133

Chapter Eleven

ACTION 5
Jumping out of the
Boundaries That
Constrain You

People who Glow have broad and extensive networks and are skilled at jumping out of the boundaries that constrain them. They allow for serendipity in their life and are prepared to meet new people and take the untrodden path to broaden their experiences.

When you create extensive and meandering networks, you Glow, as these networks ensure that you create, find and flourish in Hot Spots.

You have two diagnostics to help you understand whether this is an action you should be focusing on. The first is your responses in the Glow Profile in Figure 8.1. This will give you a good idea of how adept you are at jumping across worlds. If your final profile is Profile Type D or E, this action is particularly crucial to you. Also take a look at the names you wrote in the four quadrants in Figure 10.1. Are the relationships in Quadrants 3 and 4 taking as much time as those in Quadrants 1 and 2? Are they as well developed? If you are spending too much time walking the same patch with the same people, Action 5 is crucial for you.

134

In this chapter you will take a closer look at Quadrants 3 and 4. Our discussion of Quadrant 3 will focus on how to build more valuable communities of practice so that you can broaden your networks with people who are similar to you and therefore gain more value from rapid knowledge flows. Our discussion of Quadrant 4 will explain how to create more value by becoming a flâneur so that you can enter into the lives of others with passion and interest and thereby gain more innovative value through combining different ideas.

Quadrant 3: How to Build More
Valuable Communities of Practice

You can begin by reviewing your responses in Quadrant 3 in Figure 10.1. In that quadrant you named three people representative of acquaintances and associates who are similar to you.

Typically, your communities of practice develop through a combination of three factors:

• They are people who share a problem that they all believe to be important (for example, how can we make this company more carbon-neutral?).
• They are people who have a shared passion for a topic (for example, increasing the number of computers in African villages).
• They are people who seek to deepen and extend their knowledge by getting together on a regular basis (for example, to learn more about how change takes place in an organization or to talk about a book they have all read).

Communities of practice that can develop great value don’t all have to be about earth-shattering topics. Even the most seemingly mundane day-today issue can spark a valuable community of practice. Take the example of my friend Marilyn, who is a great networker. She tells me that the most active community she is a member of is a community dedicated to helping people housebreak cats. It is full of people blogging about their cat problems, videos of how they resolved them, people volunteering to mentor others—and all completely virtual: none of the members of the community have ever met.

135

As Marilyn’s example shows, you have to be interested in something and be prepared to give time to it for a community of practice to emerge. As the community develops and you connect more with each other, you begin to share more information, insights, and advice. Your communities of practice help you solve the problems you face; they can discuss the situations that are worrying you and explore ideas that interest you. What a community of practice is great at is creating potential value for you to become more innovative and more able to Glow.

Your communities of practice come in all shapes and sizes. They can be small and intimate, involving only a few people, or large, with many members and subdivisions. They can be short-lived or flourish over decades. They can be made up of people who have much in common or who have less in common except for a single passion. They can be based in a single business unit, range across a whole company, or transcend organizational boundaries to connect people from many organizations. The members of your community of practice can be colocated, so that you bump into each other naturally as the day unfolds, or virtual, distributed across a country or indeed the globe, so that you rely on e-mail, blogging, and perhaps the occasional meeting to keep the connections alive. Your communities of practice can arise spontaneously, without your intervention or development effort, or they can be intentionally formed by calling meetings, setting agendas, and creating supporting tools such as Web sites or knowledge bases.

Reviewing Your Communities of Practice

It’s a good idea to review your communities of practice on a regular basis to decide whether you should be changing your role in the communities you are in or perhaps even reaching out to other communities.

136

Increasing the value of your current communities of practice

To review your communities, first take a moment to think about the communities of practice you are currently a member of. Use the following descriptions to categorize the communities:

• Communities that are about a challenge I face at work
• Communities that focus on something I am passionate about
• Communities that meet to share ideas
• Communities that are outside of work

Next, think about each of these communities and the impact your membership is having on your feeling of well-being and your capacity to Glow.

Finally, for each community of practice, ask yourself these three questions:

• Am I investing the right amount of time in these communities of practice? (Actions 5.1 and 5.2 may help you decide on this.)
• Are my communities of practice providing me with the breadth of networks I need to find and create Hot Spots that enable me to Glow? (Actions 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 may help you widen your networks.)
• Are there areas of emerging interest in my life for which I have not yet developed a community? ( Here too, Actions 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5 may help.)

Your answers to these questions will help you decide which actions you should take now to ensure you have the right communities of practice to deliver value.

Actions to take now to create valuable
communities of practice

Action 5.1 Optimizing the time spent in communities of practice. First, think about the amount of time you spend in each of the communities of practice, and consider whether this amount of time is optimal for creating value. There are potentially three broad levels of involvement:

• At the highest level of involvement, you are currently interacting intensively and participate a great deal in shaping the community. The question to reflect on is, “Should I be standing back a little more?”
• At the next level of involvement, you are currently an active member of this community and make a regular contribution. The question you should reflect on is, “Should I be increasing or decreasing my participation?”
• At the lowest level of involvement, you are currently staying on the periphery and rarely participate actively. The question to reflect on is, “Should I be putting more energy into this community?”

