Contractor's fate - characteristics of entrepreneurial approach to career

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

For those of you who are considering becoming a contractor or already are contractors and looking for peer stories this is a very personal glimpse of my experience after a decade of being a contractor.

• Energy (in)balance. It is hard to maintain the energy balanse. This job is really about radiating your energy. I need to cumulate the energy and then radiate it into the human system of the client. I invest in others, both in individuals in companies, I help them grow, I help them achieve success. Lots of people I helped got a career boost thanks to what we did together and thanks to my contribution. Some are grateful, some others are not, assigning success to themselves. Once the job is done the split of benefits is drastically unequal: career advances vs a time to leave for me.  I enjoy that I helped them yet also wish there was something long term in it for me. No, there is nothing long term for me except satisfaction. It is difficult to absorb some of the energy back to compensate for the energy invested. Only a fraction of clients calls again. 

• Yes, it feels lonely sometimes. I work with some of my best friends at resonate.company yet we rarely work together at the same client. Working together is exactly what made us friends and we knew we wanted to repeat this experience, but it is not so easy. So, the synergy effect suffers.

• Lifetime adjourning. It feels lonely also because I have initiated a lot of Communities of Practice within client organizations and enjoyed being the "founding "leader" and then I had to leave them. So, I know a lot of friendly people in companies, yet I have to adjourn to make space for them to grow and become leaders.

• It is you who needs to pull the trigger and leave. For hygiene I tend not to work with the same client for more than 18 months. The power of the external perspective I bring deteriorates with time and I feel I become trapped in the internal perspective as everyone else. At the same time diversity of your exposure to various clients is what makes you attractive and appealing for clients, so even when it is tempting to stay, you should leave to build your value proposition.

• Long-term sense of ownership. As long as there is plentiful of high energy emotions during client engagements, engagements are usually short term, in months, sometimes a year. There is nothing that extends for 5, 10, 20 years and you can say it is your child, your creation. No product, no business unit, no company. They all have new owners. Except for my company, the one I continuously create, of course. That is why I am a part of a bigger digital boutique together with my friends. Our company is something that will outlive me hopefully. And, except for other assets you create - a book for instance, or other acting in addition to your regular contracts. I authored a few books and that is what heals my sense of long-term ownership. As you can see, the long-term ownership becomes your own duty. You cannot rely on a ready to use logo that simply is there and invites you to build long-term ownership simply by identifying with it. By the way, this need for long-term authoring is sometimes perceived by sponsors of contracts as "not engaged enough". I find such framings very unjust, narrow, and missing the understanding. Contractor's duty to develop her own company deserves respect in the same way as a full-time employee's commitment to spend their lifetime in one company. They both look for fulfillment through contribution to something bigger than themselves individually.

• Yes, it feels great to be on my own! No boss, not an aspirational one, not a stupid one. Would I exchange it for a full-time job engagement? May be. It depends :) For sure it would need to be a full-time job with friends and with a high dose of autonomy. It happened to me that my old friends have hired me as a contractor to help them with some topics and it felt really good. I did not care what form the collaboration took formally: a contract or full-time position. It was of secondary importance as long as I could be collaborating and co-creating with friends. 

• Jealous full-timers? I meet lots of people who initially feel a bit jealous of the freedom that is associated with contracting. Many people never had the courage to try, which I fully understand - it takes a characterological profile and a mixture of courage, stupidity, and risk appetite. Sometimes it just takes a coincidence. In my case, it happened naturally, as my first job back in 1998 was remote and in a small company so it did have aspects of contracting. And, by the way, if it makes it easier for you - I never thought I would be a contractor. Some people still say I have the worst profile for a contractor ever. The truth is that I start every job with a thought at the back of my mind that it is going to last for a lifetime. Coming back to my point - being jealous says a lot about the person who is jealous, about some lack, about an unfulfilled need, about questioning whether her style of investing time and building career, and sometimes about the need to go wild. Let me say, that as a contractor I experience jealousy in the same frame but in the opposite direction - I am sometimes jealous about stability, long-term focus, and ownership, about personal development budgets, about weeks of paid holidays, about paid sick leaves, etc. Again, let's appreciate we are just humans trying to contribute and fulfill our lives, and let's respect each other.

