It’s sometimes said amongst crusty old cynics that youth is wasted on the young, meaning, we assume, that the benefits of youthfulness - health, energy, optimism, idealism - are something that the crusty old cynics themselves can more sensibly deal with and deploy. They’re wrong. Youth is a time for not knowing what you don’t know. Like KaosPilot trainee Michael Nybrandt, who in 2001 didn’t know you can’t just knock on the door of the Dalai Lama and ask him if you can help start up the first Tibetan National Football Association. As it happens, he got the green light (he didn’t know that he wouldn’t) and the team has been a source of pride to the world’s Tibetans and their supporters, and a thorn in China’s side, ever since. And don’t forget the world’s oldest child, the Dalai Lama himself, a source of constant inspiration and good humour who refuses to ‘know’ that the battle to save the culture of his country is without hope.
Youth is not wasted on the young; cynicism is superfluous in the old.
Just recently I’ve been pondering some of the ideas I heard expressed and saw practiced in workshops here with my friend and colleague Paul Natorp, from the Kaos Pilots. Paul’s gigs were mainly about ‘creative leadership’, the kind of leadership that is appropriate to innovation and R&D. One of the phrases I heard him use, and one that’s cropped up elsewhere as well, is to ‘hold the space’, to indicate the idea that a leader’s role is to dynamically maintain a kind of framework or DNA in which the process can happen and which helps make it happen. This is a useful idea because the ‘creative leader’ may not know the actual destination or solution, perhaps because the code needed for the solution is not the same code used to identify the problem. There has to be structure but there also has to be elbow room - I’m thinking of a kind of suit, perhaps like Dorothy Heathcote’s ‘mantle of the expert‘.
This year, 2009, I’m teaching a class at QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty on ‘Business and Corporate Development in Creative Industries’ and an online course called ‘Knowledge Transfer and Research Commercialisation’ for e-Grad School Australia. In each case, I estimate about 25% of the contact time, and a similar quantum of preparation time (not to mention 100% of the time spent grading papers and so forth) is dedicated to assessment and evaluation. Leaving aside the obvious inefficiencies, I can’t help but recall Ken Robinson’s critique of a failure-adverse culture in his whimsical TED talk. If we don’t allow (let alone encourage) ‘brave failure’, how can we be surprised when we fail to generate true innovation?
At our recent Do Well Conference Leesa Watego (Founder, Blacklines Publications) talked about our self-sabotaging ‘imagined entrepreneur’.
The imagined entrepreneur is an ideal - not the ’something great to work towards’ kind, but rather the unrealistic, unattainable kind. As it is a creation of our own minds, this ideal tends to play on our insecurities. If we don’t think of ourselves as a ‘people person’, we imagine a true entrepreneur to be a networking master. If we’re feeling particularly uninspired, we imagine a true entrepreneur is never lacking in fresh ideas.
How do you deal with the imagined entrepreneur? One suggestion is to forget ideals - start where you are right now and imagine where that could take you.
This post is part of the Do Well Redux series.
There was one particular quote that was repeated several times throughout the room after Amanda Jackes (General Manager, Woodford Folk Festival) spoke. It wasn’t a ‘big vision’ statement, nor a secret mantra for success, but a lot of people took note.
“Burnout is caused by mistakes being repeated year after year.”
Amanda was talking about organising an annual outdoor event with attendance in excess of 100,000. Yet, it was immediately obvious this applied on many levels, from running a life to running a business. It hit home because it is a deeply common but rarely articulated experience.
In the case of the Woodford Folk Festival, part of the solution was to develop easily applied systems that supported the retention and effective reapplication of hard-earned knowledge. A good practice for any entrepreneur.
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