Month: March 2020

The COVID-19 carnage in the economy continues, as governments around the world desperately seek palliative measures. Measures which, despite their record-setting enormity, still don’t seem up to the challenge. The job loss numbers reported this morning in the US are staggering: 3.28 million people have applied for unemployment benefits in the last week. That’s almost 12 times the previous week, and about 4x the previous historical high. Vast numbers of people are joining the Involuntary Gig Economy under conditions of extreme financial distress as we speak. All the fiscal resources being marshaled seem set to be exhausted within months given the current rate of depletion.

Make no mistake: this is already really ugly and set to get much uglier. If you’re tempted to let your guard down, don’t. The first wave of news has passed, but the crisis itself is just getting started.

I’m trying to create the simplest kinds of scaffolding I can think of, but not too simple, to help me meaningfully navigate. Here is a fairly general crisis roadmap diagram I came up with, which I’ll apply to the gig economy in a minute.

Crisis Roadmap

I’m a big believer in keeping crisis response models as brain-dead simple as possible, and getting them down to checklist-level simplicity. The diagram above is my first attempt.

Right now, I think we all have to navigate a set of levels converging to a bottleneck I’ve labeled attitude reset. Once you get through the attitude reset bottleneck — a challenge that is more emotional than intellectual — you can start to think expansively, reorient, and find the plot again.

How does this work in the gig economy? Here’s my own journey so far:

1. Secure perimeter: Besides the obvious material preparations (stock up on essential supplies, restage your home for work, position your hand sanitizer bottles and masks) I mean the economic perimeter. In my case, I got my tax docs out to my CPA, closed my books for FY 2019, and updated my state awareness of my business/financial condition. Then I sent out invoices for billable hours I’d been procrastinating on, so I’ll be zeroing out accounts receivable soon and strengthening cash position soon. Despite the looming financial urgency, I made sure to get a decent contribution into my retirement portfolio, to be prepared for good investment opportunities.

2. Who needs immediate help? I’m fairly useless in this particular sort of crisis, but I did manage to rustle up a bunch of N95 masks to send to my niece, who’s an anesthesiologist at a hospital that isn’t supplying the staff with enough PPE. I also did a spot of pro bono consulting for some folks trying to pull a large-scale nonprofit response together. I am temperamentally unsuited to this sort of community-spirited, civic-minded general helpfulness, but there are times when you have to play to the needs of the situation rather than your strengths or preferences. This is one of those times. I’m reserving some bandwidth for this sort of thing. If you think I can help on some front, ask.

3. Buy time to respond: Luckily, I have a couple of months of my fellowship left to go. To buy more time, I launched my Breaking Smart newsletter (which I’d originally planned to do in May) two months early. That’s already bought me a month and beefed up my recurring revenue flow. I’m still shopping around for ways to buy more time. My goal is to lock down enough cash flow to see me through summer. I’m about halfway there. The second half is going to be a bitch. I’m expecting a sudden freeze-out in the short term.

4. Reboot senses: In OODA loop theory, a classic sign of an adversary getting inside your OODA loop is your senses getting cut off from external reality, so you start going nuts. This virus has literally done that to us, confining a lot of us to our homes, cutting us off from each other and the larger world. Take stock and recalibrate/re-establish your signal sources. Otherwise you risk responding to your own psychotic imaginings or garbage noise from sensors rendered newly useless. Without clean, relevant signals driving situation awareness, your psyche will collapse.

5. Attitude Reset: There is a LOT to respond to. Tons and tons of information, of varying quality and clarity, all jumbled up. The temptation is to respond immediately with a frenzy of activity. I think this is a mistake. Besides the basic triage responses in 1-4, it is better to take a step back and first clearly identify the attitude you want to adopt. What is your posture here? Aggressive? Fearful? Opportunistic? Altruistic? Selfish? Conservative? Risk-taking? Why? This is what I’m working on right now for myself.

6. Reorientation: Once I have my attitude reset, I expect to do my brainstorms, draw my mind-maps, model the situation better, and begin reorienting my OODA loop. I’m not there yet. Neither are you. If you think you are, you’re lying to yourself. Don’t get smug or complacent just because your preparedness level made your initial responses better than average. That just bought you a head start of a few weeks in what will be months, possibly years, of risk and uncertainty.

