Creating the Conditions for Change (part 2)

0:00Hey, it's Seth. And this is Akimbo.

0:08Actually, this is strategy. If you've missed the last few episodes, why don't you go pick up on those first, because then you'll catch up with us, no problem. We're back with another episode with excerpts from my Udemy course. You can find details and links to the Udemy course and to the upcoming book, This is Strategy, at seths.blog.com. I'm really thrilled at the feedback I'm getting. More than 300 people took the Udemy course inside of purple.space, so I got to see and interact with them as they were doing it. And now it is one of the top-ranked courses that I've ever created inside of Udemy.

0:56As I've gone around talking about the ideas in the book, about this philosophy of becoming, I'm discovering that it's really resonating with people. We can make things better. We can see the systems that are around us. We can lean into issues of time and empathy and games. And before we get to it, a quick aside. Next week, we're going to be doing a Q &A episode with just one person. If you've got a strategy issue you want to talk about, if you think that me chiming in might be able to help you, please visit akimbo.link and click the appropriate button. We'll be looking for folks who have something interesting to share.

1:37We'll invite them to a Zoom call. I'll record it and then share it with you after we edit it. So, recorded live in my office, here are excerpts from the Udemy course on strategy. Thanks. Being really good at one game might be useless when you go over to another game. And it's true, Michael Jordan was pretty good at baseball. But in general, we get hung up, particularly if you're coming from a position of privilege, because just because you had the benefit of the doubt over here, doesn't mean you're going to have the benefit of the doubt over there. And the reason I'm going through this rant is because if you can see the game you're playing, you'll probably play it better.

2:22Number 14, your goals might not be the same as everyone else's. This goes back to one of the earlier rules I shared with you. When we understand that there are other people who have different goals, we can figure out how to help them get what they want at the same time it's going to help us get when we want. Most of these games are not zero-sum. Some games become easier to keep winning if you win early, and some become more difficult if you win early. It's worth seeing the difference. Number 16, changing the game is often more straightforward than playing the game you're offered. If someone offers you a game that doesn't match where you want to go, that requires you to play with rules you don't want to accept, maybe you should change the rules.

3:14Number 17, multiplayer games sometimes conceal themselves as two-player games. There are far more multiplayer games than we want to give it credit for. And the last one, the most important one, is simple. We spend more time figuring out how to win the game we're in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place. If we go through this strategy journey together, and you are simply looking for checkboxes to prove you've been doing it right all along, then I will have failed, and probably so have you. We can look at what is in front of us, at the odds, at the players, at the competition, at the stakes, at what it's like to commit to our strategy and decide that maybe we should be playing a different game.

4:05The heartbreak of the unspoken strategy. I know that sounds pretty dramatic, but let me tell you what I mean. I've been lucky enough over the years to talk to people who are very, very good at what they do. well-known jazz musicians, painters, real estate brokers, people who are seen sometimes at the top of their game. And if you ask them, how do they do it? Why do they do it? What are the analyses that they go through? Sometimes they will say, well, it's intuition. It just flows out of me. This is the natural way to do it. This is my passion. I'm just being authentic. And the thing is, this is brittle.

4:51It's brittle because it's working right now, but it might not keep working. And then when we talk to someone who is truly great at what they do, someone who can not only teach it to other people, but who can shift when the world shifts, that person has a theory of the game. They have assets they seek to create, and they can explain to you why. They have questions worth asking, and we're going to go through those in a future conversation. And they can describe to you the patterns they seek to emulate and why. These four things, the theory of the game, the assets they're investing to create, the questions that they believe are worth asking, the patterns that they are trying to emulate, this represents a leap.

5:40If you are going to ask someone for directions from here to Cleveland, what you want from them is for them to be able to take out a map and show you the route, not just say, well, I go this way because it's the way I always go. Because the problem with the intuitive approach is that their bridge might be out. And if the bridge is out, the intuitive one doesn't know what to do next, that we set ourselves up in the state of denial, where early successes led to an intuitive strategy, but it's a strategy that we were afraid to interrogate, afraid to look at too closely, because we think it might disappear.

