Agitator-in-Residence: Ben Johnson

Ben is an entrepreneur, a long time creator of companies (to sale and fail!), writer, teacher, talker and guide. 

​After I’d left the company I’d founded, I fell into a dip. Well, less a dip, and more a deep, icy crevasse.

You know what it’s like in a crevasse, right? Dark and icy and slippy. Getting out is a chore. You don’t get out quickly. You wouldn’t, would you?

​I tried lots of different things, but kept falling back down.

There were low moments, there in the dark. Like lying on the floor, mentally, emotionally beaten and bewildered.

​After a time - ok, a few years - things started to shift, to click. Just little things, found with the support and insight of others - conversations overheard, perspectives shared - and learning, experimenting.

​And as these things clicked, so the confidence grew.

I think of this as me playing with an ice axe: throw the axe, it catches, I’m pulled up - even just a little. And with each catch, I throw again, a little more confidently, creatively. With each new throw, the confidence grows and with that, the throws get more ambitious until, before you know it, that’s you and me out of the dark icy hole. Phew.

We live in weirdly testing times.

​Huge swathes of people stuck in work they don’t like, for people they don’t respect, trapped in ideas not of their making. And entire companies doing the same. Coming obsolescence.

Maybe you and yours?

​There is uncertainty, ambiguity about the future - feeding populism, alternative arbiters of hope. People feeling unwell, husked out, ambivalent, lacking joy.

​All this while the seas rise, the planet warms, and technology comes for your job.

​We’re dancing through a time of grand change; old rules, ideas, habits dying and the new not yet born.

​These changes bigger than you or me. Mainly. But not entirely.

​My experience in the crevasse is relevant.

• We sell ourselves a story of control - if i do x, then y will happen etc. The truth is less so. These big wheels of change - like mine in the crevasse, or any of the above crises - are bigger than you. We can respond / adapt, not shape and control.

• Given that, trust the process and let go of the controls. Change is happening. Rather than manage, get better at sensing, tuning into the bigger patterns at play. This true for you, your company. Did I climb out of the crevasse or, in time, did the context just change?

• Work with ideas, with teachings, road tested over time. Ideas gifted from wise old sages, like:

  • everything is always changing

  • go with the flow

  • Spend more time in nature

  • Get your hands dirty, literally

  • Tend to new life.

• You are not an island.

• Get good at endings. We humans over complicate, always adding people, ideas, initiatives - even entire companies. Instead: simplify, slow down and get better at endings. Cut the tree back to invite new growth.

What will you end today?

I think this is important work for you.

Those mega crises mentioned above are a call to action.
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The planet on which we live is a complex, adaptive system, responding to the infinite nodes, playing, interacting - of which you are one.

Step off the hamster wheel of joyless work, hopeless company, dwindling prospects and disappearing joy - oh, that all? - and step into thriving, creative, joyful adaptability.

And in so doing you'll start weaving new ingredients into this giant soup of life.

What you do matters. To you, and almost everything else.