The Home movie, Bertrand and Besson, 2009

Home is a 2009 French documentary film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film is almost entirely composed of aerial shots of various places on Earth. It shows the diversity of life on Earth and how humanity is threatening the ecological balance of the planet. Read more on The Wikipedia.

Human Purpose is the next Big Time Transformation

Are good products most important? Is Business Agility most important? Is Collaborative culture most important? Well, not anymore. Not to mention frameworks, projects, or technology... Those all are just the hygiene levels, the necessary conditions for companies of today to survive. They are important, and we need to keep mastering them, yet those are not sufficient conditions for companies of the future. 

The next decades will bring a shift towards Good Companies, as I call them. Good Companies will drive us to a meaningful future by helping us to fulfill our humankind mission: to leave the world better than it is now. To respond and to internalise this new meaning of their existence is the necessary condition for companies to survive in the future. 

As the first step we will need to restore our own integrity and meaning to be strong enough to create such companies. This task requires us to redefine the current societal meaning of business and the mental model of the economy. It is high time for us to update all the legacy we inherited from our grandparents and create our own response to the living conditions of today. 

p.s. See also the full EvoMap here.

Community silo-idosis vs collaboration

When I observe the silo effect when it comes to communities of interest, e.g. Agile, Teal, Sociocracy, Holacracy, Org Development, Coaching, etc. , I deeply believe there is a better way to bring value to this world. I see plenty of events, meetup groups and communities tailored in a silo shape. Those are characterized by separate agendas.

What if we create a cross-domain communities? They would be able to deliver end-2-end value stream to the customer, woudn't they? Having experienced the power of interdisciplinary approaches I have no doubt the synergy of working together would take the communities to the next level of maturity, and next level of impact!

Yves Morieux 2014 TED talk - another call for applying the KISS rule at work!

 Keep It Simple Stupid rules 😀 This is just another example. 

This almost 10 years old is very much to the point and funny classic.

Interestingly Yves was able to present many lean and agile principles and ideas without using agile jargon at all 🤔

Three distinctive features of SAFe which I highly appreciate

Three distinctive features I highly appreciate about SAFe are:

• Dual operating model: decoupling of org structures from value streams. Honestly, in many companies it was a real cracker to start transformation promptly as the restructuring efforts of the functional hierarchy was a fragile topic. The org structure usually represented decades history of how senior managers were building the organization according to their vision, and yes some of them were also building their kingdoms, trying to shape the organization by how they thought was best for it. Thanks to the decoupling of these two aspects, it is possible to start a transformation swiftly while giving the re-structurization as much time and respect for people, their ambitions, and visions, as it needs. From my perspective the nature of these two processes: organizing around value and organizing functionally is indeed of a different nature, and the timelines are of different magnitute, and as such it deserves to be treated separately.
• Organizing into operational value streams. Designing the value streams, as described by SAFe is logical and elegant. It is an exercise I recommend to all organizations, even to those that think they have it sorted. Why? Because it will add transparency to why we organized the way we organized. I believe, to know this logic is highly important to everybody in the organization. Not only will people understand that it is an act of conscious design, but they will also respect it. Trying to design the value streams surface the choices that have to be made and the multitude of options there usually are to choose from. People quickly realize there is a degree to which the design decisions are tough as there usually are multiple equally good designs. On the other hand, the usual lack of such transparency weakens the belief that leadership knows what they do when they announce a re-org to employees, causing people to spend too much time divagating. 
• PI Planning. Planning at scale always seemed a daunting task to me. All those hundreds of people on one hand and the will to invite them all into the planning process, to make sure decisions are made where knowledge is. That has always been a challenge in my career. And here SAFe offers invaluable help for me. It offers me a template of a facilitation scheme for the PI Planning event that does exactly that. Whatever people say, I rarely see such great support.

