Signals: you think you're in control? I think you're.....

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When I decided to write this article, I got this song stuck in my head:

https://youtu.be/-N4jf6rtyuw

Guess now it’s stuck in yours.

Come on now, Who do you, who do you, who do you think you are?

Ha, ha, ha, bless your soul…

You really think you’re in control?

A lot of us are used to being in control, at least on some level. But in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world, we have less direct control than we’ve typically assumed. Some of those assumptions were us telling ourselves what we wanted to hear, but even so,

Ha, ha, ha, bless your soul…

And to thrive in a VUCA era, let alone stay Future Ready, we have to do things differently.

Here are a few Signals that point to relationships and systems that are getting upended, whether we want them to or not.

They might come back…but not for long.

The job market was supposed to have recovered by now. It hasn’t, and that has emboldened a lot of employers to lean into their leverage with their supply of scarce and valuable jobs. But the market will recover.

When it does, the first questions that are going to need to be answered are:

“Why am I on a Zoom with the person down the hall?”

“Why can we only hire within a two-hour commute of some of the most expensive real estate in the country?”

Because when an employee has leverage, questions like that no longer make any sense. And the very same companies demanding RTO now will likely be forced to offer remote work again to compete for scarce, valuable talent.

They’ll be right back where they started, while their talent heads to those smart companies that see remote work as an evolutionary concept, and are creating solutions that accommodate both remote and in-office employees.

In the Organization Man era of the 1960s (when a lot of our paradigm about office workplaces was formed), employers held most of the cards, and employees did what they were told. Now, not so much. And because workers can talk to each other across the world near instantaneously, even the most basic assumptions, like exclusively working for one employer or labor organizing belonging in a factory, no longer hold. Let alone the idea that I have to sit in a cube.

Do you see where assumption and reality are smacking together here? What do you think happens next?

When people turn into content, they become crappy content

Attempts to monetize communities through social media recording and sharing are backfiring because when people feel their behavior is being filmed, they become self-conscious and participate less authentically. Seth Resler explains how this audience-first approach undermines the psychological safety needed for genuine community building.

If you want people to bring their unique skills to the table, you have to make it safe for them to do so. And if human creativity is the most valuable value-creator (because technology can do the routine stuff), then the company that does not keep its human creativity safe is fighting with a hand or two tied behind its back.

Einstein was right.

I was originally going to write about the funny and somewhat unnerving article that Stowe Boyd led this newsletter edition with, which recounts the Wall Street Journal’s experience with an AI-driven vending machine that basically ran amok. But the article is paywalled, and “AI Goes Wrong” is almost turning into a meme.

As I was about to sigh and go searching for something else, I noticed the quote from Albert Einstein that he started that newsletter with. I’m cribbing the quote here, but you should read his newsletter, and consider subscribing.

The only progress I can see is progress in organization. The ordinary human being does not live long enough to draw any substantial benefit from his own experience. And no one, it seems, can benefit by the experiences of others. Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics. Each must learn its lesson anew.

As a mother and a sometimes-teacher, I get where he’s coming from, although I’m now learning how much my kids learned from me when I wasn’t looking.

The part that caught my attention is the first line. Perhaps our organizations are actually the carriers of progress. Communities, especially places, would therefore be the most powerful carrier of progress, because they above all organizations outlast our human lives.

But we often overlook that element of our communities, except to the extent that they become the channels through which we try to solve problems.

We treat them like a machine to drive the operations of our present.
Perhaps we should be thinking of them as the carriers of our collective growth.

If we did that, would we invest in our communities differently?