6:23Great authors, great athletes, great leaders, they can explain to you exactly what they're seeking to do. Some of them won't, because they believe they have a competitive advantage by keeping it quiet. But what we are going to learn to do, what we're going to challenge each other to do, is to say it out loud. Because you might want to change. And the reason that you're intuitive is because you don't want to change. You have an unexamined job. You are doing what you did, or doing what you grew up thinking you wanted to do. But you have to be able to talk about it, to be clear about the leverage points, about the risk points, about the decision trees.

7:07If you want your strategy to get better, you have to acknowledge that you have a strategy. If you have a strategy, you need to say it in words. So it's still early days to describe what your strategy is in words. But what I would challenge you to do right in this moment is think hard with each other about why you are hesitating to even verbalize it. Okay, let's get into the meat of this. There are 16 questions I'm going to share here. They are not complete, but they begin to highlight the road ahead. I'm not asking you to answer all 16 of them. I'm asking you to think about how these questions resonate with you, which ones you haven't been asking, which ones are worth talking about.

7:52First one is critical. our project. Who are we here to serve? If your answer is everybody, then I'm afraid you need to begin again. Who exactly? Persona, psychographics, desires. Who are we here to serve? Number two, what is the change we seek to make? So that's who's it for and what's it for? The more specific we can be, the more cogent our strategy can be. What are our resources? Microsoft has very different resources than a freelancer in South Dakota. What can you bring to bear in time, in energy, in focus, in money, in machinery, in reputation? Next question. What is the genre we're working in.

8:47Now, the word genre sometimes takes people back, aback, because genre does not mean generic. It's the opposite of that. Genre means where in the bookstore does this thing go? Where in my brain do I file this? If I'm thinking of going out to dinner with you, what would be the substitutes that might be successful instead of your restaurant? that genre is the shortcut that all of us use to figure out what category is this in? What does this remind me of? What are the substitutes? What are the tropes? What are the strategies that have worked before? Figuring out the genre doesn't mean that you're a copycat.

9:33It means that you are brave enough to say, this is a category and I'm here to make a difference. And once you do that, then you can tell me who before you has done something like this. Who has successfully shown up with resources like you have, in a genre like you've mentioned, serving the people you hope to serve, making the change you hope to make? Because what we know is that strategies are largely transferable. For decades, the Soviet Union dominated chess. Why is that? Well, one of the reasons is they had a culture that found and promoted people who were early successes at it. But the biggest reason why at the most sophisticated level they won so often is they had a library.

10:26They had a library of every chess game, every important chess game with every move. So by the time a player had gone through the Soviet system and been to the library and learned from the coaches, they'd seen it before. Next, what are the systems that are in play? We're going to talk about systems a lot because the systems, the invisible systems, are the things that we don't notice that make a huge difference. Can you name some of the systems? You know, the military-industrial complex is a system that when a Lockheed or a Boeing starts to get a head start, they get more government funding, which allows them to lobby for more government funding and on and on.

11:10Don't worry about the specifics of systems. We're going to come back to that. Am I changing someone's status? When I show up with my offer, when I show up with my project, is someone's status in relation to the way they see the world and with their peers, going to go up or down. Because we're here to make a change happen. Who's it for and what's it for? And change often changes status. Next, the people we are approaching, there are a bunch of them. Why would any of them who are not us voluntarily choose to be part of the project, to engage? They don't know what you know. they don't want what you want.

11:53Why would someone, what's in it for them to say, I will engage with my fear. I will look at this status change in the eye and I will sign up for what you are offering me. And then nested right inside of that, what will they tell their boss? What will they tell their spouse? What will they tell their kids? What will they tell their colleagues? Because if you can't give them something that they can tell the others. The only thing they're interested in is it's the same as yesterday, but cheaper. Okay, so then bringing that status back, who exactly, as you show up to change this part of the system, who increases their status, their affiliation, and their power by supporting what you are doing?

12:43Next, will early support translate into more support later? Some things get harder as we go up. Some mountains that we climb get steeper near the top. And other things get easier as we go. We gain momentum as we go downhill. Is there a cascading effect that will make small winds translate into easier later winds? And right next to that is, where's the network effect? Does this get better if I tell the others? Does this get better if other people use it too. What do you need to learn to make this work? You're already very smart. You're already very engaged. You already have an awareness of what's going on around you, but you are smarter today than you were a week ago.

