Border|Land Magazine #2 Performance Issue

Border|Land

What is Border|Land

BorderLand

- a district near the line separating two countries or areas. "the eastern borderlands"

- an area of overlap between two things. "the murky borderland between history and myth"

Border|Land magazine was launched to provide a briefing on cultural issues upstream from business.

We believe there is a global audience of People Leaders who get how culture can spawn knock-on effects on business.

Leaders who are hyper aware that events in wider culture [like Covid-19, the killing of George Floyd] can change -in obvious and not so obvious ways- all plans, priorities & policies.

The recession of 2008 happened around the same time as the start of a decade-long tech boom. We’re still living through the effects of both those events, yet how many, at the time, had the time to appreciate what was and could be happening?

Every issue of Border|Land will explore a work-life related theme and ask “what’s happening in wider culture that could impact my work in ways I did not yet foresee?

Through (self)-identified + anonymous reporting, analysis & fiction we aim to point out cultural undercurrents to get you imagining their impact on your business.

Border|Land is published 4 times a year.

Letter From The Editor

Work, in the 20th century postmodern era, was above all else performative.

A dog and pony show that saw shareholders and business owners recoup the largest share of productivity gains while wage gains slumped.

Take for instance the USA.

A global trendsetter in all things work and life.

From 1979 to 2022, productivity grew by 64.7% while inflation-adjusted hourly pay grew by 14.8%.

Work, in the postmodern era, is also mostly post-customer work.

Yes, there are “clients, audiences, users”.

There are also algorithms for which we optimise our performance.

But there are less and less customers.

People we share roots, location, community, accountability [and sometimes bedsheets] with.

Smart people are examining these and other corporate decouplings, so “future us” can do better. Present day us?

We need payback.

Or at least somebody we can point our fuckin’ fingers to and say, “That’s the bad guy.”

My pick?

Marcel Duchamp.

You can easily picture the end of Bretton Woods & the rise of financialisation being conceived by respectable men in suits staring at that toilet bowl. “Everything’s just conceptual, pal”.

If Duchamp never decoupled art from the retinal experience, would pay still be tied to performance, punishment to crime, meaning to words?

Work, in the postmodern era, has also never been more important to our lives.

It’s how many find meaning when religion, party politics and community break down. When old rituals that acted like glue fail us, we cope.

From “culturally christian & muslim”, to consumerism and workism. Yet work, in the postmodern era, has failed to provide sustenance.

As a source of social mobility and self-worth, work is failing even the most educated [elite overproduction]. Could we argue that many of us only culturally identify as workers, but are non practising and nonbelieving?

I especially feel bad for young people, who only get the aftersun. The befores are myths to fantasise or cosplay about “that period of time post Mad Men, but pre The Office”* when work seemed to work. More or less.

All In the hope of finding new routines. Routines that might turn into rituals. Rituals that might stabilise us. That might give us renewed meaning

A sense of progress.

That might [re]create community. Like they did for our [grand]parents. More or less.

If ”rituals are to time what homes are to space”** then we have a clear briefing going forward: Work, in the 21 century postmodern era, must intentionally be about the performative.

Somewhere in hell, I’m sure, Marcel can appreciate the irony. Welcome to Border|Land Magazine #2: the performance issue

Petar Vujosevic Editor in Chief

*[Emily Sundberg coined Corporate Fetish which explores a growing glamorising of the idea of the office]

**[Byung-Chul Han; The Disappearance of Rituals]

Glue Maxxing

I hate Chandler Bing and Ross Geller. Always mocking the more earnest Joey. Hate them both. But mostly Chandler for so effectively globally exporting sarcasm as a defence mechanism.

So in my view the NYPost was right to mock those Bing babies for taking something as real as team chemistry and turning it into something lame and half arsed.

Confused? The Post ran a somewhat scathing article called “Gen Z workers say they should be hired for their personality”. Perfectly depicted by TikTok creator Vienna in her video “the personality hire”.

The kids want to be hired for good vibes. The problem? A lack of commitment to the bit. Like the hipsters who went to Greenpoint Brooklyn with a Greenwich Connecticut back up plan.

There’s a lot of power in sincerity. To actually want to bring vibes. To be a glue guy. Sports teams pay glue guys millions. Music bands happily let them play bass parts that the lead guitarist wrote and recorded, just so the band stays together.

When so many are afraid of the great machine replacement, glue-maxxing makes perfect sense. It made my life easier. See as I was putting together the first issue, I wanted to publish more stuff written by me than by guest writers. This to show off my smarts to readers & potential clients.

My ability to write smart, thought otherwise. Luckily I blagged some amazing people into sharing their talents. Colin’s essay helped crystallise my role. Comedy show host, not rock star.

Warm up the crowd, then introduce the talent you came for. A glue guy. Anyways...Colin Newlyn.

I was clicking through Substacks and came across this man, so obviously annoyed by yet passionate about the state of work. In comedy terms his comp is Jack Dee or Stewart Lee [my words].

He tells you off because he cares and he cares because he knows how crap things are, and how much worse they can get and in his own acerbic way wants you not to have to go through all that.

So, it is a real honour to have him write an essay, exploring performance. Now..without further ado, please give you full attention to Colin Newlyn.

It’s in the magic, not the numbers

By Colin Newlyn

I can tell you when I was most ‘Productive’ in my career. The time when I created the most value. I was Marketing Director for a small comms company and one of the sectors we specialised in was Maritime.

A colleague, who ran customer software, wanted to talk about an idea for a new service. He’d talked to others, but was frustrated as no-one seemed to get it.

We spent a morning in a small meeting room with a flip-chart. After much questioning and back and forth, I drew what I thought he was describing on the flip chart. “Yes, yes! That’s it”, he exclaimed, “That’s what I’m talking about”. In the course of the next hour or so, we outlined a development plan, product definition and a marketing plan.

What we had come up with was a unique time & money saving ship-to-shore messaging service. We’d provide end-to-end support, a single point of contact, a single bill and my colleague had clients ready to buy it at a premium.

Off the back of that meeting and those few sheets of flip chart paper, we quickly delivered the first trial of the service to a client. It rapidly went into full production.

In 18 months, it became our most profitable product and soon after the biggest revenue earner. It kept the company afloat when other legacy revenue streams dried up, staving off closure until the business was bought by a competitor.

That morning was, without doubt, the most productive and valuable few hours of my career.

If I had done nothing else that year, it would have justified my salary. Hell, if I’d done nothing else during my three years with the company, it would still have been a great deal for them in terms of the value I helped create.

But would any of it show up on any measure of productivity out there then or now? Imagine walking past that meeting room and seeing the following; two blokes in a room, talking. And all we ‘produced’ was some flip chart sheets covered in semi-legible scribble.

It wasn’t just that, of course. It was the combination of our years of experience and expertise in our respective fields. It was the close and trusting relationship we had built up previously that enabled us to ask stupid questions and share wild ideas. It was the energy we co-created in the room.

If I’d been being ‘productive’, if I’d been chasing ‘efficiency’, I might have refused the meeting so I could crack on with processing some paperwork and getting my inbox to zero. Because that was stuff I could measure to SHOW how productive I was.

Out of time

We are obsessed with productivity. We talk endlessly about it and its evil sidekick, efficiency. Yet most of it is nonsense, because the way we think about it comes from a different age.

Productivity is generally defined as the output divided by the number of people involved in creating that output. It is born out of the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor. He was trying to maximise efficiency in manufacturing industries, particularly labour productivity, in the 1880 and 1890s.

Productivity is rooted in a defined, linear process, where a series of repeatable actions in sequence turn inputs into outputs, which generate income and profit. In Taylor’s case, these were Steel and Paper mills.

Taylor’s ideas and principles delivered improvements in efficiency, and made him rich and famous. However, they were developed for an industrial setting and firmly based on the concept of a division between managers and workers.

Managers applied Taylor’s scientific management principles to plan the work. Workers were the ones who carried out the resultant tasks. Taylor wanted to increase the separation of these two groups, making managers responsible for mental (planning work) and the latter for manual (executing tasks) work. (Taylor’s intention was to make unions unnecessary.)

He also believed in ‘one best way’ of doing every task that could be discovered by analysing the work, particularly breaking it down into the smallest components and measuring each one. Simple ideas for a simple environment.

But we don’t inhabit such a simple, straightforward world today. We mostly do knowledge work, in front of screens, shifting bits around, collaborating with others, thinking, being creative. There is no separation between mental and manual labour, we both plan and execute our work. We see Taylor’s principles being force-fitted onto this complex world to create a false illusion of simplicity and control. Linearity is imposed by ignoring inter-relationships and any factors that don’t fit.

Proxies are defined for the intangible and subjective to give them the appearance of ‘hard’ data. Processes are chopped up into small pieces and analysed to the point of meaninglessness, without any reference to each other or to the cumulative outcome. Only it doesn’t make organisations more efficient. It doesn’t increase productivity. The unintended consequences are, in fact, exactly the opposite.

Simple but wrong

Knowledge work is messy, complex and ambiguous. It’s very difficult to detect cause and effect as every outcome has multiple inputs, some undetectable, others indefinable. In organisations today, everything is potentially connected to everything else.

So how do you measure the productivity of that? And why would you even want to?

Today organisations are mostly interested in a particular group of numbers : financial performance.

It’s the ultimate reduction of a complex concept, a gross oversimplification of the collective endeavours of a community of people, to a set of numbers. Or even better, one number.

The share price. The revenue line. EBITDA. And always the favourite, Profit. Except the link between ‘productivity’ and ‘profit’ is much weaker today and really hard to define.

It’s clearly stupid to evaluate performance in this way, to take a view from a single dimension of a multifaceted entity, but it predominates.

For a publicly-owned company, it’s the lens through which most of the world sees it, the simple and easy way that it is comprehended.

More importantly, it is how the financial sector evaluates a company, and they have undue levels of influence on public perceptions.

They want to know how they can make money out of these companies, what return they will get on their investment or what profit on trading the shares. It’s their thing.

Just following orders

But how good is it as an indicator of performance? Enron was a Wall Street darling until it was found to have carried out a massive accounting fraud to produce the numbers that wow-ed said Wall Street.

And then there was the telecoms company WorldCom. Lehman Brothers. AIG. Freddie Mac. I could go on.

All these collapsed because the accounts were falsified to make the numbers look good.

So I think we can say that, at best, profit is a flawed indicator or performance. “But those were criminal acts, you can’t account for people breaking the law,” you protest.

That’s true but you have to consider what incentivised people to behave in this way, and how it went undetected (and in some cases, was normalised) for so long. Those are a direct result of taking such a limited view of performance and putting it above all else.

Were there red flags? Yes. In the culture, the attitudes & behaviours of senior managers, in the lived values of Enron (not stated ones, which, famously included ‘Integrity’).

A broader perspective of the performance of these companies would have detected problems elsewhere and would have predicted the eventual failure.

In reality, we simply want to reduce the whole conversation to numbers because that is much easier for us to understand and manage.

It avoids the complexity and uncertainty of actual performance, it avoids wrestling with the intangibles and the indefinables. It brings an illusion of certainty and control, a pretence of objectivity and rationality.

Coming unglued

The problem is that this approach, this Tayloristic simplism disguised as ‘scientific’, kills the very magic that makes for exceptional performance. In fact, it is a denial of it. It drives out the ‘Glue Guys’ that make the whole exceed the sum of the parts.

Sean Achor in his book “The Happiness Advantage’ talks about ‘The Glue Guy’, the team member who’s contribution is essential but undefinable. These are the people who sports team managers say are ‘good for the dressing room’ and value more highly than their on field performances seem to warrant.

They are the catalyst, the magic ingredient that makes the team gel. They make the relationships better, the ‘vibe’ better, and that leads to better performance.

In organisations, who are the ‘glue guys’? Well, it almost certainly is not the ones at the top, the ones with all the status, power and money. It’s probably not the ‘high achievers’ either, because they go for personal glory.

No, it’s the people who are invested in creating a good atmosphere, in developing the camaraderie and the sense of togetherness. Who bring a bit of humanity to the workplace, and make the workplace somewhere where others feel cared for, seen and heard. Somewhere that they belong.

“Yes, that’s right. The time wasters. The loafers. The gossips. We don’t want any of that, do we? They should be working! So let’s monitor the wazoo out of people and make sure they’re in front of their screens working for as long as we can make them. Let’s make them so busy they barely have time to say hello to their coworkers, let alone get to know them.

Let’s stop all that social stuff, stop giving employees money to organise themselves and build relationships out of work. Where’s the ROI in that? If we want people to connect, we’ll bring them together for an away day of forced fun and corporate indoctrination. We can tell that works because we collect the feedback from the forms and track the ratings number.”

Hmmm. How’s that working out for you? What? Ohh..you have a productivity problem? Hmmm.

You see, these time wasters are actually the ones you really need when times get hard because the spirit they foster helps people to show up and work. However, they’re normally the first to get cut because they’re generally lower paid and their official roles seen as dispensable.

Or if they are more senior, they get so overloaded with work that they don’t have time to do this vital role (something that, co-incidentally, causes them pain and impairs their own performance).

Why does this happen? Because we have almost no idea what makes people productive in their organisation. We just know the numbers.

This is the long shadow cast by Frederick W Taylor. He ignored the human dimension. To him, workers were interchangeable and replaceable cogs in the factory machine. He took no account of how people worked together, in relationship with one another.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like Community healthcare used to be done by community nurses who looked after the patients in a geographic area. However, this was deemed to be ‘inefficient’ and so the consultants were called in to find ways to increase productivity, often followed by outsourcing the work to private enterprises.

The processes for providing healthcare were defined and then broken down into discrete steps and allocated, with a target, to individual nurses. (True to Taylor’s principles for analysing work).

Previously a nurse would have looked after a patient and attended to all their needs, such as administering medication, doing checks and tests, changing dressings and so forth.

Now, each of these steps belong to a different nurse. One nurse does medication, another does changing of dressings, yet another does blood tests and so on.

Whereas the patient would see one nurse, there would now be several arriving throughout the day, each responsible for a different aspect of their complicated health needs.

For the nurses, what had been a varied and social job now became rushed and robotic. A series of repetitive tasks with no time to build rapport as they chased their performance metric for that task.

This is considered to be more efficient (read ‘cheaper to provide’ and so more profitable).

This was the situation Jos De Bloc, a singular-minded Dutchman, found himself in. He was fed up being driven from pillar to post, not being able to use all his skills and not able to serve his patients as well as he knew he could.

So he started his own community health business and got a contract to serve one community in Holland.

He gathered 12 nurses and went back to the old patterns of work. Each nurse had their own patients and were responsible for all their needs. No centrally set targets, instead everybody managed themselves, with the support of their colleagues.

This immediately improved the patients’ experience because they had one person who they could build a relationship with. For the nurses, it let them use all their skills, focus on the patient and their needs and properly serve them as an individual. It was both more rewarding and less stressful.

Buurtzorg now provides two-thirds of the community healthcare in Holland. Still with teams of 12 nurses, who are completely self-managed.

There have been many studies and they found that Buurtzorg out-performs its competitors on all criteria. Financial, operational, and patient & employee satisfaction.

Buurtzorg shows what matters to performance; the effectiveness of the human relationships, between employees and between employee and customer. It’s not the maths that counts. It’s the magic.

From Human Resource to Humanity

What we have currently is an illusion of productivity. We are trapped in the machine metaphor and are convinced that if we have the right measurements we can pull the right levers to get the right productivity.

So we have our machine, with its dials and data and we merrily have to pull the levers in the right sequence (probably as advised by some Management Consultants).

But the levers aren’t attached to anything. The machine looks like it’s working but the insides are empty.

The factors that really affect productivity in today’s complex and dynamic work environment are ones that defy definitions, are hard to describe and impossible to measure.

Team Spirit. Harmony. Connection. Relationships. Craft. Trust. Chemistry. Safety. Belonging. It’s about humanity. It’s about moments. It’s about value.

It’s magic, messy, ambiguous, unpredictable. It’s hard to do. But it’s the only stuff that works.

However, in the pursuit of their illusion of productivity, organisations do the opposite. They divide people by insisting on individual evaluation. They cut people, divisions or whole orgs who are not ‘productive’ enough. This is all accepted business practice today.

Yet we have a productivity problem. I wonder if, by any chance, they are linked?

It’s time to give up the illusion, to admit the ‘machine’ is just an empty box with some levers stuck on it, and get on with the real work of creating environments where everyone can fulfil their potential.

Stop worrying about numbers and worry about humans, because that’s where the magic is found.

Colin is a recovering corporate executive who is on a mission to ‘Decrapify Work’. In his career he experienced the highs and lows, starting in an open, supportive & enabling culture, ending up in some thoroughly toxic ones - and he knows which one was best!

Colin is variously described as a sage, critical friend, optimistic realist, independent thinker, coach, mentor and pirate. He writes, blogs and speaks regularly on leadership, teams, the future of work and the insanity of the organisations.

You can find Colin on Substack , where he publishes ‘The Decrapify Work Not-Newsletter’ every week, and on Linkedin, where he posts and comments regularly. You can find all his blogs and more info at www.decrapifywork.com.

Dear Mr Chairman,

Nobody knows anything......

Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.

Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me

Why Myers-Briggs keeps outliving better options

By Mark Earls & Alex Bentley

At the School of Wizards and Witches in Harry Potter, the Hogwarts Sorting Hat found the best house for each new student.

The Hat chose House of Gryffindor for the brave at heart, Hufflepuff for those who are hardworking, patient and loyal, and Ravenclaw for those of wit and learning. Slytherin was for cunning folk.

The Sorting Hat had trouble, however, finding a fit for Harry himself. Did this lead the School of Wizards and Witches to develop Sorting Hat 2.0? Of course not - and this could be a problem.

We were reminded of this magical storytelling device when, on LinkedIn, a neuroscientist decried how the Myers-Briggs personality profiling test— which he called “astrology for business”—continues to be the gold standard in business and recruitment. Why, he raged, was this knackered old personality test still in widespread use? Proper psychological science had long superseded the clunky assumptions about personality and how to measure it.

Indeed, many critics agree that Myers-Briggs — based on century-old ideas of Carl Jung—is not the best test of personality. Personality evolves over one’s life, and if you insist on measuring it, then contemporary psychological science offers much better tools.

One is the ‘5 pillar’ model— extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism—which is empirically validated. The five pillars can predict consumer habits or social media behaviour, for example.

Why, then, do thousands of companies, universities and individuals use the outdated Myers-Briggs test? Perhaps because MBTI, which is easy to understand and use, has become a lingua franca for social signalling.

Like driving on the right side of the road or using the same book-keeping approaches, personality tests are most useful when we all use the same ones. As a common language, MBTI profiles are how many people express their personal identities. They are ubiquitous in dating profiles, biographical statements and email signatures. As we identify with these tests, we like them upbeat.

A Clifton test (the U.S. equivalent of MBTI) measures only “strengths,” with assessments such as “Responsibility, Discipline, Relator, Empathy, Achiever.” Everyone gets a trophy!

By contrast, the modern, technical measures like ‘neuroticism” are not how most people want to describe themselves, or prospective employees, or their next date. These benefits of MBTI–a relentlessly positive, universal language–help explain its sustained popularity.

As Nobel Laureates such as Daniel Kahneman, Elinor Ostrom and Robert Shiller have shown us, we are not utility maximisers. We do not always choose the best product, idea, or tool. As utility satisficers— good enough is good enough— we are mainly social learners. This is why the best music, restaurant or personality test will not necessarily be the most popular. Popularity trumps technical superiority.

But there is another dimension besides the thing itself. This is time, and inheritance through time. As William Faulkner wrote in Absolom, Absolom, “Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished.

Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed…”

Like ripples in successive pools, we inherit our tools, institutional practices and ideas, even when superior options are clearly available. We inherit Myers-Briggs through many generations.

The four-personality prototype for MBTI was invented in 1917 by Katharine Cook Briggs, an American teacher with a degree in agriculture, who was interested to understand her future sonin-law. Later wanting to help young people find the best fit for their vocations,

Briggs and her daughter in law (Isobel MyersBriggs) developed the Myers-Briggs test, which incorporated Carl Jung’s pioneering Personality Types.As a sorting hat for public institutions, MBTI was used in WWII to place individuals into different wartime employment. In 1962, it was adopted by the US’s Educational Testing Service; some 50 million Americans have since been sorted by MBTI.

Today, it is widely used by HR professionals inside major corporations for talent recruitment and team management.

Should we be surprised that a century-old personality model is so widely used? Not if we look around us. Ancient fairy tales, for example, are still a successful genre at the box office (Mirror, Mirror, Maleficent, Gretel & Hansel, etc).

Some fairy tales date back to the Bronze age. Jack and the Beanstalk, Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin are all 4,000 to 5,000 years old. Are they the best stories ever? Maybe, but they persist by inheritance. They get “locked-in”.

Similarly, the design of the paint can that builders, decorators and DIYers use today is still essentially the same as that invented in 1877 by Henry Sherwin, first CEO of Sherwin-Williams Paint in Cleveland OH: despite all the well-known problems (drips on the side, gunk around the rim so it won’t close, small metal handle cuts into your fingers, etc).

Over the years many excellent alternatives have been designed but the industry – the people in manufacturing, distribution and – yes – painting, continue to prefer the form that is familiar to them and their predecessors. Paint tins are locked-in, too.

In the 20th century, technological inheritance included VHS video systems (technically, Beta video was better) and the QWERTY keyboard.

Is it not odd that an Iphone 15 uses a scheme first mass-produced in 1874 to prevent physical typewriter keys from jamming? QWERTY persists because it’s inherited, locked-in.

So many things in our businesses are as they are, abide as they do, because they are locked-in.

To understand why inheritance and lock-in are so powerful, it helps to consider human behaviour as inherently social. It’s part of our evolutionary wiring.

In our book I’ll Have What She’s Having, we presented a simple map of how people choose based on two simple dimensions: (x axis) to what extent is this a choice made on our own, individually or socially based on the example, recommendation or influence of others? And (y-axis) to what extent is this a choice made in a considered way, based on information about the choice and other options or guesswork.

Using this simple frame, we can be confident that the abiding success of tools like MBTI is not based on the North West quadrant: on people examining the pros and cons of the test, weighing up all its features in a rational considered manner.

It’s more likely to be on the Eastern side of the map: we use it for a number of social reasons - because other people do, because everyone knows that it’s a kosher tool and nobody (outside the psychology faculty) will challenge it. In our experience it is likely to be a combination of both NE and SE factors (it still seems very current and popular today).

These social benefits and reasons for choosing often make it seem like there is no choice being made. For most of us, most of the time, the lockin effect is clearly at play in how we choose tools like personality tests and other analytical frames in business since the results are only useful by comparison with all the other employees who have taken the same test.

The same is true of other standardised testing, like college entrance exams. It is worth remembering this when you seek to bring change to the way people in your organisation do things. It’s often better to help them a] see others choosing the new way and b] permit or encourage the adoption of the new behaviour within people’s own existing ideas, frames and practices, rather than c] challenge the existing behaviour and ideas head on.

A final thought on the angry neuroscientist and MBTI. As a leader, you need a tool that helps you build teams with compatible personalities, and to do so within and between organisations, from existing employees and new recruits.

What matters is not whether or not at a granular level, the personality test itself would stand up to the rigours required in clinical practice or experimental science but simply whether it serves you well enough in your sorting.

Why waste time, money and the goodwill of your colleagues creating your own bespoke tool, when what you already have is pretty good (and most people using it or taking it will agree)? And MBTI is undeniably a very good sorting hat.

Alex Bentley is Professor of Anthropology at University of Tennessee, where he is the new director of the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity (DySoC). He and Mark Earls co-authored (with Michael O’Brien) “I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping Social Behavior with M.I.T. Press. His Clifton Strengths are Analytical, Learner, Futuristic and Focus.

