2023 reflections
This year, I turned 50, set up a consultancy, joined a Board, got my first tattoo. What did I learn?
Value of a break
I had a proper holiday for the first time since before COVID. I honestly didn’t know how much the experience of CEO-ing an organisation back from the brink of insolvency through 7 lockdowns had burnt me out. The enjoyable work I did in 2022 didn’t fix the slow-boiled frog, but the holiday was the ice-bath tonic that did.
Lesson? I’ll never allow myself to burn out like that again. And my newfound rigour for putting little walls between earn, learn and give is my vaccination against burnout.
Earn-Learn-Give
A former Board member had told me how they’d improved their health by being clearer about what they did ‘to put bread on the table’ and what they did for their sense of ‘value in the world’. So I started the year working towards this nebulous idea. Courtney Johnston at Te Papa gave me the framework, retrospectively naming what I’ve spent the year working to build.
While the boundaries are permeable, having these three categories for my activities made my choices make sense. I could broadly categorise my year’s activities like this:
Most importantly, I have fitted them around my family, not the other way round. I’ve been more present (physically, emotionally, intellectually) for my teens than I have since they were seven. I treasure driving the school run.
Lesson? Reject assumptions about work before it’s too late. Find a way to work as you want. And don’t stop when it doesn’t work straight away.
Learning
I’ve learnt how to run a business and deliver for clients. I can drive the accounting software and pay my taxes. It felt like getting a pen license at school and was oddly satisfying. But more important was the AICD Company Director Course in February.
I wrote extensive reflections on that at the time, but looking back now I didn’t fully see how it helped me trust what I could bring to the role. Board recruitment, and how Board conversations play out in professional fora, talk a lot about finance, governance and risk. And it’s very easy to believe that unless you’re a CFO or a lawyer, you don’t have anything to offer. In my first Chair interview I was candid about what I could offer and what I had to learn. The specific experiences and diversity of thought I could and couldn’t bring to the Board were a good fit for the Board the Chair was building. But the match wouldn’t have been made had I not had the confidence to be direct and clear.
Also — balancing out trendy management fashions by going to the library. Occasionally I knew I needed a refresh on the theoretical underpinnings to serve the client. Seeking resources online is terrible for this; there’s little quality control and too many rehashed McKinsey fads. But by going to the relevant section of the library (project management, org psych, leadership…) and riffling through the indexes I found absolute gems. There’s some management theory from the 70s that holds up better than what’s in 2023 MBA reading lists.
Beginning the consultancy
There’s a lot of assumptions around that a permanent full-time job with an endless seniority ratchet should be the goal. Some of those were my inner voices. An Interim Executive role — ‘white collar tradies’ — showed me that was a lie. As did the people sharing their burnout stories. So I went all in and set up my consultancy Purpose in Practice. I discovered,
- The framework that Alan Weiss uses resonated strongly for me: ‘to improve the condition of the client’.
- Loads of things feel important in the set-up but they aren’t. Publish the damn website, choose an accounting package. Change later if you want to but stop faffing. Learn the operational stuff by doing, not thinking.
- Lots of people wanted me to succeed, and gave me advice and referrals. They had no need to, but they did; it was their ‘give’, I think. (Thank you, in particular to Brian Eno fan and Photographer-of-Japan)
I’ve written before on not having a deep network and on sector-hopping. Lots of people advised me to build consultancy from one special skill, or one sector. I’ve done neither. Started with an idea and the network I had and focused on the problems I can solve for people. When I’ve been invited to help with process/project challenges; the answer always has a people and culture component. And when clients have come to me with culture challenges; the solution always have a process component.
Across energy, heritage, arts and human services, the stories are consistent. Our world is changing fast, and responses are circumvented by specialisation, pace and the difficulty of harmonising everything with everything else.
I’ve become more certain that this is my sweet spot — getting things done in the overlap of what’s called (but aren’t) soft and hard skills. Through explaining, pitching and delivering, I’ve got a better sense of what I offer now than if I’d spend months doing market analysis. Move slowly and build things.
I did worry it’s not working, or not growing fast enough (I’m not busy enough, yet). But after I listed to an old friend all the things i was doing. he asked me if there was anything else I could be doing. I couldn’t think of anything, and he said ‘so relax. You’re doing all the things: it’ll come’. I think he’s right. (For me anyway; I don’t suggest my approach is the best, at all.)
Articulating my values to myself
These are they, direct from my website:
I’m using these values like a compass in my day-to-day activities. There’s been a few times where I have made decisions based on making clients stronger; things I’ve given or done for free because it was right to do so.
I’ve met some people whose values shocked me, and I will never work with. Firstly, some attitudes that were not based on critical reflection, and didn’t consider what people with less power in the professional world (neurodivergent and disabled people, for instance) are saying — such as “return to the office 5dpw is necessary and only professional failures think otherwise”. And secondly, what I see as a lack of kindness or commitment to a common humanity (and my activist kids see as poor politics). I’m happy to pay taxes: investing in commons and the needs of those with less fortune than me is a moral duty. But I’ve met people who describe taxation as ‘abhorrent’ and insisted to me that all businesses including mine should be offshoring activities to Asia to avoid ‘Australian labour costs’.
I’m happy to be different and if I can’t buy a second home because of that, so be it.
Drawing on three decades (!) of professional and lived experience
Consulting is recency-agnostic. This is unlike ‘normal’ jobs, which are quite linear in that your most recently learnt skills are what you most frequently apply.
Working to help a heritage site with strategy implementation, I drew on my experience of program management from 2005 (Natural History Museum) and 2022 (Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust). Working with a human services organisation on Executive values, behaviour, communication and conflict I drew on my coaching training from 2003 my Museum Leadership residency and my experience as a CEO and Executive 2017–22.
I recall an interview on BBC Radio 4 about 25 years ago with a jazz musician, (I’m 90% sure it was Leni Stern) who said her “fingers found phrases” from a lifetime of music, and onstage she would “push those phrases through the circle of fifths”. A lot of the time, consultancy feels like that. I’m reaching for index cards in my professional library and assembling them into the most relevant pattern for the problem today.
I’m also, and I am not sure where I learnt this, doing a lot of embodied listening and bringing physicality to conversations. I can feel where to lean in and where to step away from tensions in group facilitation, and that doesn’t come from theory but from hearing with my body. I can’t explain it, but I think every facilitator and performer knows what I mean. Trusting that — and getting the best feedback from the groupwork in which I have trusted that — is proving to be a game-changer for me.
An accountability buddy
A former board member introduced me to a talented ex-CEO in an adjacent sector. We’ve been each other’s accountability buddy for a year now and I can’t fully express how helpful it’s been. We meet once a month for coffee, and go through what we’ve been doing for the previous month and what we’re going to do in the next. Sounds simple, but they’ve forced me to prioritise, given me confidence in the path I’m on, and given direct ‘go read this!’ advice. Most importantly, they gave me a light-but-stern ‘yeah, but last month you said…’ — which I needed at that moment and no-one else could’ve said it. I wouldn’t be here without them.
Volunteering
I’m on the Vietnamese Museum of Australia’s exhibition advisory board. This has included advising the person leading the architectural and exhibition development and running a workshop with their Board. Sharing what I know is rewarding but there’s more. I’m working with a community of astonishing energy and talent, and the sense of bootstrapping their success is palpable and infectious. This followed working with MOD in Adelaide on their upcoming show Broken.
Joining the Abbotsford Convent’s Board of Directors — not an executive role, as people inferred from my ambiguously worded LinkedIn post — will be similarly rewarding. Even from the first meeting, the ways I could help improve a couple of areas and support the CEO were clear and I look forward to this in 2024.
The tattoo
As mid-life actions go it’s pretty mild (no sudden motorbike) but I grew up with tattoos being associated with an unspecified idea of ‘rough’: Millwall fans (that’s England’s Collingwood, for the Melburnians) and merchant sailors, not people who work in an office. I don’t have an adequate explanation for why I did it. Maybe to have not not done it. But there is a story.
It’s inspired by Ursula LeGuin’s novel Wizard of Earthsea. A book I re-read annually and recommend frequently as the greatest leadership training book every written (don’t watch the film, it’s weak). It has flaws, of course. (I forgive the dodgy treatment of gender because of her other masterwork, The Left Hand of Darkness). The protagonist is a talented and overconfident boy who is mentored, schooled and humbled. He commits a grave mistake, and labours humbly for years to atone. Eventually he redeems himself, and becomes a full adult, when he confronts his faults. (I’m not doing it justice.)
But one passage stands out to me. He’s qualified as a wizard, and only has to exit a locked door to graduate from the university. The doorkeeper is wiser and stronger than him, and requires some information before unlocking the door. The protagonist goes away and thinks, but cannot come up with a way to best the doorkeeper. So he returns and says so, then he is content to stay and learn, unless the doorkeeper might answer a question. He asks the doorkeeper, the doorkeeper tells him, he repeats it back, and he graduates through the unlocked door.
The ultimate lesson of the greatest university in that world is that the only way to succeed is to ask for help, and then put that help into active practice of your own. And for that, I now have his animal personification, this Sparrowhawk, over my heart.
Predictions for 2024?
For me,
- Improving my skills in group facilitation / groups dynamics is going to be a focus.
- I’m going to learn how to be a good Board member
- I’m going to get clearer on ideal clients and pathways to meet them
- I’m going to enter different professional fora and learn lots
- I’m going to make a misstep with a client and put effort into repairing it (cynicism and doubt? I don’t think so, it’s a statistical likelihood. How we recover from stumbles is more important than not stumbling)
- I’m going to need to get over my distaste of my recorded voice and get into video. Yikes.
For the world?
In order of least to most controversial…
The arguments between single-theory and wholistic thinking in ways of working will continue, but integrative methods such as systems thinking will begin to become ascendant
As a generational shift gathers pace in senior management, there’ll be shifts in org culture. I suspect issue-avoidance will happen more, and directive management less. Different causes, different symptoms, same ‘what’s happening and how do I fix it?’ from Boards and Executives.
There will be greater recognition that the ‘brilliant MBA CEO directing from the top’ isn’t the answer, and neither is ‘the one true philosophy’. Addressing the planetary emergency is going to be the work of networks and of multiple systems of knowledge.
I think we’ll pay more attention to the cadence of organisations. Beyond sync and async working is paying close attention to the intersecting rhythms over weeks, months, quarters and years, and consciously using these cadences to drive the organisation.
We’ll begin to chill about talking about AI in an organisation. Yes sure it’s a big deal butI remember the fuss about social media in the noughties. “Get on board or get left behind” rhetoric is all the same. The solution’s the same too: give young talent the reins within a framework and let them get on with it, monitor and re-focus. (AI’s impact at the societal level of geopolitics and military is far more important to address.)
Organisations that better yoke strategy and purpose to the measurement of tangible outcomes are the ones that’ll get the funding. It won’t be enough to say ‘200 people came’ or ‘we sold 85% of tickets’, nor to cite net promoter scores. It’s not enough to be liked. Organisations will need a followup like “…and our users benefitted in these ways: a___, b___, c___ , which we can prove by these evaluation methods”. The days of sectors talking to themselves about their own value, to an audience that automatically agrees with them and funders they’ve relied on for thirty years, are fast disappearing.
