What I've learned from playing Solitaire

Sometimes you find a life lesson in an unusual place or person. My recent mini-obsession with playing Solitaire has either taught or reminded me of the following:

• You have to be prepared to lose. There’s always another game.
• Don’t get fixated on one particular next step or you’ll miss other opportunities.
• There is no strategy that works all the time
• Sometimes it’s best to stop planning, and just pay attention.
• It’s not always useful to grab every opportunity as soon as it come up, if you can expect it to come up again, take the time to consider your options.
• Sometimes luck feels like strategy, strategy feels like luck
• Success may lie more in your circumstances than in striving.
• When things are going well, it feels like it will be that way forever.
• You’re usually moving fast and travelling well when you’re heading down a cul de sac.
• You don’t control your circumstances, but you can make the best of them.

The end of the sixth day

I'm not sure if its true whether fortune favours the bold, but I am sure that the harder I work, the luckier I get. (Thanks to either Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Goldwyn or Gary Player for that gem.)

Not that the hard work occurs in isolation. Some days the stars align, and you get a payoff for several things you've been working on at once.

I've just been perusing (great word, eh?) the first concept proof of my new music studio website by the talented graphic artists at Webalive. Very exciting. Writing the design brief was harder than I expected. I do pity designers who are given a very unclear word-picture, then criticized if the work 'isn't what I asked for'. When actually, its a bit all over the place and so was the brief.

Once my new website is finished I will link to it, right now I'd rather you don't look at the rotting corpse of my old one.  (The irony that I have been freelancing designing other people's communication strategies and websites while absolutely neglecting my own is not lost on me. Hey, doctors don't treat their families either.)

At my current comms gig, I've put to bed the outline of a new program. It's pretty exciting stuff too - the birth of my new brain child! There is an amazing satisfaction in describing a concept so that your listeners appear to 'see' what you are 'seeing'.

Tonight I feel a little like God at the end of the sixth day.

Tribal organizations

Is your company basically tribal?

Do you and your immediate team have a strong feeling of identity with and loyalty to your work group, department, region or reporting line. Is there even a certain lack of identity with and loyalty to other groups in your organizational structure?

Another common phrase to describe this is the silo effect.

Many large organizations can communicate only in straight lines, and with the cooperation of various gate-keepers along the way. If you try to cross between the lines it becomes much more difficult.

So how do you break down the silos and get inter-tribal communication happening? Officially, rather than along unofficial lines (which happens anyway and can't be stopped, but leaves some folks out in the information cold).

How do you respect the cultural patterns of your organization, while Getting Stuff Done in a way that doesn't require a Summit Meeting, trade gifts and the liberal application of a peace pipe?

Audience participation please...