(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:25 am)
SUMMARY: Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about the business strategy behind the blog, and it’s been quite VEXING. It’s much harder to do this for myself. I can think of plenty of things to do, but I don’t have the sense of surety that I have when doing work-for-hire. Why can’t I do it for my own projects? Maybe I just need to apply my own for-hire project methodology to myself, as much as I don’t like the idea of it.
When I’m scoping out a new project with a client, I start by asking three questions:
- What is your intention; what is it that you want to make / have made?
- What is your motivation; what is the reason you are doing this right now, as opposed to later?
- What is your expectation; what do you think will happen after you have what you’re asking me to do?
I find that these questions, when posed in real-time over the phone or over coffee, will give me almost everything I need to know. The first question–intention–is posed so the prospective client can get all his/her thoughts out; people are usually fixated over what they want to DO by the time we meet, and are just bursting to let it out. The second question–motivation–gets into the rationale behind the action; this helps me map the prospect’s project priorities to the critical business context that drives them. This exposes the business case for the work, which is important because that is what ultimately drives the metrics for client satisfaction. Finally, the last question–expectation–tells me how the prospect sees the world. For example, I can often read between the lines to uncover unspoken assumptions and glean how they believe the world should work in the best case. These three questions are really just your basic WHAT / WHY / HOW line of questioning, designed to elicit answers in about 30 minutes of casual conversation. Afterwards, I structure what I’ve learned into a more detailed response that succinctly describes the valuable “core ideas” behind the project. While there are more questions I ask to get into the tactical planning behind a project, it’s these starting questions that give the project direction and structure. With the core ideas in place, we have a yardstick against all actions can be measured, which makes it a lot easier to figure out what needs doing at any given moment. Presuming the scope doesn’t change, of course.
Scoping work for hire like this is second nature to me, but for some reason I never apply the same rigor to my personal goals. I’ve talked about this blind spot at length before, but to recap:
I subconsciously believe that personal projects should come “naturally” to me, with an attendant sense of “yeah, this is what I want to do!”
In other words, I don’t expect personal projects to feel like the drudgery of work. One could debate whether this attitude is logical or not; I think that if you actually ARE doing something that comes very naturally to you, and you DO feel genuine surety in the process, it doesn’t feel like drudgery. Writing (or more accurately: thinking in sentences) is like that for me, but it’s just a skill. What I really want is something more than the practice of a skill…I want to be in a better place than I am now. Getting there is the point of having all self-improvement goals in the first place; they are stepping stones to that higher state of living.
Whatever THAT is, right?
The tough part about applying my three-question project process to myself is that I don’t seem have strongly-defined intent, motivation, or expectation…at least, not on first thought. However, after just a moment’s reflection, I am thinking the source of my confusion is the sheer number of thoughts I have on the matter; I haven’t chosen one to follow. In other words, I’m not committing to a project scope.
It’s unrealistic for me to jump from having nothing to having a highly-successful business with just one quick project. And yet, that’s what I want. Even the best clients want that, but are usually reasonable in their expectations given limited resources, budget, and time. So let me revisit the big three questions:
- Intent – Build business income such that I don’t have to worry about where the money is coming from.
- Motivation – I would like to stabilize my income, because it’s erratic due to the nature of my work.
- Expectation – I will be independent and free, which I am right now already, but with the added bonus of having more money to work with.
I have written this many times before in different forms, and I find it highly irritating that I keep losing this focus, but there it is. The HARD part is pushing through the uncertainty that I feel, which is similar to the uncertainty any client feels when they’re outsourcing work outside of their domain of expertise. How can they evaluate the quality of the work as it is occurring? As my own client, I’m in the same position, and have to face my lack of expertise in making money in the quantities I would like.
There are a few approaches that come to mind:
- I could look for a business expert to tell me what to do: they provide me with a pattern to follow, which requires less thinking on my part.
- I could learn how to be a business expert: I determine what principles can be followed, derive metrics that make sense to me, and see what happens through experimentation, analysis, and iteration.
- I can continue to do what I’m doing, which isn’t really working, and naively hope for the best.
There is also a set of personal criteria in place: I want to do this in a way that I like. That means that there’s an implicit value system that I have to obey (it’s the way my personality is wired, arguably, as an INFP). I see myself as having the following choices:
- I could be a consumer, taking things in for enjoyment with the money I have, helping keep the economy going.