7. Safe-Mode Reboot: It seems hard to imagine now, but there will come a time when you will go from reactive to proactive, and start to seize the initiative once more. I expect to do so in a safe-mode first, since this is going to be a dangerous and unstable situation for a while. I think this will be around June/July for me.

8. Find the plot again: This is not the end of the world. It’s a terrible situation, but it’s not the end of the world. There’s an “other side” to this thing, even if it a permanently weird condition rather than a new normal. Right now, I think the other side is around 18 months away for most people. But there will be people who find the plot as soon as 6 months from now, and those who are destroyed by this to the point that they never recover the plot. Let’s all plan to be in the 6 month cohort, rather than the 18 month cohort, or god forbid, the never cohort.

Note the way I’ve drawn this diagram, with a bottleneck at Level 5. I think that’s a key feature of effective crisis responses. You have to converge on an effective posture while working through your triage actions, and then expand from there into a new mode of effective agency that goes beyond triage, into a new reality.

Another key is that there is no linear progress up the stack, you’ll be doing dizzying amounts of looping through the levels, as the arrows illustrate. Prepare to be a bit of a whirling dervish through this thing. Getting to a higher level doesn’t mean lower levels have been stabilized and can be ignored. It just means you have reoriented enough to handle more levels in parallel.

That’s not an intellectual condition. It’s an energy flow condition, which is almost synonymous with cash flow for the gig economy.

You’re not reoriented when you have a clever diagram representing your situation. You’re reoriented when you’re removing entropy from the situation faster than events are adding it, which will show up as a strengthening position and more agency. Gaining ground rather than losing it. For us in the gig economy, this pretty much means accelerating cash flow.

It’s not going to be quick, and it’s not going to be easy, but most of the world will make it through.

Not everybody will make it — 20,000 odd people are already dead, and nearly half a million infected. Those numbers might end up an order of magnitude higher by the time we’re done. And that’s just the first-order victims of the virus itself (which might include some of us). Victims of the economic carnage will number at least an order of magnitude higher than wherever the dead/infected number lands (and this will definitely include a lot of us in the gig economy).

I am under no illusions. By the time we’re done, many members of this list will have had their lives deeply affected. But let’s see if we in the gig economy, despite being outside the reach of most safety nets, can generate the resourcefulness to be first out the other end, as the vanguard entering the new reality we’re headed for.

As some of you know, I’ve turned into a serious fan of Roam, the novel notes app that’s been making waves lately, and with good reason. It’s a brilliantly conceived and executed product for really frictionless collaborative knowledge capture and organization.

I just created Art of Gig roam database, which I am sharing initially with paying subscribers of this newsletter. Right now, it’s publicly editable. We’ll see how it goes and later open it up to everybody. We may switch to public-readonly (with invite-only editing permission) if necessary, but I’d like to keep it as open as possible.

I had the idea of creating a Roam database for the Art of Gig community a few months back, but set it aside on my someday/maybe list, since it seemed like an important but not particularly urgent thing to take on. Well, now the pandemic has created the urgency, so let’s do it.

To get oriented, check out the Welcome page and go from there.

My plan is to evolve this iteratively by prompting all of you to do ONE simple thing each week, though of course you’re welcome to go nuts and do more.

For the first week your prompt is: Add yourself to the Directory page.

As I wrote last time, with the Coronavirus pandemic in full swing and the global economy in the early stages of a serious meltdown, the gig economy is particularly vulnerable, since it is hard for state agencies and programs to even “see” us and our needs. It’s even hard for us to see each other clearly. Let’s start fixing that.

I hope this database starts out by evolving rapidly into a helpful resource for gigsters in the immediate response to the pandemic, but then evolves into a generally useful long-term resource. Both for those of us in the gig economy, and those who need to interface with it.

Suggestions and ideas for supporting resources and activities around this are welcome. If you’re already doing something that pairs well with this, glad to create the right connections/plumbing. I’m conceiving this as just one node in a network of resources created/maintained by different people as the gig economy starts to get more self-organized.

For starters, once we have some initial content in this database, I’ll pull together a Zoom video conference for active participants to talk about where to take it and how.

I want to keep this one simple if not short, since I’m sure all of you are inundated with COVID-19 related news and developments, both locally in your communities and in your corner of the globe. I want to focus specifically on the impact on the gig economy. Let’s quickly take stock of what we’re up against, and what to do about it.

The Situation

If you’re in the gig economy, or planning to enter it, you face very unique and heightened risks compared to people in the paycheck economy. The gig economy is a feast/famine world of risks and volatility at the best of times, and times like we’re about to face are a case of double jeopardy. I’ve been through some rough patches myself over the years, but I don’t think any of them compare to what we’re about to run into.

March 1 was my ninth anniversary in the gig economy, and I’m now into my tenth year. It promises to be the roughest I’ve ever faced. Despite my confidence in my consulting skills, general history of resourcefulness, and my track record of having survived so far (or perhaps because of it), I have no problems admitting that I am worried. You’d have to be an idiot not to be, whatever your experience level.

Analysts are already flagging the extremely high risk to small businesses in general. Those at highest risk are of course in-person service business owners (restaurants, rideshare drivers, and the like) who rely on steady cash flow, have limited working capital positions, and rely on assumptions of ordinary risk management costs. Now this group is faced with demand collapse, heightened risk management costs (sanitization and hygiene protocols, greater risks of themselves falling ill), and rapid working capital depletion. Worse, most have no protections such as paid time off, a concept that only applies to paycheck types. In the United States, most don’t even have reliable, affordable health insurance, given the continuous undermining of the Affordable Care Act over the last few years.

For the most vulnerable, some large corporations in the US have already extended some enlightened protections. Many tech companies have committed to paying their hourly workers through this period even if their services are not needed. But it is unclear how long such generosity will last, given that all businesses will come under extreme pressure. In the US, it looks like small-business relief measures are in the pipeline, and other countries will likely offer similar relief.

None of this is likely to be anywhere near enough. They will be palliative measures at best. The outlook is somewhere between extreme stress and a bloodbath.

Expect many small businesses to go out of business around the world. This is going to be something of an extinction event.

For those of us in the gig economy proper — whether as platformers, contractors, or consultants — there are unlikely to be any significant protections on offer. On the flip side, our risks are also relatively lower, compared to in-person service business owners. We already mostly work remote/offsite on knowledge work tasks. Still, this is going to be something of an extinction event for us as well.

Paternalist businesses and states can’t even see us gigworkers legibly through their procedural-bureaucratic eyes, so they are not going to be able to take care of us even if they sincerely want to. Employees and traditional small businesses will come first. Gigwork is practically designed to fall through the cracks of institutional responses.

So start preparing. You’re on your own for the most part. Let’s look at the risks and how to manage them.

The Risks

For us in the gig economy, there are many risks, including, but not limited to:

1. Falling ill: If you actually fall ill, you may be unable to bill for your time for an extended period, on any gigs you do have.

2. Spooked clients: Clients in the pipeline might back out of deals/gigs under discussion, or defer them indefinitely.

3. Canceled on-site gigs: These are often the most lucrative kind, since you can bill for large blocks of time/work at once. With travel restrictions, they are on the chopping block.

4. Reallocated budgets: Suddenly tightened budgets might be diverted to other higher-priority uses.

5. Staff reassigned: Your primary client contacts might suddenly get reassigned to other roles as people in our client organization fall ill or die (or worse, your own key clients might fall ill or even die).

6. Demand collapse: What you offer may be particularly vulnerable and demand for it may collapse. On-site workshop delivery is at high risk obviously, and may be difficult or impossible to reposition as a virtual offering.

7. Force majeure clauses: A contract you’re relying on may have a provision allowing clients to back out of commitments under force majeure clauses.

8. Cash-flow crunches: An ever-present threat for the gig economy, this risk doubles during a crisis like this. You may suddenly need extra cash to care for elderly dependents.

9. Delayed invoices: As organizations get overwhelmed by their own urgent crisis management efforts, payments on your invoices could easily get delayed. This happens even during normal times. Expect more of it.

10. Deflation/cost of debt: The economy is at serious risk of deflation, which means it will be a bad time to take on debt. Take theatrical interest rate cuts by central banks with a huge pinch of salt. Even credit at 0% may be too expensive in a world of negative real interest rates.

I have faced many of these risks over the last decade, but never all at once, or with the intensity and duration we can expect now. This is new territory even for the most experienced independents. At best, people like me will be like the one-eyed leading the blind. And though I’m presumptuous enough to write a newsletter providing advice to other indies, if I’m being honest, I’m as much at risk as any of you. I’m probably only marginally above the median in terms of probability of continued survival in the gig economy.

I am personally fortunate in that I have a few months left in my current fellowship, so I have some time to prepare before I have to face this thing head-on myself. But I have no illusions about what I’ll be up against. It’s going to get tough, and I’m already taking my own advice in this newsletter and making risk mitigation plans.

Managing the Risks

There are lots of highly situation-specific things you may be able to do to manage your risks, but there are also a few general principles. As a mnemonic for these, I want you to remember three words:

Cash, Control, and Community.

It is an extension of the Cash+Control mnemonic offered by Bill Janeway in his book on venture capital/startups, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, (recommended as a generally good read) adapted for us in the gig economy.

• CASH: During a highly uncertain crisis, cash is king. Prioritize it in every way possible. Conserve it, prioritize gigs that give you cash now over cash later, even if it means less of it, focus on hardening your more passive and steady cash flows. Choose cash over in-kind compensation where possible. Avoid debt as much as possible. Defer or cut discretionary spending where you can.

• CONTROL: Do your damndest to maintain control over your business model and working life. Obviously this is easier the stronger your cash position. Keep control the IP you produce. Hold key operating assets like websites and SaaS accounts close. Pay attention to the terms of gigs. Do not accept exploitative terms for long-term arrangements that you might regret in better times. Prepare to accept some hardship to retain control.

• COMMUNITY: Do NOT become part of the problem. To the extent you have surplus cash and control over your own gig-economy position, and enjoy some security, do your best to support others in the gig economy. Keep those subcontracts flowing. Pay people doing stuff for you promptly. Look for ways to keep the gig economy going internally. If you can afford to, pay people even if you do not use their services, such as cleaning services.

Cash. Control. Community. Tattoo those 3 words into your brain for the next 18 months or so.

Beyond these general principles, you have to stay plugged in and maintain high situation awareness. Look out for any source of leverage, protection, or opportunity in your local geographic and economic environment. This is not the time to unplug and retreat under a rock, even though the stress might tempt you into doing so. That’s a luxury for the more protected classes of society. You’re out facing the elements.

That said, pay attention to your mental health, and make time for escapist diversions like reading fiction, watching television, and whatever other leisure activities you can safely continue. If you’re subject to quarantine or isolation, establish disciplines like light at-home exercise regimens, relaxing cooking sessions, and so on. If you’re not, but are still avoiding cafes and coworking spaces, get outdoors to take walks when you can.

Cultivate the obvious kinds of stress-management habits. Pay particular attention to your relationships and avoid dumping your own stress onto others. In theory, spending more time with family is always a great thing. In practice, too much time together can create enormous stress. Give each other space as needed, even if you’re all cooped up in a small apartment or house.

Be prepared for sudden spikes of emergency action (if you, a family member, or a neighbor falls ill and your local hospital is overwhelmed, what do you do?).

And don’t be afraid to ask for help from people in stronger positions than yourself, or proactively offer it to those who might be in need.

Should You Quit?

Should I quit is a serious question right now in both the ways it can be asked in the gig economy:

• If you have a paycheck job should you quit now to go free agent?

• If you’re a free agent, should you take a job to weather this rough patch?

If you have a paycheck job and were planning to make the leap to free agency, reconsider very carefully. Take all the advice in my 5-part series on making the leap, and reassess the playbook for the heightened risk environment.

I don’t want to discourage you from making the leap if you’re ready and excited for you, but don’t be dumb about this environment. Courage is good, foolhardiness is not. I myself made the leap while we were still in the very slow recovery from the Great Recession (2011), but I probably would not quit a job right now. 2011 was not a great time to quit either, but it was a predictable environment without the Great Weirding going on all around, and I felt comfortable making the leap. If you are feeling wary or developing cold feet, listen to those instincts even if you don’t act on them.

