Tag: Tom Critchlow

Liked Work is a Place (tomcritchlow.com)

Here are some of the distinct types of socializing that I might be missing:

  • Belonging. A sense of being part of a team and some kind of shared objectives / goals / shared values.
  • Support. Being able to have people around you to help you when you get stuck with something specific.
  • Jam partners. People to feel energized and electric with, to help brainstorm or cram on projects.
  • Creative collisions. Existing in a space where you can bump into new people or make new introductions.
  • Micro human interactions. Being able to step out and grab coffee or talk about the weather.
  • Tacit experience. The experience of passively observing others at work and seeing how people structure their time and work.
  • Separation of home and work. The ability to go somewhere to work.

Work is a Place by Tom Critchlow

📓 The Next Most Useful Thing

Tom Critchlow talks about going beyond the right answer to instead positing the ‘next most useful thing’.

I’ve been using this phrase “the next most useful thing” as a guiding light for my consulting work – I’m obsessed with being useful not just right. I’ve always rejected the fancy presentation in favor of the next most useful thing, and I simply took my eye off the ball with this one. I’m not even sure the client views this project as a real disappointment, there was still some value in it, but I’m mad at myself personally for this one. A good reminder not to take your eye off the ball. And to push your clients beyond what they tell you the right answer is.

This reminds me about Donald Winnicott’s notion of ‘good enough mother’.

Winnicott thought that the “good enough mother” starts out with an almost complete adaptation to her baby’s needs. She is entirely devoted to the baby and quickly sees to his every need. She sacrifices her own sleep and her own needs to fulfill the needs of her infant.

As time goes by, however, the mother allows the infant to experience small amounts of frustration. She is empathetic and caring but does not immediately rush to the baby’s every cry. Of course, at first the time-limit to this frustration must be very short. She may allow the baby to cry for a few minutes before her nighttime feeding, but only for a few minutes. She is not “perfect” but she is “good enough” in that the child only feels a slight amount of frustration.

So often when developing ideas, it can be easy to get caught up with the ideal, rather than coming up with an idea that responds to the situation at hand.

Liked Slouching Towards Innovation (tomcritchlow.com)

Innovation work should start with narrative. Create a perspective on the world and from there develop a set of research / data / prototypes / experiments that all ladder back to your narrative.

This narrative-first approach to innovation feels designed for a professional world that is increasingly a “space of flows”.

Of course, it’s harder. Because most innovation teams don’t have a perspective on the world. They don’t have a thesis or core insight about how the world is changing or where things are headed. Instead they get obsessed with new shiny things.

Replied to Subterranean Blogging (tomcritchlow.com)

We think of blogging as being performative but the value is subterranean. You can watch someone blogging and think that all they’re doing is throwing words into the feed, when in reality they’re sparking many interesting conversations and connections below the surface.

I really like your point Tom about the invisible nature of blogging. I sometimes wonder if blogging is a way of seeing and thinking. Maybe activities like actually keeping drafts is a power unto itself.
Liked Triple Entry Blogging (tomcritchlow.com)

Here’s a super rough proof of concept Replit tiny library. I’ve never written nodeJS code before and managed to copy and paste together a little thing that takes a library.json file and turns it into a library. Right now it only iterates over a single library but it’s easy to imagine how to extend this to include a feed, info across library files etc etc. I’m gonna get to all that, I jut haven’t had time.

Replied to Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick (tomcritchlow.com)

From these meditations on the architecture of blogging three questions emerge:

  1. How do you create pathways (and desire paths?) through your site? How do people start, journey, get lost and ultimately find their way through your site? I recently added a “start here” section to my writing page but I’ve been tinkering with blogchains and series of writing. What other structures emerge?
  2. How to archive, index and search? I recently re-architected how search works on my site. It’s not finished yet but I hope to use search as a way to search not only my site but all kinds of other stuff: my bookmarks, my wiki, my notes, my tweets even. Search can be a way to go down rabbitholes. Inspiration: Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life.
  3. Using a combination of static site and tachyons.css I find it extremely easy to iterate my way forward. Tinkering with my blog is possible piecemeal, there are no databases, no monolithic CSS files, very few dependencies.. It’s clunky at times but I have this sense that every time I build I don’t accumulate tech debt and that’s actually remarkably powerful for a site that’s been running for a decade or so…
Thinking about my blog as a ‘homestead’, I feel like it is one of those houses that has progressively been tacked onto over time. An extension here, a renovation there. It does not always make sense on the outside, but it makes sense to me.
Replied to Weak Ties & Strong Intros (tomcritchlow.com)

When you first start out as an independent you won’t have a clear vision of the work you do and you’ll inevitably lean hard on your strong ties to generate clients. That’s fine! It’s how it’s supposed to work. But to succeed in building a sustainable practice you’ll need to learn how to cultivate a large surface area of weak ties and create a clear, memorable image of the work you do so that your weak ties can make strong intros.

