I Exchanged Distance for Proximity
People keep asking me whether I miss the old corporate days and boardrooms. No, I don’t. Well, I still enjoy working in boardrooms and on strategy, the difficult conversations. I enjoy helping leaders make sense of complexity. That hasn't changed. What has changed is where I begin.
I no longer believe the best strategy is built from a distance. And distance is more than geography. It is also the distance created by clean data, polished reports, and second-hand information.
Over the past years, I have exchanged distance for proximity. Not because strategy meetings, reports, or data are wrong. They all have their place. But this kind of information is clean. The work I do requires first-hand experience. And experience refuses to behave like clean information.
Experience contradicts itself. People tell you one thing and then show you another. During my field visits, I find confirmation of this all the time. The most important observations are rarely answers to my questions. They are the things I never thought to ask. That changes my questions. And once my questions change, the strategy changes with them.
At What Matters we say Reclaiming Humanity in the Economy by creating intentional impact. But how exactly does intentional work if there is no path to follow or a gravel road to walk?
Community economy development has taught me that systems have a texture. It is impossible to discover this texture through clean information, such as from a report or data. We discover texture by being there, in the field, exposed to the raw energies, listening, and waiting. By paying attention to what happens in between. The unseen, if you will. The things that don't fit neatly into frameworks often explain the framework better than the framework itself.
My fieldwork is where my own assumptions go to die. Even though I would like to be brilliant all the time, figured it out right from the beginning (cute, I know), I also see that every time one of my assumptions dies, my understanding becomes a little more grounded in reality.
I still enjoy strategy. Only, I just no longer believe the best strategy is built from a distance.
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