I’ve been a bit quiet so far this year, but it’s time to unwrap something we’ve been working on behind the scenes.

This month we launched our latest What if paper: What if there were no freelancers?

Our economy relies on freelancers, in the UK there are more freelancers than all the people employed by the NHS - the UK’s largest employer - but time and time again we hear stories of freelancers being under appreciated and disrespected.

Our last two what if papers focused on what if everyone could walk to work, how much people appreciated and valued such a simple change to their lives, and what if everyone was an entrepreneur, the importance of entrepreneurial skills in the modern economy.

The idea for “What If There Were No Freelancers” had already been circling, but
the catalyst was hearing an unsympathetic quip from a Special Advisor in Whitehall, who after the announcement of furlough and emergency loan schemes for employees and businesses during the 2020 pandemic, was asked what the government was going to do to support freelancers. The response?

“Can’t all of these freelancers just go and get jobs?”

So that’s it. That’s the question. Can all of these freelancers just go and get jobs?

What if there were no freelancers? Would we notice? Would our economy thrive, or crash?

Subscribe now

Unsung Heroes

This time around we’re putting a focus on the unsung heroes, the glue in our economic model - freelancers and the self-employed.

Freelancers do what they do in many ways, but there are three key things they do that get overlooked:

They and their businesses are one in the same, their commercial relationships are underpinned by high levels of personal trust.

They shapeshift, making sure they’re always the perfect fit for their clients, and they act fast - free from hierarchy or organisational politics.

They have a highly specialised expertise using their unique vantage point. They apply solutions developed in one place to challenges encountered in another.

Why Do Freelancers Freelance?

The reasons why they do it are also useful to understand.

Scale

Freelancers appreciate scale, but in a less conventional way.

They are often attracted to opportunities beyond their doorstep, being able to service national and international clients and work on exciting and challenging projects.

Stimulation

They want stimulation from their work.

They don’t fit into a box and don’t want to. Their services are constructed around their own unique skill set and selling points, and find this motivating.

Flexibility

They crave, or need, flexibility.

They desire a way or quality of life not readily available through traditional models of employment. They want work to complement life - not compromise it.

Purpose

They have a sense of purpose.

It isn’t just about the money, they want to - and do - make a positive difference to the world.

Stories

We have captured stories in the report that show six perspectives but this is the beauty of the freelance community. It is diverse and has diverse points of view and appreciation.

However, this power of scale is undermined by its own diversity: the range of key issues, needs and priorities makes it difficult for them to form a collective and coherent message to be represented by a trade body or membership group.

Can there be one authentic voice when every experience is so unique?

Better Conditions

We believe we need a new offer for freelancers from society. Freelancers deserve respect, security, parity, and community.

From a political perspective, we want to put forward a manifesto for freelancers:

If the true value of freelancing is to be realised within our economies we need to recognise that:

By the people who pay them, by policy makers, and society at large. Young people need to grow up seeing freelancing as a positive career choice.

Strong legal protections are required to enable them to secure, deliver and be paid for work without fear and undue risk. Freelancers are not disposable resources, and need equal access to training opportunities and other benefits.

Whether through the tax system, parental rights, sickness leave or otherwise, freelancers should not be unfairly disadvantaged by their employment status.

With strong networks for peer support and access to advice and guidance. Freelancers need bespoke support, not the singular view that any entrepreneur needs to focus only on growth. Freelancing is a growing movement, freelancers should be the ones to benefit from that.

We have asks for you in the paper, whether you are a legislator, educator, researcher, business or freelancer.

We all need to recognise and value the essential role of freelancers, incentivise and enable their success, and future generations of freelancers.

We all have a role to play to celebrate and support the success of freelancers and the self employed.

Now we want to know what you think. Do you treat freelancers with parity in your organisation? Do you think they get the respect they’re due? Or to frame it another way: would you encourage your child to pursue a freelance career?

You can read the full report and share your freelancer story now on nomorefreelancers.com or on TownSq.co.uk.

If you support entrepreneurship and freelancers - make it clear. Do you have ideas and thoughts to add to the debate? Share your views on social media with the report and the hashtag #WITWNF

As the next scheduled post date is Christmas weekend I’ve decided to use this post as a bit of a wrap-up for the year.

I want to share a bit more behind the curtain, and get your thoughts on my plans for the next year.

Firstly, thank you. The satisfaction of writing is one thing, but some of the responses have been very moving.

The second year has been a bit different to the first year. I’ve published 37 times this year as opposed to 51 in 2022. I’ve been a bit easier on myself when it comes to getting content out there.

This week’s post is going to cover a bit of logistics, plans for 2024, a bit of TownSq news, and content stats.

Logistics

Last year when I did this post I shared a bit about the writing process and that seemed to go down quite well, so firstly here’s a bit more from behind the scenes.

I’ve moved from Revue to Substack, and that’s been broadly fine.

Revue, the platform that I launched on, had been acquired by Twitter only for Musk to decide that it needed to be closed down. That led to a bit of a dash to a new platform and Substack was the one.

The only issue I’m having is that the SEO is rubbish compared to Revue - so if anyone has any clues on that I would be grateful for the insight.

In 2022 I tried to stick to the 10am on a Sunday slot but in 2023 I started to try out publishing at different times and on different days.

The data tells me one thing, but I would love to get your views on this; was it a good thing to receive on a Sunday morning or is the Monday morning/lunchtime slot better as it’s more worky?

I did the 10am on a Sunday slot originally because that’s when some of my favourite newsletters went out, and to play to the fact that traditional media always saw Sunday morning as being peak reading time, but old rules needn’t apply here.

2024

I have lots of thoughts spinning around about what to do with this blog in the next year. As always I’d really value your views.

I have a bunch of half written articles on topics like:

• Knowing where you are in your journey, inspired in part by a trip to Cadbury World for my son’s birthday and realising how they built their whole village 25 years before they even discovered their most successful product.

• Won’t do what you tell me, on our conflicting desire for freedom and direction.

• Loathing learning, on the state of the education sector right now.

• What if there were no freelancers?, talking about their importance and questioning why they are so often overlooked.

• The value of gossip, and why we don’t always appreciate how useful it is for organisations and communities.

• Why you shouldn’t work from home, without getting too dragged into my own personal bias!

• You against me, me against you, on the issue with our competitive rather than cooperative society.

• React, on the way we learn how to react to situations better.

• The ticket, looking at how we pick up on the behaviour of others in unfamiliar situations, and change our own way of being.

• Fair portions, on the imbalance when it comes to entrepreneurs raising investment.

Plus, many, many more, like:

The dark room, teach them a lesson, the value of chaos, divergence and convergence, creating conditions to create, it’s not that simple, what we want from life, how we do things around here, slow Tuesdays, getting stressed out, and edging out of comfort zones.

I’ve heard feedback from many of you as to where I should point my nose next, and I’m trying not to take on the analytics-driven journalism mindset of just churning out posts that match topics that have done well on the algorithm in the past.

Whenever I’m asked why I do this I flippantly suggest it is just for my own mental health, which is true but as it has grown it has been about validating some of the way I see the world and hopefully introducing challenge.

Recently I shared the bit from Farnam St about the value of writing. It resonated with me.

Sometimes writing about a topic has fully changed how I think about it, but also has forced me to consider that my viewpoint might be overly biased or narrow.

I’ve been told I should do it as a podcast, or I should post more often, but I don’t want to over commit and end up not enjoying it.

That said, maybe I’d enjoy it more.

I’ve also been told to pack it in, so there is some balance!

I’ve considered rewriting posts from the first year with two years’ more experience under my belt, and it has crossed my mind to spend more time compiling these into a collection and exploring options for publishing them, but I don’t think I want to get sucked into all of that just yet.

My master document has 110,000 words in it now, which is well over 600 pages of content.

I’ve ignored a lot of the advice (and my own medicine when talking to start-ups) about finding a niche or a single audience and writing for that persona. This isn’t intended to be that just now, and it’s nice to see the broad range of entrepreneurs, freelancers, professionals, musicians, sportspeople, politicians, investors, lawyers, broadcasters, colleagues, family members, friends, and everything in between that have engaged with the posts every week.

The last thing any of us need is more email, and the last thing most of us need is another entrepreneur with a newsletter, so I’m grateful that I’ve passed that filter with so many of you.

One thing I considered for next year (but which I think I’ve ruled out) is taking a bit more of a political viewpoint. Next year is going to be a big year in the world of politics, so trying to apply a bit of the Good Founder thinking to issues such as education, housing, economic policy etc.. I think that one has gone away for now, but as always - just let me know!

TownSq news

More broadly, I’m pretty satisfied at being able to keep this going while my day job has not slowed down!

We’ve had a serious year of things at TownSq, I know I keep a lot of it out of this newsletter so as to avoid it being an aditorial, but we’ve hit some major milestones this year.

We made Fast Growth 50 for a second consecutive year, and we’ve managed to fully plug a big gap from a short-term contract with revenue growth from our core business.

We’ve launched new initiatives like Creative Collective and TownSq Online, new spaces like Hereford and our Barnstaple extension, and signed on for our latest spaces in Kingston and Tunbridge Wells.

We’ve also had so much heartache. We lost one colleague from our team, and three colleagues from external partners, all before their time.

We’ve had to try to balance the cost of living crisis which bites particularly hard for a company with a lot of property.

We recertified as a B Corp after 20 months of trying, and launched our 50 Stories Impact Report.

Earlier in the summer we acquired a business to grow our Admin Support operation, and we relaunched our Startup Club format which has helped thousands.

It’s been busy, but it’s been satisfying, and I think that’s the most important bit.

Content stats

Three posts in particular seem to have struck a chord in 2023:

• This is the Last Time (which apparently made people cry, this was not on the list of goals when I first started out)

• Community Saves Lives

• Why Our Places Need Us

But no post got close to doing the numbers that two from last year did:

• Learned Helplessness

• And far and away the most viewed post is Loving Problems, Breaking Up With Ideas.

Readership growth

Thanks to everyone who subscribed in 2023, we’ve grown as a community by 44% which I’m really chuffed with, and not seen open rates drop off.

I could have thousands more subscribers and get lower engagement without having such a loyal following, so for that I’m grateful to you all.

So that’s it for 2023, thanks again for all of your love and support. Please keep in touch and regularly nudging me, it feels like shouting into the void sometimes only to bump into someone and have them tell me how much they loved a recent post. I’m a simple guy, that stuff means a great deal.

See you in 2024!

There’s a point raised in the Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté about how in British Columbia in 2021, more people died of opioid overdoses than Covid.

In my country, the hospital board nearest my hometown had an avoidable mortality rate of 270 people per 100,000. For context, Covid had a mortality rate of 325 people per 100,000 in the UK.

Avoidable mortality as a basic concept covers any deaths that are caused by conditions for which effective public health interventions are available.

When Covid hit we - quite rightly - implemented a response unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. There was action, everything stopped to deal with this crisis.

It might be borderline disingenuous to compare these mortality rates given one is population-wide and one is restricted to hospital visitors, but both are terrifyingly high rates and equally random.

One led to a fully unrestricted response and action, and one is treated as business as usual.

Another example of this is with housing. Right now there is something known as the viability gap in the property world. The basic concept is that anything north of Oxford is basically seen as being unviable as a construction project, which is to say that it costs more to build a house or office than can be earned when it is sold or valued (or at least not enough margin can be made to justify the investment).

This is a weird thing when you consider how much houses cost in 2023. The average cost of a house across the UK has more than doubled in the last 20 years, as I wrote about recently.

This viability gap isn’t something that your grandparents would know about (unless they really have their fingers on the pulse) but it is totally known and understood in the property sector and government.

The solution right now is to plug the gap with grants, but there are no indications that the situation is going to change and this is just a case of weathering the storm. But it is not a new issue, which is why we see so much public sector property development outside major city regions.

Hot Frogs

There is a temptation to overreact to a short sharp blast and underreact to the boiling frog. I think we probably all understand what I mean by the boiling frog, a situation which gets progressively worse until the point where it is too late or too much of a problem.

In our country, we have serious issues with our health system that have developed over the course of decades and will only get worse with issues such as an ageing population and conflicting agendas on how public services should be funded.

We have a housing crisis created by increasing costs, decreased supply, and unfettered international investment.

These issues are not going to be magically resolved. They need new ideas and new thinking but we’re running out of time in which to do it.

On the other hand, Covid showed us that we can react with urgency and pace, and with the sense of prioritising that which is the most important thing.

What we don’t see right now is public figures working through the night with the same level of attentiveness to the varied crises as we saw during the early days of Covid.

Wait-and-see

In the last 12 months, we have seen this challenge in real-time with the emergence of a whole new paradigm shift. Artificial intelligence is a game-changer, but so many experts are still recommending we wait and see what the impact is.

When Covid hit we didn’t have this sense of wait and see (or maybe we did if half of what is being shared through the Covid inquiry is true).

Publicly, there was no sense of let’s wait and see what the impact of Covid is. There was a quick reaction and a sharp reaction.

For anyone old enough to remember this was very similar when 9/11 happened. There was not a "let’s wait-and-see how the dust settles" reaction there was a “we must act and we must act fast" reaction.

The “War on Terror” was authorised by congress on September 14th just three days after the horrific day, and troops were in Afghanistan by October 7th.

Some situations require a quick-snap reaction more than a patient wait-and-see reaction. This might be when there appears to be an obvious path to retaliation or when there’s a sense that waiting just won’t cut it.

Sometimes there’s a sense that people need to be seen to be reacting, which I think is often the more dangerous element of this.

There is also the risk that waiting won’t do it. There might be a narrowing window to act, like we saw with Covid.

But running a business often this is more a case of that which is more urgent or more screaming out that just needs to be settled.

First Aid Training

When you do your first aid training, there’s a lot you need to remember, but one point that always stood out for me was the instruction for when you arrive at a scene: you have to focus on those who are silent over those who are screaming for your help.

If someone’s screaming for your help, it at least means they’re conscious, whereas those that are silent might need more urgent care and attention in order to be stabilised.

When you’re running a business whether it’s people, situations or challenges, it’s often the firefighting and the addressing the screaming patients that takes over and becomes the most important thing.

This is perfectly logical and right: the thing which is screaming for your attention is the thing that’s going to get the most of it.

Squeaky wheels etc..

The thing which has to be different for you as a leader is needing to actively seek those things which are not screaming, but which are bubbling away, and are just slowly boiling to the point at which it could become a really hot problem.

Renegotiation

In the last couple of years, I’ve had a couple of situations where there’s been a bit of a realisation that conditions have significantly changed on contracts from when they were originally signed.

Entering into a contract renegotiation process brings major upheaval, but also disruption, cost, and lots of uncomfortable conversations. They are also wildly unpredictable.

As I’ve been going through that process a lot of it reminds me of the Ben Horowitz book, the Hard Thing About Hard Things.

You have to accept that you’re going to go through some difficult periods of leadership in order to make sure that you’ve got a brighter future to look forward to.

It’s a bit more proactive than simply acceptance; you’ve got to seek it out and embrace it.

It can be quite tempting to just let the sleeping dog lie and not interfere with situations that are not screaming out for attention when there are so many other things that are desperate for your time and energy.

It’s hard to even consider, never mind justify, starting another drama or opening another difficult conversation or difficult process. That almost feels irresponsible in the heat of the moment.

But it’s a vital part of leadership, and I think that’s why I feel so frustrated about things like how the healthcare and housing systems are being treated right now.

I think sometimes politicians try to seek credit or a claim for making the tough decisions or for taking the tough path, but this really isn’t about taking credit. It’s about doing what’s right and the difference is not doing what’s right for you as the individual, but doing what’s right for a complex organisation.

If you’re standing up as a leader, or demanding people recognise you as that, you can’t take credit for what is a minimum expectation.

Who else has the responsibility to serve communities, maintain and sustain for generations?

Boiling frog issues can’t just be ignored. They have to be prioritised.

For you as a leader that means firstly spotting the frog that thinks it’s in a jacuzzi and telling it the truth.

It’s about trying to find other ways to spot those areas of your business where things might look calm just now, but could get out of control soon.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

There’s the quote from Ernest Hemingway about bankruptcy:

“How did you go bankrupt?"
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

There is a sense sometimes that these things come out of the blue.

That shares a lot of similarity to the idea of the overnight success a decade in the making.

These situations that appear gradual are often attributed to be quite sudden just at the end.

Things very rarely change all of a sudden. More often it is the gradual thing that is perceived to come out of the blue, which is really about bad or dishonest leadership.

It is the responsibility of the leader to know what is happening across-the-board. It is to ask those hard questions, to prod and to try to get a much clearer idea of what’s really going on under the hood and not just accept that things are looking rosy or that things are going swimmingly.

As you grow a business, it’s just human instinct to want to see the good things and only look for the points of encouragement.

I’ve covered this enough times when talking about the Mom Test by now. Looking for good news is addictive.

If you’re trying to grow something for the long-term, you need to accept that this isn’t your job. It is more important to see what’s in your blindspot to get a true tale of what’s happening with your business.

That’s a much surer route to a sustainable business.

This is what I want to see more from political leadership. It’s recognising that we’ve got a lot of boiling frogs right now, like healthcare and the environment, and we need to see the level of leadership and responsiveness that was involved in the early days of Covid.

After all, these issues are already creating as much, if not more, damage, but are not getting the same level of attention, scrutiny, and intervention.

If we had committees committing the level of energy, time, imagination, and financial investments as we saw during Covid then I think we might feel more optimistic than we currently do about some of these pressing issues.

Equally this isn’t to say that all of that intervention will be a positive.

In this scenario no intervention or attention signals that we are not taking these issues seriously, and that is much more worrying than just sitting by and watching the boiled frog perish.

Gradually, then suddenly.

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La Pausa

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You Don’t Think For Yourself

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Firstly, I think I’ve done really well to hold off on the football references so that’s good. I really do think I deserve credit for that.

However, now’s the time to blow that run.

In football, la pausa refers to when a player waits an extra split second before making a pass or playing the ball.

It’s a simple idea, but it requires a lot of awareness for a player to try it, and a cool head to even consider it.

This coolness in the face of pressure does a number of things, but it’s mainly for the benefit of either letting your teammates to get into better positions, or your opponents to get into worse positions as a result of reacting to your pause.

It’s way too tempting to react in the heat of the moment and make things worse, or react too quickly and not have the full picture.

The best example of this in work is when you receive some bad or unexpected news, especially if it happens by email or some other form of delayed communication.

The pause can give you a major advantage. It can help prevent self-sabotage, but also become a coping mechanism for when things are starting to feel overwhelming.

You make bad decisions when you’re mad. This doesn’t need telling, but maybe reminding from time to time.

Reaction Time

You don’t always need to react. If someone’s given you bad news, they’re probably sat there waiting for your reaction. Don’t give them the pleasure.

Reaction time is the term we use for assessing the period between which a stimulus happens and our response and action, but I’d also suggest we think about it in the sense of knowing when the time is right to react.

You don’t have to respond to everything, and you don’t need to respond right away.

Knowing the right time to respond can help deliver a different message. I’ve always hated how common it is that when bidding for a big contract the outcome is often shared at 4pm on a Friday afternoon. Whether the news is good or bad it crashes into your weekend and can take your mood along with it.

The other way of looking at it is that it could be seen as a gift - there’s nothing you can do until Monday anyway, so put it to the back of your mind and let future you deal with it.

On the bit of not giving them the pleasure, it might not be that sinister - it could be just them lashing out themselves. Giving some breathing space might be the pause they needed to realise their own mistake.

Blow Over

Sometimes, things just sort themselves out. This isn’t about burying your head, this is about assessing whether everything has played out. If you react too soon then you might make an even bigger mess.

The trick with this is assessing whether things have played out or not.

If we go back to the football analogy you might have taken possession after a corner, and people are moving back into position having been set up for a set-piece.

This moment creates a lot of chaos, as there are defenders up front and players have switched flanks, which might be the opening that allows you to counter - but if you spring forward too fast you might leave gaps open of your own that can be exploited.

When the moment to react comes, choosing to not react is a valid choice, especially if you’re 1-0 up and don’t need to add the pressure. Context matters.

If there are multiple stakeholders or moving parts then someone else’s reaction might defuse or alter the situation altogether, saving you from causing more damage by taking the wrong action.

There will be occasions where this is akin to burying your head in the sand, but it’s more likely to be an effective tool to settle down a chaotic situation.

More Information

Going back to the football analogy, la pausa enables you to verify that a player is indeed making that run, not just shaping to make a run. If you’re playing as a number 6 or 8 in the centre of the park and it looks like your winger is about to run into space, giving yourself an extra moment can give them another yard and confirm they’re taking that action.

It can also suck the defenders closer to you, giving you more of an idea of what might happen next.

Learning is a bit like this. On the surface a situation might look like one thing until you unlock a new insight or perspective.

Sometimes you have to think and act fast, but unless you have a defender bearing down on you, try to get a new perspective or wait for more information to come.

Golate

Going back to that number 6 passing it to the running winger, there’s one final aspect of this: going too late.

If you wait too long, things might get worse. If that winger was making the run all along, by the time you’ve decided to make the pass your teammate might be offside.

Daniel Kahneman taught the world in Thinking Fast and Slow that often our instinctive, rapid response is the answer. We build this up over hours of practice, and over time we can really hone our gut reaction.

The memorable example that’s given, from Gary Klein, is that of the firefighter who uses his expert intuition to command his team to exit from a building before he even knew why. His sixth sense was right - the floor collapsed immediately after they cleared the scene.

In that instance it was realising that the fire was unusually quiet and the room unusually hot - he knew something was wrong even if he didn’t know exactly what. In the end it turned out that the fire was raging in the basement below their feet, his quick response saved the lives of his colleagues.

Luckily, most of us don’t face these kinds of life or death decisions in our day to day lives. Which is why we can afford to take a pause more often and assess what’s really going on.

But we can send the wrong message about whether something is urgent or an important priority to us by dwelling on the point.

I hope the football theme hasn’t alienated too many of you, I promise I won’t write about football again this year.

I’ve got one more regular post left for the year, and a list of about ten things to get into that one slot - keep letting me know if there are any topics you think I should be giving more airtime to. Thanks for all of the love this year.

Climate change

The last post ended up being one of the lowest read of the year. I wouldn’t be surprised, if it wasn’t so predictable.

Whenever I post about climate change this happens.

I don’t know if it is because of how mentally exhausting it is, or whether it was just a bad post, but it’s a pattern. Low engagement on socials, low read rates.

This isn’t meant to be a rant, I just want to share how this stuff happens. This is the cycle, this content doesn’t get engagement so doesn’t get created again.

I enjoyed writing it, took a swing and it turned out to be a miss. But if you didn’t read it already, or if you did and it really didn’t hit the mark, I’d love to hear why.

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Don’t worry about the person who told you it couldn’t be done.

It’s no surprise that so many people are unwilling to believe in climate change when you consider two things:

How massive it is, and how much it is due to take from them.

When you see the true force of nature that is a storm, or floods, it isn’t so easy to connect this to the car you chose to drive or your energy provider.

We’re increasingly living in a world that is designed to tap into craving for instant feedback loops, we pull down on our phone’s screen and it buzzes with haptic feedback, gives a satisfying animation and rewards us with new content. Like a fruit machine in our pocket but for memes and emails.

The climate is not so responsive, not so immediate, and not so rewarding.

Some ideas and concepts are so massive that it isn’t easy for people to fully comprehend or accept them. I think the climate is one of those. It needs us to suspend so much of what we believe to fully get our heads around them. Like imagining the size of a planet like Jupiter, or that there are planets and solar systems around every visible star in our night sky - and millions of billions more that we can’t see.

It’s also incredible complex, so even if people want to help it isn’t so straightforward to do so. Insecticides are good for increasing productive efficiency in crop yields, but they remove food for wild birds - in the UK we’re down from 114m wild birds in 1977 to 87m in 2022, 45 years later, a reduction of 24% or 27m birds.

On the other hand, the cost of rice, wheat, oilseed, and coarse grains has halved since 1977, so we have a question to answer: how much are we willing to pay for our food?

How low does our wild bird population need to get before we’re concerned? Anyone who is over 30 will have noticed the difference from what is now known as the “bug splat count”. From 2004 to 2019 car trips in Kent saw 50% fewer insects splatted on their numberplate. Half of the insect population wiped out at an astounding rate.

“The falling abundance of flying insects should be a major concern to everybody, as these essential creatures are the small things that run the world” Andrew Whitehouse of Buglife said in 2021.

It isn’t a linear path to successfully moving forward, so convincing people to take positive action isn’t without challenge. For some reason this never seems to be a part of the public discourse.

Why Can’t You Believe in Climate Change?

This post is less about convincing or reinforcing views on the climate, more about one of the less discussed parts of the challenge we face: what it’s due to take from all of us, and especially what it’s taking from those who don’t even accept that it’s true.

I probably need to be clear on something here - this isn’t about pandering. To a certain extent it’s tough luck as to whether people do or don’t believe in climate change by now.

I started drafting this post in an October week where we had more >20°C days than not in the UK.

But unless we can bridge the gap between believers and deniers we’re going to have a rocky couple of decades ahead of us.

We need new thinking on what we’re going to lose to start to build better cities, systems, and social services for the crucial decades to come.

Loss Aversion

If you’re not familiar with loss aversion, the easiest way to think about it is in a sport context. A loss always hurts more than a win feels good.

There’s a similar feeling with managing our money, an unexpected £250 bonus is nice, but an unplanned £250 tax is crushing.

If you’re gambling in a casino and you’re on a losing streak, your fear of that loss drives you to chase the loss - continuing to gamble (and lose) more.

Loss aversion is a cognitive bias where the fear of loss looms larger than gains of winning.

I wrote about this earlier in the summer.

Right now, people are at risk of losing a lot, without much to gain. The main bone of contention right now appears to be the car.

American Dreaming

I think all of this contributes to why the culture war in America has particularly taken grip.

The idea of the American dream isn’t fixed, but I think there’s an image which involves a gun-toting white man, driving a big - gas-guzzling - truck, smoking cigarettes, who gets the girl and lives in a big house with a long drive, massive garden, two kids and a big dog, financially secure. The idea that anyone can make it with hard work and commitment with god on their side.

This idea is so painfully redundant that it’s a joke.

That generation has had everything that is viewed as conventional, traditional, and aspirational taken from them.

It’s no wonder they’re angry, even if we don’t think they should be.

Dude, Where’s My Car?

Focusing in on the car point of the American dream, I think this is an important element which we can’t just ignore.

I honestly can’t believe the 15-minute cities idea has turned into a conspiracy theory that has taken people to the streets in protest.

But it has.

Given that it has, we have to take it seriously, and consider what lessons we can learn from this reaction.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised, it’s only five years since the gilets jaunes movement gave us a heads up.

The thing that some people seem to think is that this policy is a trojan horse disguising the real mission to take individual cars from us.

Although that’s not the overall goal, it’s hard to deny it’s a serious consequence that could play out if the 15-minute city fulfils its promise.

They Took Our Freedom

Cars have been a symbol of personal freedom since they were introduced and became ubiquitous. Whether it’s a Rolls Royce worth more than the average home, or a 20-year-old Fiesta for £500, they’re accessible to most folks and do the same job with varying levels of comfort.

That first day when you’re free to drive alone is exhilirating. That first time taking your friends out and being able to pick your own music on the radio. Adjust the temperature, choose the route, your speed, everything about driving is an experience of freedom and independence.

The immediate feedback of pace you get from putting your foot down, or from sharply applying the brakes.

That excitement doesn’t really fade, unless you live in a city and get sucked into traffic jams.

Road trips themselves are a romantic concept, whether it’s Route 66, the North Coast 500, or crossing a continent with no restriction.

15-minute-cities were originally a concept that was focused on giving communities more. Better access to services, better options for getting around a region.

But instead it is being seen forcing behaviour change without fulfilling the other end of the bargain.

Bridges and Rafts

One of the reasons I’m frustrated with government policy in this area just now is that this isn’t being considered. We’re trying to get people to adopt to a new way of life without giving them an alternative option.

We’re trying to force people to reduce their use of cars but not rejecting housing planning applications that are not serviced by public transport. Or letting developers get away without commitment to long-term strategies.

The train services we do have are unreliable, expensive, and unacceptably uncomfortable on local services.

Too much is being taken too fast with no trade given. It’s no surprise that people are furious.

We’re not building the bridges.

I think there are lessons that need to be learned in this.

In my country there was a policy set to build no more roads, but this was done before the alternative was fit for purpose.

We are not seeing the alternatives coming forward to give people faith in a future where they’re not the ones having to miss out.

Nothing Left to Lose

There’s one other layer of deeper context here.

Many communities that are losing out most are the ones furthest from power. There’s no point making decisions from them based on a London or capital city context.

Too many communities across Britain have been hollowed out over the last fifteen years of austerity, things have passed breaking point.

With fifteen-minute-cities I think the patience has been exhausted. It’s hard to believe that any good will come when so much has already been taken away.

I don’t know how many more decades of "just boil the amount of water you need” or “reduce your clothes wash by 10° to save money” society can hack.

It also doesn’t help when climate change is not being treated seriously by senior political leadership. The message needs to be unequivocal, but it isn’t. Climate change shouldn’t be treated opportunistically.

There was a similar point made by Lord Deben at an ESG conference I recently participated in. His argument was that it doesn’t matter what your belief is you need to factor climate change in, whether you’re a politician or business leader.

It can’t be debated that climate change is happening, and whether it is human caused or not shouldn’t be the distracting point to not try to do better.

