesired, responses, and consequences, and success is often more based on reacting & adapting to an initial stimulus than perfecting the initial stimulus. This demands conceptual thinking both to construct a plan of action as well as being able to ‘deconstruct’ and adapt as plans get implemented.

I would argue that over time the black box thinking <the intangible and vague ‘knowing’> becomes more tangible as well as we gain more faith in certain black box thinking applications. Given that belief I would also argue that Concepts, which outlines are vaguer in the beginning, gain substance & tangibleness over time.

I would also point out there is an inherent ‘human’ aspect to this idea.

Even with all the technology noise there is a persistently human future of work looming over the entire conversation. Computers are just not capable of empathy, curiosity & imagination which are the cornerstones to effectiveness. If I were to label the next age I would steal Jason Fox’s “Conceptual Age” more than just Human, or Technology, or IOT or even digital.

Oddly, the biggest challenge to thinking conceptually is NOT ability, but rather efficiency.

What do i mean by that?

The paradox is that business has a need for quality information more than ever, yet, quality information, in the form of data or minds, is readily available if we can sift through what is available. Therefore, theoretically, concepts exist they simply need to be crafted. Which leads me to what Dr. Jason Fox said:  “I worry about the curse of efficiency.” Once again, paradoxically, the conceptual age is all about the effective use of time. That may sound very similar to efficiency and therein lies the greatest enemy of the Conceptual Age.

How people view time. Efficient time or effective time or a greater “efficacy of time.”

The world has, does and will revolve around ideas. Technology will simply distribute, analyze and amplify ideas. In this case, concepts. This may paradoxically seem both time efficient and time inefficient. In other words, we will get the pieces of the concept faster and faster and, yet, coalescing the appropriate pieces into a meaningful concept will take longer & longer.

Will we be patient enough for the Conceptual Age? Regardless. I continue to believe there is a bigger idea found in just the idea of The Conceptual Age. One which captures the nexus of technology & humans & meaning.

What may help us in our Time war is that, conceptually, concept thinking is motivating. Its action in thinking. Instead of linear problem solving it is more like gathering disparate puzzle pieces and arranging them into a cohesive, or coherent, shape. We may be motivated to concept (think) slower.

The challenge to the Conceptual Age (beyond time).

Concepts, at their core, embrace tension or a paradox (not a dilemma). While a dilemma forces an either/or a paradox, and a concept, synergizes all components of tension into an idea/action/product/plan.

The trouble is when organizations are faced with these competing demands, they often tend to choose one or the other, compromise between them, or attempt to reconcile them. This happens for many reasons, but I would suggest the overriding reason is that business people constantly attempt to simplify a complex reality. Most of us embrace it because, well, people have a general tendency to see the world in black and white terms, which is a false dichotomy (Scandinavian Journal of Management).

Even trickier (worse) when you consider what John Dewey said: “there is no such thing as a final settlement because every settlement introduces the conditions of some degree of a new unsettling.” Concepts are never settled. They are always evolving.

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“Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole.  We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it.”

Sara Gran

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The Conceptual Age.

The best way I can visualize the Conceptual Age is by leveraging the Swiss Cheese Model , but for concepts and not crisis/accidents.

The Swiss Cheese model highlights accidents occur when hazards align. In my mind, conversely, the optimal concepts can be found when an alignment of ‘organizational depth moving pieces ‘(aspects of business are constantly in motion but at different speeds – fast, medium fast, medium slow, slow & unmoving) is recognized , articulated and acted upon.

Conceptual thinking comes in all sizes (venti, tall, grande), but I will suggest the largest value segments:

Structural

Or

Transactional

———————

Pillars

Or

Opportunistic

The ability to discern these concepts in a timely, actionable framework AND be able to articulate in a way to assemble resources to take advantage may turn out to be the most valuable human resource a business may have. I call it ‘resource’ because it is quite possible in the future this is a human/technology combination. Technology assessing, sifting thru, “information cues” (this does not have to just be data) and highlighting probabilities as they arise with human judgment/assessment of organizational capabilities (mustering resources is accessing mental resources as well as tangible resources). In other words, articulating the varying concepts, defining the definitions, affect the way competing demands are described and how the resulting tensions are dealt with.

Lastly.

The effect on ‘knowledge workers’ and managers. Whenever we speak of ‘thinking conceptually’ there is a belief this is for the ‘intellectual elite’ (the eggheads). It is not. It will affect everyone and it should, if properly embraced, affect everyone in a business.

1. I disagree with many future of work experts. I don’t believe managers will become obsolete in world of automation/AI. Managers are the connective tissue in organizations. In fact. I see managers as integral to any transformation from efficiency to effectiveness. I actually see them as the cornerstone of the Conceptual Age.
2. All jobs will be reshaped by technology and all jobs will play a role in the Conceptual Age (Mike Walsh: design work).
   

