A young student completed their schooling.
Fortunately, they had a career plan.
But unfortunately, it involved becoming an accountant.
Fortunately, they could add and subtract.
But unfortunately, so could Excel.
Fortunately, they knew how to use Excel.
But unfortunately, so did the auditors.
Foretunately they became an auditor.
But unfortunately, so did the robots…
Redemption involves two important things – feeling a need to redeem yourself (combining awareness, self reflection and urgency). And transforming from negative to positive (becoming something better).
Redemption is about thinking & doing not thinking & being. You can be your own judge of how much redemption is enough. You can look to others to judge. Or take a balanced approach.
Feeling a need to redeem yourself has at least one positive indicator. It typically follows some kind of situation that tested you – one that allowed you to gain experience and grow from it and further develop your character.
How is redemption related to personal flexibility? Redemption is about why, where and when. Personal flexibility is about how. If you can develop personal flexibility, you can increase your chances of redeeming yourself at a later date, when that need arises. That said, be flexible on how you do good. Don’t be flexible in blurring good and bad together. Don’t be flexible in how many ways you can be bad either.
Finally, is there such a thing as too much redemption? This might be relevant to some people working in the not for profit sector, working as volunteers, or being a parent. Where feeling the need to redeem yourself is driven by guilt, but then you discover that the more you redeem, the harder it seems to shed the guilt you feel, you have to then impose limits and boundaries. Or risk losing your sanity. This blogger’s counsel is to take advice from those you trust & respect. And listen to the voice of reason within yourself too.
Simon.
Strong squash players dominate the central zone of the court. This helps them in several ways. It helps them handle uncertainty i.e. where the next shot from their opponent will come from. And it helps them with ‘growth’ i.e. shortening the average time to hit the ball and maximising the time they have to set up their own future shots.
So what is the relevance of squash strategy to personal flexibility?
Firstly, imagine a two-dimensional matrix with columns for personal planning (strong or weak). And rows for direction (clear or unclear). There are 4 quadrants in the matrix.
Those whose natural inclination is strong planning and clear direction forward are thought of as strategic and focussed. And unkindly, as ‘control freaks’. For the control freaks, if operating in a turbulent or increasingly uncertain environment, their supporters (employers, sports coaches, parents, teachers or tutors) can help them become more comfortable with uncertainty and more agile under turbulent conditions – become dynamic planners and become tolerant of multiple versions of the truth, perhaps caused by some versions being out of date faster than others. Football goalies are perhaps a sports example of control freaks.
Those whose natural inclination is strong planning but weak direction forward are the long suffering, ‘steady eddies’. For the steady eddies, their supporters can reassure them on direction and encourage them to rely on more dynamic planning approaches – less detailed and less complex plans, more empowerment and more self-belief. Civil servants serving politicians (especially under UK Brexit) are perhaps a workplace example of steady eddies.
Those whose natural inclination is weak planning and unclear direction, are the go with the flow, ‘fatalists’. People who are fatalistic in their home life probably need supporter encouragement to build some hopes and aspirations. Anything that gets them to experience the taste of success is a good start. Supporters can help them to become better planners, project members or team players. Spectators at a sports game are perhaps an example of fatalists in the sense not of supporting their team, but of being an onlooker.
Finally, those whose natural inclination is weak planning but clear direction forward are ‘opportunists’, making their own luck. For the opportunists, their supporters need to encourage them to create more control for more benefit. With control coming from teamwork, planning and quicker influence. Football strikers are perhaps a sports example of opportunists.
Now imagine a world of constant and accelerating change – not change in everything. But change as a rhythm or backbeat to everyday life. In such conditions, a medium level of both planning and direction is desirable, like the central zone for playing squash. But requires personal flexibility from those in all four quadrants to achieve i.e. travel a similar distance towards the centre zone, but from a unique direction, with a unique rationalisation.
Families, voters, groups of volunteers and groups of friends rarely encounter the structure and rules that simple games prescribe. Therefore, all could benefit from seeking out the ‘central zone’ of the matrix to achieve good progress. It’s not just about tolerance. But appreciation of the merits of opposing outlooks too. Work is needed to seek out commonality and win-wins. But not achieve the extreme of groupthink. All that remains is to forge some cultural pathways towards the central zone for each social group concerned…
Simon
Maybe those of us in a position of privilege (baby boomer white males like myself especially) can learn the most about personal flexibility from the people that society discriminates against the most. How they cope on a daily basis and their stories of struggle are probably the best examples of flexibility and the strength of the human spirit both.
I recently watched the first TV series ‘Pose’ – largely about the LGBT community in New York in the late 1980s. A review by the Guardian newspaper of the series is as follows:
The hit series has lots of great lines, colourful characters, irony and great acting too. It’s also sparked some interesting post-series interviews and discussion with the main actors – refer You Tube interviews with Angelica Ross, Dominique Jackson and Indya Moore, to name a few.
The series shows how the trans-gender community, particularly black trans-gender women were effectively at the bottom of the status pecking order and it’s an open question whether they still are. For the characters in the series, attending costume balls hosted by their LGBT community and running fashion houses to support the models attending those balls was about celebrating human expression, their identity and defining humanity on their own terms.
Often for many of us, giving feels like a one-way street. We might choose to work in Not for Profit roles, favouring mission over reward. Do some community volunteering. And/or reach out to family and friends in various ways. The Blanca character in Pose effectively sets herself up as a house mother and one person charity to those in the New York LGBT community. Yet has few resources and quite a bit of discrimination of her own to deal with. Her giving contribution is eventually validated by all concerned, but her leadership along the way is inspiring, for those of us walking the one way street.
What we can all do is discriminate and judge a bit less. The World will be a better place for it. There won’t be so much work for litigation lawyers, therapists, social workers, hospitals or the companies who make weapons. Like one of the characters in the series said ‘kindness doesn’t cost you anything.’
Simon
Surfers know about staying on their board to ride out the lows and enjoy the highs. Breaking right or left when the opportunity arises. Surfing away from danger if they spot a shark in the water.
How can companies or staff use flexibility to stay sustainable through boom & bust cycles? For companies, buying up distressed assets and companies in an economic downturn isn’t the only game in town. With companies desperately shedding cost by laying off staff, the downturn is a golden opportunity to pick up experienced talent in plentiful supply. Likewise for staff, stay open to new opportunities from those companies wanting the good people.
In the downturn, if they can’t justify hiring operations staff, firms can hire more developers instead, to deliver for the next bull run. Or better still (in a flexibility sense), acquire staff who develop in the downturn and do operations/marketing in the boom. For staff, think about widening your skills from operations into development and marketing too.
In a downturn, business ethics are tested by fear, not greed. Whether boom, bust or in between, staff can work hard to join up their personal morals with the business ethics of the business, to keep the customer love alive and thriving.
Finally for staff, if you’re not involved in development innovation (team leaders and middle managers), try to catch the eye of senior management, by helping them develop real options for the company’s future. For the company, having both innovations and real options is the equivalent of riding the surfboard through the ups and downs both.
Simon
True flexibility makes options. It also leaves the options not chosen, available for later use.
Arguably we all need to be futurists. Embracing flexibility will make futurism less daunting.
Are dairy farmers a model for how man-machine partnerships should work? Dairy farmers made hay and mud bricks until they discovered milk production was more lucrative. Cows are the intelligence that convert grass into a substance that gives our physiological systems the ability to be more healthy and act in smarter ways. The rest is up to us!
The best markets have the greatest flexibility. Both in trading and in regulatory compliance.
In the same way data security software monitors data networks, automated regulators need to monitor market trading and evolve as fast as markets evolve.
Regulatory agents aren’t there to impede trading per se. But to limit the task of their peers in welfare means-testing (or UBI) for parts of the community that markets don’t reach.
AI needs to become an acronym for assisted initiatives, absent inequality and augmented innovation.
Simon
Be down for growth. Don’t be up for contraction.
