The Hammock Papers: Choose

07 August 2023

Choose

Ari Weinzweig on facing and working with change ...

In much the same way as people like me have long loved listening to “River Man” without having a clue about the complexity of playing in 5/4 time signature, many people like the feel of Zingerman’s without understanding the impact of collaborative and only minimally hierarchical ways in which we work. Many experiment with our alternative approaches but all too often abandon them before they can really start to take hold. The same awkwardness that goes with starting to learn to play 5/4 is, I’ll suggest, true as well when it comes to leading in this collaborative, consensus, leader-among-leaders sort of way. At first, both will feel uncomfortable, and the urge to “go back” to what one is accustomed to will be strong. But like 5/4, if we stick with these “different” governance approaches, a whole host of new possibilities will open up for us and for our organizations. It will likely take a while, but over time it will take hold. For me, after all these years, working with collaboration and consensus nearly always feels completely normal and natural. And yet, at the same time, for new folks coming into the ZCoB, it can feel frustrating—like things take forever.

It's up to us to choose: We can work the way most around us have worked, sticking with the ways that feel most comfortable. Or, alternatively, we can lean into the awkward, work at it over time, and in the process create our own collaborative way. As Susan Griffin writes, “How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.” Both 4/4 and 5/4 can work, but the latter, as Mike Goodman writes, opens new possibilities. As someone taught me many years ago, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, but if you stick with it does make ‘permanent.’"

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL