Head Of Nothing

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 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 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.