On looking for a regular job if you’re already in the gig economy, don’t let false pride about being part of the gig economy blind you to the risks. There is no futuristic honor in being a starving gig-worker. If you find that you’re struggling too much, be willing and prepared to look for a regular job sooner rather than later. Stay on the lookout for part-time jobs or quasi-job-like gigs too, such as fellowships and residencies. Being in the gig economy is merely an expedient lifestyle based on specific tradeoffs that change with the circumstances, not a dogmatic religion. You can always take another stab at it in better times if this weather is too stormy and rough for you.

That said, if you do decide to stay in the game, you may want to consider making lemonade from lemons.

Lemonade from Lemons

There are going to be many localized, specialized kinds of demand surges for expertise around very specific things in the next 18 months, including, but not limited to:

1. Crisis communications/PR

2. Rapid response/emergency operations

3. Succession planning

4. Scenarios and workshops around the risk environment

5. Analysis of impact on trade

6. Expertise on supply chain disruptions and shocks

7. Expertise on service hardening for pandemic conditions

8. Expertise in business continuity

9. Organizational restructuring for distributed ops

10. Field data collection and analysis

Even if you have no immediate interest or expertise in any of these, take some time to brainstorm the possibilities and think through low-hanging fruit options. There may be surprising things for you to do. And you may need these options later even if you’re not under immediate stress.

Many of these demand areas will present opportunities for everything from special products (a report or online course on sourcing goods from China for example), to spec work (like doing a paper-napkin level analysis of the supply chain of a specific company and sending it to their COO to pitch a more detailed study), to searching for openings/RFPs in the right places, such as hospitals and healthcare systems that need unusual services urgently.

For some of you, there may even be an opportunity to pivot or reinvent what you do around the opportunities created by this pandemic.

We are in the gig economy corner of what Naomi Klein called disaster capitalism. The phrase is almost always used in a pejorative way to describe profiteering, especially by larger cronyist companies that enjoy backing from influential political actors. But taken in a non-pejorative way, disaster capitalism has both a necessary and good side, and an ugly, profiteering side. Extreme risk environments do create unusual market conditions of demand and supply. Under such conditions, many problems should perhaps not be solved by markets at all, and instead taken over by states at least temporarily, to protect the most vulnerable from exploitation.

But that said, there is both room for, and value in, market-based responses to crisis conditions, including from the gig economy. So you do not need to feel guilty. Nobody will fault you for thoughtfully and conscientiously looking for opportunities in the crisis, and becoming part of a market-based solution to the problem we’re all in the middle of. Many will in fact be very grateful if you do something that addresses a pressing need.

But equally, there is no denying that there is plenty of room for grifting, bullshit, and exploitation of vulnerable and panicked counterparties. Be honest with yourself and resist such temptations, which will be especially attractive if you’re under financial stress yourself, as you’re likely to be.

In Summary

• We are in a heightened risk environment for the gig economy

• There are many specific risks you must think about and manage

• Approach the risks focusing on cash, control, and community

• Take the “should I quit [my job/the gig economy]” question seriously

• It is okay to look for ways to make lemonade out of lemons

• Don’t be a profiteering grifter

Stay safe, wash your hands, flatten the curve, and be smart about the next 18 months. This is going to take a while.

I’ll be doing my bit to contribute helpfully via this newsletter, and I am open to suggestions and ideas for things I could do. For starters, I have decided that anything I write that’s directly about the risk environment we’re in right now will not be paywalled.

<< The Medium is the Client | Yakverse Index | Staying With the Questions >>

I had stepped out of the cafe to take an urgent client call, and the letter was waiting for me at my table next to my coffee when I returned to my table. An expensive-looking peach-colored envelope sealed with red wax.

“Did you see who left this on my table?” I asked the barista. He shrugged no.

I sighed. Probably one of those tediously theatrical marketing stunts for some sort of stupid luxury product launch. Then I noticed the impression in the wax. It was the head of a yak.

Inside the envelope was a short note, handwritten on expensive note paper.

