25th June 2021. Time | Workplace
Metaphors for the long term; killing a toxic culture
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Metaphors for the long-term
Richard Fisher has an occasional newsletter that helps him to articulate some of his continuing research into long-term futures. This week, he was writing about metaphors, ‘mascots’, for the long-term.
Trees are the obvious candidate, of course:
I could mention many more. There’s the forest of cypress trees planted a century ago to supply Japan’s Shinto temples, which are rebuilt every 20 years. There’s artist David Nash’s “ ash dome”, a circle of ash trees grown at a secret location in Wales in the hope they’d outlive him (sadly they’re now diseased). There’s Jean Giorno’s short story The Man Who Planted Trees, about a shepherd who converts a barren valley into a verdant paradise. There’s Roman Krznaric’s “ acorn brain”. There’s the Long Now Foundation’s affection for the bristlecone pine. The Long Time project’s tree ring logo.. And I, too, have taken inspiration from the tree, as a symbol of future possibilities.
It seems, however, that the endlessly repeated story about New College Oxford having planted a wood in the 1300s so that it could in due course replace the timbers in the College hall simply ain’t true:
The story is often told to illustrate the virtues of long-term planning – even the former British Prime Minister David Cameron recounted it once during a Tory party conference speech. However, it is apocryphal. “I am amazed that this myth still continues: long-term tenacity if not long-term thinking,” the college archivist Jennifer Thorp once told me.
On the other hand, the British navy has planted trees to ensure that it would enough timber for its ships. Vice Admiral Collingwood would drop acorns from his breeches when visiting public parks.
Fisher speculates about why trees: there are other things that extend beyond the human lifetime. He suggests that it might be because they are also living things.
There’s something reassuring about the idea of another organism living as long – if not longer – than us. They provide a helpful visual representation of time passing, via their branches or rings. And they are accessible, familiar, local.
All the same, he also speculates that there might be some other candidates out there.
One might be the coelacanth, which lives for 100 years on the bottom of the ocean. Another might be the Yareta plant, an Andean shrub that lives for 2-3,000 years. Another might be the Greenland shark, which lives for several hundred years.
Chris Baraniuk also nominated a few candidates to Richard, including the 100-million year microbe.
But Fisher’s favoured non-tree candidate is the nautilus, which has been around for 500 million years and show signs of having long-term memories despite having simple brains.
(A cross section of a nautilus shell (Credit: Florian Elias Rieser/Wikpedia/ CC BY 4.0)
What he also likes about it is its shape, as a spiral:
the mind’s default setting is to construct a future that is “far”, with time framed as linear. But when you think of time as a spiral, then the past and future seem more within reach. Deep time no longer stretches into the distance beyond the horizon, but is looping and closely coiled.
#2: Killing a toxic culture
It’s a couple of weeks now since an employee group, Punks With Purpose, wrote an open letter than raised allegations about a toxic workplace at the independent brewer Brewdog:
You spent years claiming you wanted to be the best employer in the world, presumably to help you to recruit top talent, but ask former staff what they think of those claims, and you’ll most likely be laughed at. Being treated like a human being was sadly not always a given for those working at BrewDog... It doesn’t matter which part of the business we worked in; production, bartending, sales, operations, packaging, quality, marketing or HR, we all felt that in our day to day working lives, there were at best hurdles, and at worst genuine safety concerns.
The letter is a devastating critique, and it’s worse for Brewdog both because it has made a big deal of its independence and its ‘punk’ attitude, and because it has made claims about being progressive in other areas of the business, such as sustainability. Punks With Purpose gives some of that short shrift as well:
These days, you claim you want to save the planet – an admirable mission, but slightly undermined when you look back over years of vanity projects. Chartering flights across the Atlantic that had to be filled with staff to justify them even going ahead? Brewing an “eco-friendly” saison with glacier water (half of which was dumped down the drain) so the proceeds could go to charity (but only after the donation was slashed because it was too much)?
It’s hard to find anything out about Punks With Purpose, but it’s pretty clear that they are angry former employees who now work elsewhere. Of course, these are the most dangerous critics for any business to have: they know how the business works, they still have links with people who still work there, and they don’t have anything to lose. The letter is well-written and didn’t leave Brewdog with anywhere to go.
And one of the most telling sections is directed at people who’re still working for the business:
Now, for those of you still working at BrewDog.
You have a choice. The next time you are pressured into doing something against your will, or working in such a way that it will affect your mental health, push back. It is absolutely not worth it. The only reason BrewDog has become what it is, is that under immense pressure, good people have done bad things to achieve the job set before them, in such a way that benefits only the company.
The letter finishes with a direct address to Brewdog’s founder James Watt. After a longer delay than I would have expected, Watt announced a wide-ranging independent investigation—which was probably the least he could do.
There are some familiar points in this story.
The first is that social media lets critics amplify their voices in ways they didn’t used to—but you have to pick your moment. You only get a couple of shots before the social media circus moves on.
The second is that if you’re going to claim to be a values-driven business, you have to values-driven all the way through. You can’t pick and choose.
And the third is that the rules around workplace culture have changed irrevocably. Some of this is down to movements such as #timesup. Of course, there are still toxic cultures everywhere. But the old excuses—it’s just banter, they’re people who couldn’t hack our dynamic culture—and we’ve all heard this stuff: these old excuses don’t work any more.
(Image by ex-colleague Jake Goretzki. I recommend his cartoons at https://www.grtzk.com/.
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