- I could be a commenter, in the best case providing peer review, guidance, or inspiration so other people can be productive.
- I could be a cog, a piece of someone else’s creative machine providing a necessary function. I contribute to the making of things, but am interchangeable with other cogs.
- I could be a contributor, where I contribute toward a vision that is larger than myself, without being beholden to it.
In the above four roles, I don’t have to be “on point” or take any kind of responsibility. The following three roles, however, require it:
- I could be a coordinator, directing the efforts of others toward predictable and efficient use of resources.
- I could be a conduit, who is a courier of whatever is critically important (which can be a thing, idea or even inspiration) from a source to people with needs.
- I could be a creator, a maker of things that didn’t exist before and/or meet a demand.
(On a side note: I didn’t intend for all of these roles to start with the letter C, but they just came out that way.)
While I plug into all of these roles at different times and in different context, I want to be a maker of new things, and I want to be around other makers. That is the identity I want to have, but I am sort of a masterless apprentice at the moment. If I were a journeyman blacksmith becoming a master blacksmith, I would have to make a “journeyman piece” to demonstrate my mastery of the craft to a board of guildmasters. However, since I am a self-accrediting entity with an undefined new craft called “Daveness”, it’s up to ME to identify just what such a piece SHOULD be. And THAT is a HUGE CAN OF PAIN, because inside it is EVERY project idea I’ve ever had but never did, EVERY golden opportunity that I let slip by, and EVERY vision that was beyond my ability to implement. This is not productive thinking, of course, but through the gloom I see one major commonality: they are all projects that required significant new learning to implement, and they couldn’t be done in a couple of hours. It doesn’t help that the time spent on personal projects is not billable, so the immediate financial incentive isn’t there either.
To be a maker, I think, requires being able to accept deferred reward. I’m hugely impatient with myself, so this is going to be a tough one to master. The useful insight from this line of analogous thinking is that I should expect the pieces I’m making now to take around 4 hours. Blog posts, new forms, and project analysis take about this long. This blog post has eaten up about 4.5 hours of thinking plus proofreading. It’s a good chunk of content, I think. By comparison, a true journeyman piece would be equivalent to good-sized project of around 40-60 hours, and a masterpiece would be in the 200+ hour range. I know from experience just how much time is spent doing creative versus clerical work, and this helps set my expectation.
So what am I making?
- Off the top of my head, the low-hanging fruit consists of blog posts, form designs, form variations, printed pads, posters, novelty paper products, tutorials, and catalogs of stuff I like.
- The harder work will be creating systems of forms with complete documentation, and new physical products that require more capital. Other pieces will be combinations of the smaller things I’ve made.
- The hardest but most enduring work, I think, will be clarifying what I am standing for in a way that helps other people on a similar path. I guess right now, those are people who find getting started exceptionally difficult…I’m one of those people.
I know, still not particularly concrete, but it feels like I’m getting a little closer.
19 Comments
I know how you feel. I am trying to take my website to the next level and have make some amazing discoveries to help with that. They will take some time to implement but that’s fine. I am also getting job interviews, which is very, very good and that takes me in a very different direction.
I don’t know about you but a published product especially one on real paper definitely qualifies as a journeyman piece. For all the products out there few people actually do that.
That’s a good point…the paper product is a journeyman piece, or perhaps a good apprentice piece. It’s one piece of the puzzle that I don’t have to worry about anymore.
Good luck with your website! I just took a look at it, and it looks like you’re doing a great job moving things forward.
Dave, I think you inadvertently nailed the most important question you have to ask yourself at the end of your blog post. It’s not so much “What am I making?” but, more importantly, “Why am I making it?”
The reason for this is that the innate ability to create is a natural part of life for everyone and everything (it’s in nature). It’s just that we often get within groups or environments that try to stifle or control that creativity, thus preventing us from creating things from our own authentic self. I’m assuming this is why you want the freedom of being a freelancer, so that your own authentic creativity isn’t stifled elsewhere. For example, if you could work for someone else making lots of money creating widgets, obviously that wouldn’t sate your creative desire because your authentic self isn’t being expressed in the act of creation.
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw
Yet the question remains though, what defines your own authentic creativity? What of your authentic self do you need to cultivate within your creations and of what purpose must these creations serve to be of passionate joy to you? In effect, “I just can’t create widgets for someone else because I need to (fill in the blank)” It sounds like your final paragraph hints at this, as though the question within it might also indirectly be part of your answer, based upon the way you worded it.
“What am I standing for in a way that helps other people on a similar path, particularly those people who find getting starting exceptionally difficult?”
I’m very driven by the “WHY” of things…it’s that continuous search for meaning in what I do that is both a blessing and a curse. It’s my primary obsession. On the one hand, it’s made me very good at seeing beneath the surface of things, and it gives me the resolve to investigate issues in greater depth than I otherwise would. However, I am also sick to death of the very question. It’s a very easy one to ask, but one that is difficult to answer for myself. So I’ve been largely using my gut: what feels right, what seems like the right path, am I energized or depleted by such-and-such an action, and so forth. From this I’ve come to see certain patterns, but from this I gain theories, not answers, regarding the definition of “my authentic creativity.”
This is an interesting line of inquiry, though…if I approached the question using the pure science methodology, that might actually be more appropriate. I tend to think from the applied science perspective (i.e. engineering) because I’m impatient and want to DO things now. If I were to relax a bit and put more energy into researching my own properties, then I could derive the most efficient application. That is not a bad definition of “authentic creativity”, which I would think of as an appropriate and productive use of a given resource.
It’s a very easy one to ask, but one that is difficult to answer for myself.
It’s a difficult question to answer for anyone, myself included, because we don’t have a natural external perspective to see things that way (i.e. you seeing and understanding your clients from your external perspective versus their internal perspective of themselves).
So I’ve been largely using my gut: what feels right, what seems like the right path, am I energized or depleted by such-and-such an action, and so forth.
Perfect approach that I utilize myself. Just because we can’t identity or name something, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Keep intuitively trusting in that feeling, especially when it may not make “logical” sense to do so, and it will guide you in the right direction.
This is an interesting line of inquiry, though…if I approached the question using the pure science methodology, that might actually be more appropriate.
This is where I think things may be going astray for you but let me try to explain what I mean. Just because I personally know my passion and purpose in life, it doesn’t mean I now know what I should do in terms of work. All I know is who I am and what I naturally should be doing with every fiber of my being.
The scientific side of you might say though, “Well if you know your passion and purpose, logically the perfect role should be evident now.” Wrong. Because you’re assuming that the perfect role that matches your passion already exists out there when more often than not it doesn’t. And that’s why so many of us, including myself up until recently, get so frustrated because we assume the perfect role does exist and yet whenever we choose one, it never lives up to our expectations (which is why we get so sick to death of asking ourselves the purpose / passion question because none of the available options live up to our true inner passion).
For example, I assumed web design was my “passion”. Now I realize that’s absurd. My passion isn’t a job title, it’s who I am, what I value, and what I strive to create and cultivate within my daily life. So to compare this to my past web design work, I didn’t get passionate from creating a web site, I got passionate about helping a client discover who they genuinely are and then helping them communicate that clearly to the world. More often than not, the client actually got more excited about this discovery phase than anything else. It’s because I empowered them and inspired them with a perspective they hadn’t see before.
So all said and done, web design isn’t my passion, it’s just one of many “tools” I utilize to achieve my passion. Thus I could be helping a company with their internal process or organization, with their branding and identity, and even with their marketing copy on their website and all of these things would truly resonate with my passion because I’m helping people to discover and be their true genuine selves in the process. It’s one reason I cannot and will not help companies who BS their customers and themselves about what they do or who they are because they aren’t being genuine which is a integral part of who I am.
That cycle of “try something, move on” is familiar to me, and from each trial I’ve been able to extract a pointer or two that indicated where my passion didn’t lie. And like you, I’ve been able to make the switch from “the skill is what makes me happy” to “the skill enables my pursuit of happiness”.
I know you didn’t use the word “happiness”, but I’m using it because I think that’s what you mean by “passion”. Forgive me for putting words in your mouth, but I’d paraphrase what you said as, “you feel good when you help people with which you feel a connection.” The desire to feel this way is perhaps your pulling force, and it’s enough for you to adopt any number of skills to maintain that state of bliss.
I’m not sure this applies in the same way to me, though perhaps it’s just semantics.
