Malcolm Gladwell wrote a fantastic article titled Open Secrets about the collapse of Enron, and the veracity of our belief that Jeffrey Skilling (the CEO at the time) was guilty. He goes on to discuss that actually, whereas puzzels often stem from a deliberate disequilibirum of information, a mystery actually involves ‘open secrets’ - where all the evidence is in plain sight to see. Gladwell intones that whilst you can find someone guilty for withholding information to the detriment of others, we should not have been able to convict Skilling, because Enron actually met their legal obligations to disclose all of their company information. The Enron collapse was a mystery, not a puzzle.

Recently in the Huffington Post, David Fiderer wrote an article about Goldman Sachs avoiding punishment from the S.E.C…but again, this is a similar example as Enron. As Fiderer explains…

“If you actually reviewed the performance of mortgage backed securities held by the CDO and understood how cash flow waterfalls and delinquency triggers worked, then you could see that subordinate tranches being insured for the benefit of Goldman were already worthless”

Financial collapse and boom-bust cycles will continue to occur, because we continue to believe that financial management is a ‘due’ process and that due diligence is infallible. Even Fiderer, the author of this artcile, whilst picking out that the due dilligence was a sham…still espouses checking just another metric (the mortgage backed securities held by the CDO) and making that a part of the system. Metrics are important, but it takes experience and a human who is exceptionally experienced in finance and deals to intuitively asses these sorts of deals.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear a report of ‘Corporate greed or incompetence. It’s not the corporations that are guilty, save for their instinct to consistantly push an opportunity to it’s breaking point. It’s our own fault for thinking the system is infallible. It’s time we realized the efficiency of intuition and various information sources being collaborativly pooled, so that these complex mysteries may be solved.

Our personal projects are no different. Don’t confuse the problem you’re facing as a puzzle - sometimes it’s a mystery that you won’t just be able to just crash your way through. Trust your gut and search for the intuitive answers.

1) Behind great people, is a great community.

We’ve all heard the saying, “Behind every great man, is a great woman.” The same applies to people doing great stuff. Behind every magic person is a magic community. People are not awesome by themselves, they often become so because they are supported by an able cadre of other inspiring people. If you want to find magic people, start looking for the community they spend the most time with.

One example is the #samehuman community, who meet once monthly in Melbourne for dinner. If you’re doing something socially progressive and geared towards making a positive difference in the world, you should dine with the #samehuman clan each month. Another is the #leanstartup movement in Sydney, which has a monthly meet-up to discuss their ventures with each other. Or, spend a day co-working at Inspire9.

2) Magic people are doing magic things.

You can find awesome people by looking for awesome projects. People are doing amazings things every day now, and you can often find those amazing people by looking for their amazing projects. Zach Klein, as an example, gets asked for magic every day.

Sites like Kickstarter and Fund Break in Australia, are now a platform for people who are doing really good work, on their own time and money. People like Jeffery Yoo Warren, who successfuly kickstarted his project “Grassroots mapping the Gulf oil spill with balloons and kites. If I were looking for someone to recommend for a geomattic engineer position then I wouldn’t hesitate to send them Jeffery’s way purely based on the fact he’s doing what he is doing in the Gulf.

3) Don’t ask how you’ll find them. Ask how magic people will find you.

Do people like Zach know you? People are now coming to him so often, asking for magic, that he has decided to create jobs.zachklein.com; a site specifically for sharing the different positions which people in his community are looking to fill. Often, you won’t find people doing good stuff - they will find you. Trust that you’re doing good stuff and trust that these people will find you. Magic happens all the time.

I think everyone, when asked about where they make the best decisions, would probably say something like “the shower” or in some mode where their brain was not immediately focused on the task at hand. These solutions are often the best, and most suitably account for all the ‘little’ things that intuitively you know need to be part of the puzzle to solve the problem. The thing is, we often force ourselves to make decisions in environments that are not the places where those solutions crop up.