“A car service will pick you up at 8:00 PM tonight. — UAK”

I frowned. UAK? I knew of only one person with those initials.

There seemed to be something else in the envelope. I shook it out.

It was a single yak coin (see The Shadow’s Journey). I peered at it, and pulled out my own from my wallet to compare. They looked the same, give or take some wear. It seemed genuine.

***

The car service picked me up promptly at 8. Half an hour later, I was standing in front of a modest Class III mansion (an ISO Class III mansion is one where the front door is at the end of a curving driveway that runs between 50-100 meters from the main street-facing gate, with the building at least 80% obscured by trees).

A butler was waiting for me at the foot of the front stairs.

“If you’ll follow me sir…”

He lead me up the stairs, through the front door, through the anteroom, past a large, empty dining room, and into a discreet skullduggery room.

For those of you who have fewer dealings with the ultra-wealthy than I do, a skullduggery room is standard in Class III mansions and above, and usually contains a few armchairs, a small bar, and in the case of Class II and Class I mansions, a secure comm-line and secret tunnel to the basement lair.

“May I offer you a drink sir?” asked the butler.

“Thanks, I’ll just help myself,” I said. Skullduggery rooms, as some of you may know, usually operate on informal self-service principles.

The butler bowed and retreated.

This particular skullduggery room already had two people in it, my old friends Guanxi “6%” Gao, and Arnie Anscombe, nursing drinks.

“Hey guys,” I said, “so you’re here too. Any idea what this is about? A juicy new gig I hope.”

“No idea,” said Gao. Anscombe shrugged no as well.

“How you doing Rao? The 2x2s are flourishing I hope?” asked Gao.

I walked over to the bar, surveyed the options, and poured myself some expensive-looking bourbon.

“The drawing and quartering is proceeding well, thanks. How’s the 6% business?”

A tired look came over Gao’s face, and he stared down into his drink for a moment. I settled into the armchair next to him.

“6% of zero is zero. The damn coronavirus has wrecked my 2020 plans. All the gigs I had lined up have evaporated. I was actually in Wuhan in December, wrapping up one of last year’s gigs. Got out just in time, a couple of weeks before all hell broke loose. Now I have a couple of months to figure something out before my savings run out.”

“Damn, sorry about that. What about you Arnie? How’s the data-munging business?”

“Booming actually. A dozen leads asking about deep learning contingency planning models in the last week alone. I guess I’m on the positive externalities side of the virus. Sorry Gao, don’t mean to be insensitive. I’ll look out for a piece of action for you.”

Gao shrugged, and began to say something, but before he could, we were interrupted by a tall, gaunt figure striding into the room.

Ulysses Alexander Khan, UAK, was in the house.

***

“Khan! Long time no see! I don’t think we’ve met since that AspireKat business in 2013! Seven years!”

“How are you Rao? Anscombe. Gao. Thanks for coming, all of you.”

Gao looked concerned. He said, “You’re looking pretty run down Khan. Lots more gray in the hair I see, and have you lost weight? McKinsey riding you too hard?”

Khan headed over to the bar and poured himself some scotch, then settled into the last armchair before responding.

“As it happens, I’m no longer with McKinsey. I left about six months ago.”

“I’m not surprised, it’s not a place for enterprising people,” I said (see, The McKinsey Affair).

Gao raised his glass, “Well, welcome to the indie world, Khan.”

Anscombe peered appraisingly at Khan in his usual unsettling way. I always feel like a spreadsheet when the kid does that to me.

“Doesn’t look like you need to work anymore, Khan,” he said, and gestured vaguely at our surroundings. “Nice Class III mansion you have here.”

Khan shook his head.

“Not mine; I’m just borrowing it. You’re right though. I don’t need to work. In fact, I was going to retire. I have a modest little Class V starter mansion by the ocean in Greece. I was going to spend the next few years quietly working on a history of consulting in the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Long-time interest of mine.”

“So why didn’t you?” I asked. “I’m guessing it has to do with why we’re here?”

***

Khan stood up.

“Gentlemen, I have been retained by a group of high-net-worth individuals, including the owner of this mansion, for a long-term engagement that will last at least a decade, perhaps several.”

