Draft Four: Failing to plan is planning to fail
Thoughts on structure and innovation (from a Chicago hotel).
I’m writing this in Chicago, from the lobby of CitizenM, a hotel I recently discovered and have become fascinated by. They’ve been around for 15 years, and they are now in over 10 countries. A few things make them stand out, but the most important is their modular design: they are largely built out of prefabricated parts, assembled on site.
The rooms, for example, are small – think a container, but with furniture and a walk-in shower. The width of the room is taken up by the bed. The toilet bowl is the antechamber to the shower. There is a sink. In the hallway. And this is the same everywhere, because the rooms are built individually, down to the faucets and furniture, then wrapped in plastic and shipped. (The CitizenM in New York had the rooms shipped from Poland; the one in LA, from China).
The hotels are then assembled piece by piece (sometimes with a livestream going for months), like a 10-15 story high LEGO tower. The build is faster than regular construction, and less wasteful, the company says. The rooms are usually stacked on a heavy slab of concrete, which they call a „mat-in-the-sky”.
Two things I like.
The first is that this kind of modular build requires a lot of forward planning, and a lot of care in thinking about how everything comes together. If it works at assembly, it’s because the process worked up to that point.
The second is the innovation. Hotels are not easy to improve on, but CitizenM is among the companies that decided to solve for multiple inconveniences (at least as the founders saw them) and optimize the experience for frequent travelers – who are mostly looking for a good night’s sleep, a good shower, and good Wi-Fi for remote work. I also love how it smells.
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Let’s take process first. Do you have one for whatever you do? Do you know how your work gets done? Do you know how your organization’s work gets done? Is there a predictable pattern you follow to deliver your services or serve your customers? Is there a way that things are done that can be used, and codified as a standard? Does it work – both inside, for the staff, and outside, for the public?
My dear mentor and friend, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski, reminded me why I love process in an episode of the Zest podcast she was recently on. The episode was built around the idea of the Yoda approach to writing: “Do or do not, there is no try”.
At one point, Jacqui and Sabina, the host, were talking about various types of writing, and Jacqui said writing for her was process. After all, she is a craftswoman, a reporter, a journalist, not an artist. She needs an audience to write. And if ever her writing was “good”, it was because of the information she gathered in the reporting phase – that’s what allowed the “good” to surface.
To me, the discovery of process was freeing. Being a journalist, I believe in doing the work rather than talent, so belonging to a profession where a deadline requires you to let go, helped. As I’m not an artful writer, without a deadline and the promise of an audience, I might never send out anything. (Hence these letters).
The process Jacqui talked about – and that I shamelessly appropriated – is a series of steps a story usually goes through:
Idea. You want to write about something, or somebody brings you an assignment. It doesn’t matter how it starts, but now you can begin.
Reporting. To develop the idea, you need information. You report. In journalism that means interviewing people, observing scenes, reading documents, whatever the story needs. This applies to other types of research, too.
Focus. This is where you polish the idea, and you decide on what you want to say with the information you have. When you can articulate this in a sentence, or even better, a word, you’re good to go.
Organization. It might help to plan how the writing will flow: where you start, where you finish, what the journey is etc. I love sketching structures, even if sometimes they are too outlandish to follow.
Draft. You write and you produce a first version. A vomit draft. A shitty first draft. A rough sketch. Call it what you will, but it helps to lower the standards when you write it, especially if you can remind yourself there is one last step.
Rewrite. You go back to the piece, and you improve it. You add stuff, you take stuff out, you streamline, you make it as good as you can.
What’s cool about this process is that as you start to understand it, it reveals its mysteries. It’s not always linear. Sometimes you write to discover the focus, and then go back to report for extra information. Usually, when you’re stuck, it’s a sign you should go back to the previous step.
It’s a whole life support system for writing. Arguably, it might be too rigid for art, but for journalism or technical writing or communication, it delivers. Every week this letter goes through a version of this process. I juggle multiple ideas (sometimes they are fleshed out, other times not so much), I report one (understanding how CitizenM works, for example), I look for a focus (process and innovation, in this case), and so on.
“Failing to plan is planning to fail” has been a personal mantra, because it’s helped me do things. The only reason I’m able to write and send out these letters is because I put myself on a schedule, and I follow a process. Not all of it is great – most of it isn’t, if you ask me – but I’m practicing, taking chances, and every now and then, something surprising comes together.
Process can be boring. Especially in organizational settings doing the same thing over and over and over can feel tedious and repetitive. But the important question we’re rarely asking is: does it deliver better and more reliable results than chance or chaos? That’s why pilots have checklists. That’s why good hospitals do, too. Structure doesn’t kill freedom; on the contrary, it can focus it.
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The second thing I like about CitizenM is their approach to innovation.
I almost never spend time in a hotel lobby to work or read or pass the time between engagements. I have here. I wrote last week’s letter in the hotel’s living room in New York. I am doing that now, too. Other people around me are working, taking calls, eating breakfast, reading. The company’s emphasis on design (aided by the small rooms, yes) has led to a central hub with a 24/7 bar/canteen that people gravitate to. They also give guests control over the room through an iPad or an app on your own phone that controls everything: from the lights, to the television, to the ventilation.
CitizenM has also improved on something which has become more and more difficult to figure out: pricing. Hotels have become like flights: you feel you need to hunt for the best deal, and you’re never sure if you actually got it (Hotel booking today is a post-truth nightmare, this article says). CitizenM says you always get the best price through their system, and their app.
The point is you can always optimize existing systems. Make check-in and check-out at a hotel easier. Make a flight more enjoyable. Make bureaucracy more predictable. Make team communication more transparent. Make journalism be about more than the act of publishing.
Pick something you don’t like in your surroundings and improve it. How can it work better for you, and for others? How would you re-design an experience, a space, a product?
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In Chicago I spent time with two of the most amazing innovators I know. Lulu Miller is one of the co-hosts of Radiolab, the author of Why Fish Don’t Exist and among the most curious people I have ever met. In her work she always looks for ways to instill wonder and awe. That means she constantly trains her curiosity, and wonders how she might tell a story differently. (Read her book or listen to her science for kids podcast, and you’ll understand).
Jennifer Brandel is a systems thinker and tinkerer who works at the intersection of journalism, civic engagement, and entrepreneurship. She’s always full of great ideas for improving all. Because her work is cross-disciplinary and hard to fit in a box, she’s organized it by questions. For example:
What are the conditions needed for women to be liberated and move their bodies without shame, judgment or sexualization?
Could helping top-down institutions better listen and respond to their stakeholders improve outcomes for all involved?
Could flipping the model of journalism on its head so that the public has a say in what reporting is created expand the democratic imagination and improve outcomes for all involved?
The answer to each is a project or a product that either Jenn built or joined other like-minded troublemakers to build.
A couple of days ago, she and I we were talking about the upsides and downsides of operating at the intersection of roles and initiatives, and she shared a framework I found very illuminating. Let’s imagine that there are four types of people in a group / project / organization – and that each falls into one or two of these categories.
Builders. These are people that create something new where there wasn’t anything before.
Optimizers. They take existing systems, projects, products and make them better.
Maintainers. They ensure existing systems and processes function and deliver.
Doers. They thrive in execution roles.
I am in the first and second camp. I love creating new things, new projects, and new structures. I also love improving existing ones. Simply maintaining something is less fun, and it burns too much energy, which is why I consider myself a mediocre manager (especially for larger teams).
We usually spend a lot of energy getting better at what we don’t do well enough, at improving particular steps in the process we suck at. What if we focused more energy on what we do well, and then find the right partners to make sure we raise the level of the whole? You’re a great reporter, so a group of peers, a coach, or an editor might help with focus if you struggle with that step. You are a builder, so maybe you need a maintainer as a partner to take over when a new project is finally off the ground.
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Process matters: it channels the energy that innovation can release.
Both require a belief in change: that doing creates something new. That action creates new realities. If even hotels can be improved on – imagine what we can do for many of our ailing systems. I took a book from the hotel to read on public transport: it was an essay-length book from The School of Life, On Confidence. On page 44, I came across this section that summed it up neatly:
The present has all the contingency of the past, and is every bit as malleable. It should not intimidate us. How we love, travel, approach the arts, govern, educate ourselves, run businesses, age and die are all up for further development.
Current views may appear firm, but only because we exaggerate their fixity. The majority of what exists is arbitrary, neither inevitable nor right, simply the result of muddle and happenstance. We should be confident, even at sunset on winter afternoons, of our power to join the stream of history and, however modestly, change its course.
Side dishes:
1. If you have time for one long read this weekend (or next week), make it this article about the Serbian president’s ties to football hooligans, and using them as political tools (and weapons).
2. One more plug for Lulu’s book. It was also translated into Romanian, and we published an excerpt in DoR, here. The book has some of the best writing on chaos ever.
Picture the person you love the most. Picture them sitting on the couch, eating cereal, ranting about something totally charming, like how it bothers them when people sign their emails with a single initial instead of taking those four extra keystrokes to just finish the job – Chaos will get them. Chaos will crack them from the outside – with a falling branch, a speeding car, a bullet – or unravel them from the inside with the mutiny of their very own cells. Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build.
3. If you want to know Jenn better, we had her in Romania as a guest at The Power of Storytelling. Her talk on healing socials systems through listening is so inspiring.