Although I do not work as a ‘consultant’, this piece left me thinking about how other weak ties would introduce me in my current position, let alone the narrative I tell. I guess this is the difference between being the master of your own narrative, compared to being in a position where your narrative is often dictated by others.
Bookmarked LF10 – Permissionless Identities (Little Futures)

For both full timers and independents, career growth in a permissionless world is increasingly going to be a modular and iterative process vs the step-change enabled by the old world of gatekeepers.

So don’t wait for permission. If you’re unsure about the future of your career – don’t look for answers, don’t look for validation or labels – look for experiments, new networks and narrative air-cover. And remember that this networked permissionless world has enabled the opportunity to simply write your way into a new way of thinking and being

Big futures are permissioned. Little futures are permissionless.

Tom Critchlow discusses blogging and thinking out loud as a form of narrative institutions.

One way to create narrative stability is through creating “narrative institutions” – these are projects, websites, businesses, side projects, hobbies or activities that you can lean on for stability. While formal things like career, job description or professional label are in flux we can rely on our narrative institution to provide stability.

I wonder how this relates to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s discussion of anti-fragility?

Bookmarked Little Futures (littlefutures.substack.com)

Provocations about near futures from Brian Dell and Tom Critchlow

Started following Tom Critchlow’s newsletter about little things.

Little Futures is about bringing the future within arm’s reach. It’s as much about behavior as it is the tools that amplify, dampen, and reshape it. It’s ways of thinking, ways of doing, and, hopefully, useful provocations for businesses and leaders grappling with the futures they need to be building out today.

Replied to

I am with Chris in that I maintain my own OPML feed, which I subscribe to in Inoreader. Granary and Twitter OPML Export have helped a bit with other feeds. Are you doing some more thinking in regards to your Library JSON idea?
Bookmarked Yes! and … How to be effective in the theatre of work (tomcritchlow.com)

I recently read the book Impro – Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone
I loved the book and as Venkatesh said ‘it is a textbook that teaches you how to see the world differently.’ so consider it recommended.. It’s a delightful book all about improvisational theatre and importantly how to teach improvisational theatre.

The book inspired me to draw many analogies between the improv actor and the consultant.

Inspired by Keith Johnstone’s Impro – Improvisation and the Theatre, Tom Critchlow explores the analogies between the improv actor and the consultant in four five posts:

  1. The Office is a Theatre for Work
  2. Optimism as an Operating System
  3. Generative Strategy
  4. Status Switching
  5. The Contrary Consultant

In the first post, Critchlow discusses the challenges associated with working as a consultant compared to somebody on staff. He suggests that the consultant is akin to an improv actor, forced to find ways to fit in at every opportunity. A part of this is associated with spreading ideas informally through the use of the client’s language, defending ideas not points and focusing on outcomes not debates.

In the second post, Critchlow explores the first challenge, to be a pleasure to work with. This comes in a number of ways, including providing routine solutions, balancing between front and back-stage, and creating a level of optimism.

I love this quote: “a problem is a point between two complex systems”

So, to reframe our initial statement about problems – the key when engaging clients is not to hunt for problems but to hunt for systems. (source)

In the third post, Critchlow talks about the use of the co-creation process to build on top of the ideas of others. This all comes back to capacity building, rather than problem solving.

Problem Solving vs. Capacity Building

A useful strategy is to interrupt routines from within.

the better way to interrupt routines is via a thorough understanding of existing workflows, processes and routines I’m reminded of the phrase amatuers talk strategy, experts talk logistics here. Most new capacities relate to an existing routine either directly or indirectly and the job of the consultant is to map the organization effectively to understand where and how we can interrupt to build new routines.(source)

In the forth post, Critchlow discusses the difference between topology and topography within an organisation. This includes the different forms of localised power, whether it be decision makers, gatekeepers and makers. The consultant exists outside of this.

