Strands of Genius: Crisis Strategy Worksheet, The School of Stolen Genius, How To Be A Good Listener, Combatting Imposter's Syndrome
plus: our thoughts on bounded rationality, efficiency and resilience
WRITING FROM | Greenville, SC
WORKING ON | a project for Rosie’s hometown, Music City, USA
LOOKING AHEAD
April 16-May 22: Greenville, SC
GENIUS/STEALS OUT-OF-OFFICE HOURS
May 1: 9-10:30a PT / 12-1:30p ET / 5-6:30p GMT | via ZOOM
TOPIC: How Improv Sets The Stage for Creativity & Collaboration with special guest, Jared Grant
Email Ashley@GeniusSteals.co if you’d like to be included on the calendar invite.
**IMPT: We will be playing a game, and you will need your video. If you are not comfortable using your video, we recommend skipping this one, as it won’t be an enjoyable experience for you to call and listen in.**
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
A very warm welcome to all of you who are here from our WARC webinar! This is Strands of Genius, our twice-weekly newsletter, where you’ll find insights without the expense report. Every Tuesday, you’ll hear from either myself or Faris, and every Thursday, you’ll hear from one of the 50 creative individuals that we’re highlighting this year, on topics from creativity to mental health, and everything in between. We’re proud to have been named one of Hubspot’s 7 ‘Essential Reads for the Curious Creative’ and they wisely promised that we’d likely help you at work, but we’d certainly make you a more interesting dinner date.
We understand that it’s important to Marie Kondo your life, including your inbox — but we hope you’ll give us a chance to earn a place in yours.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
quarantine cohabitation, more ZOOM dates, yoga, handstands every two hours, Janelle Monae, the cast of Hamilton, Taco Bell, gardening, our friends over at WARC, The Crow Girl, postcard positivity, and of course, YOU!
:: THE LINKS ::
WARC WEBINAR: COVID WORKSHEET
We had more than 3,000 registrants for our recent Warc Webinar — Push, Pull Pause or Pivot: Strategy in the Time of COVID. Thanks to all those who joined us live, and for those who missed it, Warc will be sending a link to the recording for those who registered. We have a companion worksheet which is available for downloaded here, free until May 1: COVID Strategy Worksheet - School of Stolen Genius. If you’re prompted to pay, enter WARCWEBINAR. (School of Stolen Genius)
SOFT LAUNCH: SCHOOL OF STOLEN GENIUS
Back in November we started thinking about a way that we could connect with more people remotely. We love getting to meet interesting and inspiring people on our travels, and have started to highlight some of our favorite thinkers via the newsletter. But we want to offer more depth, and to people who don’t have the same budgets as the Coca Colas or Nestles of the world. The School of Stolen Genius is our attempt at planting those seeds. We say ‘planting the seeds’ because this is an experiment for us. We hope you’ll join us, and tell us how you think we can make it even better.
We’re offering three membership tiers, and during this initial beta launch, they’re priced from $20/month to $60/month, with discounted annual subscriptions. You can use the code FRIENDOFGS for 15% off (excluding corporate memberships). Each month, we’ll release a new template (like the COVID Strategy Worksheet above) to all those enrolled. We’ll also host an ongoing book club, and quarterly webinars, and we hope that the ZOOM discussions are just as lively as those we’ve had with so many of you on the road. (And when this whole pandemic situation is over, we look forward to hosting offline gatherings. We’re just… not sure what that timeline is just yet.)Right now it’s a bit bare, but the School of Stolen Genius is our ongoing commitment to you, to bring our learnings to you in ways you can use within your organization. But we’re busy working on tools & templates to share with you, and we’ve got expert interviews with each guest curator that we’re starting to publish. In May, we’ll be kicking off our official launch with our most requested presentation - Beyond Boring Briefs - and host a follow-up Out of Office Hours.
We’ve even put together a letter for your boss, because we think there’s a good chance you can get this cost approved. (The School of Stolen Genius)
HOW TO BE A GOOD LISTENER
The crucial trait of a good listener? Curiosity. And empathy. It’s not that bad listeners are bad people, but the effects of bad listening can be profound argues Kate Murphy, author of You’re Not Listening. “To be able to really listen, you have to get rid of your own ego, your own thoughts,” says psychotherapist Gillian Rowe. “It’s almost impossible to do, but you’ve got to try to put all that aside.” Worth a read -- plus, tips from professional listeners on practising our listening skills.
