I'm on the other side of the wall now, as I left my job at the Port of Seattle in December and am now inventing a new life as a sole proprietor of a "strategic visualization" practice. Someone told me that to be successfully self-employed, you have to structure your week so that you spend at least some time working in each of your key "departments:" Research and Development; Marketing and Communications; Operations; and Administration and Finance. The fact that it took me almost four months to get around to posting on this blog is direct evidence of how long it has taken me to make the transition from "other"-organization to "self"-organization.
Someone else told me that consulting is like surfing, that you need to be ready to catch a big wave and try to ride it as long as you can, and then paddle back out and wait for the next one. This is a very different model from working in an "other"-organization, where there is always too much work and never enough time, so breathing is really not an option. I heard once that you should always consider your employees to be "volunteers," because they can always chose to work someplace else, and now that I have made that choice I can really feel what it feels like to be a volunteer.
Structure is a "strange attractor." You crave structure and routine, and are drawn into it, but once you get caught up in something you have lost a piece of your autonomy, or at least it can feel that way. There is something important and difficult about being able to get caught up in meaningful work and be able to sustain the feeling that what you are doing is "enough". This is not so much a function of your organization or job, as much as it is a zen-like mindset that allows you to feel satisfied, abundant, and enough, in the face of interminable needs, challenges and resource constraints. I had a friend once named Mary Lynn Pulley who wrote a book on "resilience" and I wonder if this quality is what she found in people who she observed to be resilient.
So, for now my quest is to find out what visualization tools are easy to find and use, to explain what we need to know and do in order to increase our system effectiveness and sustainability in this world. People talk about transparency without showing posters of how everything fits together. I am determined to change that. I want to see every meeting have posters up which show the participants who they are, where they are going and with whom, when and why. I am a why kind of guy. There must be a way to use graphics and visualization to show how all our competing objectives related to each other and us. The Rotary "four way test" is: "Is it the truth, is it fair to all concerned, is it beneficial to all concerned, and does it build good will and better friendships?" How would you answer these questions without a map of some kind, showing who, what, when, where, how and how much for "all" to see. I will let you know what I find out. I will post my findings here and on my Facebook page, my website
http://www.burrstewart.com/ and maybe sometimes on Twitter (burrst). Maybe someday I will convince these social networking sites to have a graphical mapping component that helps you see your friends' lives playing out in multiple dimensions, not just the linear time line of day-to-day posts. Stay tuned.
Oh, what about the seven forms of intelligence? Anyone remember what they are? I think it's: Logical, Verbal, Emotional, Visual, Musical, Kinesthetic, and Self Knowledge. With the possible eighth one out there called Environmental, or maybe it's called "System Context." The point is that we have got to get on with the job of educating ourselves on the other intelligences beyond "reading, writing and arithmetic," which we now know isn't enough to do the job. So, get on with it!
