Our bodies need constant oxygen. Even a minute without it can do serious damage. Our organs, our brains, our plants, our pets, our stoves…everything needs oxygen. It is the single most important thing in our lives.
We need metaphorical oxygen too. I am going to skip all of the ways kids need intellectual oxygen growing up and how our education system deprives them of it. Rather, I’ll jump to our work lives.
I am in the imagineering business. I imagine how things could be, and then I figure out how to make that happen. Sometimes it is a process, sometimes an interface, sometimes a structure of how to organize the group. The biggest enemy to getting the thing accomplished is lack of oxygen.
In this metaphor, oxygen is the space to do something without your management chain sticking their heads all the way up your ass. Oxygen is support to try something without worrying about being fired. Oxygen is encouragement when things look sketchy. Oxygen is the catalyst to make your little flame burn bright.
Things like OKRs suffocate innovation and experimentation. Things like deadlines stop imagining dead in its tracks. Quotas and other success metrics are only good to measure things you do not want to improve. Improvements require some imagineering.
Of course, one can have too much oxygen. One can too much or too little of anything. You certainly can’t have everyone reinventing everything all of the time. You shouldn’t encourage someone who is terrible at imagineering.
The art for management is to find where execution is happening and cheer it on. “Good job! Keep it up!” – words like these go a long way to keeping people going with forward momentum. Additionally, it’s important to see where process is in desperate need of reinvention and protect the people trying to figure it out. Give them space to fail and iterate a little.
A company without this kind of oxygen fails. Are you a manager? Do you do anything to increase oxygen levels in the right places? Could there be more of it? Are you encouraging enough? Take a deep breath and see if you can increase it.
Whatya think?