The ABCD of Careers

My friend Dougald recently told me about "Asset Based Community Development", which put very simply means starting with the assets in a community already and assessing how it can provide for its own needs, rather than starting with what's missing and making the local community dependent on central assistance.

I really like this concept. I like local emphasis, and I like the faith in people that lies at the heart of it. And I've also realised that I've been doing my own personal version of the same philosophy for myself.

Dougald is also, in his spare time, an anti-careers advisor, and we speak from time to time about our own career paths in all their peculiar twisty-turny glory. And I've come to the conclusion that I've actually been doing Asset Based Career Development. Here's my first stab at a 3-step guide:

Rule 1:
Go with the flow. Career planning is hugely overrated: sometimes life has a way of guiding you into the right place at the right time. The trick is to do lots of different things and pay attention to what you find the most fun, the easiest to do, to what gives you energy. Soon you'll find that there are some things you can do almost effortlessly, there's just a natural "flow" to them. If people won't pay you for doing them, do them in your spare time and monetise it later. And don't do stuff you hate because it will "get you somewhere later" - only suckers do that. If you don't enjoy the process of the work you do, you're either in the wrong business or you're being exploited. Career planning is hugely overrated - just do lots of stuff and follow what works for you.

Rule 2:
"If you want an interesting life, find the thing that's growing fastest in your community and join it." When I left university, my dad told me that quote, paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw I think. So I went to work in the internet. I often wondered why the hell I was working in technology when I had a history degree and didn't really like computers, but after a few years I realised I liked learning new things, working with intelligent people, designing from scratch, overseeing projects from start to finish, and producing something of value to other people at the end. And with the internet swiftly becoming ubiquitous, suddenly I had lots and lots of options. I couldn't have found this out if I'd had a plan. In fact, how could I have had a plan for my career ten years ago? My current job didn't even exist back then.

Rule 3:
Follow the people, not the money. When I was younger I wanted to be a barrister. Then I met barristers. I wanted to be a filmmaker. Then I met filmmakers. Meanwhile, in my personal life, I did stuff I enjoyed with people I liked spending time with. I met activists and social innovators, educationalists, researchers, radicals and open source hackers. And I had a lovely time hanging out with them and having interesting conversations. Eventually, my friends and I started School of Everything, and I've become a "social technologist" working in "innovation", "changing the world". Which is lots more fun than being a management consultant, and actually turns out to be pretty well-paid too.

I'll be refining this methodology over time - Dougald, Tessy, Anthony, anyone out there have anything to add? But for now, from a more sociable angle, here's my current mantra that I think should be posted on the wall of every careers office in the land:

The most important factor when choosing a career is whether you like the people you work with.

Don't pursue some abstract career plan. Do the things you enjoy, with the people you enjoy, and then work out how to pay for it later. To live life the other way round is just plain silly.

Working for yourself

I was fortunate to meet uber-blogger Stowe Boyd a few days ago, with whom I enjoyed good food, better wine and lots of excellent conversation about almost everything except "work".

Reading Stowe's blog afterwards, my attention was drawn to this post about working as a "creative". The feeling that work is an expression of your personality (which all too few people seem to feel), is intractably linked to the feeling that it's really important to be good at it. If you're bad at your work, and your work is an expression of yourself, then it's almost as if you're a bad person. In the areas where I associate my identity with your work, I am also invariably far more upset when I get it wrong, or sense my personal limitations. In many ways, it would be a lot easier to be indifferent to the whole thing and live a "quiet life".

Mastering the fear of failure (oh dear, what an appallingly self-helpy phrase) seems to be vital if you want to pursue your passions to any professional level. And that doesn't always just mean mastering your own self-doubt, but those of others too. Stowe puts it very eloquently here:

Paderewski, the physicist, once said, "Before I was a genius, I was a drudge." There is a lot of slogging involved. And others, generally, will not understand: especially before you have invested the full ten years. "You'll never sell a book!" "You call that music?" "That's the dumbest design I have ever seen!" "Keep your day job."

Another good reason to work apart from others, so you don't have to hear all that negativity. Close the door, and sharpen your pencil.

Hmmm, so have I discovered my first tension between the title and subtitle of my blog? In order to have the courage to do things badly, is it necessary to isolate yourself in the pursuit of your passion? Well, possibly. I'm not sure if I want to close the door and pursue my solipsistic pleasures alone, I'd rather use my drudgery to bring me closer to the people around me. That, it seems to me, is surely the point of creativity? Hence my plea to my friends, to my society, is for us to celebrate the doing of things badly, so that we don't need to be bad at things in secret any more.