I like being around cheerful people who make excellent things that reflect their nature. That makes me happy.
My impulse, however, is to dig deeply into subjects to understand them. Naturally, I tend to be more motivated when excellence, creative people, or making things is concerned. I also have an obsessive interest in grouping things neatly, categorization, things that light up, mechanics, causality, and the nature of uniqueness. I can distill this in story form as “Where did they come from? Why are they the way they are? Where are they going?”
In hindsight, I can also see that my toolkit of skills have been heavily shaped by these natural proclivities.
You are correct in pointing out that this knowledge does not automatically lead to “the perfect fit application”. However, this is something of a straw man argument, and it’s not what I said. First, I would argue that one has a much better chance of understanding how you can fit with this knowledge than without, and you will derive a solution more quickly. This presumes, of course, that I have the creative powers to apply my natural properties and proclivities in a way that produces the intermediary assets/results that will bring me to my happy place.
And that’s where I’m stuck :)
I would argue that one has a much better chance of understanding how you can fit with this knowledge than without, and you will derive a solution more quickly.
I absolutely agree. Knowing my passion helps me to narrow down work that relates to it. For example, I enjoy photography and people have said I’m somewhat talented with it but it doesn’t relate to my passion in any way, even though I enjoy it immensely (when I find the time for it).
I also have an obsessive interest in grouping things neatly, categorization, things that light up, mechanics, causality, and the nature of uniqueness.
This is quite interesting from my perspective. It’s because my specific passion relates directly to optimizing / organizing complex systems. In effect, my desire is to help organizations (as complex systems of complex people) function more harmoniously and authentically from within.
I’ve been doing this for years without even thinking about it, even within video game communities (i.e. Quake, Counter Strike, WoW) and have even done it with some of businesses I’ve worked for in the past.
This is my passion because I can not stop thinking about this, no matter how hard I try. If I go into a book store, I always gravitate to books that relate to this sort of thing (i.e. organizational development, community building, authentic branding & identity, etc).
PS. Happiness and passion are two different things to me. I love animals and I’m extremely happy and content when they are near me but I wouldn’t want to be a vet. I’m also extremely happy alone in nature, yet I have this innate need to be around people and helping them (as noted above). Thus many of the things that make me happy, often don’t relate to my passion. If anything, I’d say my passion is more “rewarding” about what I’m doing rather than just being “happy”. Or put another way, there is just this natural “flow” to what I’m doing that just feels genuinely right within me (almost spiritual if you want).
For what it’s worth, your clients are probably equally clueless about their motivations — isn’t there usually a longer pause after you ask “why”? One of the services you provide is to help them clarify that. It’s only fair to give yourself the same advantage.
The “masterless apprentice” resonates with me a lot. It’s frustrating to lack the guidance and direction I’d like, and instead have to flail around randomly hoping something will work. I have found, though, that the RPG level model of skills is more accurate than you’d initially think; you can sometimes feel yourself “leveling up”. My friend Scott wrote about this while he was in Japan, in a post entitled ding! — between one day and the next, he got noticeably better at understanding and speaking Japanese.
I wonder whether it does make sense to put at the top of your character sheet “Type: Dave”. It might be better to use the 7th Sea/Shadowrun system that doesn’t have class/discipline/auspice/type, where all you have are just skills. That allows you to do multiple journeyman projects without any one having to be “The One”, the one that gets you “there”. I, for example, am launching a webinar this month as the journeyman project for my Sales/Persuasion skill. (I hadn’t thought about it that way until now, but it makes me much more excited about putting in the 40+ hours it’s going to take). In 7th Sea, once you’re a journeyman, you get access to skill specializations and subskills that aren’t available to apprentices.
New roleplayers prefer D&D and Earthdawn and other systems that tell you what to do; the choices are too overwhelming to someone who doesn’t even know what an attack roll is, and they don’t want to have to make those decisions for fear of making stupid ones. But as you spend more time playing, those boundaries start to chafe. Experienced players usually prefer 7th Sea or Shadowrun or Heroes, where they can make exactly the character they envision without interference from the system.
In life, we only have the one system. So, generously, it’s a free-choice Heroes-like system where you can do anything you want. It seems overwhelming and confusing now, but ultimately it’s for the best.