Jan’s session was excellent because she didn’t facilitate ‘us’ the participants but the environment that we used to evolve our discussions. We had cordoned off an afternoon just to be together and discuss Trampoline, and we moved from different places to keep our energy and discussions naturally flowing. We started with grabbing some take-away coffee at a cafe, then a chat on a rug in Flagstaff Gardens, then lunch at the serene Captains Of Industry.

Photo by superciliousness

Through doing that, over the course of the afternoon, we naturally came to a number of decision points which we suddenly had natural answers for. So natural, they didn’t feel like decisions at all…only validation of shared consensus. It’s my belief that we can come to these natural decision points often, over most complex problems, by just giving ourselves time to come to them. And now that we have made those decisions, the benefit of that shared understanding is evident in all of our planning meetings we have had since.

If you’re facing a complex problem, which appears to be fraught with complex decisions to make, then I suggest just giving yourself the time and environment to make them naturally. Jan is interested in facilitating more sessions like these in the future, so if you’re interested then you should consider sending her an email at janstewart06@gmail.com or follow her on twitter.

Whilst I was away in London recently I was really chuffed to check into my email briefly and notice that Trade School, a project I had backed on Kickstarter, had reached it’s funding goal of $9000. I thought that was fantastic, and can’t wait to see another term happen.

I love the idea of Trade School, because it acts as a conduit for awesome people within their communities to come out of the woodwork and teach others how they do their ’stuff.’ You can see a list of people and classes that took place at Trade School last time around by visiting their website; classes like How to throw an arts festival for 1-3 days or Scrabble strategy for beginners. Trade School seems to straddle well the divide between learning things that are either work-based, or fun-based. The photo below comes from a class hosted by Ellie Irons called Drawing for Pleasure. Trade School is the sort of thing I imagine working really well at Donkey Wheel House, in Melbourne. Perhaps Kinfolk Cafe will adopt the idea? (wink wink).

But the real reason I loved seeing that Trade School got funded was because I am really falling in love with the global platform that Kickstarter is becoming. It is becoming a great way to find excellent slow projects that people are working on. Sometimes, finding interesting people doing funky, out-there, awesome projects can be tough. Now, Kickstarter has 10 of them every week! I’ll be backing more projects in the future and intend on posting those projects I back on this blog. In the meantime, if you’re looking for people doing awesome projects, start your search on Kickstarter

As Peter Drucker has written, “In knowledge work…the task is not given; it has to be determined. ‘What are the expected results from this work?’ is…the key question in making knowledge workers more productive”

I like this analogy. In the industrial era, ‘things’ spewed down the factory line and all we had to do was sort stuff, or carry out one simple task to get our part ‘done.’ Today, knowledge work is vastly different but we still hold the same ideas about productivity as we did in those days when shuffling more ‘things’ down the line meant we had done a better job. There are different rules about what makes someone productive and what makes something ‘done.’ The book helps you work in that productive way. So what are the key ideas of the book? I’ve put down three areas I’ve found most enlightening.

Get things out of your head..

The main focus of GTD is to get ideas, tasks and projects out of you head and into a trusted system. Just like you trust your calender to tell you were you need to be, you need a system which you can trust to tell you what to do. This is the key, and can’t be stressed enough.

If you are currently at work, or doing your own project and you have that sinking feeling in the back of your head that you’ve ‘forgotten something’ then you need are probably operating with a mixture of 3-4 systems for tracking your stuff. Imagine keeping 4 calenders…how confusing would that be! You would end up keeping track of your days by remembering when things were on. Your to-do list is no different. If you don’t have one trusted system for keeping track, you won’t trust anything, and end up walking around with every project you need to complete circling in your head. Get it out of your head. Instead…

Use a trusted system..

David Allan talks about creating a trusted system for your actions, tasks and projects. He uses a great analogy about how you feel most organised a week before a vacation from work.

“Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I suggest you do this weekly instead of yearly.”

You need a system which you can trust, just like you trust when you walk out the door for your vacation that everything is taken care of.

Manage that system consistently

Once you have a system in place you need to constantly review it (once weekly) to get a fuller view of all the ‘things’ you have agreed to do. Get a feel for whether they still all fit, and whether you still need to do many of them. This is a huge tip - many times, it’s easy to find yourself beholden to some idea you needed to do *something*…if only you could remember what that *something* was. The GTD system gives you trust that you have everything you need to do, sorted.

And that’s really it. I highly recommend you buy the book. Most of all, start talking to people about how they manage their work and see if you can find anyone else using the GTD methodology. Chat to them about how they use it, and begin learning.

The room is available from June the 11th through till the 3rd of July. I’d like to see the room filled for the entire time, but I’m open to interesting and creative suggestions, such as…

• If you’re a freelancer or consultant working elsewhere, come up to Sydney for a couple of weeks and work directly with your Sydney clients. Nothing beats a bit of face time!
• Take that short trip you’ve always wanted and visit Sydney like a local.
• Use Sydney as your base for watching the World Cup, which will be shown live on massive screens in Darling Harbour, 24/7. 
• See a show at the Sydney Opera House
• Attend a #sydjel or two at either Agency Rainford HQ (on the 18/06 or 2/07) or Pollenizer HQ (on the 11/06 or 25/06).
• Or all of the above.

Drop me an email (steve at thesquigglyline.com) or tweet me to find out more.

What gets scored, gets played.

This idea becomes empowering when applied to different projects going on. Some readers of this blog would be familiar with the work of Sam Sabey. This week, a slow project which Sam and Nathan have been working on came to fruition - Inspire9 was hooked up to Smart Energy Groups, which itself is another great example of an awesome project that’s been bubbling away for about 2 years now.

The fun is, we can now see the energy score of Nathan and the co-working crew at Inspire9, in real time. See the dash board if you haven’t already. You can see Nathan and Sam putting together their SEGmeter in the stop-motion video below

This is a great example of a slow project, developing right now, which allows us to score and play each other, rather than just measuring and managing ourselves. The score is what will become important, as more and more houses and businesses come on board. Imagine playing your neighbours in a giant energy saving game. That future exists in the project Sam is working on. Exciting times. When you’re next thinking about your project, think about how you can allow people to play with, rather than manage, their stuff.

“How should I think about this?”

“This is really hard. I should think about this.”

You know the ones. Don’t make starting harder than it needs to be. We face a lot of complexity in life - much of it cannot be planned for. The guys from 37signals say business plan should be called business guesses because of the absurd nature for us to expect we can rationally guess where our project will be in 5 years time. I agree - but that’s no excuse to not be strategic in what your doing.

A good way to be strategic, without writing a massive business ‘guess’, is to just use simple acronyms to keep your thinking defined, and moving. Need a PR strategy? Use ROPE. Need a social media strategy? You can’t go past POST. Need a competitor analysis? Do a Blue Ocean Strategy. You don’t need a business strategy…you just need the first mission plan to give your project momentum.

Don’t sit in your chair all day stewing over the best way to structure your thoughts. Use an acronym, and just get started.

You need little flags, things to let people know what’s going on and let them know it’s going to be awesome. Little things you’ve done which will make it ‘epic for sure.’

This could be a key speaker at an event you’re running, the presence of your best friend at a dinner party or a special feature that makes your new offering just zing. The key is to ask yourself - “what will make this epic, for sure?” Think about that ONE thing that will make your project awesome - and then just go and do that. Whatever else happens, doesn’t matter. If you’re proud and pumped to be doing it, the universe will take care of the rest.

At futuresummit, we got 10 of the top twitter users in Australia along for the 2 days. Once that was done, whatever happened was going to be awesome…we didn’t need to worry about the outcome. As a result, #futuresummit ended up being the second highest trending topic in the world over both conference days. It was epic.

So when you next have that ‘awesome idea’ and you’re wondering how to go about making it actually awesome - think about what will make it epic for sure…and just do that.

Photo credit to Ross Hill: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cyberhill/3555090851/