Month: April 2020

You’ve probably noticed that in the past month or two, this newsletter has been increasingly hijacked by not one, but two kinda off-topic threads. The first is of course the Covid19 pandemic which is hijacking every conversation in sight. The second is the indie community bootstrapping effort that I, along with a few other indies like Tom Critchlow, Paul Millerd, and Pamela Hobart, have been working on.

I’m happy to report that the later persistent hijacking has now evolved and matured into Its Own Thing.™

Introducing the Yak Collective, and its first collaborative project, a report titled Don’t Waste the Reboot, with contributions from 21 independent consultants, and additional support from nearly half a dozen others.

Paul Millerd led the effort, and the process of pulling it together was as enlightening as thinking through the content itself.

Take a browse, explore the deck, and share/signal boost as you think it deserves to be. If you have the ability to do so, take it out fishing in executive-suite land, and bring us back a gig on the strength of the deck.

A big thank you to all who contributed, not just to the content, but to the process of pulling it together, and building out the just-in-time infrastructure required to get it out there. “Open-source” style output often lacks the finish and polish of commercial stuff, and that applies to open-network emergent indie collaborations as well, but in this case, we solved that problem — people volunteered for everything from proof-reading to sizing images correctly.

I’m particularly proud of the sheer speed with which we managed to pull this together. From inception to delivery, this deck, and the website/distribution infrastructure to put it out there, took about 2 weeks.

It’s one thing to claim that indies operate on a faster, more responsive OODA loop than big organizations, but another thing to actually demonstrate this.

Can indies turn into the special forces of sense-making and rapid action in the post-Covid world? I think we can. That’s what I want to talk about tomorrow morning, so let me tee up that discussion.

Town Hall

Tomorrow morning, at 9 AM Pacific, the usual time I host a Discord chat, I will host a special edition, longer, one-hour chat open to all who care to join in — a town hall to talk about this first project launch, and where we go from here. So make sure to join in.

To tease what I have on my mind to talk about tomorrow, here’s the thought-starter: If we can keep up the kind of tempo that drove our first project, while increasing the complexity and ambition of our collaborative efforts, indies can easily turn into the special forces of consulting — able to get off the ground faster, do our sense-making faster, analyze and synthesize faster, and deliver serious intelligence and output to the world while larger organizations are still holding endless meetings, lost in the FUD.

How can indie teams competing with traditional orgs deliver output that’s twice as good in half the time?

That, I think, is the challenge we face, and the reason I personally have been investing time in getting this thing going.

To that end, for those of you want to join this effort, here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor — a call for proposals, which I’ll talk more about on the chat tomorrow.

6 Reports in 6 Months: Call For Proposals

In the next 6 months, we hope to do a Yak Wisdom series of Covid19 themed collaborative projects like Don’t Waste the Reboot, using the pooled resources of the Yak Collective. The idea is to grow a network of indies who are connected not just through casual social network links, but through a shared history of working together on meaningful things.

We’re already underway — 21 of us are linked via co-authorship links on this first report, and have developed a certain amount of trust in each other.

So to get that going in a bigger way, we’re issuing a call for proposals. Check out the Yak Collective Collaborations page on our Roam database.

There’s a link to a proposal form there where you can submit a proposal, as well as a list of thought-starter ideas if you need inspiration. Join the Discord, chat with me or one of the other partners (Paul, Tom, Pamela), sound out potential contributors via informal conversations, and submit a proposal.

The deadline for proposals is Friday, May 8th.

Our goal is to put out a report a month for the next 5 months, all broadly on the Covid19 theme, to build up a solid repository of reboot intelligence for organizations of all kinds. We’ll figure out some collective way to prioritize the ideas to work on — maybe something as simple as green-lighting the ones that attract the most contributors.

I’d like to particularly encourage those who contributed to the first project to consider proposing and leading one. Compound interest is a powerful thing, and I’d like to get that particular learning loop iterating as quickly as possible in our little fledgling network. The more of these efforts a single contributor participates in, the smarter the network gets about such efforts.

Right now, only Paul Millerd has learned how to pull one of these indie collaborations together. I’d like a dozen of us to have acquired that know-how in 6 months.

We have to initially limit output to a report a month simply because our shared ability to market and disseminate work like this is still pretty limited (it’s a bunch of us with newsletters and social media followings/existing clients). To be honest, even one a month seems like an ambitious stretch goal to me at this point.

So we want to build up momentum slowly. If we can put out 6 reports in 6 months, each better than the last, people will sit up and take notice, and good things will start to happen for all who participate.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, as the special forces saying goes.

If we want the indie world to turn into the special forces of sense-making, we’re going to have to actually operate that way.

Why Do This?