To run with your awesome analogy, I’m probably more in the noob roleplayer category right now. I’m new at this whole self-definition thing in the sense that I have not actually completed my first campaign module: “Seah: Master of Seven Destinies”. I’ve been playing that campaign for years, and there’s no end in sight.
As a noob RPGer, I’m going to prefer the D&D-style character classes as opposed to the more flexible attribute-based systems. It’s easy to feel the sense of progress when you get a level bump and reap a few more hitpoints and abilities, and it feels good! Not only do they tell you what to do, but the rewards are clearly defined. But I think you’re right…we have the one system which has lots of skill facets and enough flexibility to hang ourselves with.
Takeaway: In the corporate world, there are levels built in, with corresponding pay increases and benefits. Perhaps journeyman projects are the way we can introduce the psychological boost we feel from leveling into the self-determined career path.
[Note: begin semi-coherent and hopefully useful articulation]
The crux of the difficulty is that very distinction between objectives (or principals) and pursuits (goals).
As a principal, my desire (and, I believe, yours, too) is to be moving forward on some bearing that brings effective use of my skills, and accomplishes something that I believe is worthwhile. However, I’m not married to any particular bearing – conceptually, I’m journeying down the open road looking for off-ramps or junctions that seem to lead toward a course which suits that ambition. There are at lest three or four threads that I see for myself which will do just fine for that.
I had a realization last summer (on a literal road trip, actually), however, that goals identification of necessity includes selecting and discarding. In order to embrace worthy “Goal A” and really go after it, I’m going to need to defer (or worse, probably forever forgo) “Goal B” and “Goal C”. It’s that letting go – with the lingering thought that it was really “Goal B” or “Goal C” that would have really met the objective – that is making selection hard.
And so personally, I’ve been stalling on that because I won’t make up my mind to cross that line from journeying to navigating. However, I know that I won’t really be able to constructively push my energies forward until I’m ready to
let somechoose some destinationsbe removedto remove from the map.Conceptually, my own thoughts/evaluations have been strikingly similar to what you are framing/wrestling with right here – lots of thought, quasi-overthought(!) and examination of minutiae in order to deduce & distill out what will best contribute to reaching the ultimate goals.
At some point for me, I know I just have to issue myself the “margin call” and force myself to punt.
In your articulation here, I see you operating in that same “journey minded” evaluation mindset: “I’m ready and willing for this blog to be any one (or more) of these goals if the prevailing influences in my world were to converge/reveal focus upon them over the others”. I fear you may be stuck having to face pruning first before you can start to see clarity.
Stray thought (probably not a new angle to consider): Is there a particular bullet item in your list above that feels to have a “I need to be doing this (no matter what else)” beckoning attached to it? Maybe there’s some traction to be found in that.
[End semi-coherent and hopefully useful articulation]
Personally, I see myself inclining toward finding fit as “cog”/”coordinator” with “contributor tendencies. Not that it’s an ideal analogy, but I picture the BASF tagline, “We don’t make x, we make x better”. I find myself continually looking at processes in my world to see if what is being done really matches up with the stated objectives. I think as introverts that’s part of our lot, taking in what we observe and pondering how well it is or isn’t working…
The trick – what you wrestle with – is that it’s hard to join that kind of abstract/oblique engagement to monetization. It’s easy to present a clear connection between work product and compensation. Much harder is it to come in and say “I want to walk alongside you a while to see how you go about what you do, then take some time to go under the hood and make constructive feedback on what I see would make you even more effective”.
That’s the narrative that somehow has to be pulled into the elevator speech, and I’m thinking that in the quarters of your network that you could see that narrative fit with what you’re otherwise already saying, that may be where some of the clarity will be.
Something to ponder, maybe?
It’s too late to be stopped at the crossroads each life here, each a possible way. But wait and they all will be lost roads… Each road’s getting shorter the longer I stay.
I was dead with deciding — afraid to choose. I was mourning the loss of the choices I’d lose But there’s no choice at all if I don’t make my move And trust that the timing is right And hold it up to the light.
— David Wilcox, “Hold It Up To The Light”
Thanks, Amanda, that truly captures it – I can actually percieve grief-tones in the mix when I face that reality that I have to decide. But I am rounding the point where I see “each road getting shorter” and the pain of missing out by that is prevailing over being afraid of getting the choice wrong.
