Imperfect Truth Creating Opportunity.

Wabi Sabi was born in Japan 700 years ago. Or thereabouts. 

It’s an idea with no literal translation.

It’s a spirit, a feeling.

It’s best understood by what it is and what it isn’t.

It’s intuitive more than logical.

It’s relative not absolute.

It’s one of a kind not mass produced.

It’s about the present more than a constant striving, progress.

It is borne of a belief that nature is uncontrollable and that ageing and attrition lends beauty.

It celebrates nature, romanticises it.

It is organic, soft, vague, permeable, more than it is sharp, precise, definite.

It talks to the idea that everything has it’s time, it’s window, it’s season. That all things come and go.

Like our work, our businesses. They come and go. As do our projects, clients, relationships. Despite what we think and how we organise, these things come and go.

We don’t run our businesses, our organisations, this way.

We believe we can combat this bigger nature, the nature that says all things have their day. And then they are gone.

We plan, we control, we build systems in an attempt to beat nature, to beat the inevitable rise and fall. This kind of planning is futile.

Five year plans and other largely made up business plans. Annual targets. Incentives. We celebrate scale and growing ever larger.

We believe - hope! - the upward curve is an inevitability. And feel helpless when it isn’t. We believe success is a consequence of planning and management and systems and controls.

These no doubt play a role. But they tell only part of the story.

Ultimately, nature is bigger than all the plans we might impose.

We plan and control.

Then a killer virus jumps from bats.

We plan and control.

Then we lose our biggest client.

We plan and control.

And regulation changes and / or a technology develops and / or, and / or.

‘Insert unforeseen problem’ here.

Shit happens, things change. these changes are big and seen, or they are little and unseen. The market you’re holding on to, the customer base, the prevailing ideas about what makes sense in your sector, market, country - these are things always shifting and changing. Sure, the change might be slow. Glacial, even. Or it might be tectonic. Or quick. Sudden. We don’t know.

But we do know it’s an inevitable.

I met with someone today who used to run a private jet charter business. It is publicly listed. All that means is that I can buy shares in it and expect to see plans, plans, plans.

Except their business is about the unforeseen, the random. Sure, it’s safe to say random events which require large numbers of people to be repatriated - their go-to problem - will occur, but it’s not predictable. And we like predictable.

The idea that we can plan our way to predictable success, that the nature of things can be controlled, is pervasive in Board rooms large and small.

In running our business, we planned like the rest of them.

We like to think, here in the West, that we can plan and control our way to success. But we can’t. And when the inconvenient happens, we panic, we stress, we fight. Because it doesn’t fit our view of what is supposed to happen.

What if we worked to a different set of values?

What instead if we looked to some bigger truths?

Like what?

That all things are impermanent.
That everything is always changing. Look out the window? What do you see? I see leafless trees, a bleak sky. It’s winter. But not for ever. Soon it will be spring. Everything is always changing. Everything is impermanent.

The problem I have with a team member, a client. A client who won’t leave me alone, who I have already over serviced? The situation will change. As will today’s financial crisis. Or that commercial one. These things come and go. The only guarantee is that they will come and will go. We just don’t know when.

Build a business on the principle that everything is always changing. Roll with it, don’t fight it.

All things are imperfect.
We don’t like this.

We project a picture of perfection to the world. We make a shop window which shines and gleams. We paper over the cracks. These might be personal/emotional. They might be commercial. We believe that perfect is best.

it’s an unnecessary lie. Nothing is perfect. The keyboard on which I write bears the scars of my everyday beatings. The ‘a’ key is blurred. Obviously a popular letter. I stress about this or that. We struggle for work, to be seen, to be heard. We struggle with belief.

This week I have met with three business owners. Each has expressed their own version of the struggle. To be heard, to be liked, to be bought. It’s a constant push. Not enough clients. Too many (ok, nobody had this problem).

Every craftsman knows the limits of perfection. There is beauty in imperfection. My keyboard becomes more mine. The fading jeans. The battered notebook. The balding head.

These are imperfections we carry. As do our businesses.

Businesses are imperfect too. They are living, breathing things. Maybe the success, the beauty, the opportunity hides in these imperfections.

And finally…

Nothing is complete.

We stress when the end of year numbers are short or showing a loss. Sure, that might be telling us something important, something we would probably already know without the arbitrary end of year measure.

We believe that things have a clear start and end. That projects start and stop. Sure, there are high points and low points, more intense and less intense phases, but the idea that things have a hard beginning and a hard end is illusory. Everything is constantly in flux, creating, thriving and or dying. and, in dying, new creating becomes possible. It’s a complex relationship. It’s true for the universe, which is bigger than my pay grade, it’s true in selling and losing and growing and shrinking our businesses, our clients.

These are the principles of Wabi Sabi, principles on which we might run and do our businesses.

Wabi Sabi celebrates the beauty of the otherwise unseen. Look not at the biggest wins or our shiniest achievements, but in the wilting, in the dying, in the messy ends and fraught beginnings. In the craziness starting a project. Or the exhaustion when it ends, when it dies. Or when a business is born. Or dies.

What if we celebrate these moments more than the obvious?

In Summary.

As opposed to conclusion because that’s not in the spirit of things!

Imagine if….

• We run our businesses focused more on the process, the journey, not the destination?

• We built into our assumptions that there will be good times… and bad times.

• Nothing is for ever. No client. No team. Not even the business.

• We actively stirred the pot? We embraced the uncertainty by culling clients, churning team, by discontinuing products and services.

• We incentivised to the impermanence, imperfection? knowing that in the everyday failures, the scruffy edges, new opportunities are born.

• Make these ideas, the impermanent, the incomplete, the ever changing our guiding rules of them?

  No more business plans. Just business do’s.

* A huge and very important note.
This entire piece was made possible only and exclusively by the very great writing of Leonard Koren and his great book “ Wabi Sabi For Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers’. With thanks