Because no-one, no matter how brilliant, has ever learnt anything without first being bad at it.

I had a good chat with Stowe about my attempts to learn the piano, and he has a great theory about learning a craft which he calls the "10,000 hour rule". It seems that if you want to truly master a skill, your chances are geometrically enhanced if you practice for more than 10,000 hours. Or, to put it another way, mastering a craft is basically the process of doing it badly a hell of a lot. So if you don't take pleasure in doing it badly, it's not really your passion. And if you don't like it when other people do things badly, you're probably missing something important.

I'm off to play the piano now. And I'm leaving the door open.

Adhocracy

I had the good fortune to meet Andy Goldring from the Permaculture Association this week, who filled my head with wonderful possibilities which I look forward to exploring over 2008. He also shared with me the wonderful concept of adhocracy, which has got me thinking about all kinds of things.

The word adhocracy conjures up all kinds of fun stuff, but essentially it feels like the principle of coming together to do whatever needs doing, without reference to structures, hierarchies or individual agendas. That's not something we see happening very often, at least not in the commercial and educational worlds, but if you peek beneath the surface of things you can quickly see that it's actually how a lot of things work. Families, friendships, the best kinds of creative or commercial partnerships, all operate on the basis of shared purpose and needs. It is, in fact, the secret of getting things done.

I'm currently working intently on establishing exactly this sort of culture at my main "work" endeavour, the School of Everything, so it's a timely concept for me to explore. Thinking about how to establish that crucial sense of communal purpose here reminded me of this great post by Tim Boucher about how skills are shared and horded within organisations, and particularly how people hide their skills in order to have time to do their work. "This isn’t an effective way to operate within a shared value community though, which is what a company is. At least ideally: you are working towards one another’s mutual benefit, right? And not towards a paycheck?"

If we want to build communities and networks that are truly effective at getting things done, we need to establish two things: (1) a genuine sense of shared values and common purpose, and (2) a spirit of generosity towards supporting each other's needs and doing whatever we can to achieve our common objectives. If you have these in place, then your shared problems become much easier to solve, your ambitions quite achievable. Strange then that so many organisations talk of focus, roles and individual responsibilities, whilst our schools punish collaboration as "cheating".

Andy also told me a great line that his daughter uses: when I mentioned DIY culture he said "no no, not DIY - DIT. Do It Together!" So here's to adhocracy, to DIT culture, common purpose, and getting things done sociably. Thanks Andy!

Getting tough

I've been thinking a lot about organisations and management lately, and the question that keeps coming up is how to get things done without upsetting people or wrecking interpersonal relationships.

There seem to be two opposing schools of management around at the moment. In the blue corner, we have the touchy-feely, "I'm here for you" approach, full of words like "empowerment", "development" and "mentoring" - creating positive spaces into which employees can reach their potential and feel valued. And in the red corner, there's Alan Sugar, swearing at fools, demanding 111% effort, results yesterday - humiliation as motivation.

Most management courses these days will not teach you the "do it or you're fired" approach. Instead, dozens of best-selling business books relate wonderful stories about how "we just let everyone do whatever they wanted, and suddenly our profits quadrupled," and the like. So it's interesting that in popular culture, business management is increasingly depicted as good ol' fashioned, ball-breaking rage. Maybe we're craving something here that touchy-feely management isn't giving us.

As an advocate of "sociablism", you'd probably expect me to be firmly in the blue corner, harnessing positive human social interactions rather than trampling people's needs in pursuit of money and standards. But much as I hate to admit it, I've always had a grudging respect for people who can "get things done". More than that, I remember a former boss of mine once saying to me, "now Andy, here's a development opportunity for you: read this document and tell me what it says." I remember wishing he'd just said "I can't be arsed to read this. I pay you, you do it." There's an insincerity about much of modern management that I find uncomfortable, just as I find Alan Sugar's approach uncomfortable too. Instead of harnessing people's personal desires to benefit our businesses, shouldn't it be the other way around?

My friend Charlie once told me that the free market is based on the rational pursuit of self-interest, but companies are based on the irrational suppression of self-interest to a made-up story. Management these days sometimes seems like a hypnotic process of convincing people that their best interests will be served by playing their part in the grand plan. It's particularly worrying in many social enterprises, where hard-working people can be ruthlessly exploited and burnt-out in pursuit of the "greater good". At least Alan Sugar is honest: he wants you to make him money, and if you do, he'll make you money too. (The rest is just showbiz.)