Also, I like David’s realization: “But I see if you gave me a vision Would I ever have reason to use my faith?” Indeed, the time does finally come when a step in faith must be taken.
(I’d not heard of David Wilcox before – thank you for pointing him out!)
Wonderful quote, Amanda!
This is marvelous commentary, Roy! I think you’re right on the money. I’m suffering from a kind of “decision lock-up”, unable to choose because I’m unwilling to punt everything except for one.
Regarding which one of the choices feel essential, what comes to mind first is making original products. It seems to that it would meet several needs: self-worth, an identity I think is cool, and earning revenue from assets I can replicate. I find myself not entirely trusting this, but it may be the waffling between “journeying” and “navigating” that I’m stuck in (a wonderful distinction, btw).
I’m glad to see that I’m not alone on this journey…thanks for sharing your thoughts on yours!
If you were to go into a random workplace which had no coordination or business systems in place (what a wonderful yet dysfunctional place that would be!), how would you go about creating an entire system from the ground up for them? What parts of that system would be specific to the business they run and what would be generic? What distinguishes those process groups from each other?
So, purely IMO, your focus needs to be more to the development of the holistic approach to business organization and less on the individual or small group. Once you achieve that, your transition probably will end up with you focusing consulting on a larger scale, or perhaps (tending towards what your preference is) to you writing books on the subject(./?)
Greg:
Interesting take. I’m not quite sure what you mean by focus on the “holistic approach to business organization”…doing a quick Google, I came across this Fast Company article…I’m interpreting it as meaning “whole health of company”, using an approach that assesses company success using qualitative (as opposed to financial or individual performance) metrics. I may be missing some critical nuance, but I think this distills down to, “make a smoothly-functioning business that serves its market”, which further distills down to “think like a business as a self-sustaining process, separate from its employees”.
This is the essential difference between me and a business person: I think about people (and myself) FIRST, and am trying to construct a system that will support them. I think what you are suggesting is that this is not the way it works; you should start with fundamentals of business first, and work the people into it to serve the business function to produce something (presumably profit) as a natural result (presumably of serving a market well).
This is a challenging model to follow for someone with an artistic temperament. I could suggest the inverse to a company that is failing to serve its market well: “make more creative products” or “engineer the spirit of creative innovation into your process.” Is this the equivalent of demanding a business process to be creative? Is it just as realistic to ask an individual-oriented person to think about business, not people? This seems to me like it would be a recipe for higher failure rate than trying to work with the natural order of the elements you have, but I might be missing the poing.
Actually, I think I’m at fault for lack of clarity here…I really believe the opposite of what you read into it. However, since my intent was to get you thinking about the processes involved in the flow of daily operations within any organization, I probably did a poor but somewhat effective job :)
I’ll try to see if I can clarify somewhat…ignore “organization”, “business” and “company” for a moment and focus on “team”. What are the stages, complexities and interactions between members of a team that are likely consistent across those teams and others? Would you, given an artistic temperament (and believe me, I wholly relate to what you mean there), be able to identify those interactions and turn them around in a way that’s explainable? One of the biggest difficulties is turning away from the immediate needs of the individual and determining what needs that individual has that could be defined and codified (game-ified?) in such a way that you are able to help others who may be facing the same problematic situations/problems/complexities.
Firstly, if you can do that completely, you’d be my hero :) Secondly, if you can approach that even partly (and I have no doubt reading some of the things on this site that you can), you’ll likely find that your talents can probably be “businessified” pretty easily and in a way that’s enjoyable to you.
Of course, as always, please keep in mind that I’m not wiser than just about anyone. I just think about team interaction and project complexities an awful lot and it can cause me to fixate on those topics in ways that may or may not be helpful to others. :)
Ok, I think I see what you’re saying Greg…thanks! I think I confused who you meant as the focus of the holistic analysis. Actually, still not sure…are you saying that “focus on the team” is the market opportunity for me? Or are you saying that I should look at myself and apply the analysis internally? I was assuming the latter.
I’m not sure I’d be interested in the former. Unless a bunch of us want to get together and make something out of it :)
Greg, if I’m understanding you correctly, this is extremely close to my life’s passion / purpose. As I commented to Dave in another thread, I can’t stop thinking about this sort of thing. And yes I look at organizational development from a sort of holistic approach as well.