“To do what?” asked Gao.

“I’ll get to that. But as one piece of it, I have been asked to staff up a global network of experienced independent consultants. Ones who are past the basic challenges of making enough money and meaning for their own needs, and are looking for more. That’s where you come in. I’m hoping to get the three of you to seed one local corner of it.”

“Well, I’m in. For the right percentage of course,” said Gao at once, grinning.

“There is no percentage. If you’re in it for the percentage, you’re not ready for this. What I’m offering is not what you’d call a regular paid gig.”

Arnie raised an eyebrow. “I hope you’re not telling us a bunch of millionaires and billionaires is expecting us to work pro-bono for the questionable pleasure of their occasional company?”

Khan drained his scotch, made an expansive gesture with his arms, and walked back to the bar for a refill.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen. You’re thinking too small. That’s always the problem with you indies. Thinking ‘power before money’ doesn’t come naturally to you. Still, your skepticism is warranted. I too, in my time, have had dealings with the Scrooge class of wealth. But as a gesture of good faith…”

Khan reached under the bar and pulled out a small wooden box, and opened it. Inside, two rows of yak coins gleamed. There must have been at least a hundred in there. He extracted three, put the box away, and returned to his armchair with the coins and his drink.

“You each already received one of these with your invitations, but…”

He slid a coin towards each of us.

“I know you have a few of these already, Gao. And you have a couple I think Rao? And you, young Anscombe, I believe had none before today? Well you have two now. They’re of course, either worthless or priceless. That’s up to you.”

He leaned back.

“Those are yours just for hearing me out. No expectations. You’re free to walk out that door after you’ve heard what I have to say. Keep the coins, pass them on, or throw them in the trash.”

The three of us looked at each other briefly.

I stood up, “let me get another drink.”

***

“My clients… sponsors is perhaps a better word… my sponsors — our sponsors if you choose to accept my offer — are, as I have said, a global group of high net-worth individuals. They are collectively worth several hundreds of billion dollars, and refer to themselves as The Club.”

“Very imaginative,” I said.

“Like the Davos crowd? Bohemian Grove?” asked Arnie.

Khan shook his head.

“No, this is not your usual partying, pearl-clutching, rule-the-world LARPing crowd. That crowd is mostly running for the hills these days. Some of them are already bugging out, in full-on bunker mode. Unbelievably banal bunch. No vision or imagination. No, this is a serious group. Dent in the universe types. Bug-in types, not bug-out types.”

“And what does this serious group want to do? Save the world? Freeze themselves until the luxury Mars base is ready for them?”

Khan smiled and leaned back.

“Why not both?” he said.

“And why does The Club want to sponsor a network of independent consultants?”

“Not just any old network, gentlemen. The Club wants me to resurrect the Order of the Yak.”

Khan paused dramatically, then scanned our faces with a speculative look on his face.

“Though maybe this time around we can find a way to get a few women into the Order too. It’s always been a sausage fest as far as I can tell from the history. One battle at a time though, we must start from where we are after all…So…what do you think?”

***

“Is this a joke?” asked Arnie incredulously. “The Order of the Yak… that’s just a bunch of pre-modern hokum… sorry guys, I know you in particular like to nerd out about that stuff Rao, but seriously. This is 2020. We’re not in a world of wizards, viziers, and assassins guilds anymore. And our clients aren’t monarchs and nobles.”

Khan looked at him and nodded.

“Perhaps, though I wouldn’t be so sure about monarchs and nobles. But we are in a world of viruses disrupting supply chains. A world possibly on the verge of climate collapse. A world of what Rao here likes to call the Great Weirding, where old certainties are crumbling, and with them, the institutions built on trust in those certainties. And that’s what the Order of the Yak has historically been about, as you’d know if you’d studied the history. Every dark age, every troubled transition between eras, every uncertain, chaotic patch of history anywhere in the world, you see the Order of the Yak quietly step up its activity, steering the affairs of the world a little more firmly than usual, shepherding it through its bottleneck crises. Or yakherding it rather.”

