THE LEAFLET
December 19 2024
setting the overton window of complaint, the “no complaining” rule, storytelling about your signature challenge
SETTING THE OVERTON WINDOW OF COMPLAINT
There are parts of the work your team does that are hard. They probably require real emotional labor in addition to technical chops and smart thinking. Often these hard things sit at some meta-level of your work - it’s not the direct provision of your service or creation of your product.
In start-ups, non-profit or for-profit, Dealing with Change is one of these hard things. If you’re surviving as a start up, it’s likely due at least in part to big and rapid change you’re undertaking. Change is hard; unpredictability is hard. You can feel like you’re in the bewildering swamp of learning, over and over, never getting to enjoy the clear plateau of mastery.
But if choosing and weathering change is part of your competitive advantage, you shouldn’t complain about change. In fact, you should champion change. You should lick your chops when you see some change become available.
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Two ways to preclude the complaints and normalize a difficult thing your team needs to excel at:
Set a cultural rule against complaining about that hard, essential thing. Enlist your leaders to (warmly) enforce the rule with modeling and reminders.
Tell the simple story over and over and over again about how your excellence at the hard, essential thing got you here and will carry you forward.
-eric
Read the rest here.
THE “NO COMPLAINING RULE”
As a founding principal and CEO, Ben had real success with a “no complaining” rule. It wasn’t just that his team couldn’t complain about change. We (I was on this team) couldn’t complain about anything. Complaining was not a mode of thinking or communication we permitted ourselves. This was in a public education context where there was an immense amount of things one could reasonably complain about.
Instead of complaining, Ben’s rule forced us to return, again and again, to feedback, ownership, and experimentation. Complaining sounds something like, “This is busted again…ugh…I’m so tired of this.” Ben’s teams said things more like, “This is busted! I have 2 ideas for ways we can address it. What are yours? Ok, let’s try x.”
A really key thing here is that Ben’s teams still said some version of “This is busted.” Ben didn’t ask his people to turn a blind eye to problems. He didn’t silence critique or stifle feedback. On the contrary, he pushed us to maintain high, detailed standards (no peeling up corners of posters on the walls of classrooms; no boring-ass lessons that lacked interesting challenges for kids, eg). He encouraged careful, regular observation of our work, our kids, our physical space. Find where things aren’t right, offer the feedback, build a solution.
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Eventually, refraining from complaint didn’t chafe like an artificial rule - it was a point of pride, a spiritual discipline we had mastered. A line written right into our base code.
-eric
Read the rest here.
STORYTELLING ABOUT YOUR SIGNATURE CHALLENGE AND (META) SUPERPOWER
In a young organization, especially one that is growing fast, it’s easy for the founder’s story of what this place is and how it got here to get lost. Breakneck growth compressed years of experience into quarters. The team doubles in size, then doubles again, then doubles again. People who have only been here for ~6 months think of themselves as seasoned veterans and they’re not totally wrong - maybe the median tenure of their colleagues is 3 months.
We all carry around some measure of a healthy, default desire for stability and status. Often someone you’ve hired in a period of volatile change will do great work in that period, and then immediately pin hopes on that being the Last Time We Have To Do Stuff Like This. If the hectic beginning of their time is the peak of the chaos, they enjoy the double benefit of a) a much more sane and predictable work situation moving forward and b) bragging rights about their “wartime” service, back in the old days.
As a founder, you may need to repeat yourself, a lot. It might be with the same dumb slide you use in every single all hands presentation. That slide could contain a single sentence; it could be a chart or a few bullets from your breathless history. The point of it is to remind your people - thriving in the face of change is what got us here. It’s our signature. It’s what we’ll need, maybe even more, in the 6 or 12 or 18 months to come. As hard as that change is, I’m not going to complain about it. And you shouldn’t either. Because our uniquely badass approach to change is why we get to do this rad thing we do.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Polymath Cate Hall on learnable skills:
Many … supposedly fixed traits can likewise be altered. Some other things you can learn: confidence, charisma, warmth, tranquility, optimism. Someone recently asked me how one might go about learning charisma, and the answer was really boring: by reading a few books, watching many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopting a few of their habits. This is surely a plan of action most people could come up with if they didn’t have the notion that charisma is innate lodged in their heads.
Whatever it is, assume it can be learned and that the task is to figure out the best way to do it.
Open Philanthropy CEO Alexander Berger reflecting on donating his kidney 13 years ago (something he remains glad he did!):
A personal lesson from this experience is that it's a mistake to focus on the most certain factors and round off the uncertain ones to zero. Doing so led me to accidentally ignore the most important factors, both costs and benefits, when I was making the initial decision.
Humorist George Ade on credentials:
“Whom are you?” he asked, for he had attended business college.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric