Open Hands · Week 3 · Saturday · INSECURITY

On Sunday I said that a man who builds on credentials has a particular problem waiting for him. Here is mine, in the words it actually uses.

These people are paying real money for this. Am I worth it. I want to give them the value. Why me.

That runs before I walk into a room, and it has been running for a while now.

The Ground Moved

What I do is change leadership and organizational design for product companies. That is the work, and I have done it long enough to be unembarrassed about it.

But AI is now moving faster than organizations can absorb, and the places I am asked into are the places where that gap is widest. I am working in that too — building into it deliberately, because it is where the need is.

And the honest fact about this work, the one nobody says out loud in a sales conversation, is that nobody has twenty years in it. Not me. Not the person who would be standing there if I were not. The ground is new for everyone in the room, and everyone in the room is working it out in something close to real time.

My head does not file that as the condition of the field. It files it as my deficiency. The absence of a track record is a fact about the terrain, and I experience it as a fact about me — and the word it arrives with is inept.

Four Syllables, Three Thousand Years

There is a man standing in front of a bush that is on fire and will not burn up, being handed the largest assignment in the Old Testament, and what he says is this.

But Moses asked God, “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”Exodus 3:11 (BSB)

Why me. The same four syllables, three and a half thousand years earlier, in a considerably more serious situation than a workshop.

And he does not get an answer to it. That is the part I have had to sit with, because I keep wanting the answer. I want the paragraph that explains why I am in fact the right person, so I can carry it into the next room and stop running the sentence.

“I will surely be with you,” God said, “and this will be the sign to you that I have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, all of you will worship God on this mountain.”Exodus 3:12 (BSB)

Not here is why you. Not a credential, not a qualification, not a list of Moses’ strengths read back to him. Presence, and a sending. The same two things Gideon got in the winepress, and in both cases the question the man actually asked is simply left on the floor.

I keep asking for a qualification. The answer on offer is a Person.

What It Costs

I have clients succeeding with this approach right now. Not politely — measurably. People come out of a workshop and tell me it is the best one they have been in, that they learned more than they have anywhere else.

That is not nothing and I am grateful for it. It helps for about a day.

And then I am standing outside the next room, running the same sentence, with the same weight behind it as before any of that happened.

And there is something uncomfortable underneath that, which is that filing it away is a kind of safety. If I never accept that I am good at this, I can never be wrong about it. The sentence running outside the door is not only torment. It is also insurance.

Still Going In

I am not ending this with a breakthrough, because there is not one. I will run that sentence again on the next engagement, and the one after that.

What I am trying to do — and this is small, and it is this week’s whole report — is let the sentence run and go in anyway, without waiting for it to stop first. Gideon did not stop being the youngest son of the weakest clan. Nothing about his résumé changed. He went.

And the next time somebody tells me it was the best workshop they have had, I want to try saying thank you and leaving it at that. Not arguing with them inside my own head. Just letting it be true for someone other than me.

Still inept, most days. Still going in. Still loving every minute of what I do.

Open Hands · Week 3 Complete · The series continues