Mark Earls aka The Herdmeister is an award-winning writer, speaker & consultant to business and other organisations. A pioneer of the application to marketing and business of what we now know as Behavioural Economics he has written a number of other books including HERD & Copy, Copy, Copy (Wiley) which champion our social or HERD nature. His MBTI profile is EFNP-T (this week at least).

This must be the place

By Henry Oliver

Why is it that people of high accomplishment so often work together? Donatello taught Bertoldo di Giovanni who taught Michelangelo; Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle. Many Nobel Prize winners work with, or are taught by, other Prize winners.

One scientific lab, run by Gerty and Carl Cori, produced six Nobel Prize winners. Part of the answer is that excellence selects excellence: if you only allow the best people to work with you, you will create a culture of accomplishment. But that is not the whole explanation.

Putting people into new cultures, new circumstances, can often bring out their talents more fully than they would have otherwise realised. If Samuel Johnson hadn’t been a university drop out and moved to London, he probably wouldn’t have written the Dictionary.

If Julia Child hadn’t gone to France in her late thirties (because of her husband’s career) she wouldn’t have eaten real French cuisine, met her collaborators, or written The Art of French Cooking. In both cases, to become the titans of their work—Johnson as the preeminent figure of literar London; Child as the most admired chef in the United States—they had to immerse themselves into a new culture.

Multiple studies show the ways in which changing our circumstances can lead to changing ourselves. It is more important for a firm’s productivity to avoid hiring toxic workers than to hire from the top 1% of talent.

Toxic colleagues really do drag performance. When Psychologists Therese Amabile and Stephen Kramer studied workplace productivity they found that having a positive inner life improved productivity, but having a negative inner life decreases productivity. The main factor that influences inner emotional states is whether managers are enabling or interfering. Disruptive micro management leads to worse outcomes.

Similar findings are seen in academia: the more collaborative scholars are the more productive. The closer you are to a star performer in your network, the more your own productivity increases. The more widely you can sample the world, the more information you have about the options available to you and the sort of work you can perform.

Sometimes being in a new culture directly affects productivity; sometimes it simply allows you to make changes to your life you didn’t realise you could make.

So, we should be careful about the circumstances we put ourselves in. Black students who have at least one black teacher are more likely to graduate high school. College courses that are predominantly male see higher rates of women dropping out. The economist Raj Chetty who studies the effect of background on your future propensity to be an innovator has written: “If girls were as exposed to female inventors as boys are to male inventors, the gender gap in innovation would fall by half.”

He and his colleagues have described a group of people called “Lost Einsteins”, those who, under different conditions, may well have become inventors. As John Stuart Mill said, the main lesson of history is “the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences”. Circumstances matter. But we all reach a point in our careers when we stop exposing ourselves to as many new influences.

We reach what Jerker Denrell and Gaël Le Mens call a “competency trap.” Learning is hard. Being in new circumstances stretches us, and that is demanding. Once we reach a point where we have accomplishment and expertise, we become reluctant to go back to the start. Doing something new would require more stretch, more discomfort. We remember the struggle to learn the first time. We prefer the comfort of competency.

But just because something doesn’t go well to begin with, doesn’t mean it isn’t our best option. It’s easy to accept that lost Einsteins who, but for their circumstances, could have been something else—it’s harder to see that the same lesson might apply to us too. Change comes dropping slow.

We can cultivate something new in ourselves. Slowly, step-by-step, we can change our circumstances. The kayaker Audrey Sutherland spent her forties and fifties exploring the coasts of Hawaiian islands, becoming a competent solo explorer, going off in her inflatable kayak. Then, aged sixty, Sutherland flew over the coast of British Columbia and Alaska.

She felt the need to go there. This was a different thing altogether. The cold Arctic water of the north was not the warm Pacific water of Hawaii. But, Sutherland had spent twenty years cultivating herself as an explorer, step-by-step. So off she went. And she kept going for the next twenty years. She had become a different sort of explorer altogether.

She escaped her competency trap.

Henry Oliver is a writer, whose work has appeared in the New Statesman, The Critic and other magazines. He writes a Substack called The Common Reader, about biography, talent, and literature. His first book, Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success And Reinventing Your Life is published in May.

Dear Mr Chairman,

It may be of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall.

However, the prospect of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many art devotees to rout.

Diversity and Merit Are Not Contradictory Goals in Faculty Hiring

By Musa al-Gharbi

In many higher ed circles and culture war forums, concern for diversity and inclusion is often portrayed as being in tension with, or outright antithetical to, meritocracy. Implicit and sometimes explicit is a narrative that, “back in the day,” before institutions became obsessed with DEI, hiring and promotion decisions used to be made by merit – whereas today folks are hired and promoted primarily on the basis of their identity characteristics instead. This narrative gets the historical dynamic almost exactly backwards. For instance, with respect to institutions of higher learning:

Peer review did not become a standard practice for evaluating research quality until the 1960s. The use of formal and ostensibly objective criteria in hiring and tenure decisions was not widespread until the late-60s. Colleges and universities weren’t even required to advertise faculty positions or do open searches until after the AAUP imposed this norm in 1993.

Prior to these shifts, academia was an ‘old boys club.’ Unabashed nepotism was the norm. Deliberations about hiring and promotion were completely opaque and varied wildly in terms of the criteria relied on and (if or) how they were applied across individuals and institutions. Tenure-line jobs were discreetly given away to well-connected people before anyone else knew there had even been a job available, with little-to-no competition, meritocratic or otherwise.

And far from being more identitarian “these days,” selection based on identity characteristics was the default until relatively recently.

Women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities were overtly and unapologetically excluded from many institutional roles and professional organizations. We’re not talking ancient history: It wasn’t until the 1970s that co-educating men and women became the norm at colleges and universities and rules against sexual harassment and sex-base discrimination were put into place. Likewise, until Adams v. Richardson in 1973, 19 states continued to have racially segregated colleges and universities.

And of course, even after colleges and universities began admitting non-whites and women in higher numbers, it’d be several more years until they matriculated through BA and PhD programs, and longer still until they started getting tenure track jobs in decent numbers.

Prior to this point, with the applicant pool ex ante restricted near-exclusively to straight white men, it was almost certainly the case that the ethnic, sexual or gender characteristics of applicants rarely had to be explicitly considered or discussed.

But that hardly meant that hiring was not identity based! In fact, hiring was much more rigidly determined by race, gender and sexuality in the past than today. It was only when race and gender-based exclusion stopped being taken for granted that faculty representativeness could even become a conscious part of the hiring and promotion agenda.

Put another way: there is more contestation around the composition of the faculty today than in the past precisely because selection is less uniformly identity-based than it used to be. In a world where we don’t take for granted that professors are and should be straight white men, questions about who does get to become a professor (and on what basis) become more salient.

Likewise, there is still a lot of secrecy, arbitrariness and shady behavior in hiring and promotion decisions today. However, it’s also the case that hiring and promotion decisions are far more competitive, standardized, metrics-focused and transparent than they ever have been (for better and for worse).

Critically, the shift to more metrics-based and standardized evaluation processes happened around the same time that institutions of higher learning began to admit and hire women and minorities in larger numbers. That is, far from diversity and inclusion undermining meritocracy, institutions of higher learning only became recognizably ‘meritocratic’ in their hiring and promotion decisions as the pool of applicants grew increasingly diverse.

There are a few ways to understand this historical relationship.

Perhaps the most straightforward explanation is that, as a result of new laws banning discrimination against women and minorities (and myriad lawsuits accusing institutions of running afoul of those laws), employers had to come up with ways of making and justifying hiring and promotion decisions that were, in principal, open to all and procedurally fair – eventually settling on things that could be easily measured and compared across candidates like educational credentials, research productivity, publication prestige, citations, fundraising or teaching evaluations.

A more cynical take, popular among critical race theorists, is that meritocratic hiring and promotion standards were established precisely to help academia remain an “old boys club” in a way that would not run afoul of non-discrimination laws. Proponents of this view correctly point out that many of the ways higher ed institutions define “merit” rewards and reinforces antecedent social advantages.

And to the extent that “meritocratic” standards are, in fact, structurally tilted in favor of the alreadyprivileged, the use of these criteria can allow inequalities to persist and reproduce more-or-less indefinitely even in the absence of forms of bias or discrimination that run contrary to the stated “meritocratic” selection criteria. This, proponents argue, helps explain the persistence of significant and systemic representational disparities along the lines of gender, race, socioeconomic status, etc. within the professoriate a half-century after many of the formal restrictions keeping women and minorities off the faculty have been lifted.

On the other hand, it may be that institutions have a sincere positive interest in diversity and inclusion – one that transcends mere compliance with the law and dovetails nicely with meritocracy.

As UBS Wealth Management Chief Economist Paul Donovan has shown, identity-based bias, prejudice, and exclusion tend to be quite expensive for institutions. In the hyper-competitive global spaces that many knowledge economy organizations operate in, the pursuit of profit maximization often aligns cleanly with the pursuit of greater diversity and inclusion. It increases the efficiency of capitalist enterprises to avoid losing access to talent, partnerships, or customers due to “irrational” discrimination.

Properly managed, diversity provides a range of competitive advantages with respect to innovation, problem-solving, forecasting, knowledge production, and quality control. Indeed, economists estimate that 20 percent to 40 percent of all economic growth in the United States since the 1960s was due simply to improved allocation of talent—particularly, the opening of more opportunities to highly talented women and minorities at the expense of less skilled, less “hungry,” and less innovative white men (who had largely taken their positions for granted prior but are now “hungry” as well, owing to heightened competition, which only enhances the bottom line further).

It thus shouldn’t be surprising that, as legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw put it, “every corporation worth its salt is saying something about structural racism and anti-blackness, and that stuff is even outdistancing what candidates in the Democratic Party were actually saying.” And it isn’t just words or high-profile donations to organizations like Black Lives Matter. Multinational corporations have also leveraged their political clout to defy and overturn laws perceived to disadvantage immigrants and racial and sexual minorities. Elite universities aggressively fought to preserve affirmative action. And so on and so forth.

This needn’t be reduced to genuine altruism or mere cynical gesturing—it is in the perceived material interests of many knowledge-economy institutions to become more diverse and inclusive and to resist external impediments to their ambitions in this regard. These bids are intimately bound up with institutional goals to recruit and retain the best talent in a highly competitive environment. From this perspective, meritocracy and DEI are not just complementary or interrelated priorities, they’re actually mutually reinforcing. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which of these explanations seems most compelling. In my personal view, the juxtaposition of “diversity” against “merit” has never made much sense.

No one has ever been hired purely on the basis of their demographic attributes – not even in ‘diversity searches.’ It’s not like committees are pulling random people off the street and giving them tenurestream jobs because they check the right boxes. Instead, during these searches, the pool is restricted (in borderline illegal ways) to ‘diverse’ candidates, and then they choose between eligible applicants on the basis of factors like their credentials, publications, fundraising, letters of recommendation, etc. Departments aggressively try to recruit and hire the best ‘diverse’ candidate they can snag.

Selection between these comparably qualified finalists typically centers on para-meritocratic factors like perceived ‘personality’ or ‘fit’ -- vague criteria which, in practice, generally serve as proxies for cultural, ideological and demographic homophily between candidates and the people doing the hiring.

To argue that decision makers should prioritize diversity instead of always defaulting towards similarity when selecting between otherwise roughly equivalent qualified candidates is in no way inconsistent with hiring on the basis of merit.

Recognizing these realities does not in any way preclude pointing out that, for instance, diversity training doesn’t work, the use of DEI statements as political litmus tests is bad, academic activism often backfires, or that affirmative action, as typically practiced, did little to help the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society. There’s plenty to critique about the constellation of actors and policies that Pamela Newkirk has labeled “Diversity Inc.”

There’s also plenty to critique about how metrics are currently used in faculty hiring and promotion.

While more ‘objective’ in some senses than the previous (nepotistic) model, they’re also easily gamified, distort our understanding of ‘merit’ in many respects, and pervert how universities operationalize and pursue diversity. There’s no problem with emphasizing any of this.

However, insofar as people implicitly or directly present the pursuits of meritocracy and greater inclusivity as either/or propositions, they are creating a false dichotomy. Increased institutional concern about representation has not corresponded with a weakening of meritocratic hiring.

In fact, the opposite is true: institutional concern about the demographic composition of faculty and commitment to more objective and meritocratic hiring and promotion practices arose together within higher ed institutions. Hiring and promotion is far more meritocratic today than it was in the past – and this is both a product and a driver of increased diversity in institutions of higher learning.

Musa al-Gharbi, Ph.D., is the Daniel Bell Research Fellow at Heterodox Academy, and an assistant professor of journalism, communication and (by courtesy) sociology at Stony Brook University. His first book, We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.

This story originally appeared on Heterodox Academy and is reprinted with permission.

The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System

Embrace ‘state over story’ to shift your thoughts and overcome anxiety

By Jonny Miller

Techniques for tactical mindfulness—using mind-based or “top-down” tools to influence our thoughts and feelings—have exploded in popularity. But when our nervous systems are hijacked and adrenaline is coursing through our veins, unless we have thousands of hours of mindfulness training, it can be hard to avoid panic mode, let alone drop into meditation.

Fortunately, it is possible (and, as I will argue, far more efficient) to leverage your physiology—known as “bottom-up” practices—by using breathwork to self-regulate and positively impact your internal state in real-time.

The cultivation of calm

The human nervous system is one of the most technologically advanced operating systems in the known universe. It is not only responsible for our energy levels (aka productivity) and capacity for relaxation, but it is also the filter through which we experience the world and people around us. You would think this remarkable network of neurological hardware would have a complex instruction manual. Fortunately, it is more simple to learn than you might think.

Many of us find it challenging to think clearly when our nervous system has been hijacked by a trigger or an intense situation. Perhaps you experienced nervous energy, even anxiety, before an important conversation or presentation, which hindered your capacity to give it your best or be fully present. Or maybe you felt lethargy creep in when you sat down for a deep workflow session.

Making matters worse is that unproductive thought loops and feelings exacerbate the issue. These reactive states are the underlying cause of ineffectiveness, reactivity, conflict, and regrettable decisionmaking.

Luckily, there is a zero-cost solution to this quandary—an always-accessible operating manual for your nervous system that is more effective than any prescription drug, with no unwanted side effects. In fact, it has been under your nose since you were born: your breath.

I’m going to explain the science of how breathwork functions, and then I’ll give you some actionable exercises so that you can do it yourself. Drawing from recent discoveries in neurobiology, there are two concepts that will empower you to be more effective in aligning the state of your nervous system with your desired state of grounded calm or clear focus.

1. The nervous system remote: using the bottom-up method of our breath to impact blood chemistry, which shifts the thoughts and feelings that arise.

2. If [this] then [breathe]: two protocols you can use to effectively leverage your biology to up- or down-regulate your state, accessing either focus or calm as required

The nervous system operating manual

How is your breath right now? Take a moment to tune in. There’s a reasonable chance (especially if you are reading this on your phone) that your breath is shallow, in the upper chest and possibly through the mouth.

Our breath is perhaps the only activity in our body that happens on its own that can also be consciously controlled. Yet it is rare for most of us to inquire how our breath is or consciously control it. Why does this matter?

Because how we breathe impacts how we feel, how we show up in the world, and even the types of thoughts that arise. (Tip: As you read the following paragraphs, explore deliberately breathing faster than usual through your mouth and into your upper chest.)

Deep inside your brain lies a piece of biological hardware known as your insula cortex. It interprets signals from your breathing rhythms, serving as a central hub for somatic (bodily) and interoceptive— or internal—signals.

When you breathe through the mouth and into the upper lungs, signals are relayed to activate the sympathetic or activating part of your nervous system, creating a cascade effect that communicates to your endocrine system to secrete adrenaline and cortisol—which, in turn, generate measurable shifts in your blood chemistry.

These shifts in blood chemistry impact the emotions you feel and even the tone of thoughts that will arise—like impulsive actions, anxious thoughts, and feelings of frustration. We can fall into a trap as these unproductive thoughts and feelings reinforce or even exacerbate the breath pattern that activates the sympathetic response in the nervous system.

(If you haven’t already, you can let your breathing return to normal. Notice how you feel internally.) Here, the common strategy is to attempt to think our way out of the stress. You may be familiar with tactical mindfulness, cognitive reframes, or thoughts of loving-kindness to change your state of mind.

These act as top-down interventions for throwing a wrench into the negative thought spiral. However, it’s possible—and more effective—to shift your breathing pattern to generate calmer thoughts and feelings. There are important neurological reasons why. Our nervous system consists of 80% of afferent neurons, which move from the body to the brain—in contrast to roughly 20% of efferent neurons, which run in the opposite direction, from the brain to the body.

As a result, so-called bottom-up interventions—or practices that leverage our physiology by consciously shifting our respiratory or visual systems—are 4x more effective at altering our blood chemistry and, therefore, shifting our state.

Embrace state over story

Working with clients, I will often talk about “state before story”—the idea that the stories we tell ourselves and the perspectives we inhabit are a function of our nervous system state. If our system is overwhelmed or dysregulated, the mind will find reasons to explain why. At times, we might even invent false reasons to justify the internal anxious state.

By intervening at the level of our biology, leveraging our physiology to shift blood chemistry and regulate the nervous system, new stories arise, and in many cases, the insurmountable challenges seem to solve themselves.

Once this idea clicks, the impact is profound. The CEO of a rocket ship company told me that he now felt able to “regulate [his] energy through the ups and downs of running a startup.” A senior product manager at Amazon similarly shared, “I have lost the fear of stress activation since I can now interpret it and also regulate it.”

If we deliberately change the way that we breathe, for example, using exhales that are twice the length of the inhale, we consciously send different signals to the medulla oblongata (the brain’s control center), just as we might change the input channel on a television remote.

This part of our brain responds with instructions to the endocrine system to produce a neurotransmitter that slows down our heart rate, regulates blood pressure, and returns our body to homeostasis.

It’s a profound insight from the neuroscience literature—that our seemingly objective experience of reality is, in fact, entirely mediated through neurotransmitters. Furthermore, because shifts in breathing patterns create reliable and consistent shifts in blood chemistry, we can learn how to alter our momentto-moment lived experiences.

No matter how intense an external situation might be, whether it’s dealing with screaming children or a boardroom confrontation, there is always a grounded center of calm available to you through consciously shifting your breathing rhythm.

Now that we’ve talked about the science of how this works, I’ll walk you through the exercises to put it into practice.

If [this] then [breathe]

You’ve probably come across iPhone shortcuts or automation tools that allow you to write something along the lines of: If [tweet] then [save to Evernote] or If [time = 7 p.m.] then [dim lights].

Here are two automation recipes you can use to up or down-regulate—i.e., activate or calm—your nervous system in real-time. These exercises take advantage of the changes in blood chemistry shared above.

1. If [lethargic or sleepy] then [espresso breath]

2. If [anxious or overwhelmed] then [breath of calm]

Let’s start with espresso breath.

Espresso breath

Sit up with a straight lower spine, tuck your chin slightly, and begin rapid exhales through your nose, at the rate of roughly two per second. The inhale happens naturally. You should feel your belly contracting like a pump with each exhale.

Continue for 30 exhales. Once you’ve completed this, exhale completely to the end of your breath, holding until you feel a mild breath-hunger (the desire to inhale).

Then inhale deeply and hold at the top for 20-30 seconds. Release the breath completely, keeping your body as motionless as possible for 30 seconds afterward to allow the effects to settle.

Repeat this 2-3 times as desired. You may also experiment with noticing how this short practice creates a shift in your internal state.

Breath of Calm

This practice uses the technique of alternate nostril breathing that has been shown in studies to effectively reduce anxiety, combined with an exhale that is twice the length of the inhale.

Longer exhales are key for the down-regulation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the branch that enables us to recover and rejuvenate following a stressor and also creates the conditions for sleep in the evening.

Ensure you’re sitting comfortably, ideally with a straight lower spine. Bring your right hand up to your face, using your ring finger to close the left nostril and your thumb to close the right nostril.

Begin by closing the right nostril and inhaling through the left side for a count of three. Then hold at the top for three. Exhale through the right side for a count of six. Now inhale right-side for three, hold for three, and exhale left for six. This is one full round.

If you find a count of three and six challenging, start with inhaling for two, holding two, and exhaling for four. Over time your carbon dioxide tolerance will increase, and you can extend to counts of 10 in and 20 out.

Repeat for 3-5 rounds or until you feel sufficiently calm. It’s beneficial to end the practice with a full inhale and an audible relaxed sigh, which deepens the relaxation response.

There are various cues to watch for to see if your body is downshifting gears into parasympathetic. The most obvious is a spontaneous sigh response, but you also may be aware of a softening in muscular tension in the shoulders and belly or a more relaxed gaze.

Flipping your internal switch

In my experience, breathwork practices are the most efficient protocols for shifting my state in realtime. I’ve seen first-hand how these zero-cost tools have empowered clients to navigate intensely stressful situations - from calming pre-interview nerves to stepping into the public speaking arena with far greater conviction and composure.

The next time you notice a negative thought loop arises or sense the tentacles of overwhelm take hold, remember “state over story”: Find a quiet place where you can practice for two minutes, give this breath of calm a try, and notice what a radical difference it makes.

Jonny Miller hosts the Curious Humans podcast and Nervous System Mastery, a cohort-based boot camp that shares evidence-based protocols for cultivating calm and resilience.

This essay first appeared in Every, a daily newsletter that publishes a long-form essay every day to make you smarter about technology, productivity, and AI. Republished with permission.

Dear Mr Chairman,

Mastery is being present with what is occurring, staying with it from beginning to end.

Breaking out of Compensation Culture

By Matt Ballantine

In the past decade, as HR teams in the UK have strived to engage with their staff more effectively, fussed about their health and wellness and invested in building an employer brand, I’ve found a common change in a word that People team people use increasingly bemusing.

Where once we talked of “pay” or the slightly more confusing “remuneration”, it is increasingly common to hear the term “compensation” used to describe the money that people receive from their employer in exchange for their efforts. Why do I find this curious? Well, it seems to have happened by osmosis despite the term in British English describing what one receives in return for something terrible happening.

We receive compensation for train delays or physical or emotional injuries. It feels jarring that modern employee-centric businesses think that work is so ghastly that we need compensation for our suffering.

But of course, this change hasn’t happened through conscious choice. My hunch, and I’ve yet to find clear evidence to refute this, is that the term compensation has become common HR vocabulary because it is the term used to describe pay within American-developed HR systems like Oracle and Workday.

HR teams have adopted the language because that’s what their databases tell them to call “pay”. Compensation has been a far more common term on the other side of the Atlantic.

It’s an interesting example of how technology, the particular workplace customs and habits of US companies and Internet culture are changing how we talk, interact and exchange ideas.

This kind of terminology change is, to use a phrase I’ve encountered many times in my working life, “just semantics”. That throwaway line is used by people who want to dismiss something as unimportant. But the different meanings of words like “compensation” should not be overlooked.

Such different interpretations of words are a fundamental barrier to organisational collaboration and performance, and it’s possibly getting worse.

In his imaginatively titled 2009 book “Collaboration”, Norwegian-American management theorist Morten T Hansen proposed that four systemic barriers prevent people from collaborating in the workplace.

The first two, the “Hoarding” and “Not Invented Here” barriers exist at a personal level, where people feel unable to or unwilling to work with others because of their fears, vulnerability and risk of loss of political or social power.

The “Search” barrier is one of practicality - that people simply cannot find others with whom cooperative working would result in productive outcomes.