As someone who has worked with friends, and befriended work colleagues, for many years, my biggest challenge in business has always been how to get things done without destroying social and professional relationships. What do you do when your friend lets you down? When do you say "getting this done is more important than our friendship?" Can we be sociable and get things done at the same time?

Business traditionally tends to view itself as a special case, distinct from the social and familial interactions. It works to higher standards, in pursuit higher purposes, and follows its own rules. But in reality, business is no different to any other part of human life. Families have confrontations, and so do boards of directors. Friends argue about missed deadlines and stolen girlfriends. And just as there are times to be fierce in business, so too there are times to be fierce in other areas of your life. Take the ideology out of it, and it's all just human beings interacting, positively and negatively. We're all people, and we all deserve to be treated as such - even when we're being fired.

I think we can learn a lot from organisational theory about how we live our lives and work to make our worlds better. But work should not be the place where we learn about these things, and business goals should not be only ones we use these techniques for. I have been quietly focussing of late on cultivating fierceness in myself, finding healthy ways to get what I need from my society without recourse to bullying or manipulation. Fierceness, anger, disappointment are all essential parts of our social interaction. It's only when we dress them up in "greater good" narratives that they become dangerous.

We don't need to choose between being sociable and getting things done. Sometimes we must embrace the tougher aspects of "sociablism", to get what we need from each other.

It's a small world

I just got back from the Shambala Festival, a small but perfectly-formed event near Market Harborough. Massive congratulations to Sid and the rest of the organisers for creating such a wonderful playground for us all. I was particularly struck by the warm, sociable atmosphere all around the event. It felt like being in a small village for a few days.

I think this feeling had a lot to do with the strong emphasis on participation and interaction. Everyone was encouraged to have a go, through workshops, singalongs, discussions, games, whatever. The usual divisions between entertainers and consumers didn't seem to apply. Everywhere you went there were people doing things they'd never done before, and the community seemed much closer for that. I was very impressed by the attitude to education too: encouraging learning because it's a fun, sociable thing to do. I've improved my wicker weaving skills, and now have a nice wicker snail adorning my window box. (No doing things badly there though: it's a f***ing good snail.)

But it's the sense of smallness that has stayed with me since I've returned to London. Doing things badly is hard to do in our vast, multinational, ever-expanding world. After all, on the world stage what right do I have write about business and education? But in a small world, doing things badly is much more acceptable. In fact, lots of things seem to work better in a small community.

For a start, it's pretty easy to meet nice people there. I had a lovely conversation with the guys at Fairy Love about the need to make money - for the organisers, the stall-holders, the acts, everyone involved to make a profit, so that the festival could keep happening. Hearing a giant fairy talk about business is quite a mind-altering experience, and his words affected the whole way I saw the weekend. Everywhere I went at Shambala, I saw money, marketing, branding, enterprise, hard work - all the essential ingredients of hardened capitalism, and yet it all felt resolutely uncommercial.

I had a quick chat with very personable hip-hop guy Clayton Blizzard about "work". His CD's amazing (I paid him a fiver for a copy in an act of flagrant capitalism), and he'd clearly put loads of "work" into it, but he said he didn't think of music as work because he loved doing it. It seems to be the default association these days: "work" means doing something you don't enjoy. Strange how these words get distorted over time. Lots of people were working very hard at Shambala, but I didn't see many unhappy people.

I also had a very nice conversation with Tom Hodgkinson of the Idler, who was giving a talk about medieval values like neighbourliness, playfulness and community. I was particularly struck by his use of the word "trade", which seemed to carry with it all the humanity of commerce without implying the damaging excesses of modern enterprise. Tom's a marvellous advocate for the importance of idleness, which I've never been very good at myself. But I'm a firm believer in doing things for fun, and for spending more time socialising, which some may see as idleness. I'm starting to see Tom's point. He also played the ukulele quite badly and led us all in a most enjoyable singalong, so perhaps sociablism is close to idleness after all.

Festivals are well-known as bastions of "alternative culture", but what I experienced at Shambala wasn't all that different from the mainstream, just a lot more sociable. I've heard a lot of talk from anarchists over the years about the need to smash the capitalist system, to destroy money and stop work, but the system seemed to be "working" very nicely here. I gave my money to people I liked, for things I enjoyed, and I understood the consequences for my community and my environment. Suddenly capitalism didn't seem so bad after all. Perhaps in a smaller community, and properly balanced by sociablism, the old systems of money, work and commerce might actually start to work properly again.

I don't think I'd be happy to go back to living in villages though. I like the possibilities a larger world can offer. But we spend so much energy these days on making our world larger, maybe we could all benefit from being in a small world now and then.