Energy is the point on this that gets me scratching my head. I don’t know why people would argue the toss on this. Even if you didn’t believe in it, it is common sense for us to gain energy security and strive for cleaner energy.

Unless of course you decided you hate Coldplay or Oasis. Or I could plug this post here too.

I’m going to call it there, though there’s so much I want to write about chaos theory, the complexity lost in calling it climate change, conspiracy theories, Rwanda, and why I don’t think people are as stupid as it’s convenient enough to label them.

Let me know if you want to see more about this topic, my schedule for 2023 is done now, but I’m making some decisions on what direction to take this in 2024.

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Get Together

This weekend we had our annual team get together. I wanted…

You Don’t Think For Yourself

When was the last time you listened to a Coldplay album?

Nice Idea, Won't Work Here

Don’t worry about the person who told you it couldn’t be done.

Not Normal or New Normal?

Did Beyoncé stop us from living our best lives?

I know these things are often seen as being a bit naff, and it’s a lot to ask full-time workers to give up a weekend to spend time with people they don’t much like, but I really think it’s vital for any mission-led organisation.

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Maybe I’m selfish, but it’s so awesome to spend time with this group of people. Part of what makes it so awesome is that each of our local teams are like local superstars. It’s like hanging out with some of the most influential ecosystem actors and getting to learn what’s really happening across the country.

For this get together we had 28 people come together from across the UK, and we all descended on Cardiff. We spent the day in Techniquest and everyone had a slot to share what’s working across the business.

In seven packed hours we covered a lot, but the joy came from spotting the patterns and trends, and working together on the opportunities for the next couple of years.

I thought I’d share a bit about why I think these types of gatherings are essential.

Newsletters

Sending information by email is fine, and more recently I’ve started recording our internal all-team memos like a news package which increases engagement but it doesn’t do what meeting in-person does. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t think 100% remote works.

Some of this information has to land - it doesn’t work if you just put it in peoples’ inboxes and both hope they read it and hope it sinks in.

Meeting in person enables you to have a much more interactive discussion rather than trying to work out how to put it in an email.

Strategic ideas are complex and counter-intuitive, you can’t always capture the full context with the same power as face-to-face.

You can make a statement and look into people’s eyes to see what the reaction is. If you’re still not sure you can ask if that really landed, you can ask things more provocatively and more conceptually to create the space for things to move into in the future.

It also means you can share ambiguous news that might otherwise be taken as being good or bad depending on how you react. We can immediately take views and gauge reactions - more on that later.

It is useful to share why we are making decisions before sharing those decisions, and some of these things need time to settle.

Change unsettles, and too much change too often can lead to confusion as well as the lack of a solid foundation.

As the company has grown we’ve had to be a bit more strategic with how we do change without causing this disruption, and while it might slow down the innovation process it prevents that innovation going to waste.

Sharing’s Caring

There’s something more powerful about delivering in person that just can’t be achieved online.

It’s useful to be able to share things and know that you give everything the best chance to land.

We’re a business that has grown fast in the last six years, and anyone who has been involved with fast growing companies will know that it can be a very painful process. And that’s not to mention that in these six years we’ve (so far) had Brexit, Covid, and the cost of living crisis, and that only scratches the surface.

We’re also a business that relies on having amazing people who are empowered to create value for their communities.

We do a thorough induction process, and we do weekly and monthly check-ins. We encourage peer-to-peer engagement and we have Slack for everything in between.

But some things, like opinions and ideas, develop over the course of months and years rather than day-to-day.

We don’t necessarily know when these ideas sneak up on us, but then all of a sudden there they are, and they seem as clear as day.

Reflecting on the past year gives us a chance to go back over the days and weeks that have come and gone, and see how the picture has changed.

We have a section on things that haven’t gone so well, but it isn’t one of those “tell me about your weaknesses” “well sometimes I work too hard” style questions.

It’s about having people share issues with peers to come up with ideas for how to overcome them, and because everyone is doing it there should be more confidence that those issues will be shared with empathy and understanding rather than blame or any traditional sense of failure.

The other value in sharing these issues is that it humanises other peers who might look flawless or like it is effortless to them. In our world there are honestly never two days alike, and there are certainly never two Community Managers alike.

By sharing what went well we get ideas, but by sharing what went wrong we get a toolkit to overcome issues in the future, and the mindset required to make it work.

Flat Hierarchy

I know flat hierarchies are a bit of a cliche, but the lack of politics  this weekend was a joy. Going back to that point at the top about these things being weekends spent with people who you don’t like - I don’t think that’s true in our case.

I think fostering a peer-to-peer environment has built a level of mutual respect and admiration across teams that has stacks of value, and which means that there’s an appreciation for what they do.

By spending such a big portion of the day sharing what went well and what didn’t in the last year we create humility. The vulnerability in this creates an opportunity to ask for help, and their wins don’t feel threatening but feel like shared success.

That’s a vital part of our model: we don’t want to cookie cut what works best, but we want to learn lessons and implement sensitively at a local level.

If someone thinks a new idea won’t work there’s a platform to be heard, and for that feedback to be heard by other peers to try to influence them, rather than just a private email which only influences one person.

That environment requires a lot of psychological safety to work well.

Psychological Safety

Last year I read Fearless Organisation by Amy C. Edmondson. It focuses on this idea that nothing prevents and grips the mind in the same way as fear, and improving psychological safety is to create an environment in which people can ask questions and raise issues without fear of humiliation, blame, or being ignored.

It’s raising confidence for people to share concerns and be themselves.

Self-preservation is immediately rewarding, and speaking out brings risk with limited reward. Nobody ever gets sacked for sitting silently while things go wrong around them.

If you can’t criticise something that you can’t fully get behind then you’re not going to be delivering it with all of your ability. Maybe even with any of your ability.

It’s something I try to practice by being as honest and candid as possible with the team. We’ve seen our core business grow massively this year, with new services gaining traction, new launches, and acquisitions. There’s a tendency to only talk about the good stuff.

If we don’t validate the concerns of others, and talk candidly about the hard, hard times in the middle of that then you’re telling your team that those concerns aren’t real.

We all believe we are seeing reality, rather than a highly subjective view of the true reality. We often fail to wonder what others are seeing, or fail to be curious about how someone with a different perspective might see the situation.

We won’t always agree with that other perspective, but that doesn’t invalidate it. If someone believes it, fortunately or unfortunately, that makes it their truth.

If we only talk about the upsides you create a bullshit factory, where people spend all their time sharing how awesome and flawless they are. I don’t want to work with those people.

Growth

Going back to the earlier point on rapid growth - anyone who has been through it knows that it comes with pressure. You don’t have much slack, and it can feel like there’s little margin for error.

That’s exactly the place you need psychological safety.

Milestones come and go when you’re running a business, but for all of the growth we’ve seen there are simpler things that bring satisfaction.

Only about half of new businesses survive beyond the five-year mark. It drops to one in three making it to a decade.

We had our 6th birthday in November, so now our next big target is to make sure we’re one of the minority who make it to a decade.

Often we talk about big milestones like doubling revenue, hitting a certain turnover target, or another measure of growth as being cause for celebration, but I’ve learned to take more joy from other achievements.

I’m not a big believer in pride, but we’ve never missed payroll and now have a team of over 30.

If you’ve never run a business you might think that’s the minimum requirement, but anyone who has been in a leadership position knows what it means to manage growth while keeping the lights on.

That we’ve been able attract and convince this group of people to spend this part of their careers with us is worth more than anything else I could do with my life.

The next year is looking great, and it’s thanks to this team that I feel like we can really make it happen.

Read More

You Don’t Think For Yourself

When was the last time you listened to a Coldplay album?

Nice Idea, Won't Work Here

Don’t worry about the person who told you it couldn’t be done.

Not Normal or New Normal?

Did Beyoncé stop us from living our best lives?

No More Normal Life

What's wrong with being boring and normal?

As much as we might like to pretend we’re single-minded, that’s less true than we would feel happy to admit.

We look to those around us to make our decision making easier, and save us the mental anguish.

This prejudice saves us having to put in the effort needed to assess everything in isolation. It is quite a useful evolutionary advantage, but we need to know when we’re on autopilot.

We’ve had two big social experiments that have illustrated this better than anything else in the last decade in the UK: Covid and Brexit.

At the start of Covid, people first looked to their leaders for guidance and advice, then to their peers.

Very quickly, the consensus of that peer group dictated to you whether you were taking the vaccine or wearing a mask.

Even more unexpected was how much of a relationship there was between people’s views on Brexit and Covid. The data suggests Brexit voting patterns influenced the likelihood of taking a vaccine, but also that areas that voted most in favour of remaining in the European Union have a lower death rate and higher vaccination rate.

Can our stubborn commitment to prejudice really lead to outcomes like this, or can we wrestle back control of our minds?

First Response

When I mentioned Coldplay at the top, you would have had a reaction.

Coldplay are a band that everyone knows, and whether you listened to an album of theirs or not in the last decade is probably a position you’ve held since their first album came out in 2000.

It isn’t necessarily an informed position, but it’s easier to have that than to have to listen to every one of their albums and change your mind.

Changing your mind is hard. Both admitting you were wrong, and the effort of having to review the back catalogue with the multiple listens it takes to form your own decision.

Life is much easier if you can just decide you don’t like music by Coldplay, U2, or Taylor Swift rather than invest the effort and energy to find out for certain.

It’s also likely that you won’t need to question your gut, you don’t obviously lose anything by not giving Coldplay the benefit of the doubt - or any other names or concepts that might create mental shortcuts.

Mentioning names like Karl Marx, Edward Bernays, or Adam Smith, evoke a similarly strong reaction. All of these names have become shortcuts that represent a deep culture which in one go people can automatically dismiss, reject or ignore.

If someone says to you they agree with Marx you’d take a view even if you’ve never read Das Kapital.

It also wouldn’t matter if you agreed with 80% of Das Kapital but disagreed with the overall concept - there’s not much room for that in the current climate.

This world doesn’t like those who are different.

It’s easier to follow a crowd than to dare to take the alternative path.

To that end, it’s safer to decide that you don’t like Coldplay even if you might be starving yourself of an experience you’d enjoy.

Single Knowledge

One of the really fascinating things for our generation is what the internet has done for urban legends.

There used to be a single knowledge on things like how long it takes for a chewing gum to digest in your stomach - seven years of course - things that every child knew but that was never taught in a lesson or written in a textbook.

I grew up in the town where Mary from Mary Had a Little Lamb grew up. Her school was on the bottom of the hill on Brook Street, now Penllyn Chapel. That was the school that the lamb followed her to every day.

Only that story was never true.

All of those urban legends when we were kids we now know were not true.

The internet has created a wholly new landscape for these urban legends and agreeing what truth is.

Even simple things like everyone having a different route to get to places convinced that their route was quickest was ruined by satnav.

Single knowledge was the stuff that everyone just agreed on, it’s the way the world is.

When you go to uni you start comparing these different myths about the reality of the world around you. Some of it is nostalgia, some of it is more fundamental than that.

It’s world building, it affirms what we know and hold as truth.

There are some things like language and local dialect which share this quality.

Language is a single knowledge issue, until you are in a bar with a northerner and a southerner and you ask them what you call sausages in-between bread.

It doesn’t matter what you think is the truth if someone else is convinced you’re wrong.

We’ve had generations of trusting what you’re told and the stories shared by those around you, until this millennium came around and all of a sudden we had access to all of the world’s knowledge, opinions, and perspectives.

Now, there is no single knowledge.

We justify our position by listening to people we trust will reinforce our views.

We’re influenced directly and indirectly by individuals and groups that we might never physically share a room with.

We Don’t Even Hide This Anymore

In the last decade we’ve started giving a name to the people who professionally attempt to change the way we think and act, the clue is in that name

Influencers are more now than just a novelty on social media, the movement has become a powerhouse industry.

Influencers took more ad revenue than magazines for the first time in 2022, and as a collective are on course to overtake newspaper advertising in the next few years.

Influencers aren’t accountable to the same powers as newspapers when it comes to editorial quality and impartiality.

This idea of influencers goes two ways - firstly there’s the idea that “anyone” can generate revenue now that it has been democratised, but secondly that a narrower field of folks even stand a chance of becoming an influencer.

The Russell Brand controversy earlier in 2023 showed how this can become dangerous. People tended to have a fixed view that almost felt curated by influencers. You either had mistrust of mainstream media, or a mistrust of the personality. It’s unlikely you’d have no opinion.

The same has happened with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Boris Johnson in the last couple of years. Whether you think Trump caused the Capitol attack, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop is the clearest evidence of wrong-doing, or that Boris Johnson was negligent during 2020-2021 is highly likely to be affected by the way you vote.

Instead of rationally assessing the information it takes much less mental energy to jump to a conclusion that fits our own narrative.

Influencers play a role in representing a much bigger shift in our society that has quietly become dominant.

There’s a big risk associated with this: there’s no longer value in putting in the work to become a master gin distiller, much better to just get a celebrity to endorse your new brand as a “co-founder”.

We don’t need the best, we buy the most familiar.

It’s also so narrow that anyone outside that audience can’t process the fierce enthusiasm.

Last October I was at an Arsenal game and they had a new drink in the fridge in bright blue and red bottles. It meant nothing to me, but the teens around me couldn’t believe their luck - they’d be the talk of the school by taking in bottles of Prime the next day.

This obsession with nostalgia and familiarity could be a whole other post. As could be the question of whether this is even a problem if people have smiles on their faces.

There’s one other key way to filter if someone is worth our time.

Privacy Politics

Politics used to be private matter. Now it becomes important to know every perspective from every person - why is that?

Does it help us to know them better? To decide if they’re “our kind of person”?

Earlier this year the England men’s football manager, Gareth Southgate, used a press conference to ask when it became the job of a football manager untrained in these complex issues to be a spokesman for topics as diverse as LGBTQI+ rights, Middle Eastern politics, and misogyny.

Do we really need to apply these expectations to football coaches? What does it teach us about how well they can do their day job? To prejudge their future decisions?

When we were kids, it felt like left and right were much more abstract concepts.

Nowadays each touchpaper topic demands a hot take that inevitable leads to ignition and explosion.

Politicians aren’t fallible, three-dimensional humans, they’re shallow: “evil right” or “deluded left”.

Did the social media algorithms not only categorise us for their benefit, but help us to categorise ourselves and others? Once we’ve categorised them one way or another we can decide whether to save the effort of whether to trust them in the future.

Look at the Stars

I’ll admit, I haven’t listened to a Coldplay album since I was a late teen and Parachutes was the indie album of the summer.

According to Spotify, they’re the 11th most listened to band in the world.

That should be a good enough reason to trust that they create good music that we might enjoy.

But that’s just not what people like me listen to, is it?

Read More

Nice Idea, Won't Work Here

Don’t worry about the person who told you it couldn’t be done.

Not Normal or New Normal?