“Nice speech, Khan,” interrupted Gao, “but Arnie is right. Theatrical wax-sealed envelopes, antique coins, a ridiculous medieval secret society of consultants that’s been dead for centuries. What do they have to do with…” he trailed off uncertainly and looked at me.

“…with a bunch of billionaires trying to save the world in 2020?” I finished for him.

“Myth and ceremony gentlemen, myth and ceremony!” shouted Khan, getting up.

The three of us looked at him quizzically.

“Perhaps you should finish your speech,” said Gao, in a resigned tone.

“Thank you,” said Khan, and paused. He seemed to be gathering his thoughts.

“We consultants, gentlemen, do you know what we are? I mean beyond being everyday advisors, counselors, and mercenary instruments to those immersed in the fog of war, and the stream of action? What role do we play in the human drama? Why do we exist?”

He looked around at us.

“Myth and ceremony, gentlemen. We create meaning out of the fog of action, that’s what we do. Mythmaking Bardic Artistry. That’s the real MBA! We consider what is in the light of what could be, and in the process of creating forms and structures around the action, we see, we value, we witness. And through those acts of valuing and witnessing, we create the meaning in the stories that our clients enact. The history of the world, I tell you gentlemen, does not actually exist until we witness it into existence. Until people like us turn mere events into significations, history is just one damn thing after another.”

Khan paused for breath. He was getting worked up. The old fire I had first witnessed seven years ago was back, and coursing through him.

“We are stewards of the adjacent possible. Think about that. We are the guardians, champions, and evangelists of the great what-ifs of humanity. And there are times in the story of humanity when that adjacent possible, it gets just a little thicker, just a little fuller of possibilities that must be navigated, possibilities both gloomy and cheerful. Times that call for a greater shared consciousness among us constant witnesses and occasional nudgers of history. Times that call for, yes, the Order of the Yak. And at such times, we the consultants of the world, we who make it our business to consider the human condition in the context of all the scenarios that could be, at all levels from startups to nations, we have a choice before us.”

Khan glared at us, his eyes aflame with the fire of the Old Religion.

“We can either help each other help the world uncover better futures, or we can let it continue its blinkered, unreconstructed descent into hell, concerned only with our damn hourly rates. We consultants, beyond our everyday work of helping clients navigate this or that specific challenge, you know what we do? We turn zemblanity into serendipity for the entire world! Unsurprisingly unlucky into surprisingly lucky. That’s our real calling.”

He paused for breath and a swig of the scotch.

“And that’s what the Club is giving us a chance to do. Not with money, not with specific gigs, though those may well flow your way as well. No, what they are offering is a chance to grasp history a little more firmly by the scruff of its neck, and nudge it in a different direction, towards greater luck. The Order of the Yak is not just a historical curiosity my friends. It is an idea about how we humans ought to live our lives. The unexamined civilization, gentlemen, is not worth perpetuating, and it is we consultants, we who step aside from the tumult of action long enough to examine it on behalf of the rest, in order to make it worth perpetuating. And we examine it neither from the spotlit center, nor from the shadowy margins, but from the interstices. Gentlemen, we are neither part of the distracting pageantry, nor a part of the gawking, uncomprehending crowds. No, we are the ones who ensure that the show goes on, for both the actors and the audience, by weaving in and out of its liminal spaces, nudging here, pinching there. That’s who we are, that’s what we do, and that’s why, the Order of the Yak must rise again, because you see gentlemen…!”

He paused triumphantly, drained his tumbler, and glared at us.

“…because you see gentlemen, unlike birds, civilizations are unnatural things with no instincts. They must be taught to fly. That’s what consultants are for. And that’s why the Order of the Yak must rise again.”

***

We sat in silence for a moment, as Khan poured himself another drink and caught his breath.

Gao spoke first.

“So what exactly is it that you and the Club want us to do exactly? Prance around in Tibetan robes sending each other wax-sealed letters about the coronavirus? Not that I mind skulking in skullduggery rooms with quality alcohol.”

“I’m glad you asked,” said Khan, and reached under the bar again, this time pulling out three plain manilla envelopes, which he passed around to us.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Khan smiled, “Just some fodder for the first meeting of the first chapter of the resurrected Order of the Yak, should you choose to form it. What you choose to do with it is entirely up to you.”