It might not be clear to some of you, especially if you haven’t been in the indie game very long, why it is a good idea to attempt this marathon of 6 reports in 6 months.

Building up a track of internally generated collaborative activity like this will, I suspect, address the single biggest thing that prevents independents from going after larger gigs and projects — a proven ability to assemble larger teams with varied capabilities.

This is an area that I myself have significant learning ahead of me. The most collaboration I’ve ever done on gig work is with 1-2 other subcontractors, and for a few months at most. By contrast, back when I had a paycheck job at Xerox 10 years ago, I was leading a great team of 10-12 people for nearly 3 years straight.

I honestly have no idea how I’d pull together a 12-person/3 year team for a larger project out of a loose network like the Yak Collective, while still operating by a model that is still essentially indie in spirit, with its ethos of people working on their own time with very low mutual-dependency levels. It will be hard to do that without defaulting to the old ways developed by paycheck organizations and reproducing their well-known failure modes. If we’re going to fail at this sort of thing, I’d at least like to fail in new ways.

It’s not going to be easy to have our cake and eat it too — retain that sense of individual freedom that attracted us to indie work in the first place, while realizing the benefits of working in larger free-agent teams on larger projects.

But I’d like to learn this game, and give the paycheck consulting crowd a run for its money. As I’m sure many of you would too.

And once we address that weakness around building larger teams, our natural strengths — diversity, speed of sense-making, loose synchronization, true variety of capability, improvisation ability — will kick in.

But there’s a larger principle here. Not only can we attempt this, in a sense we must attempt this. Here’s why.

How Can Indies Not Waste the Reboot?

Our first deck has launched with the title Don’t Waste the Reboot. If you’ve been participating in the community, or contributed, think about that for a second.

That advice applies, first and foremost to us, the ones presuming to give it to others. How can we make sure that we don’t waste the opportunities being created by this crisis to advance the interests and capabilities of the indie sector?

It’s not a cynical disaster-capitalism type question. It’s not about profiteering.

I think most of us genuinely believe that the indie sector is a force for good in the world, bringing speed, variety, diversity, dissent, unique capabilities, alternative value orientations, and other good things, to a monocultural institutional world that sorely needs all of those things in spades.

So yes, we have to ask ourselves first, how do we not waste the reboot?

The tagline of our first report is “Making the next normal better than the last one” and again, by the dog-food principle, if we aren’t able to take that advice ourselves, what exactly are we doing peddling it to others?

So the next normal for the indie consulting sector should not be the same as the old normal. What does that mean?

1. It shouldn’t be limited to small 1-2 person table-scraps projects on the margins of bigger, more consequential projects.

2. It shouldn’t have to struggle for the attention of leaders in organizations driving the most interesting work around the world.

3. Bringing on teams of indies shouldn’t fail for stupid reasons like not having the ability to set up the necessary webs of subcontracts, insurance policies, and NDAs, or managing the payment distribution logistics. Those transaction costs need to go down.

4. Bringing on a team of indies should be the first thing an executive thinks of when faced with a new kind of challenge, not the last resort. New problem, new people. Why isn’t the calculus as simple as that? It should be.

How do we make these sorts of things happen? Let’s figure it out, one collaborative effort at a time, one conversation at a time, one attempt to pitch a team project at a time.

That’s what I hope the Yak Collective will be about, at least to the extent I have had a hand in shaping it.

A New Praxis for Indie Work

Not wasting the reboot as indies means thinking harder about every aspect of how we operate, from philosophy to low-level tools and tactics.

I talk about both a lot in this newsletter — as do my fellow instigators of the Yak Collective in their writings — but for the next-level thing we’re attempting here, those ideas have to evolve from talk and “advice porn” to a larger praxis — an attempt at situated, philosophical practice.

We’ve already put some effort into laying out our philosophy on the About page. It’s not the usual yada-yada-contact-us boilerplate. So check it out.

But that’s just starter thoughts that occurred to us in the process of pulling this first project together. The real work of figuring out a reimagined praxis of indie work for the post-Covid world is going to be done in the conversations around actually trying to do different kinds of work.

And doing it in different ways, through open-network modes, like the Yak Collective is trying to do.

Eating our own dog food as indies is not about doing philosophy, but about doing philosophically. It’s not about debating manifesto points, but about mindful reflection on work being done and shipped. Rough consensus and running code, applied to gig work collaboration.

So let’s not the waste the reboot. Let’s make sure the next normal is better than the last one — for indies. By starting to work differently now and learning from it.

What might happen if we succeed?

Back in the 1950s they used to say, what’s good for GM is good for America. It was a positive sentiment about the worth of big paternalistic companies that eventually turned into a satirical line.

I’d like people to start saying: what’s good for indies is good for the world — but intend it sincerely rather than satirically.