I like to imagine the consultant as a quantum structure on top of a classical map (the org chart). While the map is fixed and tangible, the quantum structure behaves strangely and has bizarre properties like non-locality. This non-locality of the consultant brings with it an uncertainty with regards to power structures.(source)

Instead a consultant engages in fast status switching.

In the fifth post, Critchlow unpacks the power of the fool. He reflects on how you respond to a clients answers, the fine line of speaking truth to power and engaging in the disruptive act of fitting in.

It needs to be noted, playing the fool is about generative destruction not defensive destruction.

I found this a really useful series in thinking about how I work with different schools, adjusting to each as I go.

Bookmarked Introducing: Quotebacks (tomcritchlow.com)

Toby Shorin and I have created a small tool called Quotebacks. The ultimate goal is to encourage and activate a deeper cross-blogger discusson space. To promote diverse voices and encourage networked writing to flourish.

A browser extension to help capture quotes and embed them within posts. Just not sure if it works on a Chromebook. Kicks Condor applauds the strategy as a return to the web. He also provides a useful breakdown.
Replied to Library JSON – A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads (tomcritchlow.com)

Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.

I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json.

This maybe the beginnings of a federated site to support book clubs etc. I too keep my books on my site, the next step is a reader and incorporating a bit more nuance. I was also interested in Cory Doctorow’s thread on Twitter, as well as Matt Webb’s call to build on top of RSS in a similar way to podcasts.

I know that using RSS instead of JSON objects looks more complicated on the face of it… but RSS is already battle-tested and there’s no point reinventing the wheel. And in terms of building an ecosystem, it’s faster to start with RSS rather than doing something bespoke. It worked for podcasting!

Liked S, M, L 1 – Wither Substack (tomcritchlow.com)

I’m with Ben Thompson – VC money doesn’t tend to play well with a mass of indie content creators.

See exhibit A: Medium. Remember, Medium started out all cool with the street cred and the high quality bar and gradually raised too much VC money, pivoted too many times, screwed over the very indie creators they saught to sustain and ultimatley limps along too bloated to either die or raise more money

Bookmarked How (and why) to roll your own frameworks in consulting engagements (tomcritchlow.com)
  • Frameworks are simple tools for thinking that can create a shared world view and be easily referenced
  • The first instinct of many consultants is to grab a framework that you’ve heard of but this causes problems in three ways:
    • They’re too complex
    • They’re not relevant enough
    • You didn’t make it so there’s little attachment
  • Instead I believe you should be making your own frameworks and they you should focus on:
    • Simple frameworks (even a simple categorization is a framework)
    • True frameworks that say something about the client’s business
    • Co-creating them with clients so you get the IKEA effect
  • I’m still figuring it out but I believe doodling, sketching, notebook diagrams and visual thinking can help you get better at making frameworks
  • And, finally, for maximum effectiveness you need to focus on memorable names – compress to impress.
Tom Critchlow reflects on the use of frameworks to inform decision making. He touches on the failure of pre-existing framework and instead suggests we should focus on co-creating:

  • Firstly you avoid almost-true frameworks. The client almost certainly knows more than you do and has an awareness for the corporate memory so can help you avoid evolutionary dead ends that might not be immediately obvious.
  • Secondly by co-creating with the client you get at least one senior member of the organization fully immersed in the theory, not just the summary of the framework. Remember frameworks are abstractions – by design – but you want at least someone who understands the whole system not just the abstraction
  • Thirdly, because the client co-created it with you they are proud of their work and far more likely to use, reference and share the framework than if you hand it to them fully formed.

This process stems from ‘client-ethnographies’ that is a part of ongoing work:

Every time you’re on-site with a client’s organization you’re studying the people, the behaviours, the motivations. You’re asking questions of as many people as you can.

Activities such as doodling and refining the name can help with with the process.

Replied to Integrating Annotations into a Static Blog (tomcritchlow.com)

Hypothesis doesn’t have a good concept of a site owner so there’s no way to get alerts for new annotations on my posts.

Tom, I think that I would use Hypothesis more if it better integrated with my site. This is something that Chris Aldrich and Ian O’Byrne have been exploring quite a bit lately.