13:30What is left to learn? Can you itemize the things you don't know and the people you don't know that will make a difference? Almost at the Who do I need to work with to help me get to where I'm going? There are people in community, maybe closer than you think, who are ready to answer your questions, open a door, challenge you, give you insight. A couple more. They sound a bit negative, but they don't mean to be. Next, where is the dip and when should I quit? And one of the things that we see among successful game players is they don't play full out until time is up. There's no point. That once the dip hits, the hard part, the part where most people quit, they are ready for that.

14:16And they power through it because you can't run a marathon without believing that mile 20 is going to be hard. Knowing that mile 20 is hard when it arrives makes it easier for you to get through it. But sometimes, sometimes we need to look at the strategy. We need to look at the game and say, I'm out of resources. I'm out of time. I'm out of energy. This isn't a dip. This is just something that I can't make my way through. And finally, what will I do if this doesn't work out? Because if you are saying failure is not an option, you've now announced neither is success. Failure is an option for any project we're doing that's actually worth doing.

14:59Because we have to lean into possibility, and possibility doesn't mean guaranteed. Possibility means we have an opportunity. So that's a lot. It's a lot, and there's dozens that I left out. But what I want to do is help you start thinking through what are the questions you should be asking yourself at every moment as you make decisions going forward. How do we think strategically? Well, it helps to start to agree about what strategy is. I'm going to argue that strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It's not who we are right now. It is where we seek to go. And the reason it's complicated is because it's complex.

15:48You may be aware of the windmill, the fabled windmill. There are more windmills on miniature golf courses around the United States than any other obstacle. And the thinking of the windmill is pretty simple. The hole's on the other side, you're on this side. Every single person has the same club, every person has the same ball. The arms of the windmill go at a steady rate. The tactics are simple. Get the ball under the windmill without getting hit by the arms, and maybe they'll get a hole in one. This is not strategy. It's not strategy because it's simple. and what we're dealing with instead is the future.

16:32We're dealing with systems. We're dealing with games, with competition, with multiple people and organizations participating. We're dealing with the past, with status quo, and what might happen. So we can't approach it like the windmill hole, but it does help to keep a half a dozen or so things in mind. The first one is this, awareness about what we are dealing with, where we are going, what the systems involved are, what the game theory behind our choices. Number two is the fact that it's not about us. This is hard because everything you want to do is in your head. And if you just read through the comments that have been showing up, you will see that the people here, well-meaning, generous people, are really focused on what they're doing and how they're doing it.

17:28But no one else has that story in their head. So strategy demands empathy, acknowledging that every single entity we're going to deal with from here until the future is going to make their own decision based on their own goals based on how they see the world based on what they want to have happen. And so if we can't bring practical empathy to the table, I don't see what you see, I don't want what you want, I don't know what you know, and that's okay, then we're going to be frustrated. And that's going to end up leading to burnout. Because we have something inside of us that we want to share, but other people can't hear it, feel it, understand it, or might not be interested.

18:14And that means they make choices, and so we make choices. Choices about which shoes to wear, about the tools to use, about where to show up, about who our customers are, about the impact we seek to make. And all of those things happen while we are under the cloud of uncertainty. The uncertainty that comes from complicated problems in the future. we are not sure this is going to work we have no proof that if we do it this way we're going to get that and it's uncertainty that makes us feel comfortable just winging it it's uncertainty that says well then what the hell i'll just play it like a windmill hole but we can do better than that because there's clouds of probability and we can lean into things that are more likely to work and then we need resilience.

19:08The resilience that says I am probably wrong. I am probably wrong about how that is going to go down or how this is going to happen or what that person is going to choose. I have failed a lot and I am proud of every one of them. I wouldn't trade them for anything, but I was very careful not to fail big because if you fail too big, you're done. You're out of the game, that there isn't enough time and there isn't enough money to recover from betting everything. So what we seek is the appropriate size steps as we work to get traction. And to do that, we need to understand our resources. How much you got?

19:51How much time? How much money? Who are your partners? Where are they going to take you? How can we show up in the right place, step by step on this journey to the future we want to live in. Thanks for listening. Next week, we'll be back with a special Q &A episode, Diving Deep Into Strategy. If you want to find out more about the book or the course, visit seths.blog slash T-I-S. Thank you for the ruckus you make. We'll see you soon.