However, the “Transfer” barrier has interested me the most and makes me wonder if our digitally-enabled world of work is becoming harder to navigate. The Transfer barrier makes collaboration hard because people from different professional or cultural backgrounds use different lexicons and often use the same words to mean different things.

I experienced this when I changed jobs in 2019 and joined a London-based social housing provider to work in that sector for the first time. After nearly three decades employed in the technology world, the term “developer” had become very subconsciously associated with people who write computer code.

I had been a developer, I had worked with developers, and I had marketed to developers. I like to think that I know how developers tick.

I was frequently confused in many meetings during the first few months in my new role. Why were my colleagues talking about developers in the way in which they were?

The answer was simple. In the world of social housing, developers are the people who build houses. It took me a good couple of months to rewire my subconscious so that my mental patterns when hearing the word didn’t immediately conjure up images of computer programmers.

These kinds of misassociations happen all the time at work. When IT people talk to finance people. When lawyers speak to salespeople. Or when HR people talk about “Compensation” rather than pay. Technology is now bringing new realms of miscommunication into our teams.

Enter emojis, the hieroglyphs of the digital age, which are increasingly vital to communicating efficiently in our messenger-based world of hybrid working. We all know what they all mean, right?

Well, don’t be so sure. Some emojis are almost intentionally ambiguous. Some messaging systems only provide a limited number of icons for easy reach.

The combined effect is that messages are being misinterpreted along the way, opening up yet more silos for the Transfer Barrier to raise its head.

Is a “thumbs up” a virtual pat on the back or a passive-aggressive move dripping with sarcasm? When we use the “prayer” emoji, are we offering condolences, saying thank you, or even initiating a high five?

Not only have we seen technology open up substantial new opportunities for confusion, but as we become more reliant on text conversations to make sense of our hybrid world of work, we find ourselves in a place where previously off-the-record chats that would have taken place in corridors or over desks, and now being stored as documents of record.

This came into sharp focus during the UK Government’s COVID inquiry at the end of 2023, when senior Civil Servants and politicians had the indignity of their messaging exposed and poured over by the investigators and press. Behaviours no doubt will adapt and change as a result of the technology mediating our conversations.

So what to do? It strikes me, above all else, that there is a need for us to become much more intentional in the ways in which we communicate and the methods in which we set teams up to work with one another.

A periodic check-in with people to help each other understand what channels are being used, what language means, and how it’s OK to regularly check in with one another to understand meaning in context.

So often, people are afraid to raise questions about what things might mean for fear that they will be perceived as lacking competence in their role.

Yet, as our teams become more diverse, more complicated, and increasingly mediated through technologies which come with their own cultural baggage, checking understanding becomes a perpetual task.

Hansen’s Transfer Barrier has become much more complicated in recent years, and to allow teams to perform, we need to take action to acknowledge that complexity.

Matt Ballantine is a sociologist, technologist, writer, audio producer, and playing card maker. In just over 30 years, he’s held leadership roles at the BBC, Reuters, and Microsoft and forged a successful career in consulting. He is currently an engagement manager at software consultancy Equal Experts, based in London.

Dear Mr Chairman,

When older generations have all the money and have seemingly stacked the odds, what do you do? You don’t work for it.

You chance it.

You gamble wherever you can, on anything, at any odds.

Why?

Because the cost of living is strangling most people. Because upward mobility is out of reach for many. Because children and homeownership feel like a thing of the past.

Because the house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house owns you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you own the house.

As a result, young people are turning to gambling [sports betting to memecoins] to try and win big. The technical term for all of this is financial nihilism. It’s well worth it for leadership to look further into, sir.

Especially given its global impact on our primary labour pool.

But..there is a silver lining.

More than 4.6 million women joined betting apps in the U.S. alone in 2021—a 115% increase of women users compared with 2020.

The number of men on sports betting apps still exceeds the number of women by 250%, but the growth rate of women (115%) nearly doubled that of men (63%).

The gambling gap, I can report sir, is closing.

Nahum 3:6

“I will pelt you with filth, I will treat you with contempt and make you a spectacle.”

By Border|Land

There is this idea that in the West we’ve passed “peak woke”. But social justice progressivism has not peaked. It has shed its old and morphed into its newest skin; that of postmodern progressivism.

The civil rights fights of the last century became something different with the rise of their importance in business. They became DEI. The players also changed. From activists to mostly arrivistes & parvenus.

We are now spectators presented with a tightly-controlled and stylized version of social activism, far from its actual reality and meaning.

Note: I believe there are battles left to be fought, people are still exploited and inequality is not solved. And In the end also “nothing will happen” in the Jean Baudrillard* spirit.

A couple of things point to DEI having become a fashion show. Firstly, as the successor or civil rights, DEI was largely built on a coalition of progressive academic, political & business leaders and SM**.

The enemy was “the man” and his system that institutionalised and codified inequality. And this playbook worked, until it didn’t.

In the West, we find ourselves in a time and place where everyone is up for critical analysis. Especially traditional progressive allies, who are seasonally redefining their alliances, loyalties and meaning, based on widening tribal interests. With the preferred battlefield being Social Media.

Secondly; already decoupled from how many civil right gains got acquired [large scale civil disobedience], DEI’s weapon of choice became “cancel culture”. A form of deterrence; a virtual exercise of power upon actions of others by economic, informational, judicial & reputational means.

Of course cancel culture had a real impact [‘12-’21], but more and more it’s taken on different forms with different implications. From job loss & social isolation or worse, to now an online echochamber drama, filled with shaming & mockery. And then back to normal life as if nothing happened.

And thirdly, terms like DEI, woke, equity, equality seem to have become simulacra***. Like almost every part of any culture in the world, DEI was not immune to the impact of financialization and hollowing out of meaning in the wake of other postmodern decouplings.

As a consequence of this it looks like the Great Culture War in the West is no longer a hot one, but a cold [beer] one, for the time being.

Spectacle

There are off course rumblings of a corporate DEI backlash, especially in Finance & pockets of SV. See for example e/acc’s attempts to win the battle re: which values the A.I complex will hold, because, looking at history, we know that advances in technology tend to lock one particular framework or ideology in.

In hindsight this might be a decisive battle. In the meantime? Russo, Musk, Ackman and others are grabbing headlines and driving “a wedge between CEO & CHRO”. Headlines that are making C-suites in finance and tech seemingly reassess its EDI programs and promises.

But these headlines and rumblings might be misreading how Western elite centres operate. What the “backlash” seems to be doing, is negotiating the margin of dissent.

Governments, unions, armed forces, entertainment, political parties across all ailes, NGO’s and more elite centres are very aligned in maintaining a flattened version of progressive social culture.

Volatile, but not too edgy or active, because that’s not good for business. No perpetrators, no victims, no cancellations. Only players, likers, followers & subscribers.

All these developments throw up interesting consequences for future HR/DEI Leaders. DEI in the West going forward will need “creative director” types with huge social media followings.

People who can create spectacles, sequels, collaborations. Who can stage manage polarity. Who can revive & repurpose past ideas. Imbue them with a sense of [faux] radicalism.

But also someone who can craft tangible high quality solutions to make DEI desirable and not boring again for all demographics [especially since the “competency crisis” is a strong meme that could unite many disparate factions against a common - the elite - enemy].

That is the state of play in the West. But looking at it from a global angle, we can see that Social Activism and DEI are not going away and have teeth. They remain powerful geopolitical weapons. So if DEI is here to stay, yet increasingly cosmetic at home, what is next for those who are more wartime than peacetime consiglieres? Practitioners for whom the action is the juice?

Filth

Failed in London Try Hong Kong is what the acronym Filth stands for. It used to refer to many western office workers who became expats in places like HK & SG during the 80’s & 90’s.

For this essay’s purpose, “finished” is more apt than “failed”. Why? Because East Asia is the new DEI frontline and as we’ve seen above, all is fine on the Western front. Like it or not, DEI is a tool in service of US/Western foreign policy. A policy that, after Russia and the Middle East, now slowly but surely is finally turning its full attention towards East Asia.

