Mary Panttaja

The Idea of Net Potential

We are all trying to create things—lives, families, product, projects, businesses, communities. We are trying to create a future in which our creations are part and parcel of our lives, and perhaps the lives of many others. This seems to be our role in the evolution of the cosmos—to create what inspires us. Our ability to create is measured by how all our activities and beliefs net out—productive actions minus non-productive actions. Our results are the “net” of what we do. (Along with everything else that’s going on.) So the more aligned or coherent we are in what we do (assuming we find the right trajectory) the more “net” positive motion we can cause. So we can see that sometimes we do the right thing, and sometimes we do the wrong thing. And sometimes our beliefs can conflict so we don’t really know we’re doing the wrong thing. It’s hard to get it right even for ourselves and our private goals.

But when you build an organization (family, community, business) you have to coordinate the net positive potential of everyone. Everyone has to be working toward the same goal (we call that taking aim on a trajectory.) And then the hard part, everyone needs to execute productive actions—do the right thing. And there are so many more ways now that things can go awry. The further the group expands beyond the truly inspired, the more dilute becomes the net potential. Sometimes adding a body is a net negative, not even a small net positive.

Of course, we all know this. We can see that the complexities of size in organizations is a cost. But what we sometimes don’t appreciate (and totally forgot in the year 1999) was the possibility of size producing nothing but a negative to the potential of an organization. Suddenly we spend more time on the support structures than on the creative work; more time organizing ourselves than inspiring our customers and partners. More is often less. And usually the inspired ones are distracted from their efforts by the need to support the organization.

So what does this have to do with technology and smaller companies?

In any organization you need the key inspired folks who create the product. They have the idea, understand their customer, and have the passion to make something happen. Then, it seems, you need a lot of support (management, marketing, sales, system admin, office management, etc.) Any of these roles can be fulfilled by inspired partners—but as the numbers get bigger the likelihood is that some people you hire will not come the table with the passion and engagement that the key players embody. They will be playing at another level. These folks dilute the potential of an organization. And they can be anywhere in an organization.

(There is nothing wrong with these players. I have found myself to be one when I got into an organization that had a great deal of passion for something that I didn’t share. I wasn’t a bad person and on paper I looked useful, but I had gotten in over my head with respect to my ability to really commit myself to their passion. After struggling for awhile, I figured out that I should just leave. I was a net negative to their ability to maximize their potential. I wasn’t really helping (even though I did useful things) and I wasn’t having fun either. Both good measures of whether you should be doing any particular thing.)

Modern technology enables the source, the people who are the inspired participants, to deliver their wares/message/media to their audience with a lot less support from those who might be diluting the potential. So what goes wrong? That is, how is the potential of a company diluted when it requires “bodies”, people that “have jobs” in support of the creative effort?

(Now don’t get me wrong, anyone in any role can be a source of additive potential. It’s not the role that causes net negative, it’s the level of engagement. The janitor, the marketing support team, and the system administrators can be incredible contributors to the potential of an organization. The scariest thing is to have anyone in the leadership of an organization not be an inspired, engaged participant—a net add. As an organization grows, the difficulty in managing net potential grows more quickly.)

Think about dancing. If you are dancing by yourself, and your potential is how much creative enjoyment you get, you see that you are in control of what you get out of your effort. (Any activity you love will do if dancing isn’t your thing.) But if I match you up with a partner (let’s say a friend), then the enjoyment you can extract is complicated by your need to work/understand/communication with one other. Now the possible potential, should things work out really well, is higher. But getting the necessary coordination together makes it more difficult to realize.

So imagine that I pair you with a random person. Or four random persons. How hard will it be to extract the same quality of enjoyment or quality of work, and how long will it take you to get to a level that supersedes what you could generate by yourself?

The truth is that if we very carefully choose partners who are as inspired as we are, our potential can grow exponentially. But as an organization gets larger, and we’re probably not talking about dozens of people, then the likelihood is that self-selection or hiring-selection is moving more towards being random than it is to capturing people who are truly inspired. (You can hope that they will become inspired—but they might just want the job.) And, of course, they not all uninspired, but geometrically increasing creative potential requires that the team be really focused on the same value proposition. If they are going even slightly different directions or using slightly different trajectories (in the terminology of Catching the Updraft!), then the potential does not increase, but can actually be degrading all the time. We’ve all seen this happen.

And why do I care? Well, I’m working on what happens next and I’d love to find or figure out what combination of people, technology, and business models can fuel my inspirations. I think its different than it was twenty years ago when I started my first company and I don’t want to use any old assumptions in this very different environment.

Tomorrow:
Why Doing More With Less is an Important Opportunity