Between Movement and Home

In my first article I tried to put words to the distinction between state and movement in an organisation — something I have spent a long time searching for the right language to describe. That distinction is also, in a sense, why this newsletter exists. Writing about it is a way of building a real conceptual world around the fairly intuitive way I have come to work with companies and their leaders. I want to try to create a passage between unconscious competence and conscious practice. To expand the vocabulary we have for the more organic development of our organisations.

When I look back at the companies I have been involved in, and the public debates and networks I have moved through over the years, I am struck by how narrow our perspective tends to be. We talk as if we have full control and free choice over how our organisations develop. We talk, above all, about growth — how much, how fast. I have myself helped tell the story that a business owner succeeds on the day they receive investment, and again on the day they sell. I was wrong. The real human success is in the day-to-day running of the thing. I still wait to read an interview with a CEO who is happy because they make something good that people need, and because the company is made up of a good team. A company moves not only with a market — it moves with its society. Behind that thought lies a lot of accumulated observation. I have also, over time, found different ways of supporting business owners — ways that hold more respect for the part of a person that has a genuine calling to take on the work. Most people are where they are because it fits something real in them, but we don't always manage to cultivate that part. I am approaching fifty, and so much of what I have seen and understood is finding its form now, wanting to be expressed in new ways. I hope, over time, to give words to more of it here.

The real human success is in the day-to-day running of the thing.

But back to the distinction between movement and state.

The framework came from bringing together Joseph Campbell's work on the hero's journey with Ursula K. Le Guin's carrier bag theory. You don't need to have read either to follow the distinction — but that is the path my own understanding has taken. We are fluent in the language of heroes. We create them readily. Often it is the business owner or senior leader who ends up representing the entire organisation's achievement, and that has its own validity: the top sets the direction, and direction is the precondition for movement. But what does it do to a person to always be orienting toward the next thing? What gets lost when the present is constantly being traded in for an improved future? I notice something tends to get lost — because the present is, after all, the starting point for any change.

I see it in the leaders around me, and I have felt it myself. The relief of always being on the way to somewhere else. Over time you can almost lose the capacity to stop and sense the organisation around you, as if you gradually lose the ability to navigate at lower speed. Sometimes you feel almost like a stranger in your own back garden, and notice that you feel more at ease leaving than staying long enough to find your footing again. I find this easy to see and genuinely hard to describe.

Le Guin's carrier bag theory — which is in fact a theory about literature — gave me a new dimension to the language I was missing. Rather than telling the story through the hero who overcomes the obstacle, it tells the story through what holds the events. Through the vessel, not the sword.

We know the phrase holding the space — the ability to create room for complex dialogue, to signal to the people around you that there is enough safety and trust here for disagreement to unfold before a solution is found together. I value that kind of space because in it we can avoid carelessness. When we can hold a complexity without demanding its resolution, the solution is allowed to emerge through collaboration where every need is heard and perhaps even met.

Another way into the same thinking is to consider a home. Our homes are permitted — invited, even — to be still. Home is where we can simply be, without the expectation that we develop or improve ourselves. And it is there, in the unhurried ease of a home that demands nothing of us, that we most often arrive at the insights that carry us to the next level. State is a precondition for progression. And yet state is not something that gets honoured in how we talk about work.

State is a precondition for progression. And yet state is not something that gets honoured in how we talk about work.

So how do we hold both? I spent a long time with that question until I remembered something from a physics lesson: that light is both particle and wave. That helped me understand that it is the dynamic of the paradox itself that offers a new frame. You have to cultivate an awareness of both how you want to be in movement, and how you want to be while you are moving. From there come some difficult questions — which I think we will return to in a future edition — about how a leader takes responsibility for the state they are in, and the state their organisation is in.