The road less travelled
Instead of clinging to what we know, shouldn't we embrace business’ reinvention with curiosity, freedom, and optimism?
I keep having the same conversation. My fault, I suppose. I started it here.
We have been living inside a pointy end of history since 2019. And yet, we’ve kept suiting up, turning up, and selling ourselves as though nothing is amiss.
· Natural disasters
· Pandemics
· Lockdowns
· Economic change
· Inflation
· Technological disruption ala AI
These pressures have dramatically reshaped Australian business.
Yet, denial persists. People are still adamant the post-pandemic playbook applies.
I don’t think we’re coping.
How can we? We’ve been so busy getting away from what’s happened, we haven’t even stopped to reflect on it properly.
Change, especially forced change, is brutal.
We’ve withstood crisis after crisis, feeling every inch of uncertainty and powerlessness.
And the desire to control something, anything, finds itself rearing it’s ugly head inside roadmaps and marketing plans that reek of comforting familiarity, but fail to bring us much of anything.
We are living in the world as capitalism breaks apart. We’re not just burnout. We’re positively crispy.
And when the hits keep coming, the future is frightening. Or is it?
Image: wooden suspension bridge in the falls
Optimism lies in letting go
In 2018, I lived in a hospital room for a week. A very clever Wollongong surgeon had spent three hours handpicking internal weeds that tried to end my life. Two organs lighter, and with strict instructions to hustle around the nurses' station once a day, it was a week of being thankful for second chances.
It was also the first time I had done nothing business related for ages.
I took Back, After the Break, a book written by Osher Gunsberg. He talked about his choice to drown persistent, life-crushing anxiety in rivers of alcohol and misadventure.
Even though my vice, work, was more socially acceptable, I related to the same terrified anxiety-avoidant drowning sensation.
Osher had been so consumed with running away from himself, he’d lost everything. He had to let go finally to get anywhere in the future.
It’s the theme of 2024, really, letting go:
When you have nothing, you have the freedom to do anything.
If we are hurtling towards changes so big it will up-end business, you can finally free yourself from:
· all the ways you’ve tried
· all the maps everyone else wanted to hand you
· the ideas you never really liked but went along with
· the obligation to the indefinable idea that is “consistency”
· the must do this crap that’s weighing you down
Clinging to the last vestiges of marketing and trying to recapture the alleged magic formula is not working.
It isn’t just unhelpful. It’s compounding the misery.
There is no structure to rely on. There is no right way to fall. There is no such thing as control.
And that is as freeing as it is terrifying.
Re-inviting reinvention
I believe being a little arsey is what will save us in the end. That it’s better to end up failing at something wonderful than getting a C-grade at being safe, yet ultimately non-descript beige.
That leads me to believe that:
Curiosity is our best remedy to the sleepwalking we do before a crisis shakes us unceremoniously awake.
Our duty is to our values, the problems we want to solve, and the people we want to help. Not to indifferent and opaque algorithms or big tech platforms.
Reinvention means accepting our reshaping, even though it hurts.
And that means going out the back, admitting you don’t know as much as you thought, burning the rule book, sobbing in the sunshine and grieving the certainty you’ve lost, wiping your face, and rewriting a new experiment. One that centres on embracing hope, optimism, and squeamishly high chances of vulnerability, creativity, and yes, even failure.
Are you headed in the right direction? Perform a check-in:
1. What is scaring the crap out of your customers right now?
2. What are you doing to make living with and managing those fears easier?
3. Take a look at your last fortnight’s marketing:
a) Are you a beacon of hope or a pile of the same old information?
b) Are your customers at the centre of your marketing, (or are you talking about yourself)?
c) Are you outlining frustrations and practical, optimistic ways to improve things?
d) If you had your customer’s problem, would what you’ve offered in the last fortnight help them?
4. Are you enjoying and connecting the marketing story you see in front of you? Or is it what someone else told you it should look like to be effective?
Give yourself permission to do something different:
5. What’s an idea that’s been knocking on the back of your head for a while that you haven’t had the courage do try yet?
6. What version of that idea can you do with the resources, people, and time you have within reach?
7. Nut out a brief, one-page outline to see if it works:
a) the Wish you want to try
b) the Outcomes you’d like to see
c) the Obstacles that you’ll have to address
d) the Plan to overcome them (WOOP)
8. If things are scary anyway, what’s stopping you from giving it a shot?
And remember, change might be scary, but it’s the only thing that takes us places.