Maps are easy to sell. If you know where you are and where you’d like to go, the map solves your problem. Maps are all around us: how-to, what-to, step-by-step.
The compass is more resilient but less descriptive. It shines a light, gives us clarity, but the next steps are up to us.
In an age of ubiquitous AI, answers are no longer in short supply. But questions are more valuable than ever.
Twenty years ago, I published my scariest book, The Dip. It frightened my publisher and the booksellers because it was about a topic rarely written about (quitting) and it deliberately did not contain much in the way of answers or procedures. The book was designed to give people clarity about something they’d been avoiding, and to provoke the difficult questions that can transform the path we are on.
Decades later, I still get earnest questions about quitting. Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee, which is the point of this sort of work. The existence of a compass helps us realize that it might help to know which way is north.
This fall, I’m back with The Knot. It’s not a sequel, but it rhymes.
Because sometimes, the question isn’t whether to push through or to quit. Sometimes, you’ve already decided the work matters. You’ve already decided the problem is worth solving. And still, we’re stuck.
A knot happens when we want two things that can’t both be true. We want to make a change, but we don’t want to risk disapproval. We want to ship the work, but we want a guarantee it will work. We want to move forward, but we’re carrying a commitment, a scorecard, a fear, or a story from the past.
The book is a compass with a simple north star: Problems can be solved. Our work has a purpose, intent, the change we seek to make. If we can name the baggage that’s holding us back or confusing us, progress is possible.
It ships next week.
The people who have read it can’t stop talking about it, because it helps us realize that better is possible. I hope you can share a copy with someone who needs it.
Let’s imagine the airline you run had to cancel just one flight a year. You have three days notice. How would you go about it?
You might begin by considering the travelers with the tightest itineraries, and explore which options exist and prioritize them.
Then, this being late-stage capitalism, you might look at the passengers who are paying you the most, or are the highest-value customers. You’d prepare alternative plans for them, and, in clear language, make it easy for them to switch with just one click.
And you’d expand your staff, just a bit, so the dozen or so people who can’t be served by your well-designed self-service model would be able to call or text in real time.
Add it all up, and the overhead you’d need to create a layer of customer-service around a cancelled flight (with $180,000 in revenue) isn’t that much.
With tech tools and training, your team could save long-planned-for trips and salvage customer loyalty.
Multiply it by the 3,000 or so flights that KLM cancels every year and it seems like a big number. Which is why it’s the accountants, not the marketers, that create so much chaos.
Start with one.
Your scale should not be your customer’s problem.
One person isn’t a lecture, it’s lunch.
Three people is office hours.
Six people is a seminar.
At some point, we shift from interaction to performance–but the people are the same people, the very ones that were happy to simply sit and have lunch with us.
Bring in some cameras and it goes from a lecture to a broadcast. And that brings all sorts of other requirements, anxiety and noise.
Perhaps we should act as if it’s just lunch.
The office worker has learned to dread the annual review. For many good reasons.
It’s going away.
Now, like workers on the factory floor, it’s likely that the metrics will be exposed and the system will be contributing a review, not just the boss. AI will show up with your score, once a day, or even more often.
It will read your email, watch your clicks and listen to your calls. The relentless deskilling pursued by bosses is pushing each of us to work for an AI.
The better alternative is to have an AI work for you. Upskilling is the best response to the race to the bottom–leadership and projects, not tasks. We can start now before it’s too late.
Seen.
Remembered.
Understood.
It might not be enough, but it helps.
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