8r4d Consulting Ltd.

  • professional anecdotal

    I have been observing the subtle art of the professional anecdote.

    As someone pointed out to me recently, LinkedIn and other similar networks, along with individual websites like this very site, a professional-ish blog, are rife with people wearing masks.

    Professional masks, of course. People post on sites and blogs like LinkedIn and their own portfolio websites and almost unanimously do so wearing a kind of digital mask. That is to say, much of what you read here, there and other similar places is almost certainly, to a degree, appropriately, necessarily, and interestingly performative.

    Not in a bad way. Rather, it is performative in a work way.

    We are all trying to be professionals, and build up a facet of our identities online that normally we would reserve for the office.

    And this leads to the fine art of the professional anecdote. How does one tell a work appropriate story that is simultaneously a little humorous, a little insightful, and all around something that might be the kind of story one would feel perfectly comfortable telling at a meeting or a conference or to a client? 

    A few minute before I sat down to write this a former colleague of mine, can I call him a colleague? Someone with whom I did business in the past to whom I am now connected on LinkedIn, wrote a little story about how on the way to catch a cross-country flight to attend a business meeting recently he encountered a faulty gas pump while refueling his rental car, soaked his only pair of shoes in gasoline, and consequently had to think on his feet (groan) while navigating airport security, a crowded flight, and an important business meeting. A little humourous. Insightfully relatable. And assuming it was told with a tact, perfectly the kind of story that one could tell at the start of a meeting with just about anyone. Professionally anecdotal.

    And it is an art form that while often derided a bit pejoratively, just as I did to a degree when I noted that this is a kind of performative mask wearing, it is also a part of professional decorum that is vital to anyone in business these days.

    I note this second take because on LinkedIn lately I have seen some people, clearly the kinds of folks who have crafted long and careful perceptions online to their colleagues, suddenly shift into deep and divisive political opinion, telling stories that tick all the boxes as above, but then also make people a little uncomfortable regarding the state of the world these days, from almost every perspective one might imagine.

    So I wonder: is this a blip, and will the fine art of professional performance online shift back to the apolitical “a funny thing happened to me on the way to work” anecdotes? Or are we entering a refreshened era of tinting those masks to match our political colours to better understand with whom we are doing business?

  • strategic simplicity

    I write all of these things I post into an offline word processor first.  Then I do some light editing, copy and paste into the blogging software, and then ultimately push publish.

    Maybe you read that and thought so what? 

    Big deal? Obvious.

    We all have these simple little habits that keep us organized. They are each of them personal strategies to creep us towards whatever definition of success we’ve chosen. And each of these strategies are fundamental building blocks of who we are how we can get stuff done.

    I was observing a coworker yesterday inputing some data into a spreadsheet. She made a mistake and quickly realized that she had entered the data into the wrong cell. For me, I would have highlighted the cell, Ctrl-Xed it and then highlighted the right cell and Ctrl-Ved it, and been off to the next item. She used the mouse, located the undo button on the menu, clicked it to erase what she had written, then highlighted the correct cell and retyped the data.  Same result, but my method would have been literally five times faster.

    Never assume the little things are obvious or so what? moments. We might spend hours writing and talking about our big strategies for getting stuff done, but often I think I could teach a course on all the little things I’ve learned about getting things done and each individual step I take to accomplish it all.

  • social games

    I spent nearly a decade feeding the massive social media networks like Facebook and Instagram with my creative output.

    What did it get me?

    I could tell you that I learned some skills in social media engagement, but that would be a bit of an exaggeration because an invisible algorithm did most of the work.

    I could tell you that it gave me an excuse to write and create, but that would be something of a cop out because one shouldn’t need such excuses to practice one’s craft.

    I could tell you that it gave me an audience, but honestly I could have currated an email list of my friends and family and had nearly as many eyes to see what I made.

    What it really did was create value for someone else.

    What the social media networks never admit is that the house is only one guaranteed to win, and it’s always their house. Sure, some folks hit a jackpot and walk out richer and wiser, but most of us spend our creative chips and they vanish into the coffers of the app or network.

    I can’t tell you that you shouldn’t play the social media game, but I can suggest that there are far fewer winners there than there are the rest of us. And I can tell you that I have lately been, and will continue to be, putting more effort into building my own (much smaller and less social) networks with my creative energies.