Head Of Nothing

I’ve had to take a week or so off to to other stuff but the search is back on.

All this thinking suddenly has come to a conclusion.

The reality struck me squarely and firmly: to take business development, and the investment in time and resources through the use of another person or business, to grow my business along the same lines as it is already developing cannot deliver a step change in performance. Something radical, something different, something which I might think of, but, would be likely to remain unthought, constrained by my own history, is much more likely from the individual who is as unconstrained as I can make it.

My conviction that the role, and the experiment, was worth the investment became profoundly real in my mind.

In true Donald Rumsfeld fashion!

My business, as it stands, woks in a way that means that I know a significant amount about the way it operates, the people that it helps, its target market, its marketing and sales strategy, its ways of working and its processes. Of course, I should. It is after all my business.

If I impose those things on others then those very things constrain others from opening the doors to the very “Rumsfeld-ian” matters of the “unknown unknowns”.

Someone who is truly unconstrained will inevitably think of alternative strategies, alternative marketing, alternative routes to market, different target markets, different products, different services, different ways of working, and different approaches to most aspects of the business internally. That is what I want.

I concluded that it could constrain, but in general it was simply seeking the outcome. I decided to resolve that particular dichotomy later. It might after all be dependent on the individual I found for the role, rather than on the description of the role itself.

So, I have concluded that I wish to invest a reasonable sum of money in my business in order to help it grow. One way that I can do that is to find someone to fulfil a role with no constraints but to pay them for undertaking that role. The search is on….

I had determined that I did not intend to employ a Head of Nothing; rather I sought a collaborator, an associate, someone who would see “Head of Nothing” as a part of their portfolio and not their “job”. It wouldn’t be all that they did, and the other things they did would allow them to continue to innovate and develop and think about their role in my organisation in more depth. That seemed to fit, it enabled them to be unconstrained by the need to focus on one organisation so one significant constraint already was removed.

I also knew that I wasn’t in a position to invest enough in my business to provide an income for an individual working on a full time basis. However, some of what they deliver should of course develop and grow the business. I was, however, prepared to make an investment in the business in order to help the business to grow.

Immediately, I have a problem, I have constrained the role by defining it as a role which is intended to “help the business grow”. My question, to myself, became one of is that a constraint or is it a desired outcome?

That question arose today when I was talking to someone about the role. It’s a choice, it may not prove to be the right one, but in part this discussion, this experiment, will provide some information to enable others to determine whether the strategy was correctly or incorrectly formed. Of course, they will do so, with the benefit of twenty twenty hindsight after the event, but that’s OK too.

I’d been issued with a challenge (see here…) by some existing clients to think about what a job with no contraints would look like and after some consideration (see here…) I’d given form to an idea of a role I’d called ‘Head of Nothing’.

‘Head of Nothing’ is a job that is not one without a title, but, actually, it has a title that described it in its entirety.

I then began to think about the implications of hiring someone in such a role. In general I have concluded that my business should grow through the use of associates and partners in other similar businesses working collaborately rather than through employment of individuals working solely for my business.

That (employing others) may become necessary as the business grows and develops, but in general I believe that the development of groups of independent people working, collaborative, and developing business through innovation and agility means that a business strategy that constrains itself with employees may be critically constrained at a time of rapid change.

The ability to engage others with different skills at relatively short notice to meet an immediate client need seems, for now, at least, a more appropriate way to develop the business.

Of course, growing a business in that way does mean that the cost base is both variable and at times, particularly when delivering to clients, much higher, without careful planning cashflow can be a real issue. However at other times when business is not sufficient to support the level of work that would maintain employment for staff, the cost base is automatically adapted.

A Head of Nothing isn’t working for clients though, at least not necessarily (remember - no constraints) so their costs are like an employee whatever the contractual arrangement. Does that create the first insurmountable constraint? More thinking is clearly needed.

I thought for some time about the nature of a role that was truly without constraints and for a long time struggled to identify how such a role could be defined. Of course, I eventually realised that by trying to define such a role I was indeed constraining it.

A role without constraints is a role which does not define its purpose. A role without constraints does not require an individual to be working on strategy, or marketing, or sales, or product development, or operational improvement, or any other particular role within an organisation. Perhaps, from time to time, there would work on each, or some, of those roles but to predefine them would be to constrain them.

At that moment the concept of, and search for a “Head of Nothing” was born.

I was talking to some clients recently about the challenges of providing genuine accountability and responsibility to staff. We all agreed, after some discussion, that it is very difficult to provide a clear and open framework in which our staff, colleagues and associates can work without constraining them with our own beliefs about how and what should be done.

We discussed, again, for some time, what form those constraints could take, in particular, in those with whom we expect innovative thinking within their day to day activity. Our conclusion was that genuine accountability and responsibility only really comes when the only constraints are self imposed and not imposed by others.

As an example if we are asked to perform a particular task, and told to follow a process which we have not developed (nor accepted) then, when the output fails to meet our expectation, our natural reaction is to say, something along the lines of, “well, what did you expect”. It’s not the task that has caused the poor outcome, its not the process that’s caused the poor outcome, necessarily, but, at least in part, the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility, that arises from a lack of ownership, i.e. the constraints imposed on the task that cause the problem.

This set me thinking, is it possible to have a role, a job, to work for somebody, and yet to do so without constraints. I concluded that in general there has to be some constraints but I set about thinking about a role that was as constraint free as possible.