I think in 2018 for the first time I may have made more of my income from climate/energy/sustainability type gigs than “tech” gigs. I’m amazed. It’s the first time I’ve tried to deliberately steer my consulting life (starting about 3 years ago) and it actually kinda worked.
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Don’t know if it will stay that way, gyroscopically snap back towards old direction, or fishtail/spin out of control leaving me stalled in a snowdrift pointed somewhere random. Still, interesting feeling and experience. Real steering is HARD. And unavoidably lossy ($, momentum).
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I don’t often try to proactively steer my life with deliberate intent. I’ve done it maybe 3 times in 44y. I generally keep doing things out of momentum for ~2y too long before unsustainability forces a steer, like arriving at a T-junction or running off a cliff, Bugs Bunny style
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I value momentum more than direction. I guess I take a good-big-company-CEO-style attitude to my life: minimize steering, which as I argued here, is a key trait. The more complicated and momentummy the business, the less you should steer:
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I honestly don’t much care what direction I’m headed so long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, pays bills, and is fun. Instead of steering, if I get bored, I increase, not explicit risk, but brinkmanship. Pushing things to see how far they can go without breaking. Crash-only steering!
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I suppose I’ve come to believe (or rationalized) that the best way to steer is to crash faster, bringing you to a meaningful and forced crossroads, rather than trying to theorize a proactive decision. Steer on post-crash reboot where possible. Like a hypervisor.
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So it’s interesting to experience a different mode of being. In particular just how LONG it takes to achieve a meaningful true reorientation, not cosmetic. It’s not a snap insight-decision/turn on a dime thing. Lives are like oil tankers. If they’re moving, takes miles to steer.
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I think we’ve come to overvalue “agility” and crazy steering in response to every new stimulus. Every unnecessary steering event bleeds momentum. Startups can “pivot” pre-PMF because they’re going nowhere anyway. Ironically, Lean done right is about “pricing” steering correctly.
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The “fat thinking” idea I’ve been developing slowly over the years is in part an effort to firewall “momentum” operations from “speculation” ops. Costly real steers vs dummy fake steers that might get real. Have cake, eat it too.
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This 2x2 captures a lot of my ideas about how to firewall lean from fat, momentum from experiments, etc. Here’s a newsletter I did last year about it. mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/gut
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Ideally, if you have meaningful momentum, you should be playing with 100 interesting steering ideas all year, saying no to 90 of them, doing cheap-fail learning experiments on 9, firewalled off from momentum ops, and maybe taking ONE real momentum-risking steering action.
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Note that this is not applicable if you’re underemployed relative to how much you want to work (individual) or overresourced (too much cash and smart people sitting around) as a company. Adding activities is “steering” in a different sense from replacing/altering existing ones.
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In fact, I’d say that if you have any momentum at all, any attempted steering is definitionally attempted self-disruption. This is why most (~70% iirc) “change” projects fail. Improving “change management” won’t help. One does not simply change-manage self-disruption.
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Anyhow, reason I tried this steering at all was partly curiosity to see if I could self-disrupt, and partly because climate action is one of those rare cases where if you’re going to steer at all, you should try to make it proactive. Crash-only climate action is a bit too risky.
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We’ll see if it sticks. I’d like to do more energy/climate/sustainability work (hint hint!). It’s interesting work. Though I mostly do management/org consulting around this stuff, the tech domain is quite challenging to master even at that level. I’m learning a lot.
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It’s also become clear to me that software eating the world is central to effective climate action. It’s the only metalever that can act fast enough, broadly enough across all the levers. It is also how everything else gets operationalized. But that’s a story for another day.
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Anyhoo...
Moral of story: don’t even think about steering until music slows and the groove starts to feel like a rut.
If steering feels easy, check momentum. I’ll bet it isn’t there.
Steer by forced-hand, crash/crisis, or run-off-cliff if you can.
Momentum is THAT valuable.
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But in the rare cases real steering is called for: science it to death, bring all the momentum into play, and treat it like an aircraft carrier turn, not a juvenile “pivot” fueled by the the latest pot-smoking session.
It’s a bet the momentum-farm self-disruption. Not a joke.
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It’s resolutions season. Fun exercise and it’s always good to send out reflections to people affected by your potential steering, whether it’s just your wife and cat like me, or a 100,000 person org.
But the best resolution might be NO resolution. No steering.
Unless you must
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