In the end.

The Conceptual Age has emerged from not only the emergence of technology in business, but also the challenges to conventional wisdom from science, philosophy and knowledge. I would suggest people, mindful of the of the overarching issues with business (lack of moral leadership, hierarchy control limitations, diminished meaning and engagement in tasks and work) and aided by the easy movement of ideas created by technology, in a larger narrative, the Conceptual Age is seeking a new understanding of a human-centric world. The Conceptual Age will be a cornucopia of ideas, some of them contradictory, but will be defined by reason, conceptual thinking and, inevitably, how those concepts inspire progress.

I do believe The Conceptual Age is going to be an equal opportunity employer. And I think Concepts are the products with the highest value in the future. To me, this is the future of business. Ponder.

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originally written Fall of 2018

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“I suppose in the end it’s almost too easy to look back and say what you should have done, how you might have changed things.

What’s harder – what’s much, much harder – is to accept what you actually did do.”

Peter Hook

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Well. Suffice it to say 99.9% of us have a nasty habit of going back over ground we have tread before. Again and again.

We retrace our steps as if we could not only have actually chosen a different path or stopped and smelled the roses or hurried past something a little faster, but also if we had done all those things, well, things would be different in the here & now.

We all do it. It’s kind of natural.

Why? Because it is easy <in a hard way>.

While it is hard, as in ruefully painful at times, to think about the ‘shoulds’; it is easy to see the ‘shoulds.’ And we convince ourselves in that going back and revisiting these things we will be better in the future <because we convince ourselves it will make us smarter>.

In many ways this revisiting of decisions is a version of not really accepting what we did.

That said. Here is some truth. Some real, but unfortunate, truth.

99% of these things you should have done were done with best intentions, best viewing of the situation at hand and, most likely, in the range of best decisions available.

99% of these things you should have done are most likely viewed through a lens which incorporates the contextual ripples that surrounded it at that time <which are almost impossible to see within any moment as it happens> as well as the ripples of time since that moment <which are difficult to envision within any moment>.

99% of these things you should have done only appear to be ‘should have dones’ because you assume the path from that choice & decision would have remained the same as current history.

Oh. And that last 99% is 100% wrong.

Each pebble you drop in a pond is slightly different sized, dropped ever so slightly differently and hits the pond ever so slightly in a different way … all of which sends out a different ripple effect than the original.

Suffice it to say that Time & Life is neither linear nor impervious to other actions.

Oh. The other thing to remember is that 99% of the time you do not really have to retrace your steps to know what you should have done. Whether you realize it or not, in our heads our memory does a pretty fantastic job of taking a picture of moments like that and stores them in your mental photo library.

99% of us see crossroad moments exactly as cross road moments and recognize they have the potential for should haves and store them away. We need not revisit or retrace, we know them subconsciously and reassess them should we cross another similar crossroad moment. You need not examine and tear apart and have angst over the moment viewing it thread by thread in the tapestry of the moment.

Suffice it to say 99% of everything you will need is already stored away in your pea like brain and will naturally arise 99% of the time it should.

Now. It is hard to accept all of which I have written. And maybe 99% of us will chafe at it, maybe ridicule it, possibly oppose it and, yet, will eventually, finally, find it self evident.

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“All truth passes through three stages.

First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

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Truth, in Life and in decision and choices, is, well, truth. And just as truth is sometimes not self-evident in the moment, as with most things in Life, truth always resides as simply ‘it is so’ with the things you have done.

This is the ‘truth’ that 99% of the time is the … well … the just ‘it is so’ aspect:

You do your best.

You make the best decisions you can.

You accept what you did as neither stupid nor smart, but rather the best in that time and place.

That last, my friends, is a simple definition for ‘acceptance.’

And because of what I just said 99% of the time you should just accept what you actually did and not invest time going back over ‘should haves’ and instead invest that 99% of your time moving forward or making some progress.

Well. That last thought is hard. It is difficult.

Accepting what you have done, the bad and the good, is difficult. Accepting that you have learned that lesson in the moment and do not have to retrace steps to ‘really learn’ is difficult.

All I can really say is accepting what you have done, the bad and the good, is actually a lighter burden than carrying along a shitload of ‘should haves.’

Acceptance is a light load and makes you nimbler for the future. And if that isn’t the ultimate argument for acceptance I don’t know what is because in today’s world having some agility to adapt may be the single most survival skill anyone can have. And maybe that is my point. Accepting what you actually did do comes back to one simple phrase: “I survived.” Retracing steps can never change that fact. And I would bet 99% of us have stored away everything to do with our survival. Ponder.

Note:

I did not research this so the 99% is made up.

