Time To Embrace The Uncertainty And Create Anew?

Ending things is painful.

I ran a company for about 15 years. It was a good and wild ride.

We did great work - hat tip to those of you who shared and continue to author the journey! We twisted. We turned. We pushed hard. We hit walls. We surfed waves. There were ups. And downs. But we were always on the move. A relentless energy and curiosity. A relentless hunger to change, to improve, to tweak.

This kind of hunger is important. It keeps the balls spinning, moving, evolving. Some might call it creative destruction. In economist Schumpeter’s speak that’s constantly creating the new to make the old obsolete. Or, in Marx speak, the inevitable consequence of capitalism. It will destroy itself in war and recession.

And to us?

For me, running a business is like playing with a sparkler.

You know, those sparkly things we played with on fireworks nights? Wave them around and they leave a trail?

The company, like a sparkler, has a certain amount of energy; the tail can only be so long. The end of it needs to die in order that the source continues to thrive, to glow. Make the tail too long, add to much to the company, and you might compromise the whole.

Or, put another way, you need to kill a little bit of what’s old in order that the new is born.

Which is why I fired myself.

Business was good. We worked for some of the biggest brands on projects which cost $millions for thousands of people. We worked around the world. At different times, from studios in London and Singapore. Then Australia.

Firing yourself would be stupid, right?

A walk away to an unknown future?

Well, we’ll come back to that.

But first, let’s go on a journey. A journey via the Native American Indian ceremony of Potlatch, to the Aboriginal farming technique, Firestick Farming, and back home to being fired. Via David Bowie.

Potlach was a ceremony hosted by West Coast American Indians. A chance to demonstrate wealth and status, a chance for the Chief to showcase his giant kahoonies.

Ceremony to showcase strength and power, nothing new in that.

We see it all over. We see it in gleaming glass towers where we work. In the gleaming steel pods we drive. In what we wear, what we buy, what we say. For us, we demonstrate power by how much we accumulate. But not the Potlatch.

No, the Potlatch ceremony was about how much the chief would give away. How much he’d destroy.

This of course has two benefits.

Firstly, the wealth of the whole community is increased in giving everything away. Whether they’re hunting rights or fishing rights, or land or, yep, people, in giving away, the Chief increases the wealth of the group. The community is richer for it.

But something more powerful happens too. In giving everything away, the Chief invites the opportunity to create anew. To replenish. To refresh. In giving everything away, in destroying, the Chief sparks the deep wells of human ingenuity which exist inside us all, waiting to rise up in search of a problem to solve.

When we accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, which we do individually and organisationally, we suppress our natural desire, our natural ability to create anew.

Through Potlatch, the Chief invites the regenerative power of giving everything away.

And the Aborigines?

Topical.

Australia burns. Like a ring of fire. No belittling pun intended. I mean literally, geographically. Fires range the full breadth of Australia’s habitable land. The coastal ring.

But these bush fires are a recent phenomenon. Geologists know that the fires didn’t burn like this before colonial settlement.

I was in Australia recently and spoke to someone who’s been working to piece together aboriginal knowledge and approaches to land management. Aboriginal impact wasn’t neutral - the Australian cousin of the Woolly Mammoth didn’t survive the Aboriginie - but everything the Aborigines knew about living in concert with the land we have forgotten. Their knowledge might be described as a 5,000 piece jigsaw, almost entirely lost and destroyed. But, piece by piece, people are working to put it back together… before it’s too late.

The Aborigines knew that everything had a time to burn.

Just not all at once, across an entire continent. And not in huge, one size fits all chunks, which has been the colonial preventative way. The colonial way leaves the land vulnerable.

The aboriginal way is more subtle, more ongoing, more live and dynamic.

Everything has time to burn, to renew. This death is necessary for new growth.

Which brings me to Bowie. Ziggy actually.

In 1972 sitting back stage at the Hammersmith Odeon, so the story goes (I wasn’t there). Bowie, or Ziggy, made the decision to kill himself. To kill off his cash cow, to discontinue his most sucessful product. Imagine Apple swiping the iPhone to oblivion? That’s what Ziggy did. The ‘product’ which had catapulted him from cult hero to global super star had to die. And with it he’d invite all the creative energy to create anew.

That the old needed to die before the new could be born.

This makes sense.

You know the biggest cause of death?

Yep, you’re right.

It’s birth.

Nothing can be die unless its been born. So, by extension, nothing can be born unless something dies.

We know this to be true.

We see it in our eco systems too. Conservationist Mike Philips speaks of the importance of the predator to the health and vibrancy of an eco system. We’ve seen this in North America. When the wolf was removed and subsequently reintroduced, the health and vibrancy of the whole system adjusts, amends accordingly. Death in the system keeps it alive. Keeps it healthy.

And on being fired?

Whilst firing myself would seem dangerous, reckless, stupid, something needed to die for new things to grow. In firing myself, the old company is able to go on, with the other exceptional team, people and leadership in a new environment. To grow into its opportunity unencumbered by the old. The old company found a new, bigger, more spectacular home, merged and in bed with a bigger cousin.

It’s only in letting things die, in killing things off, that you create the opportunity, the invitation, for our full creative ingenuity to rise up. As a species, we are extraordinary. Our potential knows almost no bounds.

But to serve it, the creative system needs stoking. It needs to be fed, sparked, energised and we do this by killing things off, by risking the unknown. Not by accumulating.

Whilst this is all true for big macro things like how whole companies or industries or economies work and function, it’s true for our day-to-day too. We carry assumptions, ideas. We are ‘holding on’ machines and we reflect this in the companies we create and work for.

But these accumulations slow us down. They make us fat. As we get metaphorically - or, in some cases, literally - fatter, we slow down. We have less energy. We think less clearly. Our brains are awash with chemicals.

But cut away and we sharpen. The hunger in the system, whether that be our personal system, our company system or whatever other system we’re knowingly or unknowingly plugged into, is sparked.

Cut things away and we invite a fuller creative and ingenious response.

So cut away. Kill off. Destroy.

Run your own Potlatch.

Take a Firestick to your projects or assumptions or ways of working.

Do a Ziggy.

Sure, it’s scary.

But a little bit of death is a good thing.