With the USA increasingly planning to assert itself more strongly in the region to halt China’s regional ambitions, the spreading [not managing] of liberal values will become a greater point of emphasis.

It’s still very risky to be a minority in many parts of Asia and the world. And when I mean risky, I mean physically risky. More risky, I think, then most of us typically acknowledge. Except for the few who “look at the whole board”.

“We’ve taken steps to acknowledge and address systemic racism and the scourge of white supremacy in our own country. Racial equity will not just be an issue for one department in our administration, it has to be the business of the whole of government in all our federal policies and institutions.”

President Biden, First Foreign Policy Speech, February 4th 2021.

Both China and the USA deploy soft power in Asia. Both sanction/support pro-democracy groups, politicians who stand up for human rights, and independent activists abroad. Both do so for specific and different geostrategic reasons.

The US? It is kicking into high gear the internal transformation from Anglo/Christian values to multiethnic, multi-racial, secular values. Blurring domestic and foreign policy while doing so. And if its values are universal, then they must be accepted by the rest of the globe, either through diplomacy, coercion, or violence.

Which means US/progressive companies will be drafted to help achieve certain goals as the USA and China face off. And things go from cold to hot[ter].

Men wanted for “hazardous” journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

Shackleton’s ad might not have actually ever been written, but the sentiment kinda, sorta holds ups, for those who have ambitions of becoming a DEI live player****

“The future belongs to you. Should anyone insult you, tell yourself this: I am a child of destiny who will unite East and West and change the world.”

*[La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu, The Gulf War did not happen; Jean Baudrillard]

**[for more read Katherine Dee’s essay “Tumblr Transformed American Politics”]

*** [blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2022/03/28/how-woke-became-weaponized-in-the-culture-wars/]

****[For more read Samo Burja’s various essays on live vs dead players]

COLOPHON

Border|Land Magazine©

A GapJumpers Publication

Editor-in-Chief: Petar Vujosevic

Creative Director: Petar Vujosevic

Editorial Designer: Mo Tawil

Inquiries: petar@gapjumpers.me

All images and text are protected under the 3% rule.

Dear Mr Chairman,

On the basis of the evidence, there has to be a fundamental rethink in the approach to male suicide which includes the development of a gender-informed male suicide prevention strategy.

Current approaches are not working or not working quickly enough. A new ‘whole system’ approach is needed. In the UK 13 men take their lives every day and each one affects 135 other people.

Any strategy to tackle male suicide has to be gender-informed and focus on male-specific drivers and interventions effective for men. If not, any refreshed suicide prevention plan risks not moving the dial.

This view is predicated on the evidence the APPG heard that the focus has been on viewing suicide primarily as a mental health problem when in reality it is largely the outcome of external issues, or personal stressors, that take many men down the path to suicide.

Whilst most men who suffer from these external issues don’t take this path (they can also take other paths like addictions, obesity & poor physical healthcare), suicide is a symptom or outcome of a build-up of stressors.

Suicide is chosen when stressors reach a critical level. It is not due to a single cause or ‘men not talking’.

These stressors range from a combination & culmination of issues like relationship breakdown, work culture, employment & financial worries [the male burden of performance] which are also impacted by wider issues like social isolation, loss of belonging, lack of male-friendly services and lack of empathy towards men.

We heard evidence that many men see suicide as a rational solution due to their failure to fix these stressors. They often do not conceptualise their problems as mental health problems.

Men do talk and talk about their problems – the challenge is whether policymakers, society, employers and public services are listening, asking and acting.

Being gender informed about how men express suicidality is vital. When external stressors to the path to suicidality are addressed, male suicidality is significantly reduced.

To echo Professor Louis Appleby: “The data and issues we present are not dry. They are real lives. They are deaths not prevented.”

“Start copying what you love.

Copy copy copy copy.

At the end of the copy you will find yourself”.

Yohji Yamamoto

The idea of making a magazine was a spur of desperation decision. And in a pinch we all default to hacks to get things done. One of mine is finding a suit.

A suit for me is someone’s worldview that I can wear. A gateway drug to dive into the influences that helped create their outputs. All, to rapidly & hopefully, get an understanding of how to create similar outputs.

For the first issue it was a coin flip between Anna Wintour and Tyler Brûlé. Tyler won.

I knew if I copied Tyler that I could end up somewhere different and distinct. Especially when comparing myself to other HR-ish magazines.

Given the feedback, I did ok.

But it also felt like I had mined Tyler for as much as I could, given talent, time & money constraints.

Issue #1 published and then…nothing.

I had boxed myself in regarding the theme of the 2nd issue; performance. I picked it, because it continued the play on words from the 1st issue; trust issue; performance issue.

But the pages were empty and the presentation of ideas flat. And then one day a few words popped in my head that shifted things. “From working harder and smarter we have to work art-er”

The line is cringe, but it worked for me.

In my own words I had reached an [obvious?] observation that was interesting, exciting and energising.

When technical ability [skill] to create output reaches “almost zero human”, inputs [in white collar jobs in particular] will become the whole game.

Prompts, points of view, aesthetics, taste are the whole game

Now I had an intrinsic reason for doing the magazine. Exploring [my own] taste while creating issue #2.

But with somewhere to go and with nothing to wear, I still needed a suit.

The magazine somewhat reflects that journey. The cover came about because for a long time I had “ghost town” by Ye and friends on repeat. Cover done and…nothing.

And then one day I came up with a cover idea for the 3rd issue, which ended my slump. It was a movie poster and I had written the words “relationship issue” on it. If you know the movie, “relationship issue” perfectly summarises the movie. And the movie also perfectly encompassed many themes I could explore in issue #3.

Why did double entendres mixed with images break my slump?

Because [double entendres x images] + [ghost town on repeat] = Virgil Abloh

I knew of him, but I did not really know him. He was the guy at LV who used to run with Ye. That was really it.

But..I had promised a March edition to readers and contributors. And for the longest time I had nothing, while also dealing with personal stuff. So with nothing to lose, I dove into the life of Virgil hoping to find a suit.

The more I learned about him the more I felt it was a fit.

See, I like magpies.

That is why, in no small part, I like Noel Gallagher, D’Angelo & James Murphy. Yes, their music has emotional meaning to me.

But what clinches it is that they are a gateway drug, a fasttrack to the best music of the 20th century.

And now I like Virgil. Architect, clothes designer, dj, curator, creative director. Gateway drug

In his Harvard talk he described the Pyrex 23 Caravaggio t-shirt as being a poem. One image, one word, one number. In the same talk I learned about his 3% rule.

And the meaning and thought process behind the “quotation marks”.

Now..he is no saint, as a designer or man. But in many ways, me being this late to discover his work, worked in my favour. With him dead, the hypebeasts have moved on, leaving just a cold body of work to examine.

Could I do with a magazine what he did with that t-shirt? Probably not, but it seemed interesting, exciting and energising. Especially when comparing myself to other HR-ish magazines.

How could I mix high & low culture to better support the amazing writing of the contributors? To push a HR magazine into a space more reserved for art or fashion, without forcing the issue?

All of sudden things I liked but had never considered using, were in play. What do you get when you put Selma Selman’s Omer in a business suit?

Mr Chairman.

And so I was off to the races.

Trying to do more with less.

To design as Virgil said “with words, not photoshop”.

Some of the things in this issue will miss.

Some might be meh.

Some things might hit.

Most can come off as pretentious, lazy or easy.

The meme version of “deskilled art”.

Though this all feels like a needed stepping stone towards an authentic expression of taste.

As Patrice O’Neal said “good & bad jokes come from the same place.”

But if taste really will become as important as I think it could, I have to eat my own food.

And publicly share my own experiments.

The only way to learn how little you know about something is to build that thing.

I started out trying to build a better understanding of [my] taste. In the process I copied the shit out of everybody else’s.

And ended up with a slightly better understanding of my self.

Maybe this is true whenever we really challenge our own performance? Maybe any sufficiently meaningful work is indistinguishable from self-inquiry?

Thank you for reading Border|Land Magazine #2: the performance issue.

Petar Vujosevic

Border|Land