137

Action 5.2 Creating value in communities of practice. Reflecting further on the amount of time you are spending in each community, evaluate how valuable the community has been for you.

Consider whether you need to shift roles among the three levels of involvement, perhaps becoming more central to the community or disengaging from the everyday flow of the community and moving out to a more peripheral membership.

You don’t need to be in the center to gain value from a community of practice. In fact, being on the sidelines and connecting through associates can let you gain insight and watch what is going on without making a major commitment of time or resources.

Remember that you have finite resources available to build and develop your network of friends and associates, so if you want to extend your communities of practice, it may be wise to move to a more peripheral role.

Quadrant 4: How to Create Value as a Flâneur

Think back to Quadrant 4 in Figure 8.1 and the extent to which these networks allow for the possibility of serendipity in your life. It is often from these unexpected connections that innovation emerges.

You can create these unexpected encounters by becoming a flâneur, being prepared to wander around with no fixed idea of where you are going. Be interested and inquisitive about what you see and positive and open to the people you meet.

138

When you become a flâneur, you bring flux and transformation, fleeting relations and connections into your networks. In your wanderings you rediscover acquaintances you carry in your memory rather than through regular interaction. You encounter strangers, some of whom you will meet again. It is in these fleeting encounters that you gossip, exchange unexpected news and details, develop new perspectives, and glean new insights.

Becoming a flâneur is both an attitude of mind and a decision to give time to serendipity. It can also be encouraged by your physical space. Some places are built for the flâneur. Thinking back to my own chocolate story, the Mediterranean town in which I live is tailor-made for the flâneur. The climate is mild; the streets are so narrow that you are forced to bump into people; there are no cars, so there is no danger as you wander; and the outdoor cafés and tapas bars encourage waving, stopping, and chatting. It is easy to become a flâneur in this town, to wander where you please with no fixed plan or predetermined destination, to devote time to the activity and keep an open mind to appreciate all you see.

However, you don’t have to be in a Mediterranean town to become a flâneur. Remember how Harry and Julie met. They were not strolling around a quaint village. But they were taking time out to participate in an executive program. When not in lectures, they spent time talking with each other over coffee, and after the conference, devoted even more time to catching up and talking more. If you want to be a great flâneur, even in a cold northern climate, you need to adopt and pursue four precepts:

• Allow for serendipity in your working life; do not overschedule your time to the point that any possibility of the unexpected is excluded.
• Use the unscheduled time to go off the beaten path.
• Be positive and warm to the strangers you encounter.
• Cultivate a fluid identity that ensures you will be welcomed as you jump across worlds.

139

Allowing for Serendipity in Your Life

Tight schedules can eliminate any possibility of wandering around, so the first action to take is to schedule time for the unexpected and then just let the moment take you. Here are three actions that you can take right now:

Actions to take now to allow for
serendipity in your life

Action 5.3 Setting aside “golden moments.” This is a little trick I play on myself to encourage me to leave some time unscheduled. Every couple of months, I take a pen with gold ink (the gold ink seems to be more difficult to cross out later) and go through my desk calendar, blocking out time every week to wander around and let serendipity into my working life. Some weeks it’s a couple of hours; other weeks it could be a day or two. So buy yourself a gold pen and get that calendar out! I am aware that this is easier for me because as an academic I have freedom built into my worklife. But even if you are in a highly scheduled job it is crucial that you allow yourself time out to wander and reflect. In the short term this may seem counterproductive, in the longer term it will help you be more innovative and creative.

Action 5.4 Taking time out. Encourage your team members and manager to give you time to work on something that is different from your day-to-day work and enables you to meet with different people. You might point out to them that at Google, employees are allowed 10 percent of their time to work on something of their own.

Action 5.5 Taking minisabbaticals. You can expect your working life between now and the time you retire to be more of a “portfolio” than a direct, hierarchical line to the top. Part of the portfolio will be opportunities for you to take time off for personal development. So when you take this time off, recognize that these are great opportunities for you to release your inner flâneur by developing a new skill, traveling to another city, state, or country, or jumping into a completely different situation.

140

Going off the Beaten Path

Be sure that in the time you have carved out in your working life, you are really engaging in jumping across worlds. The emphasis here is on creating broader networks with people who are different from you.

Actions to take now to create broader networks

Action 5.6 Creating broader networks. Make sure you engage with different people in your normal day-to-day activities. For example, when you play tennis, chess, or computer games, play each game with different people. In Action 6, finding and moving to boundaryless places (Chapter Twelve), you will get an opportunity to look at this in more detail; here is a summary of the ideas you will encounter there:

• Pursue a career path in which you are able to move across functions, businesses or countries.
• Seek out mentors with wide, diverse networks.
• Make it known that you want to work in different functions or businesses.
• Attend seminars and meetings outside your own group.
• Join communities of practice outside your immediate work group.
• Volunteer for socially responsible projects.
• Widen your social and sports activities.

