Are you tiling a floor — or creating a mosaic?
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be...
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Marianne Williamson, frequently mis-attributed to Nelson Mandela.
Are you tiling a floor — or creating a mosaic?
Have you ever tessellated? Any complex problem can usually only be solved by many people working on it. Think of the pyramids. Lots of essentially interchangeable labour, well organised, working to execute a design over decades. Or to refine the system for electricity generation. That took several technical breakthroughs and just two key concepts, originally developed in the second half of the 19th century and still used today to power the device you're reading this on.
Tesselation means to fill an area with pieces so that there are no gaps - think of tiling on a wall or floor. Simple tessellation can be with square or rectangular tiles - think of this as people who all have essentially the same role and you're trying to get them to fit together. This is a bit like building pyramids. Just carry those blocks up there. And again. And again. On the whole, this is fairly simple work.
However, what if your people aren't all parallel sides and right angles? What if they're curved and non-symmetrical? Can they still still tesselate? Sure they can, it just takes more skill to get them to align. Usually it depends on getting the angles just right; once you've got it, they'll work together nicely. This is a bit like building cathedrals. Lots of different shapes, but all cut just so.
What if your people aren't the same at all? What if they're in a couple of different configurations? Like electricity generation, or water supply, or motor vehicles, a handful of different fundamentals have to fit together to work effectively. For cars, it's the combination of internal combustion, mass production and road building. All of them need to be present for mass transportation to work.
But what about areas like urban design, or feeding a city, or building an economic hub for a small town, so everyone's employed? In these issues, many different individual tiles have to come together to create a coherent whole. There's a place for a small yellow tile as well as a larger white tile, but they have to adopt their places and you only see a pleasing result when you design carefully and then step away from it all to have a look.
What sort of skill is required if your components are all quite individual? Can you still make something meaningful from your collection of different colours and shapes?
And, what if you're trying to solve intractably complex social and health problems. Like obesity. Or poorer kids dropping out of school to give birth to still more poor kids. Or people who are so disconnected from society they turn to drugs and alcohol and disconnect themselves still further. In that case, the task you're trying to fit them to isn't a nice flat sheet, but perhaps a curved irregular surface? Can you still tesselate?
The message here is that increasing complexity of tiles and surfaces requires increasing imagination and skill from you and other leaders. It requires knowing what you're working with (don't assume white squares when you've got six types of curved shapes) and what you're working on (don't think your ground is flat when in fact it's hilly and curved). And finally, know that you need many types of tiles, often in repeating patterns to get the result which looks pleasing to the eye.
Question: Are there times when you’re trying to build a simple tiled floor but, in fact, require a mosaic?
Are you paying real attention to your customers?
Bali has a population of just 4 million and, until this year, had more than that many visitors (over 6 million). This tropical paradise is infested with all sorts of healers: spiritual and physical, Eastern and Western, shonky and authentic. This includes what must be the most concentrated population of masseurs anywhere on earth (except on board the ocean liner, The Queen Mary, where the ratio is one masseur for every 60 passengers).
My wife and I love massage and on some 40 trips to Bali, we’ve road-tested dozens of masseurs: some charge as little as $5, while others charge Western prices.
However, long ago, we found the best, we think. Nyoman Suparsa is not a massage therapist. He's a healer who doesn't need you to tell him "my lower back's sore". He just knows. He doesn't need you to say, "A bit harder in there please". He just does it. He's become so popular, that he's trained numerous therapists to model his approach.
Nyoman says he has only four secrets, which he tries to pass on to his students:
Focus: Put yourself 'in the zone'. There's a mental, physical and emotional state which is conducive to great massage. Know how to put yourself in this state, even when it's hot, your wife's yelled at you, your kid's failed a test, the traffic is a nightmare and you're running late.
Concentrate on the client: Don't forget who you're here for. Don't' think about business, or the spot on the wall which needs painting. Give the client your full energy.
Don't just practice your technique: just running through the same moves each time is not enough. You've got to watch different people massage, have massages yourself - and incorporate these into your personal style.
Get energy from your client: I’ve asked Nyoman how he can do 6, 8 or 10 massages a day. He says, “I get energy from them to give to me, through my hands”.
Question: Do your people do this? When they're with your clients are they focussed, concentrating, learning and gaining energy from their interactions with your customers?