p.s. Give any tool to bureaucrats and they will turn it into a heavy process that will make people suffer

p.p.s. Give any tool to skeptics and they will prove it does not work in our case

Attribution: Photo by Tony Hand on Unsplash

Big Dipper Org Constellation

Each time I see an org structure like this I take a deep breath and pause for a while... Omg, that is a vanity show! How do I influence such organization... The Warren Buffet's ABC of Business Decay is in front of my eyes... 

• Should I bother? As they say: do not change what is there, focus on the new, the old will need to adapt or extinct
• How many levels are there between the vision maker and the implementers? What does it tell me about the culture of this organization?
• What is the agenda of the middle layers? Can it be anything else than politics and kingdom wars?
• What is the domain knowledge decay curve across these layers of bureaucracy? Usually, team managers and above have insufficient skills to be active knowledge contributors. They happen to be structural proxies.
• What happened to the inverted pyramid model? Ah, sorry, wrong question - they have not heard about it most probably. 
• What happened to the hands-on leadership by example role modelling? But we don't have time, we have more important strategic topics on our agenda... Don't believe that - it is the usual excuse.
• How to evangelize for 0-layer onion structure? It's going to be controversial for some, but I am still going to say it: this is why I like the dual operating metaphor of SAFe as it cuts off the kingdom wars from value streams!
• How to dismantle the egos? You don't. Usually, it's too late. 
• How to connect teams with the source of truth? Through Value Streams!
• How to celebrate real doers? Locally, in value streams. Accept the fact the hierarchy will always get a higher bonus and career development opportunities.
• How not to disconnect? I would like to hear it from you! I saw multiple ways, people are creative.
• etc

Kate Raworth - economy designed to thrive not to grow! TED talk

I am apparently a few years after the pioneers, still trying to catch up, even with the whole research I did for the Good Companies book... :) And it still feels good that my ideas are genuine so that I can contribute them to the world! What a year that was - the Pinker's book and Raworth's book published!

Here goes the summary of Kate Raworth TED talk.

• It is time to reimagine the shape of the progress curve - do we need economies that grow, whether or not they make us thrive?
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) invented in 1930s and very soon became the overriding goals of policymaking
• Governments still think that the solution to their economic problems lies in more growth
• W.W. Rostow,  The Stages of Economic Growth, 1960 book installs the believe that growth is necessary for something beyond than itself, like national dignity or better life for children
• Roster left us flying into the sunset of mass consumerism. Yet the plane can never land. He knew this, and left us with the unanswered question:

What to do when the increase in real income itself loses its charm?

• We are financially, politically and societally addicted to unending growth, through ROI in business, GDP in politics, and a century of consumerism propaganda in societal dimension, respectively.
• GDP is 10x biger than it was in 1950s, brought prosperity to billions of people. Yet economy became devisive - 1% rich problem, degenerative - destabilizing this delicately balanced planet on which all our lives depend, 
• Politicians offer new destinations of growth, yet

    I think it's time to choose a higher ambition, a far bigger one: to meet the needs of all people within the means of this extraordinary, unique, living planet so that we and the rest of nature can thrive.

• No economist from the recent century saw this picture (of the current state), so why would we imagine that their theories would be up for taking up its challenges? We need ideas of our own because we are the first generation to see this, and probably the last with a real chance of turning this story around.
• The new economy must be regenerative by design and distributive by design. 
• We intuitively understand that when something tries to grow forever within a healthy, living, thriving system, it's a threat to the health of the whole. So why would we imagine that our economies could be one system that can buck this trend and succeed by growing forever?
• We need to overcome the structural dependency on growth so we can instead focus on thriving and balance
• It is boundaries that unleash our potential