WAYS TO COMBAT IMPOSTERS SYNDROME -- AND WHY IT SHOULDN’T BE CALLED A SYNDROME
This is a 4minute video from BBC Ideas, where Sandi Mann, a psychologist and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, talks about what you can do when you feel like a fraud. She suggests start by looking as objectively as possible at your successes. Write them down, and then write down all the reasons why you might have achieved that success. Then, write down a percentage next to each factor - Your percentage should correspond with the amount that you think that factor, or that action contributed to your achievement. Yes, there is luck and privilege and plenty of other things we have little control over. But, seeing on paper your own contributions helps to fight Imposters Syndrome. (Oh, and btw, Mann argues that we should not call it a ‘syndrome’ because 70% of people feel it.) (BBC Ideas)
:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: BOUNDED RATIONALITY AND EFFICIENCY VS RESILIENCE ::
Despite what economists like to model, humans aren’t perfectly rational, and we can’t be… for perfectly rational reasons ;) Perfect ratiocination requires perfect information, which we can never have. (Rosie’s note: yes, ‘ratiocination’ is a word, and yes, I often have to look up what Faris is talking about. Ratiocination means ‘to form a judgement by the process of logic and reason.’)
We have limited time in which to make a decision, which is another limiting factor. Finally, we are only ever us, with all that entails. We have limitations in the cognitive and bias boundaries of our minds, meaning we make decisions in the same circumstances that another wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
In a rapidly changing scenario, the situation changes, rapidly, [by definition, lol]. That means situational awareness is fraught with anxiety, because new information is coming in very fast. It also means the context which informs the decisions were made is changing rapidly, which necessarily requires changing the strategy. There are limited priors that can inform us accurately as to what is going to happen, as well as vast amounts of misinformation in the system already.
Armchair epidemiologists all over have taken to twitter to complain about whoever’s approach. It’s clear that some countries are experiencing more second and third order system level shocks than others, because those countries managed to suppress the spread of the virus faster, and have more robust health and social care infrastructure.
The modern neo-liberal economies operate on a principle of efficiency. In part, this is efficiency as an approach to business. Efficiency in a business context often being: stripping costs as aggressively as possible, through outsourcing, automation, challenging regulation through lobbying, and union busting.
However, it is also about the efficient allocation of capital. Since interest rates have been negligible for years, capital needs to be constantly reallocated to generate returns. That’s why, when US corporations received a massive windfall from changes in the tax code, they used these profits to buy back their own shares.
The structural and tax incentives do not reward companies for investing in the future or their own people.
What the crisis exposes so starkly, is that efficiency and resilience are limiting factors on each other.
Using just-in-time supply chains and short-term credit to fund cash flow is fine when everything is going well, but problematic when there are large, rapid changes in the global transport infrastructure, demand, and credit availability.
Business resilience requires redundancies - a second pilot and a second jet engine (even though you only need one of each) makes flying safer, for example. But cash, or a lack thereof, is the great leveler. The biggest U.S. airlines, including American, United, Delta and Southwest, have spent 96% of free cash flows to repurchase stock during the past decade, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. That leaves little for a rainy day.
Using the boundaries of their rationality, managers, investors and whole economies make decisions about what is likely to happen and act accordingly. Since unusual events happen rarely, it is reasonable for a commercial entity to heavily discount them, and thus leave itself unprepared for system level shocks. It is inherently inefficient to have backups, or a lot of liquidity, right until you need them.
Boundaries also exist on behavior, in the form of incentives and regulations. When the incentives work they way they currently do without regulation, the system becomes increasingly fragile, running hot, when each actor is behaving rationally. Crises expose fragilities and strengths.
:: AND NOW… THE FAMILY LOCKDOWN BOOGIE ::
Just in case you didn’t have enough to do, why not choreograph, perform and edit together a family lockdown disco track?! We may not be able to summon this much energy, but we’re so glad they did!
We’re still here, on the other end of this email, but forgive us if it takes a little longer than usual for us to respond. We appreciate you, and hope you are staying safe and as sane as possible. We hate to admit it, but sometimes we’re better when we’re apart.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob & @ashley hang out on instagram
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)