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Published on 2024-12-30 11:00:00 | words: 1575
December 24th, most in Western Europe are thinking about Xmas.
Personally, I prefer to look forward to 2025.
So, before resuming the ongoing article series while crossing from 2024 into 2025, this week and the next will go for short articles, each one around a single word.
Will be shared all before 2024-12-31, and hopefully would generate further material in the future.
Therefore, do not expect my usual structured articles divided into section: just some "pointers".
Anyway, my focus will be to take a different perspective on each word.
The overall rationale? four corners in a circle (yes, I like the Apollo 13 take on fitting a square on a circle and viceversa), but will disclose the full circle only within the last "episode".
The obvious inspiration of selecting four is the four directions (North South East West) and, in business, the PDCA cycle from Deming (that studied over 30 years ago in preparation of other activities)
And this preamble will appear in each article.
So, let's start: episode 4- respin.
Yesterday's article in this short series, about sustain, was focused on extending the considerations of the first two articles outward, "looking at the big picture"- again, as actually the first article, about sustainability, started looking at the big picture to "frame" the specific project or initiative.
As you can see, also today it is an action verb- but probably, while the meaning is understandable, the verb "per se" is an unknown.
Welcome to my world: I started inventing or re-inventing words as a teenager, and, courtesy of my multicultural business experience since the 1980s, including spending summers studying, I ended up doing that by "borrowing" words from other languages.
I do not know if this comes from reading Gadda, Joyce, Rodari, Calvino- or by passing for fun a mini-exam in Esperanto from Yugoslavia as a teenager.
In our modern times, "spinning" got a negative vibe, e.g. generating consensus by tweaking information for political purposes or to launch yet another Ponzi scheme.
In my cultural and organizational change experience, even before started officially doing that in 1990, and even before started working officially in 1986, I blended political experience and observation, with something else.
E.g. what I learned first as a self-appointed tutor/supporter at the university IT lab while during the first year of university in Turin (even created some software to help other students, after I saw routine errors made by many).
Or even what I learned in my first intensive experience across social classes in a closed culture, in the Army, for my office role but also as teacher of a course I had proposed and created- was really funny being called "Comandante" from a colleague years later in Milan, who had been one of my students, and being called again "Comandante" in Brussels by an Englishman from Cornwall who somehow knew my military dossier and curriculum better than many Italians.
The paragraphs above were to give a palette of contributions, not to brag about something that was able to do only because, at the university as well as in the Army and, before that, in political activities, found managers and senior managers or senior officers who went past my childish appearance, lack of university degree, and tossed my way challenges.
E.g. in the Army had proposed two hours twice a week after office hours, and was approved for... four hours a day five days a week *after* office hours.
What did I learn across all of that? That no matter how good or positive is the result of a previous activity, if you want to keep it alive, or, even better, turn it into a set of "organizational Pavlovian reflexes" that become "organic" and part of the natural toolbox, you need to get back a bit of... "Sturm und Drang" (I wrote about the positives and negatives of that in previous articles).
You need a narrative and a motivation- and I think that that attitude was actually helped by all the readings that had while in school, first all the stories in the Bible as a kid, then the Divine Comedy, and finally, in high school, a book that was much, much more intense that your ordinary high school literary anthology, a 10-volumes monster called "Il Materiale e l'immaginario".
It was obviously selective, but I was able to get a "Virgil" that guided me also through further explorations in libraries.
Consider it as a series of appetizers- few thousand pages of appetizers.
In business, we do not have the luxury of time, and have to prioritize- still, probably some members of my teams or customers remember how, between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, I was used once in a while produce as "preliminary reading material" 10 or 20 pages to build a common ground.
In this "respin" phase, you have to convey and integrate the lessons learned on a wider scale, and look beyond the confines of your own project, initiative, and even organization, to create a compelling story that will have to be associated with them.
As I shared in past articles, sometimes this requires simple devices, such associating a visual memory, pictogram, keyword, symbol.
And this is something that still eludes many in my country, Italy: you have to layer communication, and care about your audience (if you read Italian, have a look here).
Somebody said the medium is the message, many disagree, I think: depends.
Anyway, during "sustain" the expertise from the project or initiative team had a key contributing role, I would dare to say "pivotal" (and I am thinking now about a UK Prime Minister)- to avoid misunderstandings that I still see often around in many "best practices adoption" initiatives that forget the context and constraints, and degrees of freedom of the sources.
During "respin", the results and material from "sustain" are digested and integrated within the "Leviathan" of the aggregated organizational memory and current ethos of the organization, something that described at length in 2003-2005 (yes, the 2013 reprint I referenced in previous articles).
Because the key element is not just to "extract value", but to "seed further value".
Meaning: in Italian, we say that "tradurre è tradire"- to translate is to betray (I like better the French translation: traduire c'est trahir).
In "respin", that is done by design.
You are not trying to replicate, you are trying to expand or at least reassess the "knowledge stock", and extract material that could inspire, even just by difference, other initiatives.
Any project or program management framework or methodology will tell you that their object is "non-repeatable": even when I was working on Decision Support Systems or Business Intelligence for partners using the same tools, the method and approach was the same, but had to be contextualized- and we were in pre-Internet times.
In our times, where almost any project or initiative, "with or without technology" (it is my motto on Linkedin) involves directly or indirectly multiple parties, regulators local and few degrees of separation away, and multiple "knowledge providers" that sometimes you will cross path with only once in your business lifetime, having shared frameworks of reference becomes paramount.
I think that anybody reading anything on this website, or that at least worked occasionally with me around Europe and in few other locations, know my perception of certifications.
Useful to share a "lingo", as I did in the past first as a learner in politics and the Army, then courtesy of Andersen on methodology in the 1980s (I still have my "Personnel Reference Binder", in a box somewhere in Europe), and then...
...with my "position papers" shared with teams, customers, partners.
When those getting a certification keep talking about it, I think that they missed the whole point of getting one.
You have to walk the talk, not brag about having listened at it for short while well enough to pass a test.
Actually, part of the "respin" should be also, in my view, to create, if relevant, additional "learning pills" to share in your organization, "highlights" to inform and train (in Italian used to say "informare e formare").
This article, as the previous ones in this series, was to deliver pointers and raise questions, not solutions.
And I think that adding 2,000 more words would not add any value- as would be insufficient to expand what I am thinking, and just waste your time.
So, let's close it as is, and see you soon for more articles.
Meanwhile, have a nice week.
Tomorrow, another article to keep going on other article series.
Stay tuned!