Messages – roll, flip, spill, season and preserve them. Don’t deep fry, filter or spin them.
Back to life. Back to flexibility.
Simon
P=Plan flexibility (Plan A, Plan B, Plan C).
E=Enlist support & ideas. Good ideas come from anyone, anywhere, anytime!
R=Rotate when you need to. Rotate, Reset, Relax.
S=Select amongst style & substance flexibility.
O=Options management. It’s as important as accumulation.
N=Name your epitaph. What do you want to be remembered for?
A=Analyse the situation. Unless you want to rely on dumb luck!
L=Lay out encouragement and praise like a new carpet. You might get a magic carpet in return!
F=Flexiscribes & flexitypes to flex your flexibility.
L=Limit your pessimism, limit your downside, limit your limitations.
E=Explore new routes. Life’s meant to be a great adventure.
X=X on the trade-off spectrum.
I=Invest, invest, invest in more options.
B=Brace for impact, brace for success.
I=In it for the long haul.
L=Leverage for impact. Small lever, big technique!
I=Initiative & innovation.
T=Turn to & tune up the talent of the team.
Y=You are never surprised the way you surprise yourself!
Simon
As our lives become more VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous), personal flexibility can be helpful as a coping mechanism. It gives us piece of mind and options.
Eventually, many of us will encounter certain life events like; retirement, moving countries, or ‘empty nest’ down-sizing. Such events might help us shed cost and excess physical capacity. But not necessarily the life complexity we’d like to simplify. How so? We can anticipate that downsizing will likely be undermined, when complexity compliance acts as a brake. One simple example is that empty nest parents don’t stop being parents (or offspring of their own, perhaps ailing parents), just by downsizing their house, after the kids leave home.
So how can we achieve matching, so that downsizing and simplifying the complexity of our lives go together?
Using personal flexibility as a tool to alter the complexity before downsizing is one avenue to explore. On this, we can take inspiration from our own brains. Each night, our brains exhibit personal flexibility, in relaxing the body (reducing the complexity of physical activity) in preparation for sleep.
Another personal flexibility example is time flexibility – buying time to reduce complexity before we downsize. For example, hiring specialists to help us ‘get our affairs in order’ and simplify the maintenance time required.
Reducing complexity and downsizing together is another option. For example, we can build up a passive income portfolio, to replace the need for us having to work a 40 hour week, therefore downsizing the number of hours worked. And the complexity of handling a full-time job.
Regarding complexity, in the same way that households and wage earners have fixed & variable costs to pay for, (think of rent/mortgage payments and food bills respectively), complexity can also be described as fixed or variable. There is however no direct relationship between cost type and complexity type – you can have any mix of both. But in a VUCA environment, some combinations are likely to be more troublesome than others. For example, high fixed cost, high life complexity.
Some examples of fixed complexity in our personal life are as follows;
Some examples of variable complexity in our personal life are as follows;
Personal flexibility thinking is about designing both costs & complexity to be as variable as possible, regardless of our (own perceived) level of expertise, other people’s dependency on us, our career success, or our bank account balance.
Why is variable complexity in our lives desirable? Fixed complexity doesn’t stay fixed forever, so by coping with variable, we can cope with fixed complexity (inevitably) becoming variable. Assuming fixed complexity may lead to complacency and stop us looking for improvements i.e. personal growth opportunities. Some types of fixed complexity in our lives may be an illusion. When the unexpected occurs, for example our teen or adult children bring home a partner and behave differently in the partner’s presence, this reminds us not to make assumptions.
Simon
The best is ahead of us when we create uncomfortable choices. When we settle into a comfortable rut, the World starts looking for an epitaph for us.
Play your cards well. But keep a spare pack up your sleeve.
Flexibility stands, we run.
Style flexibility – celebs who put skin in the game. Believe they have a duty to entertain. Grab media attention, based on the celebs’ style.
Substance flexibility – emergency services workers who put skin in the game. Believe they have a duty to serve. Grab people in danger, based on the emergency service workers’ substance.
Simon
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