Being Positive and Warm to the Strangers You Encounter

Expert flâneurs gain from their wanderings because when they meet strangers, they are good-mannered and courteous. The philosopher Bertrand Russell summed up this state of mind perfectly in The Conquest of Happiness:

141

Actions to take now to become more positive and
warm with strangers

Action 5.7 Showing interest in others and appreciating others. Ensure that you are mentally and physically engaged in conversations and meetings, showing your interest in others. Be curious about the world around you. Learn to appreciate people who are different from you, find out what they do, why they do it, and how they developed these habits and skills.

Cultivating a Fluid Identity

On the face of it, jumping across worlds sounds easy. However, one of the reasons you do it perhaps less than you might is that in reality it is far from easy. Take Harry and Julie, for example. Although they have a lot in common, in reality they inhabit different worlds of work. Julie is on the essence and fragrance team that worked on Magnum ice cream. Most members of her team have a research background and postgraduate qualifications. If you observed one of her team meetings, you would hear people deep in technical conversation. They would be discussing the complexities of keeping these essences and fragrances stable and how the substances behave under pressure and at low temperatures. Julie and her team use a language dominated by technical and mathematical terms and are relaxed about long, unstructured meetings.

142

Now let’s observe Harry and his team. Many members of his team are from a production or marketing background, and their meetings tend to be decisive, short-term oriented, and pragmatic.

Both teams have developed their own norms and ways of behaving. For example, how you dress (Julie’s team: jeans and T-shirt; Harry’s team: business suit), when you turn up for meetings (Julie’s team: fifteen minutes late is fine; Harry’s team: punctuality is demanded), and what you talk about (Julie’s team: long conversations about molecular formation; Harry’s team: short-term marketing problems).

See the challenge? When Julie meets Harry, they are not just jumping beyond their team; they are actually connecting to a world very different from their own.

If you want to be adept at jumping across worlds, you have to develop a fluid identity. What that involves is taking some of the norms from the other world while remaining authentic to yourself. Julie has something of a fluid identity. For example, when she is in Harry’s world, Julie does not use the technical jargon that is common parlance in her own team; she also dresses in a more formal way and makes sure that she comes to meetings at the appointed time. She is able to sound “research” when with her own group and “marketing” when in Harry’s world.

Do you want to develop a more fluid identity? You can take action right now.

Actions to take now that will help you
develop a fluid identity

Action 5.8 Developing a fluid identity. It will help greatly if you can become more aware of yourself and the norms of your own team and community so that you recognize the differences between your own world and others’ worlds. There are two ways to do this:

• Become extrasensitive to the norms of others, how others behave, the language they use, and their attitudes toward time. Julie quickly learned that some of the R&D jargon she used with her own team was not going to be meaningful in Harry’s world, so she modified her use of jargon and learned some key marketing terms.
• Monitor the impact you are having on others. Watching other people’s reactions to you will help you become more aware of their norms and the norms you may be violating. For example, Julie modified her technical language because she saw how Harry’s team responded to her initially. She also noticed the subtle reactions when she was a few minutes late, even though nobody said anything. By monitoring her effect on others, she could figure out what to change. In a sense, she was able to become a “social chameleon,” adept at adapting to different situations.

Having a more fluid identity does not mean that you lose your authentic self. In Julie’s case, there are aspects of her behavior and values that she is not prepared to compromise on. A good example of this is the handling of deadlines. When she is with Harry’s team, she is not prepared to agree to the shortened deadlines that Harry’s team always seems to want. The norm in Harry’s team is that everything should be done “yesterday” or “as soon as possible.” But she knows that the members of her team hate working under what they consider unreasonable pressure. So while she compromises on the clothes she wears and the language she uses, she does not compromise on the time she needs to work through a problem.

Key Points in Chapter Eleven
ACTION 5
Jumping out of the Boundaries That Constrain You

It is wise to become skilled at escaping the boundaries that constrain you by building more valuable communities of practice and creating value as a flâneur—being prepared to wander away from your natural networks.

144

Building More Valuable Communities of Practice
Communities of practice consist of people who share a problem, a passion, or an interest in deepening an area of knowledge. The emphasis is on increasing the value of communities of practice by investing the right amount of time, ensuring that they create a broad network, and picking up on emerging interests.

Action 5.1 Optimizing the time spent in communities of practice

Action 5.2 Creating value in communities of practice

Creating Value as a Flâneur
As you wander outside your normal networks, you must be interested and inquisitive about what you see and positive and open about the people you meet. To do this, you need to allow for serendipity in your life.

Action 5.3 Setting aside “golden moments”

Action 5.4 Taking time out

Action 5.5 Taking minisabbaticals

Action 5.6 Creating broader networks

Action 5.7 Showing interest in others and appreciating others

Action 5.8 Developing a fluid identity