Good fences make good neighbors
One of my favorite things about living in New York was biking. It’s a terrifying, thrilling way to see the city. The city has hundreds of miles of green-painted lanes that show drivers and cyclists alike where it’s safe to ride. You turn on your lights, put on your helmet and weather-appropriate gear, and let your heart rate spike as you gawk at the city. However as The New Yorker recently wrote, fewer cars on the road and less traffic made cycling more dangerous.
“Under Mayor de Blasio, City Hall’s top priority was the Vision Zero program, which focussed on reducing auto-related fatalities, rather than on building cycling infrastructure. The pandemic has proved to be a disaster in this regard. Drivers, delighted to find the roads empty for once, floored it. Road fatalities have been the highest since Vision Zero began.”
Why? Because it changed the rules around how we share the road. It’s a lesson that applies to doing work, too.
In my last post I said my only ambition in my late teens was to be a pro surfer, but that wasn’t totally true. Ever practical in my career plotting, I also considered being a poet. I loved Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost.
Frost wrote Mending Wall about two people working together to repair the wall that separates their properties, deteriorated by the winter.
It’s also the source of the saying “good fences make good neighbors” and a beautiful meditation on collaboration. The two characters in the poem are working together toward a shared goal of clear division of a space they need to share. You could say that fence is good for saying “stay out,” but it’s also good for saying, “I’ll do my work right here.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about collaboration over the past few years. It becomes dramatically more important as you a) rise in your career and/ or b ) join bigger, more multidisciplinary orgs. Those often mean you from having a manager who’s a senior version of your function to having talented peers with different functions. The lines between each of you aren’t always clear, haven’t been drawn yet, or are constantly being re-drawn. You also each have personalities and personal goals that affect your engagement model with other people. It’s HARD.
But paradoxically when you have clarity, collaborating become easier.
Some orgs use a RASCI (responsible, accountable, supportive, consulted, informed). I find the model too complicated, but the intent is right. One could argue that a sign of a healthy org is never having to look at RASCIs; they should be endemic to well-defined roles.
Adam Morgan and Mark Barden wrote a brilliant book on the incredible things that can be done under extreme clarity or purpose, called A Beautiful Constraint. Strategists and creatives understand this at our cores — when we have a narrow focus around our roles, we can create amazing things. When we don’t, we become part of a spin cycle.
Collaboration thrives on constraints that help us own space and trust each other’s — green lanes (and traffic density…), clear roles, good fences.
