Completism

Summer Edition #5

When you don’t know what you’re looking for

My wife, Kate, spent all of her primary school years in Germany, so when she returned to Australia aged 12, she spoke basic English only, and her spelling was below her peers.

So, she got to work to put things straight and was a diligent reader of the dictionary, laboriously learning the vagaries of English spelling.

The problem was, as you can guess, that if you don’t know how to spell a non-phonetic word at all, it’s hard to look it up. Where should 12-year-old Kate have started to look for celery, or ceiling, or cycle?

But, sometimes, it’s good to not know what we’re looking for.

The venerable American department store, JC Penney, targetting its ‘lower middle class’ demographic, misstepped badly by creating a new, ordered, minimalist look (led by the same person who designed Apple’s stores): it turned out customers loved the former clutter and the seemingly chance bargains they’d score.

When that disappeared, so did the customers.

And, if you think about it, the appeal of social media is its randomness: the idea that scrolling or swiping will take us to hitherto unknown — and possibly unasked-for — content.

I was in Los Angeles last week, and I looked forward to visiting one of my favourite bookstores, Taschen. The pleasure of a Taschen bookstore visit is precisely that I don’t know what I’ll find.

If you don’t know them, Taschen is actually a publisher, not a retailer, so every book is carefully curated to fit their ethos: democratising art and culture by making beautiful books available at reasonable prices; high-quality production, with many books beautifully hardbound; and risk-taking, with many bold and controversial titles.

I saw numerous books I wanted to buy: on NASA, on the Japanese artist Hokusai, and on the impacts of big game hunting in Africa. None of them were books I’d gone in there to look at, so I left them on the shelves after I’d pleasurably browsed through them. I did walk out with a different book I’d never heard of before: a book on Brutalist Architecture, to prime me for Mexico which is full of 70s concrete creations.

Question: How do you curate information and services so that your customers can ‘discover’ what interests them?

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Trying too hard

I started learning tennis about two years ago, and for most of the first year, I had tennis elbow.

Never so badly it stopped me from doing anything (let alone playing tennis), but it was always there. Then, one day, I realised it hadn’t been there for a couple of months.

Why? Because I’d stopped trying. Well, I’d stopped trying so hard.

I began my tennis journey believing (falsely) that how hard I hit the ball is dependent on my arm strength. So, I gripped the racket tight and hit the ball with as much force as I could muster. Gradually, the ball ended up more often where I wanted it to, but my right elbow was annoying me.

But, after a year, my coach’s patient explanation of two things finally got through:

1. I should hold my racket loosely. So loosely, in fact, that someone could easily take it from my hand.

2. I should not use arm force but ‘ground reaction force’. When I adopt a squatting stance, I push against the ground so the ground pushes back with an equal force, enabling me to move, rotate, or generate power for strokes.

I notice that ‘trying too hard’ also occurs in organisations I work with. Have you ever seen a stretch goal set, disproportionate resources are allocated to its achievement, its shadow blocks out the light for many other initiatives, and when everyone collapses having met the goal, the organisation is depleted?

Better to consider my tennis lesson of the past year, I suggest. Set an intention, loosely organise effort, and look for ‘ground reaction forces’ you can harness: give your initiatives a strong grounding in data and information, relationships and interpersonal support, policy and governance.

Those ‘ground forces’ will lessen the effort that your people then have to put in on a day-to-day basis and make it more likely you will get to your intended state.

Question: What are you trying too hard to achieve?

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Is your vision complete?

I’m working right now with one of Australia’s leading organisations that provides possibilities for young people who are homeless. The big question we’re asking at board level is this: “Is our vision complete?”

In their case, this means asking what ingredients fit together to assist a troubled, perhaps traumatised, young person make their way in the world. It’s not enough to provide a shelter - those young people need stable housing. And education. And a job. And supportive relationships. And . . .

Another of my clients, a household-name consumer company, is conceptualising environmental sustainability and what it means to them. They are building a ‘complete vision’ by defining not just their role in climate stability, circularity and nature-based solutions, but also the role of their suppliers — and their customers.

A third client is a significant state-based aged care organisation. They’re going beyond the usual ‘triple-pronged’ offerings of residential care, retirement villages and in-home care. They’re conceiving a ‘complete vision’ by looking at a service layer that fits between villages and residential care, as well as looking at affordable housing and even shared housing for ‘assetless’ people in the 50+ age group who will become some of the most vulnerable old people in 25 years time.

Question: What does a ‘complete vision’ look like for your organisation?

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You know what I’m going to ask you to do.

Yes, please click the ‘heart’. In this world of AI where the bots know what you and I don’t, it’s even more important to assert our supremacy by telling them what we like. That is, if you’ve liked what you’ve read today.

Until next Friday, enjoy looking for complete solutions and curated discoveries.

Andrew