Did Beyoncé stop us from living our best lives?

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Finding New Fixers

Crowdfunding is more about the crowd than it is about the funding…

There’s a LinkedIn cliché which comes up most weeks in my feed, where someone needs to share a long story about the adversity they overcame when getting started, and it usually involves being told by someone of influence that they could never do what they dreamed of.

This seems to trigger a “how dare they, I’ll show them” mindset. And then a couple of years later, when the goal has been hit they finally get their moment of being able to press send on that LinkedIn gloat post, and they get this amazing rush of satisfaction.

Or not.

It is quite a romantic idea, but it’s really not a great reason to get out of bed every morning.

Maybe I’m biased because I listen to a lot of Alan Partridge audiobooks and it always makes me read the posts with his voice in mind, and add “needless to say, I had the last laugh” at the end.

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Intrinsic Motivation

There’s something in here around where the intrinsic and extrinsic meet, and how that dose of “I’ll prove you wrong” energy can get the intrinsic pumping a little bit more.

You don’t think about that person or comment every day, in every sales process or every hire, but there’s obviously something rumbling away under the surface.

I’ve written before about the need to have the deeper intrinsic motivation to get you through the roughest days, nights, weeks, months, and years of starting and scaling something from scratch. It’s the stuff about falling in love with the problem not the solution, and not just doing it for the money.

Maybe for some people it’s a case of overcoming adversity that keeps them going on the worst days.

I think this is especially true for those who feel like their name is the most valuable thing they have, but this would need a longer piece to explain my thinking fully.

Getting Good Advice

Some people feel it is their duty to tell you that your idea is rubbish, to save wasting your time.

I’ve written about this before.

I’m not sure if they think it’s a moral duty, or what, but it’s often a bit misguided and filled with some kind of superiority complex.

There were a lot of meetings that I had when we were first setting up ICE that had this tone. I remember one specifically which was very well-meaning but ended with a “nice idea, won’t work here” which I always recite but which really wasn’t that much of a motivator.

If anything it just acts as more of a reminder of how hard of a challenge you’re taking on.

In those early days, you’re looking for someone to tell you something positive for a stack of reasons.

When you’re trying to drive a new idea, you want validation, you might want people to tell you how wonderful you are.

You know it is hard, but you’re not afraid of hard work. Unless you’ve done it before you also probably don’t know just how hard it’s going to be, so it’s unlikely that the “it’s going to be hard work” advice will land without sounding like your commitment and effort is being challenged.

You want to feel welcomed in this new community and know you’ve found the right place.

So it’s perfectly normal and natural that those people telling you that it can’t be done will leave a mark.

But there’s a big dollop of Mom Test in this.

You need to decide whose advice you take on board and who you politely smile back at and move on from.

There’s no value acting on feedback from someone who is not going to be a customer or key stakeholder. There’s no point asking me if your energy drink business or film idea is going to be a hit.

Taking the wrong advice and feedback seriously can lead to a great sense of facing more adversity than the reality.

On the Face of Adversity

Adversity is the last bit of this I would like to explore more.

A big part of the LinkedIn post is this perspective on having overcome adversity.

It’s the same with Britain’s Got Talent.

There’s something in the empathy created when witnessing a human do something superhuman and overcoming unbelievable barriers.

We are really attracted to this story, the hero’s journey. Crossing the threshold into the unknown, facing your fears and living to return to tell the story - sharing the gift.

Knowing how much the hero’s journey resonates has led to successfully replicated films and TV show formats.

Without the adversity, it’s just someone doing something. The adversity introduces this sense of doubt that they could possibly achieve their goals given everything they had to face and overcome.

Adversity is an interesting thing to explore.

Our instinct would be that you really want to avoid adversity, but even beyond creating a compelling background for your future TED Talk and appearance on Britain’s Got Talent, adversity can be strangely good for you - sometimes.

Written All Over Your Face

In Sikh culture, there is a belief that at birth you have the destiny of your soul written on your forehead. It is where your soul resides, not technically “written” but told.

There’s a thought experiment linked to this, if you could read the destiny of your newborn daughter and see that she had a catastrophic accident in her late teens - say a car crash in which a close friend dies and she loses a leg - would your instinct be to protect her and avoid this destiny, or let it happen?

Of course, instinctively it would be to protect her and have her avoid the pain, but these episodes of adversity can be the making of us.

This is not to say it is wise to create catastrophic events, but it is how you react to these events that is crucial.

Not wearing a helmet on a motorbike isn’t inviting an opportunity to create an interesting backstory.

There’s an extreme to this, and that’s the recognition that adverse childhood experiences - ACEs - contribute to a lot of bad outcomes later in life, from social integration, economic engagement, or even health conditions and inflammation.

There’s a very thin line between adversity being good or bad for your long term prospects, and even then it isn’t binary.

It seems from research that the best time for adversity is in young adulthood, old enough to comprehend and process what’s going on, and young enough to build a new path and respond to it.

But that probably feels like quite a crass comment if you’ve faced serious adversity in your life that affects your day to day living, so I hope this brief section on such a deep and complicated topic doesn’t come across as dismissive or insensitive.

Hindsight

One of the people who told me it wouldn’t work has since held their hands up and accepted that it wasn’t their finest prediction.

I don’t resent their feedback - they were probably right. There was no convincing evidence that we would make it work.

That’s the point, I suppose. Overcoming the adversity to have a story to tell. Not having the experience, skills, means, or resources for anyone to believe you could do it, which leads to quite a reasonable assumption that you will fail.

Of course, alternatively do what ever you like.

If you’re getting what you want and what you need I’m sure a random post from the guy sat in this seat isn’t really going to change your course.

It would be pretty hypocritical if that wasn’t the case at the end of a post like this.

Read More

Not Normal or New Normal?

Did Beyoncé stop us from living our best lives?

No More Normal Life

What's wrong with being boring and normal?

Finding New Fixers

Crowdfunding is more about the crowd than it is about the funding…

Last week I wrote about the importance of enjoying a boring life, and why it is good for us.

Here’s part two on why we might not think that.

Too Late?

Our economic models rely on constantly driving up productivity and boosting growth.

(I’ll write a lot more about this next year…)

Have the next generation already given up on this? Is it even possible to keep growing when things have been cut so far back?

I mentioned last week about quiet quitting; there’s also the culture of slow working, and, more broadly and difficult to measure, not giving more than is needed.

If you don’t believe you can win, no matter how hard you try and how much you commit, what does this do?

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Mental health is at crisis point and I think a lot of it comes from the undue pressure that we put on people before they even have a chance to learn where they fit into this world.

This generation is entering a workplace where they’re starting their careers tidying up from the last person who sat in that desk chair, assuming they’re not still clinging on to it as they can’t retire and leave the void.

And what’s the point even doing the work when hard work won’t get you anywhere anymore?

Merit Myth

Meritocracy is now a myth. Nepo babies are an accepted part of our culture that highlight this better than anything else.

Meritocracy creates an attractive framework that if you try your best and work hard you can achieve anything.

But that doesn’t add up. Does it imply that lower-paid workers like nurses and teaching assistants don’t work as hard or don’t deserve the same rewards as financiers or politicians?

It’s why I hate the language of bootstrapping in the start-up world. Some people have bootstraps that don’t fall off on the first pull.

You’re more likely to end up as a lawyer or in finance if you had someone in your family who was a lawyer or working in finance.

Same way you’re going to be better advised if you have close friends in the same professions, and feel less intimidated asking for help.

One point I want to make on this is the deeply irritating advice that I hear when people tell others to, “Follow your passion.”

All of this creates further barriers for people. But what if we had an economy and society that created the environment for people to find the passions they can realistically make a living from?

That’s where we need to make the obvious and smooth segue to the teachings of the Goddess Arete.

The Goddess Arete

Arete is goddess of virtue, excellence, goodness, and valour or glory, and a descendent of Poseidon.

This gives us the old Greek idea of arete.

Something can have arete, or you can strive for arete. It’s a very important concept in Greek culture.

What this means is that everything has its purpose for which it is excellent and glorious. The arete of a knife is to cut well, the arete of an eye is to see, a spade’s arete is to dig holes. But what is the arete of a person?

More important than this is the specific application of that question. The arete of a person might be something we could discuss at a high level, but the arete of you or any other individual is much trickier.

The arete of a good lawyer is to support others in legal conflict, whereas the arete of a chef is to create great meals.

Discovering your arete in an opaque economy might not be such an easy or painless task, and is especially tricky if you don’t have visibility of opportunities.

It’s something that might even seem like an alien concept if your experience and belief of work is not about finding the thing at which you can become uniquely talented, but is instead a means to an end.

Arete is something which means we understand and live our best life. A good life is where we develop our strengths, realise our potential, and become what it is in our nature to become.

It is the discovery and realisation of a person or thing's “full potential or inherent function.”

I think this is vital right now, and pertinent to why so many people are struggling with a normal life.

I’ve met so many lawyers and teachers over the years who have spent decades training and practising only to realise they feel they need to get out.

There’s a bit of the aspiration to have a good job, only to end up in a role that doesn’t play to your arete or in a system which no longer enables the realisation of this arete.

I don’t want to miss another key point in this, linked to two concepts: Professor Carol Dweck’s growth mindset idea and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Carol Dweck’s growth mindset concept tells us that (almost) anyone can achieve greatness with the growth mindset. You just need to commit, and do deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is the difference between constant repetition and making meaningful gains by focusing on the areas where we can improve our performance.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is basically social media in the last decade. People with less knowledge on a subject are more confident in their ability than those who delve deeper and uncover the nuances.

When you’re at the deepest valley of the Dunning-Kruger graph it can really dawn on you how big the challenge is.

Sometimes it’s important to not jump ship when you’re at the lowest ebb of your confidence, or when it gets increasingly painful to make that next step up.

Sticking At It

I wrote previously about the Helsinki Bus Station Theory (the theory that to find your own arete, you should stick to the path you’re on and let it guide you.)

There’s a reason why it gets so hard to stay on the bus.

We don’t have to ride alone, so many of us think this is the case. I think it’s Beyoncé’s fault.

Find a companion for the bus ride. Someone who will sit by you on the long journey and might even bring snacks to keep you going.

It’s more like finding a good carpool buddy.

There’s a big link here to the interdependence movement. The more we think we have to fulfil our potential, the more we feel individually responsible for our success so as to be able to fully take credit for it.

That’s where Ms Knowles played an important role.

Me vs We

It was August 2000 when Destiny’s Child released Independent Women and preached the importance of boasting about not relying on the support of others.

There’s a curious book I read a few years ago which tries to explain a concept that suggests that there’s a bit of a cycle linked to this stuff.

It’s called Pendulum, and looks at How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future, written by Roy Williams and Michael Drew.

The big idea is that society goes through cycles, as the “pendulum” swings from an emphasis on “me” to an emphasis on “we”.

It’s an interesting idea, but a lot of it needs to be taken with a bucket of salt. It can hardly be described as objective.

But when applied retrospectively, it is quite convincing.

Basically, it suggests the four cycles are towards me, away from me, towards we, and away from we in twenty year phases. It also suggests that 2023 is the midpoint between the zeniths of “we” and “me”, so very much a time of conflict.

1943 was the last year that was in this same point of transition from “me” to “we”.

2003 was the proposed last “me” peak (around the time that Independent Women was a smash hit), and 2043 would be the next high point of “we”.

1963 was the last time we had a “we” period and 1923 was the peak of “me”.

I hope this is making some sense. I’d recommend the book, but really only the first half. The second half is just a bit weird.

That Was My Idea

One thing that always annoys me is when people do the whole “I had that idea before they did” like as if they deserve credit or a percentage of the proceeds.

The best example I can think of here would be the Apple AirPods.

It doesn't matter if you had the idea for a small, lightweight bluetooth headset that you could carry around in your pocket; there’s no way that an invention like that could be created by a single person.

You need designers, you need access to market, you need chip experts, battery experts, you need the capital, you need the process.

I’ve written previously about Edison’s lab: you need to realise it isn’t all on you to make your career and your experience as an entrepreneur a success.

In case I’ve veered slightly off track (I have, it’s what I love doing most), this is the point:

I think so many people are struggling because we place too much value on rushing to find a career which is socially celebrated, and striving to do this all alone.

There are systemic reasons for why this is the case, but unless we start to call them out these issues are only going to get worse.

We could all live happy, normal, boring lives if we accepted this, and build systems that celebrate it.

Callbacks

I want to wrap up with two callbacks. First, to the comment about carpooling.

There’s a really enjoyable book written by Marc Randolph - co-founder of Netflix - called That Will Never Work all about the origin story of Netflix.

The story that I love from it is before they started Netflix he and his co-founder, Reed Hastings, used to carpool together everyday from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley and would spend the whole trip everyday pulling apart ideas for what they would do next.

They took the carpooling idea to the next level, but it meant when they found the right idea they knew exactly who to try it out with.

Second, I don’t think Beyoncé will read this, but I strangely only have one degree of separation from her so I want to make clear that I don’t hold her that much to blame. I think it’s a different idea of independence to not rely on someone else to pay for your own shoes.

I don’t know why, but this generation in which we’ve been raised seems to think we all have to strive to have an above average life.

This is part one of a two-parter on why we should be worried about the problem with a normal life.

It might start at school where success is judged based on the percentage of its pupils that end up in Oxbridge.

Or the schools being set an impossible goal of all being above average. Or those that are marked down because they have one child going through a difficult time dragging their scores down.

It might be the TV we’ve been raised on like X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. The idea that you just need someone to spot your unique talent and discover you.

It might be the constant craving for validation to stand out amongst peers in an environment that has been moulded into a hyper competitive economic and employment challenge.

It might be social media, and the myth that anyone could have the life of an influencer, and is responsible for creating content at that level multiple times a day.

It might be the scale of the challenge faced by future generations to get this planet and civilisation back on track.

I’ve never understood why we’re so obsessed with this idea of “potential”. But I think it’s a dangerous message to keep parroting to people already feeling pretty overwhelmed.

The Boring Good Life

So much data, research, and evidence would suggest that the happiest life is a life in which we spend more time with our boring family, doing boring things like going for a boring walk in boring nature.

But unless we can put these things on Instagram or on the bottom of our CV as one of our passions as the thing that sets us apart, it seems to not have a competitive edge or angle.

We need this explicit validation to justify our behaviour.

There are no £multimillion billboard campaigns advertising the idea of going for a walk in your local park. There’s no social media clout that comes from spending time with your Nan.

I recently had a friend ask what he is doing with his life, when he already has everything.

It’s like we have this guilt that unless we are striving or pushing, or forcing ourselves to do more and more and more then we’re wasting our potential or we are letting people down. That we’re being lazy or not doing what we ought to do.

It’s exhausting, and I wonder if this is why there’s such a trend of quiet quitting, and of people looking back to Covid lockdowns with fond memories.

