One of our Fishbird team members was out in San Francisco for the past two weeks, interestingly enough brushing up on his culinary knowledge (we don’t believe in pigeonholing ourselves). Over the course of his days out on the West Coast, he often wrote us short emails discussing what he was doing and learning. We thought we’d share this one with you:
I went to see a Picasso exhibit at one of the museums by the bay. I’m not sure what drew me there. In most cases, I find art museums to be difficult to walk through, if only because there are so many people standing around trying to get something. By “get” I mean they are trying to figure out the answer to a question that was never asked by the artist. I have counted myself as one of these people until this particular Picasso exhibit. Something changed for me, walking amongst his art. I was staring at one of his paintings, listening to a woman converse with another woman about why he used this color for the face, that color for the hat. I watched people flirting with the artwork, attempting to tease out its secrets. And I realized in that moment that there was nothing to find in Picasso’s work.
It just is.
And all those conversations I used to hear, or used to be a part of, about how some of the greatest pieces of art look like a child could have done them, these conversations came rushing back to me. This is what makes these paintings so prolific, it is that they are just raw energy, thought has not entered the process. By “thought,” I mean the adult ideas of doing things for a reason. Try painting like a child and you will inevitably get lost in thinking about how to paint like a child and all of your energy will not be expressed on the paper.
I walk into another room after all these thoughts have drifted in like summer rainclouds and I see a quote from Picasso, saying something along the lines of, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, it took me a lifetime to paint like a child.”
This is what we are all trying to get back to, in some form or another. Children are energy. Adults are the thought of energy. It is when we get out of our minds and become present that we are able to become children again, children who have no need for greater reasoning or meaning.
Meaning is a solely human pursuit. And we look for it everywhere. It is very much like how we are by and large programmed to see a human face in how certain rocks and shadows are arranged on the surface of Mars. Our minds are looking for humanity, for a sign of life in everything, just like we are constantly scanning for meaning. But just as those Martian rocks are not a human face, the majority of this world has no meaning. It is not trying to mean anything, it is not trying to get us to understand something bigger.
So, for the first time in my life, I appreciated an art exhibit. I stopped trying to be intelligent in the space, and I just let Picasso show me what he wanted to show me. It was beautiful.
The New York Times posted an article on Friday that piqued our interest and got us thinking. In early 2009, the brand behemoth embarked on Project Oxygen, a data-driven attempt to build a better boss. By the end of the year, the project team unveiled their findings, which NYT titled, Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers. Here’s three of them:
Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.
Help your employees with career development.
Don’t be a sissy: be productive and results-oriented.
These habits aren’t anything to write home about; while we were excited to see the “clear vision” point make the list, we were even more excited by what we found near the end of the article:
“Google executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.”
And following:
“The thing that moves or nudges Googlers is facts; they like information… They don’t like being told what to do. They’re just, ‘Give me the facts and I’m smart, I’ll decide.’”
Yet at the same time, Google surprised the world in January by announcing that Larry Page, one of the company’s co-founders, was taking over as CEO from Eric Schmidt. The move was explained by writing, “Day-to-day adult supervision is no longer needed.” Point being: we are speeding up decision-making and simplifying management.
Speeding up decision-making and fact-finding are at opposite ends of the work spectrum, and yet the two fiercely co-exist in almost every organization Fishbird has worked with. Google appears to be no exception. As a general rule, fact finders are the slowest to pull the trigger (they’re researching!) and quick triggers are the least tolerant of an abundance of information. The key is finding the balance between these two important, and necessary work functions: supporting fact finders in moving faster and providing quick triggers with enough background to make smart decisions.
From an interview we read on CNN:
“Born and raised in Libya, the man in his 40s says this is the first protest he’s ever seen in his native land. With no freedom of speech, no one ever dared to utter an ill word about the government or its powerful leader, Moammar Gadhafi, lest they risk jail time, he said. But with Friday’s protests, violent clashes and dozens of deaths, something changed. “We can speak now,” he marveled from a noisy street near the protest’s epicenter. “The fear wall broke. Even after the killing, nobody is getting scared. Their numbers are increasing.”
He thanks other recent revolutions for the opportunity to see that change. “I think the driving force is what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Because of that fear, that wall, we felt that we couldn’t do anything. After we saw Tunisia and Egypt, we thought that we can do it too. Tunisia and Egypt give us hope.”"
Let’s keep breaking these fear walls.
Watching the “Emergency Mine Rescue” special on NOVA we saw lots of metaphors for Fishbird: The rescue set out to do the impossible – it had never been done before and no one had ever lasted, trapped in a mine that long. They were unstoppable – faced with failures, upset, and breakdowns the rescue effort never let the problems stop them. They were committed to the outcome not the path – there wasn’t one “right” way to save the miners, multiple tunnels were dug simultaneously. They dug many holes – as it was said in New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono: “one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even after one has found a promising one.” We are reminded that “You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”