But I have 90% confidence that it is within the realm of factual truth — in business as well as in Life.

Remember. I am a cynical optimist.

——–

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“Sometimes the solution is to rebuild your house. Sometimes, it’s to set your house on fire.”

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“The future is not just about inventing disruptive technology; it is about reimagining human experiences.”

Mike Walsh

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Business is infamous for doing the bare minimum to change and saying they have done something big. There are more Frankenstein businesses, business that have plugged in, bolted on and rewired things, than any other business shape in the universe. I get incredibly annoyed with business mostly because I do not know one business NOT interested in progress, innovation and improvement and yet they increasingly adopt things in the name of those things that, for all practical purposes, don’t really do shit to improve the model. I could argue that while intentions are good the attempts are almost all buried under ROI, measurement and some impractical ways of judging the isolated choice (but that’s a different piece for a different day). Sometimes we forget technology, or whatever ‘thing’ we are injecting into the business, is a means to an end & the end is more important than the means. And while I understand what I am discussing is “investment” and wasting investment is a big problem in the world we live in, it doesn’t mean we necessarily have to know what the goal is for every step we take. Sometimes we do things that are not directly connected and, yet, are still significant. Business, if we are honest, is a gambler’s game.

Which leads me to disruption.

Disruption, one of the most bastardized words & concepts today, occurs by rearranging the conventional status quo, in the box, in unconventional ways so people benefit. The truth is that constraints drive imagination to work toward the meaningful, not the meaningless. In my mind … things like the elements are innovations which I like to call ‘portals to discovery.” They are the incredibly small discoveries which enable huge discoveries.

I admit. I struggle to find big disruptive fires, more typically we find, well, a campfire has become a ‘fire’ and it is burning some shit down. All revolutions, disruptions, seem to accelerate out of a blob of mistrials, missteps, overlooked innovations poorly articulated up to that point or conventional which has been plodding along. Culture often eventually just embraces an idea. You always have an opportunity to disrupt the systems – the systems of society and culture. But you cannot disrupt a system while you contribute to it. you have to choose contributing or disrupting.”

Which leads me to rebuilding or setting fire.

Business is inevitably about people, not things. Which leads me to suggest business is about campfires. What I mean by that is if you look around your business you will see people gathering around campfires. Metaphorically this means some people gather around things for some reason – to listen to a story, to be with likeminded people, to do something that keeps them ‘warm.’ The reasons are many, not one.

The dynamics of an organization revolve around groups and individuals and campfires (or fires in general). The functions of these little campfires span, shared values, common assumptions, shared goals, permitting smaller group agendas to contribute to both individual interests and collective good. But fires are fires and while they can be fostered separately, if there is a spread in one place, we can expect to see it manifested elsewhere (sometimes in unexpected ways). We are all part of a group WITHIN the group in a system and any significant improvement cannot be solved in isolation. I would argue sincerely improving any business is playing with fire and you either set the fire or learn to rebuild from a fire made of its own making (which is usually a campfire within your system that has just grown out of control for a variety of reasons).

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Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.”

Peter Drucker in 1999

Which leads me to why burning shit down is a good thing.

My favorite example of burning shit down is Moscow and Napoleon. But the truth is most businesses see fire as dangerous, a failure in some way, and it is rarely fostered and more often squelched. Fires, in many cases, is simply a reflection of a failure in the system, but this type of failure is the system unable to handle an emergent opportunity, or innovation, or whatever is frying the system as it tries to rebuild and gain some momentum for this ‘new thing’ that doesn’t fit within the status quo. This type of failure should actually be viewed with joy by business people, not a failure. It is proof that uncertainty is our constant companion and friend and we can discard the illusion that some best practice, some process, some tried & true system, is what will sustain us in the future. embracing having shit burn down means, in some way, we are freed from the false expectations that if we were only smart enough, had some specific experience, knew some management ‘myth’, we would have been able to build something fireproof. That’s silly. You either embrace shit being burned down or you will get burned. To be clear. This does not mean a lack of direction just that we should learn to respect uncertainty and randomness and some of the gambler’s game that always exists in business and that fire can actually clear the way. This isn’t disruption. This isn’t any nonsensical word. It is simply, well, reimagining human experiences as Mike Walsh noted upfront. Like gathering around campfires and such. Ponder.

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“I am free and lost in this freedom

Do you know what I mean by that?”

Ingeborg Bachmann

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Freedom, in and of itself, is quite possibly the most valuable privilege one can have in the world.

Freedom, in and of itself, may be one of the most misunderstood and least understood ideas in the world.

Freedom, in and of itself, may be one of the most appealing concepts in the world.

Freedom, in and of itself, once attained may be one of the most difficult concepts, as an individual, to manage in the world.