Maybe it helps to explain how people who give it all up to live in a van can gain 10,000 Instagram followers overnight and maybe why too.

I think it comes from this craving for simplicity, when we don’t realise that we’re all hooked on this invisible habit.

Chaos Reigns

Nothing is simple right now. There are no good guys and bad guys, or correct answers to how to do things.

Who stands up for a normal life? Who tells that story of its importance? I don’t know.

I remember in my early twenties, realising that our generation was always going to have a problem.

Many of us were fortunate to have seen our parents generation get to a point where they have the house, the garden, two cars, but they still don’t feel fulfilled.

And many born after 1980 have less chance of achieving that level of comfort either way.

If you graduated into a £25,000 job in 2003 that same job should start at £44,000 today.

The average house price in 2003 was £92,000 in Wales, £134,000 in England. So around 5x salary would get you an average house.

But we don’t have an economy that can tolerate this, despite the fact that the same average house now costs £213,000 in Wales and £288,000 in England.

(Minor point, but this indicates that Welsh average prices are at least catching up with England, 68% in 2003 vs 74% in 2023).

Even a boring normal life is an impossible milestone.

Fix This Mess

Beyond the financial realities, there’s a broader sense that kids of the future have unbearable pressure on them to do something with their talents.

People who are doing good, honest work who feel like there should be more.

Maybe there is more.

Maybe we do need to have this constant desire to strive to do something with our lives to achieve our potential.

Maybe now more than ever when we have environmental and social crisis all around us, and there is a sense that it is on younger generations to fix the mess made by older generations.

It may not be solely made by all of the previous generations, and not necessarily knowingly, but there are plenty of people who have benefited from the negligence that has put us in this current mess.

We need strivers and we need to sense ambition and hope, but more likely we need more people to know when they’ve done a good day at work.

I can’t believe that people can’t feel value for the role they play in society and on the services that we rely on them for and by committing their lives to these causes. That they can’t have the benefit of a secure life in their own home, a safe home that they love, near loved ones.

Instead, we seem to have people who feel a sense of guilt because they cannot afford to take their foot off the pedal for even a heartbeat. Maybe that’s right for vital, normal people doing vital, normal jobs and living vital, normal lives.

To feel like they have to be superhuman to do the bare minimum is not right.

Maybe this is why younger people (and women - but that’s a deeper post) are at higher risk of burnout than any generation before.

We measure productivity gains as if it’s the best way to assess the success of our nation, but what happens if there’s a ceiling to that growth? And what if we’ve been banging our heads against that ceiling for so long that it explains the increase in migraine sufferers and other autoimmune disorders?

Part two comes next week, including the merit myth, importance of the Goddess Arete, and why I hate when people talk about bootstrapping a start-up.

Thanks for the love for the last post.

The Sunday I published it was the busiest for traffic since I started the Good Founder.

It’s nice to know I can go a bit broader and still strike a chord.

Thanks again 🙏

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You don’t know when goodbye really means goodbye.

I remember a wedding recently where I hadn’t seen so many friends for a decade or so. None of us knew that the last time we said goodbye it would be for so long, but I think leaving that evening we realised it would likely be the last time for a good while.

You never know if this is the last time that you will do something that seems so normal.

This isn’t a “live every day as if it is your last” bit. Things change.

It is because we have a finite number of experiences that they are enjoyable, though we often don’t think of it this way.

If we had infinite Christmases, or infinite bedtime stories with our kids, then we might enjoy them a little bit less.

Or maybe we don’t even consider that in the moment, when they’re mundane or even inconvenient. When we’re imagining being somewhere else or when we are somewhere else, scrolling through social media rather than being fully present. We don’t imagine that one day we will long to have one more bedtime story, or pint with a friend.

Of course, we don't think selectively about what qualifies to eat our time. We don't think of the opportunity cost of time.

If we had infinite experiences maybe we would learn how to do them better, or maybe they would be so pointless that it wouldn’t make a difference.

一期一会

There’s an old Japanese idiom, ichi-go ichi-e, a yojijukugo which translates as one time, one meeting and implores you to give respect to your host as though it were a meeting that could only occur once in a lifetime.

Suggesting this level of ceremony would have been laughed at in the dining rooms and kitchens of my grandparents, but as you get older you realise a thing or two.

You might have seen the Twitter thread from Sahil Bloom. The moment he realised that if he only stuck to seeing his parents once a year then he probably only has 15 more visits left.

And that’s 15 visits with possibly decreasing quality of life and assuming they stay healthy enough in the meantime.

Often it isn’t easy to make visits happen more often. Life is good at getting in the way.

Ichi-go ichi-e makes me think about the things that change, and the things that never change, in between these Christmas meals or birthday occasions.

We change our minds through every experience, every book, every relationship. If you’re lucky enough to have eight people coming together for your Christmas dinner then that’s a lot of experiences to change the context going into that dinner.

But sometimes things feel like they don’t change at all, which I guess is why we’re tricked into believing they never will.

I think it’s more of a modern issue as it becomes so easy - and likely - for people to move away from their family and where they were raised.

If you’ve had to spend hundreds and travel for hours to make it back for a party the sacrifice is better understood than if you’ve been sat at home waiting and wondering why they’re fifteen minutes late.

If you have grown up in a nuclear family with grandparents, aunties, and uncles all in the same town, I think maybe it’s hard to process something so different.

It’s certainly harder for traditions to continue at distance.

New Traditions

I’ve wanted to address the importance of tradition and ritual more in this series, and at some point I will, but I want to talk about them a bit in this context.

My great Taid (Welsh word for grandfather) on my mother’s side celebrated his birthday on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas Day for any non-Brits). Anyone with birthdays on Boxing Day or around Christmas will tell you this is bad news, but I think it gets better as you get older.

It was a great tradition creator in our family. Every Boxing Day we would visit their house nearby, and extend the festivities for another day.

When he passed in 2006 there was quite a void, but we started a new tradition. Every Boxing Day we would go for a riverside walk in Llangollen, near the home that they raised their kids (my Nana) in.

In 2013, after his surviving wife, my great Nana, passed away, we further secured the tradition, by adding a plaque to the bench nearest the old house and that we ended our walk at, and added in a swig of whiskey from an old hip flask.

Now, every year we all make time to come together to have that walk between Christmas and New Year. Family from all over gather, to pay tribute and to have that moment.

It might be a different group every year, but it is no longer just about honouring Raymond and Queenie. It’s about honouring our surviving family and the future, and the finite moments that we have to gather and recognise these occasions.

The tradition gives it further clout, which means that more people are likely to commit and participate.

We didn’t discuss it as a tradition, it emerged and then it was about encapsulating it and doing everything we could to make sure it was repeated annually, come rain or light rain.

These traditions normally have some consistent elements, I’ll definitely talk more about that in the future, but one of the most important is place.

This is Not My Beautiful House

The place is a vital part of a tradition.

A house isn’t just a building. We don’t value them just on the materials used.

If you’ve ever been to a grandparents’ home after they’ve passed you realise how much of your memories locked into that space are taken for granted. When small, insignificant items hold deeply locked memories which were living in the dusty corners of your mind.

We don’t know when we walk into that room for the last family dinner, or birthday party, or late night waiting for positive news from the hospital.

It would feel strange to document that room, to walk around and take pictures of the pictures on the walls, the carpet’s pattern, the books in the bookcase.

The first time you walk into a building after a person has permanently left it can feel, well, empty.

If you walk in after those trinkets go - those things that if you were asked to paint a picture of the room you would forget to include but when you walk in you’re painfully aware of their absence - it feels less like the place.

The joy of the place is as much about the company you have, but they all overlap and contribute to our single memory of a fleeting moment in our lives.

Funerals

I’ve been to more funerals this year than I have in the last decade combined. It’s not great.

Funerals are strange things, maybe this is a very British thing but we get together in a church, chapel, or crematorium, have a ceremony of varying levels of sincerity and personalisation, and then head to a pub or social club for a beige buffet and beer or two.

It never feels like much of an honouring of that person.

I want to try something different at the next funeral I attend. I want to leave cards with questions on the tables which ask what they remember about the person who has passed.

What was their favourite song? Who was their favourite team? What made them angry? When were they really embarrassed? When did you ever see them cry?

We all have these memories that we never surface (apart from maybe those late nights when you can’t sleep nor control the randomness that becomes urgent) but never have chance to share.

We have this amazing gathering of people who are uniquely able to honour the memory of the person who has passed.

The funeral is the last time you will have this diverse set of folks altogether in one place. It’s like a solar system and the person who passed away is the main gravitational pull. Friends who would never meet, distant cousins, ex-husbands.

There are so many of these stories that are the soul of that person. The soul is the imprint on our minds and hearts that persists.

For some people it might be what they do in the world, the buildings they build, the companies they start, the families they raise.

But for every person it is what they do to our hearts and our memories that outlive the mortal self.

I’ve mentioned the Margaret Atwood poem about souls before.

We create a soul through the memories we create in the company of loved ones.

But sometimes the best stories come from how we react to something embarrassing, silly, or melodramatic. Those “do you remember when…?” stories that are tinged in shame but not mockery. The time she fell in the stream, the time he got ketchup all over his shirt, the time they didn’t turn the oven on and left the turkey in the cold ruining Christmas dinner.

But it wasn’t ruined, nobody starved, and it made a humorous tale for every Christmas to come.

I think there’s something in our defences that sap these precious memories from happening, none of us ever want to look silly.

I’m going to write more one day about how it seems like it’s become impossible to live a normal life. We all have personal brands to protect nowadays.

Maybe if we were all a little more vulnerable and humble we would have more embarrassing stories to tell at funerals.

Next Christmas

What are your plans for Christmas?

What are you going to do to create embarrassing memories, honour traditions, and value what might be one of your last ten Christmases with people you cherish?

Thanks for letting me vent.

This is part three on storytelling, you can read part one here, and part two here.

This whole series comes from a workshop I regularly deliver to startups and university students across the country. The broader theme is crowdfunding, the storytelling component is an important part of it.

When you start thinking about launching a crowdfunding campaign it’s because of the funding part - right?

I don’t see it that way, and if you ask most people who have crowdfunded in the past they echo the sentiment.

More often than not crowdfunding isn’t that lucrative. Even if you hit a six-figure raise, you are likely to have very slim margins, and will have created a lot of work for yourself in the process.

But that isn’t to say there’s no value in crowdfunding, you just need to recognise the other value created.

As I see it, there are three reasons to crowdfund:

To launch something

To make a difference

To invite others to be a part of something

Launching is always a tense time, but launching with crowdfunding can be a useful way to drive interest.

This way, you formally launch it while simultaneously creating a sense of urgency and deadline.

You tell people - honestly - that without their help this big, new, exciting thing won’t happen. Your dream, your big ambition.

You can tell the story of the difference you hope to make, and the role they can have in making that change happen.

This then in turn leads to a couple of other things:

1. Validation

2. Market testing

3. Some revenue

If you hit your goals on the crowdfund then you should go some way closer to validating there’s a market for your product, evidencing that people will pay for it, and creating some revenue.

There’s still risk. If you’re launching a restaurant or cafe and you are selling credit for future people to use when you open then you’re losing out on tomorrow’s revenue when you need it most. There might be a lean period as you go through the pain of serving a lot of customers for free as they cash in their credit and vouchers.

That’s the problem with thinking about crowdfunding narrowly as a funding exercise. You can come out of it feeling worse off financially.

Crowdfunding works when you create a sense of exclusivity. You can invite people to be a part of something that can truly make a difference.

On the flip side to the financial disappointment, you build a lot of loyalty. A LOT.

One cafe in Cardiff that we worked with on their campaign still see people come in every week from their original campaign five years ago. This is vital loyalty that can make all of the difference for any small business.

Is this loyalty rational? As always, there are mental models at play, but we will want our previous decisions to work out.

People want to be proven right. If they backed you at the start then they have a reason to want to make sure you are successful. If you are, they were smart and wise and did the right thing. They came in at the ground floor.

If you fail, there can be a sense of that reflecting on their judgement. It doesn’t have to be necessarily the case, but that commitment to your success can be something which creates value for you time and time again.

Big job

Crowdfunding isn’t a shortcut to get funded. Often people will ask about crowdfunding because they’re not sure where else they will go to raise money.

Just because it is obvious doesn’t mean that it is easy.

There’s so much to do before launching, and so much to manage while the campaign is live.

There’s a long task list, and this isn’t exhaustive:

• You need to get your video (I could write pages on this alone)

• Work out your rewards

• Map out your social media campaigns

• Prepare all of your written content

• Create media assets

• Plan press coverage and press releases

• Form your company

• Set your targets - for all stages

• Consider the time of the campaign - when to launch and how long to run

• Evaluate which platform to go with

• Capture and share team information

• Plan and share your data use policies

• Get your insurances in place

• Create a website

• Consider the consequences if you overachieve

• Consider the consequences if you underachieve

• Assess and prove your ability to deliver

• Create a project management plan

• Map your competition

• Plan your follow-up campaigns

• Write your business plan

• Open a business bank account

• Line-up your initial backers (ideally at least 50%)

• Work out the cost of delivering the rewards

Some of these things might not be immediately obvious, but there are a couple of good examples of why - for example - you might need a plan for what happens if you overachieve.

There was a campaign a few years ago for a drone called Zano which raised £2.3m but never delivered a single unit to any of their backers. A lot of breakout campaigns have led to similar disappointment for backers. You might think this would be a nice problem to have, but the evidence points to it being a curse.

Why would someone part with their money?

There are a few reasons to evidence value for money for potential investors. You might choose different platforms or approaches depending on which of these you think is what you’re offering and what your investors will want.

There are five things an investor or funder might get from investing in your business:

• Cash

• Coverage

• Intellectual property

• Product/service

• Warm feeling

Cash is the simple Dragon’s Den formula. I give you £100,000 for 10% of your business and in five years time when your company is worth £10m my 10% is worth £1m, 10x the amount I invested.

There are other ways to get cash back if you’re a funder, it might be loan repayments, or you might buy them out.

Coverage is something that a sponsor, philanthropist, or trust might seek from making cash available to you. It might be naming them in a plaque on a wall, or mentioning them in a press release.

Intellectual property is the protection that your ideas have in order to secure the value of them. R&D funds will have IP generation as a clear goal or outcome, which gives a tangible asset to show for their investment.

Offering your audience exclusive, early access to your product or service can be enough of an incentive to get people to invest - but this is basically just commerce. The difference here is if you’re going down the route of crowdfunding and you’re asking for the faith of the investors that you’re good for the investment and will deliver.

Some, but really not many, will be happy to support you just for the warm fuzzy feeling in their heart. These will really only appear if you’re socially driven or in a clear niche that they’re interested in.

Other Storytelling Frameworks

One last bonus bit.

There are plenty of other good frameworks out there which you need to look into if you’re interested in this stuff. I’m not going to overshare here in order to encourage you to get those books on order.

