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Hello,
After 8 editions, I finally got this one late.
Our brain is fantastic at coming up with excuses:
“I never said it was on Thursdays.”
“It’s better late than lame”
“Do you think the audience is really impatiently staring at their inbox to get your newsletter? Really? I’m sure they will not notice.”
“If they notice that’s actually a good sign — it means that they we’re eager to receive it”
“I’m doing this on my spare time, not that this is a professional commitment”
It’s kind of strange. On the one hand, I’m quite punctual when it comes to schedule appointments. My family even complains that I get quite agitated, to say the least, when I sense that we’re going to be late. Honestly, I can be a pain!
On the other hand, I’m too relaxed regarding delivery deadlines. I’m not sure why. 🙊
Anyway, I’m still very much committed to this newsletter being weekly with frequency distribution around Thursday, with a slightly positive skew ;)
2020-2022-2035
Thank you for being part of this journey — 8 consecutive weeks of original content with half-backed insights.
Some weeks were easy and exciting. Sometimes I had to push it through.
I think that’s the beauty of a newsletter model — is not about posting if something comes up, is about a commitment you made to post every week on that day. Is that gentle push that sometimes you need to ship it. Maybe sometimes it is better than others. That’s fine and part of the process.
The other day a colleague of mine with experience in journalism said:
“Pulling a blog post for tomorrow? Sure, that’s what we did when we worked in a newsroom, every single day, several times a day!”
This realization that what it can be challenging for me can be easy for an experienced writer struck me. It’s like an athlete that can do 100 push-ups easily, and I can’t — yet!
It is interesting to look back at what I wrote about — our relation to work and the future of work and organizations stands out. Sign of times?
I think about Humans. How they behave and interact in systems is interesting to me — sometimes, the Humans are consumers, employees, or leaders.
I’m not so happy that I lost some humor and creativity that I can see in the first two issues. I suspect it is a result of the pressure and the push-it-through that I mentioned. When you’re forcing yourself to write and you aren’t a trained professional is expected that you lose the creative edge.
March 3, 2022
Thank you for being part of this journey — 80 consecutive weeks of original content and half-backed insights.
I still remember those first weeks, the rollercoaster of emotions, from excitement to the despair of having to meet the deadline. What am I going to write about? Is it good enough? Interesting enough? A bit boring, no?
Most people don’t respond to newsletters — somehow, it part of how the medium works. So in a sense, you’re broadcasting without a feedback loop. I felt the same when I started the podcast six months ago — you’re speaking to the ether… no echo, no reverberation. I guess it is the same for any broadcast medium.
By the way, do you remember 2020 when we’re all in lockdown due to a worldwide pandemic? It was crazy!
I remember going outside for a walk and being slightly nervous when a cop went by — would she asked me what I was doing outside and sent me home? Then I got a dog…
But, if we forget for a moment the casualties, it was also an interesting social experiment, an adventurous period that removed us from our well-oiled day-to-day. We stopped and thought about work, offices, schedules, and more than anything that was the value of social proximity.
December 20, 2035
Thank you for being part of this journey — 800 consecutive weeks of original content and half-backed insights.
I remember when I wrote about the first 8 issues. That was 15 years and 1 month ago! Or let’s say 15 years.
I have a friend that established this rule — all the stories we tell between ourselves about the past, from now on, happened at most 15 years ago. The idea is to avoid facing the fact that we’ve been here for long — “ Remember when we met? 40 years ago! What?! 40 years!”
It’s funny. I keep writing this good-old-newsletter when technology has created so many different ways for us to interact. I guess it’s the nostalgia for the good old email, the written word. Now everything is immersive, hyper-sense-neural-experiences! Do you really need to smell me to get the message?
Scaling Empathy
I've written before about scaling empathy but in the context of customer service. But lately, I've been thinking about empathy in another context: organizations.
It all started by thinking about these questions: Why is it so challenging working together without friction in an organization? Why do we have power struggles, machiavellian moves, and politics? Why so many organizations have a problem with ethics issues on how they treat employees, consumers, society, and the environment?
We usually associate these dynamics with larger organizations. How can we explain the relation between size and politics? Can this be related to the Dunbar number?
According to the Dunbar number hypothesis, humans have a limited capacity to relate to more than 150 people. After 150 people, a new set of dynamics emerge in organizations.
So we could argue that, until we reach 150 people, we can have empathy-based organizations. Once we cross that limit, empathy breaks.
But what is an empathy-based organization (a term I just came up with)?
If you think of empathy as the capacity to understand and care about the other, it seems reasonable to link our empathy limit to the Dunbar number, 150. So after 150, we stop caring. And that's when politics kicks in. If empathy is down, trust is down, and if you don't have trust, you can't build an effective organization.
So either we find a way to scale empathy to go beyond the dreading 150, or we need to grow organizations differently.
Thanks for reading,
Hugo
Really impressed with your commitment to keep this weekly routine. Very refreshing style, I find I am always curious to discover what you wrote each time!...
The best one yet :)