Freedom, once truly given, can be a scary prospect to wield responsibly and well.

Freedom is one of those things that should make you think long and hard about what, exactly, do you want? But, yet, many of us do not. And we should. We should because, at its core, freedom is about liberty of self and what you want. I believe it was John Stuart Mill who stated that the individual “is the person most interested in his own well-being,” and that the “ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.”

What this suggests is that, while freedom may have some societal demands and constraints, the real ‘rule of freedom’ comes from within each individual and, well, responsibility.

Within?

No fences. No boundaries. Not even a public compass … just one that resides in yourself. Well. This would suggest it could become easy to get lost.

Look. I am not suggesting society would ever permit all of us to actually decide how we wanted to define freedom for our own lives and live our Life in that self-defined way without any repercussions <and there would have to be as each of us pursued ‘our own wellbeing’ to the possible detriment of the ‘greater we’>.

However. Because you can view from such a personal standpoint and a self interest standpoint, it can become incredibly easy to start seeing your own path as <a> the path everyone else should be walking on and <b> the path which reflects the best definition of how freedom should be viewed. In that, well, it can become incredibly easy to get lost within your own views of what is freedom and how you may choose to use your freedom.

I tend to believe freedom is freeing AND constricting at exactly the same time. In addition. The only way to enjoy freedom is to actually do something with it and not just talk about it or enjoy it.

Yeah.

The secret to not being suffocated by freedom is the ability to use that freedom to create something <not simply being free>. Please note I say ‘create’ not destroy. Anyway. I imagine another way of saying that is you can suffocate by not doing anything <or not choosing to choose to use your freedom>.

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“The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.”

Henry Ward Beecher

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Ah. Therein lies the rub. Create from freedom.

Sometimes that can seem like creating something from nothing. Freedom encourages ideas and thinking but then … uh oh … Life kind of demands you convert your access to freedom into ‘something.’ It is within that ‘demand from Life’ where most people abuse freedom — people choose not to choose.

Now. We do this all the time – choose not to choose. Oddly enough, a shitload of people think this is actually exercising your freedom. Go figure. Not doing something is an expression of freedom.

<scratching my head here>

Some people argue this is an excellent way that we exercise our freedom and flex our choice-making muscles. Either we actually do not make a choice at all or we delegate the choice-making to someone else <sometimes an expert – doctor, banker, service provider> or we just delegate the choice making into the “to be done later” file. In general, we have good intentions. We do this because we do not want to invest the energy and  time to make a ‘right decision’ <this actually becomes ‘not choosing’, or using your freedom, because of fear of not making the right choice … or using your freedom properly>. And, yes, it is ‘good intentions’ to intentionally avoid making a bad decision.

Sure. Using the overall excuse of “I am too busy” choosing not to choose can often seem to be the best choice because it can sometimes appear to then free us up to do something else. Personally I call bullshit on this type of thinking.

Freedom kind of has two levers or maybe an “on/off” switch … opt in or opt out. Either use your freedom or don’t use it. You either value your choice or you don’t. There really isn’t a lot of room in-between. And, yeah, people will argue with me on this, but I am stating it this way because while freedom can far too often look abstract, in reality, in practice, it is anything but abstract.

Doing, action, is at the core of freedom itself.

I have traveled the world and seen freedom and no freedom.

I have traveled the world and seen the arguments and debates and fights over freedom itself <my freedom versus your freedom>.

But here is the deal.

The opportunity to choose is not all that matters. I say that because far too many people who actually have the opportunity <a> do not exercise their freedoms or <b> get bogged down on the debate & conflict of my freedom versus your freedom. Choosing is what matters where freedom is concerned.

That said. As I have said before, surprisingly, freedom is tough. And it is even tougher because you may never really know if you have used your freedom well or wisely.

But here is what I do know.

It will be how you use your freedom which will be immortalized. And, yes, everyone is immortalized. Either through your forgetfulness or lack of memorability or lack of choice or doing something or how you cannot be forgotten or memorability through how you used your freedom and the choices you made. I say that because immortality will be the stories that are told about what you did with your freedom. That will be the final judge. Ponder that <because I think it is important>.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm … maybe that is why we get both lost and free within freedom. Given freedom we tend to hug tightly to any boundaries we find for fear of getting lost. But, assuming we actually ‘do shit’ and make choices using our freedom more and more we start to get a feel for those boundaries and begin pushing them out. Simplistically we push them further and further away from ourselves. At some point if we push them far enough it will feel like there are no boundaries and yet we do not feel lost.

I imagine that is what some people would call “freedom.” Seeing boundaries yet pushing against them to stretch what can “be”. And, yes, I also imagine that it feels good. So. Ponder this: If you have freedom, use it wisely.

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“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody notices, do not be sad.

For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”

John Lennon

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