The excellent “Made to Stick” by Dan and Chip Heath follows the SUCCES (sic) template of:

Simple

Unexpected

Concrete

Credible

Emotional

Stories

The book is exceptional, and gives stacks of great examples to go along with each of these lessons.

In Do Story, Bobette Buster shares 10 Principles of Storytelling. Three standouts are:

• Setting the GPS: giving a place, time, conditions, context to make people feel the moment

• Juxtapose two ideas that might collide uncomfortably

• Let go: hand the story over, end it, and leave your audience wanting more, less is more

The downside to any of these frameworks is that they create an opportunity for exploitation. Stay savvy to when people are trying to manufacture a calling or candour to gain favour.

There was recently a great example of a sticky tape manufacturer who had changed all of their packaging to create the impression of making their product more environmentally responsible, but it was all just smoke and mirrors.

Influence by Robert Cialdini is a great read to improve your defences.

Are there other storytelling frameworks I should have on my list?

Read next…

Finding New Fixers

Crowdfunding is more about the crowd than it is about the funding…

Telling Stories People Will Hear

Storytelling is an undervalued skill that can become a superpower…

Get Touring

In the world of coworking the art of doing good tours…

Community Saves Lives

We need to talk more about the true meaning of life.

Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science

One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off…

This is part two on storytelling, you can read part one here.

Once you’ve practised weaving in the six storytelling Cs, you need to keep telling that story to as many folks and as varied an audience as possible.

The crucial thing about getting these elements woven into your story is that it can do two things:

1. Build a following

2. Diversify your following

If you imagine the “is there a doctor in the house” trope, the best way to ensure there is a doctor on hand is to fill the bus with as diverse a range of people as possible.

You need to build a diverse following of stakeholders. They don’t all have to be customers, or employees, or investors, they can just be interested folks who want you to succeed.

You don’t need everyone to commit, you just need them to want you to win for now.

McGraw-Hill Magazines

There was a great advert that ran in the 1950s which is still one of the best ways to explain this 65 years on.

Known as “The Man in the Chair”, this 1958 Business Week advert has stayed relevant for so long thanks to its simplicity and depth.

I DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY.

I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S PRODUCT.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOUR COMPANY STANDS FOR.

I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S CUSTOMERS.

I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S RECORD.

I DON’T KNOW YOUR COMPANY’S REPUTATION.

NOW - WHAT WAS IT YOU WANTED TO SELL ME?

Despite being written nearly half a century before the advent of social media, it captures that need to gain trust before trying to sell or engage.

When you need to get sales, you feel like there’s a need to cut to the chase, but sales is rarely as transactional as walking into a supermarket and buying a banana.

Martyn Baker wrote a great piece on this. Why do we try to  close sales in the first meeting?

Martyn is an exceptional story-based sales expert, and his model perfectly encapsulates the need to be patient and build the trust in the sales process.

Your goal with every interaction is not to rush to the end, but to take the next step.

It’s more like snakes and ladders, or a cha cha, two steps forward and one step back. The step back doesn’t have to be seen as a set back, it’s just part of the dance.

Being able to deal with this disappointment and getting back up is a vital way to develop the resilience required to start a new organisation that will thrive.

You don’t go on a first date and propose there and then. You don’t assume that every date will be successful and you know that committing to the wrong partner isn’t good for either of you.

Of course, you don’t want to get to the alter and realise they were never going to commit - so you have to keep savvy.

Sales, relationship building, and stakeholder engagement can be the same thing.

Selling to the right customers is much more rewarding in time than hard selling to the wrong people. If you rely on word of mouth, as near every small or growing business does, then you need a high proportion of your customers and partners to be singing your praises as often as possible.

Bad customers - or perhaps bad-fit customers - don’t do this, and become a time sink in countless other ways.

Ecosystems

You need to give a lot of thought to the ecosystems you need around you to succeed.

Customers are one group that enable you to do what you do, but you likely have a range of other stakeholders around you that you indirectly (and often directly) rely on to do what you do.

If you’re doing a Business Model Canvas then this is the section where you’d list your key partners.

When we’re going into a new area we complete a comprehensive ecosystem mapping exercise.

We look at ten areas that play an active role in what we’re hoping to build and what our community will rely on.

These ten areas are:

1. Business support programmes

2. Public sector

3. Investors/funders

4. Media & press

5. Community groups

6. Professional services

7. Education, HE & FE

8. Established businesses

9. Startups & freelancers

10. Networks/associations

We list all of the organisations in these sections, whether local, regional, or national. The next step is to colour code them based on the current relationship that we have with them.

Finally we look at how we think these relationships might develop - what exactly are we asking for (if anything) and how will it play out.

If we can actively build this rather than assuming it will passively happen we can turbocharge our chances of success.

Ecosystems can enable so much more than we can achieve in isolation. You need to find the people who have the same goals and ambitions and shift the narrative away from competitive to collaborative.

I’ll write more about this in a future post, but this can be harder in some ecosystems where there are established patterns of mistrust and cynicism.

This is where the previous section comes back into play. You can’t assume people are going to give you their full faith at the first engagement.

They might see you as a threat, they might have been burned before, they might not see their role in the bigger picture immediately.

Don’t let ecosystem development become a passive endeavour. Let the compound interest build by constantly investing into it.

Social Selling

You don’t build community on social media by selling with every post and tweet. Social media is not a billboard, it’s a place to converse.

I’ll talk more in the future about reciprocity, but this has another role to play in simply getting the algorithms to work.

If you only ever see ads and salesy content then chances are you’ll soon disengage. That decreases the likelihood of any future content getting a second chance to make a good impression.

Your social strategy has to be social in nature.

More able folks than I have made the case for this elsewhere, but it’s an important thing to remember if you’re trying to build a long-term strategy.

This forms part of your effort to show the authenticity of the goal you’re pursuing.

Again, this isn’t just about sales. This helps you to recruit better, it helps you to get insight and guidance on your blindspots, and it can improve idea flow and information sharing. It can also help with gossip, which I’ll talk about in a future post but is a vitally important and under-appreciated social lubricant (sorry if this phrase causes ick).

Part three comes next week and focuses more on this in the context of crowdfunding.

Read next…

Telling Stories People Will Hear

Storytelling is an undervalued skill that can become a superpower…

Get Touring

In the world of coworking the art of doing good tours…

Community Saves Lives

We need to talk more about the true meaning of life.

Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science

One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off…

Our main advantage as human beings over all other species is our ability to communicate complicated things in memorable and engaging ways through stories.

It’s how we warn of danger, persuade people to join our cause, and how we make lessons echo through time.

Other species can communicate specific threats, and trees can warn others if giraffes are coming, but there’s no evidence of animals using abstract stories and tales to get their message across.

When you’re telling the story of what you do, there are six things you have to make sure you’re covering.

I first learnt these lessons when researching what made a successful crowdfunding video, but more and more you can see how this relates to other opportunities in life that you have to story tell and share what you do.

This is a three part piece on storytelling that ends with a more specific focus on crowdfunding. I’d love to get your thoughts on each part.

The Six Cs of telling your story are:

1. Clarity

2. Competence

3. Calling

4. Credibility

5. Candour

6. Click

These six themes can work as a checklist or a guide.

1. Clarity

How likely is it that the person you’re explaining it to gets it?

I was talking to a sophisticated investor recently who said he had a rule that he wouldn’t invest in any company that you couldn’t explain to a ten-year-old.

It makes sense, but often you don’t have such a clear indicator that your audience truly understand what you’re up to.

The more you talk to folks and ask them to feed it back to you, the more you can better understand how clear it really is.

This is the most important rule. It doesn’t matter how competent you come across and how candid you are if people have no idea what you’re talking about. Don’t let the curse of knowledge or being too close to your project trick you into thinking you’re speaking clearly.

If people aren’t clear, you can end up getting irrelevant introductions or requests that can take you off course, so there are secondary benefits to getting this right.

2. Competence

You need to establish with the audience that you are capable and the kind of person who finishes what they start.

You need to establish confidence, how are you explaining to the viewer that you’re the kind of person who gets things done?

There are ways to do this efficiently, you can talk about things you’ve been involved with before, or ideally you can use other people’s feedback to establish your competence.

Some people have fortunate shortcuts like being able to say they’re a Cambridge graduate or they’ve worked for a company which is a household name.

Sometimes you can use things like “award-winning” but often that doesn’t cut it unless it’s a credible award. It certainly doesn’t work on its own.

If you don’t have that shortcut or advantage then you can do some small things to start to build evidence. I wrote more about that in this post on how you find your place in the world.

The best way to do this is to build a reputation, and let that speak for itself. Testimonials are good, but personal references from recognised people who are willing to put their reputation on the line to validate yours - that’s the really good stuff.

If you don’t have that already, build your network, and keep your promises. That’s the quickest route, but there are no shortcuts to accrue something that’s earned in drops and lost in buckets.

3. Calling

You need to share with others why this purpose is so important to you. Your calling is something stronger than just a job, or just being paid to do something or choosing something just because it is the best remunerated, though that doesn’t mean you can’t have a calling and be well rewarded.

You need to talk about that purpose with the people who share that sense of purpose. Those who are empathetic to your passion and seeking like-minds in the good fight.

This has to be authentic. People can smell insincerity.

If you have a calling, you have an advantage. It’s even better if it’s a calling that resonates with others.

There tend to be flashpoints that attract people to a calling, whether it’s a documentary, an event, or just consensus building.

Some callings are mainstream, some are niche. Just because it’s niche doesn’t mean it’s a limited opportunity. Niche can build loyalty, and it might mean you’re working in an underserved area.

If you have lived experience then this can be vital.

If you have a calling that can attract others who want to see someone do something about that, make sure it forms a big part of your storytelling.

4. Credibility

Following on from competence, what proves your credibility? What have you done before?

There’s a line in the Jason Calacanis book Angel in which he assesses his investments by attempting to judge what the chances are of this person “succeeding at life”.

You’ll probably know I’m a football fan and from Wrexham by now, so I really ought to use a Wrexham story here. When Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds started working together, Ryan cited the fact that Rob commits as being something that convinced him they should work together.

Always Sunny, Rob’s TV show, is the longest-running live-action series in US TV history. It’s longevity served as proof that Rob wasn’t going to lose interest in the project anytime soon.

Credibility isn’t just what you do, but how you do it. Showing your character and your attitude through your work.

5. Candour

Don’t act like this is risk-free. It is so disingenuous when founders say there’s no risk, or no competition. It ranges from delusion to dishonesty.

There’s another upside to being candid about the risk - it can add in an element of jeopardy that attracts more people to it. They want to know what will happen, whether you will really do it. It's the drama that can keep people hooked and rooting for you.

The other side of candour is the vulnerability. If you show people you’re comfortable to be open and vulnerable then people will entrust you with their own vulnerability.

Finally, if you’re being truly candid you invite in new solutions. If you’re going to the crowd with an ask, you can find other ways to fix that problem.

This will come up again, but if you’re doing crowdfunding or just building your network it isn’t just about getting backers or customers. Having fixers in the mix can pay back so much more than a single sale.

6. Click

How are we alike? People buy from and bond with like minds. We want to know that you can empathise with our situation and not just assuming you know what I need and want.

Make your content relatable, share the parts of your story that will show how you’re like the people you’re trying to engage.

If your project is geographic talk about your relationship to the area. If you’re a parent targeting parents talk about why that matters.

How do you share these bits of who you are and what you stand for in a way that resonates with an audience of people you’ve never met before? Hopefully you’ve profiled who you think this will appeal to and have a good idea of what is going to make them listen.

There is a great bit in Do Start from Dan Keiran where he talks about how investors like to live vicariously through the entrepreneurs they invest in. I’ve seen this a lot, it isn’t always a rational and professional relationship, people fall in love with the idea of helping you to succeed.

Compromise

Not a seventh rule, but the big challenge in trying to cover off as many of those above in as little time as possible. How can you express your competence without compromising the click? How do you clearly communicate this is your calling by being candid?

Opportunity cost prevents you from squeezing everything in, but sometimes you can cover off multiple points in a single sentence. Work on being as efficient as you can with every word you choose to use.

You have to be frugal and effective to make sure your message hits home.

The more you practice and hone the message the more you can spot what resonates and what helps to get people to see things with the same level of excitement and enthusiasm as you have.

Next week is social selling, other frameworks, and having broader goals than just sales.

Read next…

Get Touring

In the world of coworking the art of doing good tours…

Community Saves Lives - part one

We need to talk more about the true meaning of life.

Travel Together - part two

Community doesn’t mean being identical, just alike…

Finding Your People - part three

If it's easier than ever to find people, why the loneliness epidemic?

Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science

One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off…

This article is quite focused on the world of coworking, but there’s relevance for other industries too - I’ll let you be the judge of that, let me know what you think!

My view is that you should be doing 10+ tours a week. These aren’t all for potential customers (members), but could be partners, stakeholders, supporters, or just people who are nosey.

Our theory of change at TownSq is based entirely on getting this right.

It’s a long game, and as a result I think it’s important to not have hard conversion rates. If you’re organising tours with the sole intent of converting visitors into members then - in my opinion - you’re missing the point and missing a trick.

I recognise there are others who will have strong and contrary views on that point.

You want people to come into the space and really get a good feeling of what it is about, and what it stands for. If your main focus of every line and question is to drive people closer to signing up as a member then I question whether it’s creating an inclusive experience and setting up a barrier for other ways that people can provide value beyond being a member.

The tour’s purpose is not driven solely by our goal to increase our membership in such a direct and blunt way. If we are more open we might see that although this person might not be a potential customer they could introduce us to five people who might be.

Of course, what even is a tour? A tour could be as simple as that, an opportunity for someone interested in seeing the site as a potential user of the space, but you can think in the abstract. A tour could be a networking event which gets people in but leads to a tour of the space, it could be a workshop, it could be a roundtable or group lunch.

It could be a memorable conversation or a call to action. It could be a nourishing lunch or coffee meeting with one of your members that turns into an impromptu walk around the place.

It’s simply a way to open people’s eyes to what you have and what you do - we’ll come back to this.

The real objective of a tour is to give someone an experience that compels them to support the space.

The secondary objective, which is the motivation to provide a good tour is that they leave feeling a sense of wanting the space to succeed. This is the deeper level of support, because while it may be non-committal it is still high value.

Supporting the space might be in tangible ways, like become a member on a flex or lite membership, but also committing to delivering a workshop or becoming a mentor.

Wanting the space to succeed is often less tangible, but involves them becoming a champion who tells the story and spreads the good word. It could be a post on their LinkedIn or Instagram, or it could be a referral two months later.

The real reason for removing the barrier and making tours accessible is that it can create an invite for people to come in. In the world of coworking, most potential members are not actively looking for coworking, don’t necessarily understand the benefits of using a coworking space, and won’t just sign up for membership on your website.

If this is a significant proportion of your potential market - especially in areas that do not have an established coworking market - you need to be creative to make it welcoming and engage with future users.

You want to engage people who will tell people that your space exists, people who want to help by delivering workshops, sponsor programmes, buy from your members and more.

It is especially important that you don’t turn away the people who are just being nosey! They might be time-wasters from time to time, but if you don’t leave space for serendipity then you’re failing to capitalise on the biggest value your space can create.

The nosey ones might not become members, so if you have conversion targets then you might avoid them. If you’re qualifying your leads then you’ll ditch these ones. They might not be the most obvious evangelisers, but you very rarely hear the good feedback.

The best nosey folks are the ones who act like bees, cross pollinating between communities. The ones who have brains like telephone interchanges, connecting the dots in ecosystems in an instinctive way.

They might meet a member who they commission to do a project for, or promise to make an intro, or remember your community when they’re looking for some support or expertise.

These people are the magic!

They can make your members appreciate the value of being a member more. It isn’t very often that a customer, investor or expert just turns up in your home office unannounced, and even less so facilitated by someone who knows their needs and situation as well as you do - as a community leader.

This value is massive, and it multiplies the worth of your membership in turn.

Serendipity is something that we in our industry can do better than anyone else. It is our job to create that serendipity and the unexpected encounters that can lead to great things.

If you’re doing all of this right then you will naturally have a healthy conversion rate when it comes to members, but it isn’t because you’re focused on that. It’s because you’re attracting people, making them welcome, and creating a value that they can’t get anywhere else.

Some serendipity just happens, but if you can curate that good luck then members will feel like they’re winning every day just by turning up. For a freelancer or founder that sense of momentum is rocket fuel - you can’t put a price on its value.

What do I do on a tour?

Don’t overthink it - you don’t need to give people a life changing experience to get them interested and excited.

The more tours you do the more you will pick up on the signals that get people to raise their eyebrows. Some of that might be always passing by one member doing something interesting, or pointing to an interesting architectural feature, or creating a talking point.

In Wrexham it was always the members who had products on their desk, like Toddle or Love Wrexham, in Bicester we have our nettle wall, Bognor Regis has the bleachers, Hereford has the heritage. At ICE we put up some artwork and created a museum of different defunct memory cards on a long corridor to turn that dull part of a tour into a talking point. We called it “memory lane” because everyone loves puns.

It might be things that are interesting, it might be something funny, it might be unexpected. Most of the good stuff just is about familiarising people with your space. It must be enthusiastic.

You want to spend lots of time listening to them, hearing their needs and their situation. The more you understand about their needs the more you can sculpt a tour to suit but don’t exclude things that you assume are irrelevant. People don’t know what they don’t know and sometimes showing them something can spark their imagination and a realisation.

You have lots to show on a tour, so make sure you don’t let your curse of knowledge prevent you from showing something that you might take for granted.

No idea

The main purpose for the tour is correcting any preconceptions.

I wrote about this in the abstract a few weeks ago, but our imagination is boundless and unpredictable when it comes to trying to visualise something for which we have no anchor.

What do they think it is that you do?

If they hear the word coworking they might think of a packed office, or a sparse office. They might think of bean bags or Google’s slides, they might think of hipsters or hustlers.

I can guarantee they have a different idea of what you do than the reality.

While it is important to go out and about and be active as opposed to passive in your pursuit of enquiries and leads it is vital to have those conversations in the space.

We learnt this first hand before launching ICE. We’d have hour-long conversations in the space and then when that person passed on the message it would so heavily distilled that it would be worthless.

When you do something that is novel, or difficult to share through words alone, you need people to feel it through the experience.

Some people will want to visualise the space, some will want to see the people,

Give extra care and attention to understanding how to do this well, and in time you can create a whole new default idea of what you do in the minds of others.

What do you think makes a good tour? What’s the equivalent of a tour for your industry?

Read next…

Community Saves Lives - part one

We need to talk more about the true meaning of life.

Travel Together - part two

Community doesn’t mean being identical, just alike…

Finding Your People - part three

If it's easier than ever to find people, why the loneliness epidemic?

Letting People Go

Learning to let go is an essential skill as you scale and grow.

Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science

One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off…

This is the final part (for now) on communities.

If you missed the first two, you can find Community Saves Lives here and Travel Together here.

Anti-social Media

In the last twenty years, our access to the internet has really distorted what it means to be social, and part of communities.

Platforms like Reddit have done an incredible job at creating pockets of communities in the most varied niches (mostly people with different interests in what cats do). Increasingly this is seen on TikTok and other platforms. Celebrities become their own communities, and common people have to worry about their own personal brand and how consistent their behaviour is with that image.

For anyone growing up in a town or area where they don’t feel understood, or valued, welcome, or even valid in their own skin, these platforms have been true life savers.

But they’re not community in the truest sense.

I want to be clear here: I’m not repeating that lazy idea that social media is evil, I’m saying it’s a different thing altogether.

A couple of years ago I was invited over the Berlin to meet with community leaders from all over the world - Boston, Accra, Valencia, Hyderabad, Gaborone, Tripoli, Belo Horizonte, Varna, and so many more - as part of a Facebook Groups initiative.

Over the course of a few winter days in the company of community leaders from across the world it was clear how the varied ways that people come together can create safety, validation, opportunity, friendship and love.

There were stories of single parents who were able to gain economic opportunity through their communities, ex-military who were desperately underserved by public mental health services but put their continued living down to the empathy that comes from their communities, and plenty of more mundane everyday examples which are still packed with importance.

Online communities are an important part of how we grow as people.

But they’re not the same. This felt validated in part by the fact that all of those global representatives being together in one place was so effective - rather than us just having a video call or relying on the Facebook group we were already all in.

Online communities need different curation. They have different rules, etiquette, and cultures.

Wallflowers and lurkers can themselves feel connected enough without commenting and engaging actively, but that doesn’t move the conversation forward.

Online platforms lack that community spontaneity, those side chats and “tell me more” moments that you can’t do on Teams and Zoom.

It’s something that’s really missing in our newly remote lives.

I’d also probably say that the culture on platforms like Twitter/X are so vicious that the term “social media” is probably redundant at this stage. It gets about as antisocial as you could imagine, and the default mode is to challenge without assuming the best in others. Basically like road rage, but for people sat on the toilet.

Homesick

The online communities can become a part of our life quickly, but there can be a lot of effort that goes into building communities.

That said, we often lose a lot of that effort if we decide to move away.

Increasingly we live further from where we grew up, especially if you are a higher earner or travelled for Uni.

That means you’re ditching a sunk social cost to start again from scratch.

I felt like this when I first moved to Cardiff. For the first 12 months I could have happily left and never returned. I had no ties, connections, or relationships that I would miss.

When we think of cities we think of their buildings, infrastructure, and history, but it’s the people that make all of that matter. There’s no point having a great transport infrastructure if you don’t feel drawn to another’s company.

Professor Jeffrey Hall found in a 2018 study that it takes 200 hours of time together to form a close friend, and it helps if that contact time is in a short period of time rather than spread out.

As you get older - and life gets more complicated - it gets trickier to make the time needed to build those relationships and communities. 200 hours would be two hours a week for two years, which might work if you’re dating them but probably is less likely for any other kind of new friend. It is said to take 50 hours to move from acquaintance to casual friend.

It took the best part of that first year to have the events and interactions with my new corridor neighbours that moved them to acquaintances and then, in time, to friends (that have stuck).

That social environment is probably the most intense you could ever experience, it isn’t representative of life (unless you live in a city with a housing market that forces you to house share well into your 30s).

I think that’s why as adults we’re more likely to find friendship and love at work - 38% of us have supposedly dated a coworker, and 14% of marriages come from workplace romance.

We don’t have as many intense social interactions as life gets more complicated unless we join a club, society, team, choir, orchestra, or cause.

This is where the “5 a day” style slogan is needed. We all feel so busy with everything going on in life that we don’t realise how much we need to socialise. Meeting up with good friends is like gym for our mental health.

Why I Believe

That’s a bit about why I believe so much in the power of community.

I guess there’s a perspective on this which would raise the question: what does any of this have to do with business?

It’s a good, and appropriate, question if your perspective on the world is that business and enterprise needs to stay as it always has been. In the era of B Corps and social impact, I’m more of a believer that we can use business as a force for good.

We’re living in a loneliness epidemic, and it’s clear that there's no doubt that it is impacting our health and well-being.

It won’t be business that fixes this, but business plays a role to show another way. This is especially true right now when we’re not seeing any new ideas or thinking coming from the state.

I feel like social entrepreneurs have a role to help visualise how these solutions can be - and I’ve talked before about why we need that so much right now.

We don’t know what the solution will be, but we need to see examples and new ideas to really visualise it.

For me, in our game, it’s those moments of overhearing one coworker express to another how useful and valuable that serendipitous moment where support was shared has been for them. Or seeing a new partnership emerge, or even romance blossom.

We can’t charge people more money if they fall in love, but that’s not the point. The point is that if you can create this much good for people then you must. I’ve mentioned this Steve Kerr quote before, but it really should be repeated daily: “It is a civic duty to give people joy.”

Community is the answer, now we need to work hard to make sure that the right questions are being asked - and demands made - to accelerate this cause.

What would your community-first, anti-loneliness slogan be? I’ll make up some laptop stickers for the best ones and one day we can get it printed on the side of a bus and see how we get on.

Read next…

Travel Together - part two of this series

Community doesn’t mean being identical, just alike…

Community Saves Lives - part one of this series

We need to talk more about the true meaning of life.

Letting People Go

Learning to let go is an essential skill as you scale and grow.

Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science

One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off…

This is part two of a three-parter. If you missed the first one, you can find Community Saves Lives here.

When we think of communities in this way there’s usually a shared purpose or reason for being.

Shared Journey

Our thing in common can be linked around one shared interest, like supporting a football team, which binds you even though you have no other shared interests. It can even ignore all of the other things that might differentiate us or set us apart.

When you’re in a crowd and your team scores you don’t care who your neighbour voted for. That moment overrides any better sense.

Community can be temporary, it can be serendipitous, it can be spontaneous, or it can be sustained over years.

It isn’t always so formal, you don’t always know that you’re in one. You might not realise until you notice it is missing.

The same shared purpose idea drives our friendships.

This was explored in Billy No Mates by Max Dickins.

Our needs for friendships change. This might sound cold and transactional, but it plays out.

The friends you were in university with were going on the same journey as you at that time.

You’re more likely to stay in touch with people who are on a similar journey to you.

When you leave school you stay in touch with people who are going to uni. When you leave uni you stay in touch with people who are going into a similar career or profession. If you have kids then you end up spending more time with friends who also have kids.

Some of this is obvious logistics, if you move to the same city as someone else then you have more opportunity to stay in touch, similarly if you have kids at a similar time then you will have a reason to meet up and socialise collectively.

But the more important part is driven by empathy, and shared understanding.

Of course this doesn’t mean you intentionally only stay in contact with those people, but it is more likely to happen. You’re more likely to have interesting things to talk about with them.

There’s pretty obvious evidence in this when you’re childless and find it so painfully boring to hear about what your friends’ kids have been doing, and then if you do have kids realising how much they dominate your lives and thoughts.

Most of us are more empathetic than this, and are still able to make an effort to stay in touch with those that we have less in common with. But reflect on your existing friendships and whether you have consistently had more in common with those that you stayed closer to than those who have drifted.

Friendship Club

We get the feeling of communitas through sport, whether participating or attending an event.

If you’re a big sport fan, you might have never thought about how that urge to throw your hands in the air when a goal is scored or a decision goes against you is totally involuntary.

The same at the end of a great piece of music, the round of applause can be so charged.

When you feel this sense of fiero you respond. We can’t not do it.

It doesn’t affect the game, the referee doesn’t see you waving, the players wouldn’t underperform if you were the only one who didn’t wave.

Another unexpected place where this communitas is present is in choirs and orchestras.

Singing creates synchronicity, and synchronicity builds relationships.

It’s why militaries march, it creates compliance and understanding - for good or bad.

One of the best ways to feel connected to people is to join a choir. Singing in time with others is good for the soul.

Synchronicity pays back in other ways too.

Synchronised holidays are another fascinating indicator of the importance of this. Time shared is better than time hoarded.

In Sweden, a 2013 study found that antidepressant usage went down during holidays - when prescription data was tracked.

This might not be that much of a surprise on its own, but there is a twist.

It dropped exponentially if more people were on holiday at the same time. The more people that are on holiday, the more the benefit is.

The USSR found something similar in an experiment designed to increase productivity by giving a new four days on, one day off, work pattern. There was a lot of sound logic here - it would spread the demand for public services like GPs and dentists - and basically decreases the days off to a weekend every eight days.

This was abandoned when mental health was seen to really plummet as a result of how difficult it was to sync up social engagements.

The patterns didn’t lend themselves to community building, if your day off wasn’t in sync with your partner or friends then you might still get the day off but you don’t have any of the benefit.

Time is a resource that can’t be hoarded well. It’s much better shared.

Time is a network good, the more of it that people around you have, the more it is worth to you.

Having lots of time but no constructive or collaborative way to spend it isn’t just useless, but it can be uncomfortable.

In Quiet, Susan Cain explores how introverts recharge with alone time, whereas extroverts recharge with others. That doesn’t mean that only extroverts need others and only introverts appreciate being able to shut themselves off.

Finding others in a community with shared views and perspectives can help us to feel validated.

We’ll cover more of this in part three.

Click here to read part three, talking about social media, marching, and workmates.

Continue reading part three >

Read next…

Community Saves Lives

We need to talk more about the true meaning of life.

Letting People Go

Learning to let go is an essential skill as you scale and grow.

Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science

One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off…

I normally use a reference in a book as a jumping off point for these posts, so here’s one of those from someone who maybe isn’t typically associated with business leadership.

“It was a community and that is how human beings were designed to live.

“Anytime you wanted to be alone you simply close your door and anytime you wanted to be with people you would open it again.

“If there’s a better recipe for happiness then it hasn’t been seen yet.”

This quote is from Thursday Murder Club, a best-seller but I don’t think Richard Osman was going for the urban regen market in his tale of property developers targeting heritage sites with dirty money.

There are lots of quite strong signs that community is a vital, and vitally under-appreciated, component of a good life well lived.

I think it’s the secret behind the meaning of life.

Communitas

When we are in a community we feel it, we feel the communitas - the spirit of community. It’s a powerful sense of togetherness, solidarity, and social connection.

Sometimes it’s more obvious than others, maybe when we’re at a concert of our favourite band, or on a protest march.

I talk about Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal a lot, but she really hit the nail on the head here when it came to the itch that social media scratches well. It is ambient sociability, the ability to tune in and tune out of social interaction as we see fit.

That’s what Richard Osman is describing.

It’s this idea of being alone, together.

It is something which freelancers and entrepreneurs can relate to, and why coworking spaces and community workspaces are so vital to create this new social infrastructure.

I’ve talked before about this pervasive idea of independence and how dangerous it is.

We’re interdependent beings, our survival depends on us understanding this.

Our society needs more focus on enabling and fostering interdependence, and regularly building relationships with new people.

Survival

In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg talks about the 1995 Chicago heat wave, and how community played a role in the fatality rates.

People were more likely to die if they were socially isolated. When controlled for everything else the number of friends and social contacts was the main determinant of whether elderly people would survive.

This ended up being more of a social disaster than natural disaster.

As heatwaves and extreme weather events become the norm rather than once in a generation occurrences, this tells us how much we need to consider investments in social infrastructure.

Increasingly this is being backed up by research on loneliness in other aspects of our lives.

The campaigns for eating more veg, cutting down on smoking, or getting our 10,000 steps in have succeeded as pervasive and recognised ideas.

Loneliness is as dangerous as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day when it comes to the impact on life expectancy.

We don’t have national campaigns highlighting the importance of elderly people building communities and networking. We don’t see it as being essential for men in their 30s to carve out time to socialise without alcohol involved.

Slogans like “5 a day” are now parroted as being a truism. The bed shop Dreams introduced this idea that we need to replace our mattresses every eight years because nobody had a fixed idea of how long you should keep a mattress before you replace it.

How often should we prioritise meeting friends? Five hours with friends a week? What’s the equivalent of 10,000 steps or 30 minutes of exercise?

We need a slogan for socialising to highlight how vital it is to our health - mental or otherwise.

Big ideas like libraries or youth clubs don’t seem to be gaining as much traction or support from the state or philanthropy as their potential impact should demand. The Men’s Sheds movement is vital, but youth centres don’t appear to have had their 21st centre evolution.

YOUmedia in Chicago gained prominence when artists like Noname cited it as being crucial to her success, having access to resources and communities of people (serious people - like Chance the Rapper) who helped them to work on their craft and make a career out of it, before cuts and layoffs weakened the programme.

After school and work we tend to be short on ideas for how to make friends and grow our communities.

This isn’t networking. It isn’t about building our circle for some future economic benefit. It isn’t a transaction. It’s building meaningful relationships that make us feel connected and valued.

Long-life Ilk

In Nicoya, Costa Rica, they have become world famous as a “blue zone” by defying the wider national average life lengths.

Blue Zones are regions where people live better, longer lives. It’s a 20-year research project which looks at systems-level changes required to create better living environments.

There are many theories as to why Nicoyans are living such long lives, with an eye on having a diet which features less processed food, and even looking at their genetic make-up.

The leading belief is that it’s the close inter-generational relationships and tightly-knit communities that create the conditions for a long and well-lived life.

There’s even more evidence of this closer to home.

Men are 70% more likely to die within the 100 days after losing a spouse, it’s known as the widowhood effect.

6,000 people per year have what is known as a “public health funeral” or a “pauper’s funeral” a funeral for people who die with no next of kin.

This is one of the most tragic, under discussed crises in the modern world.

If you’ve worked in retail for five minutes you’ll know how much people value coming in as part of a routine or just to have someone to speak to. The closure of banks for “efficiency” gains, without recognising the wider role they play in society feels symptomatic of an extractive mindset that leaves nothing but a void when they’ve taken all they can from a community.

We owe a lot to people who have no places to meet, connect, and chat without spending on cakes and cappuccinos.

This one ended up getting a bit long, so I decided to split it into three parts.

I’d love to hear from you on this topic, what is your view on community?

Click here to read part two, on about shared journeys, fiero, and the futility of hoarding time.

Read part two >

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I used to feel a real sense of hurt when people left our team or community.

I remember when members used to leave ICE it would feel like that was it. Once one had left it would be the watershed moment and everyone would go.

It was even worse if someone decided to leave our team.

The very idea that they could thrive in another environment felt like a comment on how bad ours must be.

Learning to let people go was a skill I didn’t realise I had to develop.

Failed leadership

This old feeling was one of failure. That I’d not seen it coming, that we were not an essential part of their lives.

How can a leader trying to create a welcoming environment for coworkers and a great team for colleagues fail to see why people would want to leave and be helpless to do anything about it?

In time, I’ve been able to see a new perspective on this, which means I get less stressed out but also that feels more reflective of the truth.

Is it definitely true?

Firstly, there’s simple mental health check-in trick that I’ve used time and time again and which helps here.

Whenever anything is feeling overwhelming, all encompassing or invasive as a thought or idea can often do (for some of us), I ask myself a couple of questions:

Firstly, I ask is it true. To which my mental response is “of course it bloody is otherwise why would I be worrying?”

Then, the second question: “Is it definitely true?”

That’s a harder question to answer, and when being honest there’s often a bit of: “well, no, I don’t know that it is definitely true”.

That’s where the light gets in.

Anyway, that’s how I started to rethink my relationship with people leaving and why I now think it is important to let people go and see it as a positive step.

Letting People Go

This new feeling has a couple of elements:

• People outgrowing you

• People needing to go

• People coming back

• And the worst case scenario

Next steps

If you are focused on growing people then you can take joy in them being ready to move to the next level.

When someone outgrows you it should be a moment of celebration.

I’ve written previously about the old cliché:

“What if we train them and they leave?”

“What if we don’t and they stay?”

There’s something validating in giving someone a platform and seeing them get the recognition they deserve.

This is especially true for me when we have someone who has joined us either from a totally unrelated industry and who has now made a name for themselves, or someone who was feeling rudderless before they joined.

It is hard to not feel the feelings of abandonment and questioning loyalty, but those are fleeting feelings, and not true.

It is something to take pride in, developing people to the next stage. And if they have a good reputation with a new potential employer then it would suggest they’ve done a good job for you too.

In our industry especially this has been hard given that we’re rarely hiring people who have done the job before, and chances are they’re not going to do the exact same job after they’ve moved on.

I personally feel it’s a civic duty to create opportunities for people to shine, but I recognise that varies based on your world view.

There’s a sense of momentum to some of this stuff. When you have a couple of folks leave all at once you panic that people will think it’s rats leaving a sinking ship, but more often than not it’s just bad timing.

Of course, the momentum can get out of hand, but this is again where that previous mental health exercise comes in handy.

When it feels like you’re in the darkest moment it often means dawn is around the corner. Don’t assume that to be the case though, life doesn’t always honour metaphors no matter how snappy they are.

Perspective helps, and when one person moves on it can create an opportunity for someone else to step up, or for new ideas and experience to join the team.

People needing to go

Sometimes people need to go, and sometimes that rests on your shoulders to make it happen.

I’ve struggled with this over the years, but recently Dan Kieran’s excellent Do Start put it in the specific context that I needed to make peace with this challenge.

Radiators and drains are two ways to describe employees. The radiators create the warmth, they’re optimistic, loyal, and willing to do what it takes.

The drains suck the energy out of the room, they’re not shy to tell anyone who will listen what’s wrong and rarely take the positive side.

You want to help the drains, or at least I always feel I do. It feels like a challenge to take on to turn them around or help them to develop.

It’s even worse when they were once one of your best radiators, and then the magic goes. You know that person has to be in there somewhere, but one day you have to accept they’re not coming back.

We had an incident recently which had a big dollop of sunk cost fallacy in it too. After committing so much to that one person you want to see it come good in order to validate your decision to go with them.

Sometimes you have to be honest when it isn’t working and realise how beneficial it is to everyone if you give them the opportunity to move on.

That’s the important conclusion to this in Dan’s book. It isn’t the person who is the radiator or drain but the situation. A drain is just the wrong person in the wrong job, company, team, or moment.

You can help them by moving them on, because chances are they know they’re not happy or fitting right, and by freeing them to a new opportunity they can gain a lot more joy in their life.

Where this goes wrong is if you don’t deal with the drains quickly enough, and then you lose good radiators who don’t stand for it and are very welcome elsewhere.

If you get this right, you can ensure that you’re not leaving on bad terms, and also realise that you can’t get those wasted months or years back.

Work takes up too much of our yearly lives, don’t let it waste away in this way.

People coming back

In time you start to see the boomerangs, the ones who needed to leave before coming back.

We had this a lot with members who didn’t necessarily recognise all the intangible value of being in the space until it had gone.

There’s a similar situation for team members though, and leaving the door ajar for a future comeback.

It’s essential to always part on good terms. Make peace, don’t take it personally. And in my opinion never attempt to mediate after the event.

If you can leave things open then you have the opportunity to bring someone back with a lot of embedded operational expertise at a time that you might really need it in the future.

A lot of people don’t believe in going back, but I think that’s often a load of rubbish (I might be slightly biased here by seeing Thierry Henry score in an Arsenal shirt in 2012 on his return).

Steve Jobs is the best example of how sometimes you need distance and a change in order to gain perspective and come back stronger.

There is a slippery slope here to creating a closed shop to trusted friends only, but when trust is such a vital quality in a team it’s easy to see why nepotism persists.

And the worst case scenario

Sometimes people leave for the saddest reasons sometimes for the happiest. We’ve had our fair share of both of those.

This month, we’ve had one of the hardest things happen that I’ve ever had to deal with in what I thought was already quite a comprehensive decade of running our business.

One of our team members passed away unexpectedly and it hit hard.

The challenge as a leader is you feel an obligation to do all the expectation management around capacity and everything like that, but it all pales in comparison.

Especially when you’re trying to build a team of people you like and whose company you enjoy.

I’ve mentioned before about the resilience of people, especially when they’re going through unimaginable suffering in their personal lives.

When writing things like compassionate leave policies it can be impossibly hard to strike the balance between fair and firm. It isn’t financially sustainable for a business to give everything, but it isn’t emotionally sustainable to rush people back.

Sometimes the things that happen in people’s lives change their ability to be in your team. Some things are positive and some are negative, like having new childcare responsibilities or caring for a loved-one who has just had bad health news.

You don’t want to put people in a place where they resent the work because it is taking them away from more serious responsibilities.

One thing I’ve learned as we’ve scaled is that keeping the whole business on the right track as junctions emerge, wheels fall off, and you’re running out of fuel becomes a much bigger part of the job, but it’s also so much more satisfying when you get those decisions right and - maybe stretching the metaphor - reattach a new wheel without losing pace.

A lot of this comes down to trying to lead with empathy, but there are lots of folks who will tell you that you need to draw a line somewhere.

As a leader of a business, your one job is to ensure that the company perpetuates.

Whatever your experience is when the time comes to let people go, don’t take it personally.

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I can keep this one quite brief:

Don’t build an app.

The opportunity has gone, building an app is no longer the default.

Lots of people are already on this train, but I still keep hearing the “I’m raising money to build an app” line and I feel like there’s a massive disconnect between those who have spotted the signs and those who are just getting started.

Why Shouldn’t I Build an App?

There are three main reasons:

• Our habits and inertia

• Opportunity cost

• Demand

Just as a human being - user or consumer - take a look at the apps you have open on your phone. How many of them have you downloaded in the last month, never mind three years?

We are stubborn beings, and it takes a lot of convincing to get us to change our ways.

Creating an app now that people will download, and use is a multi-layered challenge that takes a full team.

You don’t just need the technical skills to create the app (although this part is arguably getting easier thanks to the no-code revolution), but more important are the product management and comms roles required to get it to stick.

The cost investment required to build the thing needs to be backed up with the expertise that makes sure you’re building (and prioritising) the right things for the right people, that they know about it and tell all of their friends.

Even if you do build an app, and get people to download it, you have the next challenge of getting people to keep coming back.

Whether it’s new features, new content, promoting it, maybe it addictive (and balancing the line), or having some kind of regularity to its use or requirement, it’s no good overcoming the hurdle of getting it installed if it never gets used.

You then have all of the upkeep, maintenance, bug fixes, patches and coping with annual software updates. It becomes the thing, not your core service or business.

There’s sunk cost (read one & two), and then there’s needing an asset to pay you back.

If you’ve put all that time, effort, and cash into building it then you won’t feel like you can drop it without a thought if it isn’t working out.

You’re more likely to persevere, and it’s hard to know when that perseverance is unwelcome.

If you’re one in a thousand it might be that you need an app - but don’t be the judge of that yourself.

We covered that two weeks ago.

Back to the stubbornness, inertia is a simple concept. Nothing starts, stops, or changes course on its own without an external force.

The best way to get through that inertia is to influence or address the behaviour change, but that isn’t so easy.

We had the first rush, where all the low hanging opportunities were realised and that gave a lot of hope that it would be easy for everyone to get in on the action.

Now, network effect leads people to use new apps and platforms. It’s the one which is growing so fast that those who are already there must know something, or that your friends and family are already at.

What Does Your App Give People?

Can having an app help your users do things faster or better, easier or cheaper?

The important thing here is that the app is no longer the thing. The thing is the thing, and the app is the way to access that thing.

What I mean by this is that in the late 00s the app was the novelty. Having, launching, or developing an app was a gold rush.

Over the last decade things have sophisticated a lot. Today, the app is just one window to access the tech solution.

It’s an interface, as is Alexa, a website, your watch, your in-car entertainment system.

Each interface has its own role and limitations. When I’m checking my football scores on my watch I just want the information quickly, I don’t need a screen full of stats and what the possession is looking like. Similarly if I’m asking Alexa what the weather is, I don’t want to be asked to confirm if I mean today, or if I mean at home, I just want that info fast.

If I’m browsing AirBnb I might use my phone, but if I’m making a decision I’m more likely to use my laptop or iPad to get a better look at the images and keep more tabs open. AirBnb currently has a split of 42% of traffic coming from traditional computers and 58% from mobile (according to Semrush in May 2023).

If you build an app, it will be a window into something else. Creating a simple web app or progressive web app can help you test how people want to engage with what you do.

Cardboard Cut-outs

I want to make one quick final point on technology and our hope that the more we innovate the more we can gain an advantage.

There’s a technology company which has built a very successful reputation on using out of date technology to create products that inspire and outsell their much more advanced competitors.

Nintendo is a 133-year-old company that has profit margins that their competitors could only dream of.

There’s a story of a member of the team coming to Gunpei Yokoi - the Chief Engineer - with news that Sega had announced the Game Gear which could potential be the killer for their Game Boy. Yokoi asked about the specs and then said they needn’t worry - they’re doing something totally different.

He was right, the Game Boy outsold the Game Gear by 11 to 1.

The Game Boy was seen as an embarrassment internally before it launched, with a nickname of DameGame. Dame translates as hopeless.

The Nintendo Wii and Switch were primitive compared to their contemporary competitors but you wouldn’t have much luck when trying to get your hands on one at Christmas. They struck a chord with their innovation and user-centred design, and reached new audiences for video games that Sony and Microsoft could only dream of.

Don’t assume you need to build the best version to be competitive. Being innovative, nimble, creative, and understanding the problem better is an advantage that means you don’t have to spend as much time and money up front, and if you get it right you can build something beloved.

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