That’s my personal success metric here.

And I hope the Yak Collective is not the only effort of its kind to emerge in the post-Covid world.

I for one would like to see dozens of such experimental efforts sprouting up around the world, trying out new ways of working within the free-agent economy, and new patterns of relating to the paycheck economy.

Most such efforts will fail. Most, but not all.

New entrants to the indie economy in 2025 will enter a different, better indie economy than I did in 2011. Because at least a few experiments starting right now will work out, and then the next normal won’t be like the last one.

Where to Now?

You can follow the progress of the Yak Collective on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. I’ll continue to highlight interesting developments selectively here, as will the others involved, on their newsletters/blogs etc.

As most of you know from the last few newsletters, there’s a knowledge base built on a Roam database, and a Discord community with several hundred people. We’re slowly building out more infrastructure, as people step up to build out bits and pieces of what we need to be effective.

A fledgling community building effort like this will of course continue to require significant TLC and stewardship from all involved, especially from those of us who instigated it, so I expect to continue talking about the Yak Collective and its work from time to time on this newsletter.

We’re past the hijacking stage, since the project is now starting to take its first wobbly steps on its own, but it will be a while before it becomes sentient, turns into the Indie Skynet, and takes over the world.

I haven’t yet decided how I will be weaving in the community stuff with my own writing, but I’ll figure something out.

Those of you who are primarily here for my writing, you’ll be able to tune out the Yak Collective stuff if you want.

Those of you who are interested in the Yak Collective, and my piece of that activity stream, you’ll have ways to tune in to that too.

Even at the level of this email newsletter, I’m trying not to waste the reboot myself. So yes, there’s a small pivot going on here, but I hope most of you will decide to stay with me through it.

We’ll be back to regular Art of Gig programming next week. No doubt my participation in the Yak Collective will shape some of the topics I cover here. For example, I already have a LOT of thoughts on how to make larger indie collaborations on gigs happen, so I’ll be writing about that. And of course, this whole effort has inspired a lot more ideas for me for Yakverse stories, so there will be that too.

Strap in. Interesting times dead ahead.

And don’t forget — browse and signal-boost Don’t Waste the Reboot, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, join in for the Discord chat tomorrow morning, and consider submitting a proposal for our Yak Wisdom series.

I can’t believe it’s been a year already, and time for the first Art of Gig annual review issue 😦.

I started this email newsletter on April 30, 2019, and here we are now, 54 issues later, in the middle of a pandemic, trying to run an already difficult playbook in perhaps the toughest environment ever. If we get through this, we should award each other medals.

More on that, and on where we go from here, at the end. But let’s do a review of all the Year One articles first, grouped in hopefully helpful ways. If you’ve been meaning to introduce any friends to this newsletter, this would be the issue to forward (or even give them a gift subscription perhaps?).

First Leap Series

Though most of the content in this newsletter is aimed at people who are already in the gig economy, particularly as indie consultants or freelancers, I did write some material explicitly with potential new entrants in mind, in the form of a five-part series covering the basics of preparing to leap into the gig economy.

1. The First Leap: Employees hunt, entrepreneurs launch, gigworkers leap. Understanding how to enter the gig economy.

2. Leap Risk: The financial math and risks of leaping into the gig economy, and what you can do to mitigate it.

3. Minimum Viable Cunning: How to inject enough strategy into your first leap to manage the risk.

4. The Inner Game of Gigwork: Managing your inner life by becoming more of a robot to express more of your humanity.

5. The Road to Agency: Concluding the five-part series, mapping out the path to gaining control over your own life, which is what typically drives those who manage to last in the gig economy.

This series was partly paywalled, but I’ve made the whole series public now, in case it is helpful to people suddenly thrown into the gig economy due to the crisis.

While this First Leap playbook is obviously much harder to run in the Corona era, it is still the minimum-viable playbook you have to run. If you’re new to the gig economy (voluntarily or involuntarily), or still in the paycheck economy and eyeing it as a future option, this series should be helpful.

Core Articles

The heart of Art of Gig is a track of essays where I try to pick out and discuss themes that are important, but not always obvious if you’re new to the game. The bulk of these essays are intermediate level, and assume some work experience, if not indie experience. I wrote 20 essays on this track in Year One.

1. Elements of Consulting Style: The 4 types of clients and how to serve them: achiever, integrator, explorer, tester.

2. A Tale of Two Schools: An introduction to the structuralist versus people school philosophies of consulting, and why indie consultants tend to fall on the people school side. 🔒

3. Knowing Which Nut to Tighten: How do you price your knowledge? Consulting and the principal-agent problem. 🔒

4. You Are Not a Scientist: Gigups and startups share an important attribute: neither is science-based. A “scientific” self-image of what you do/know is a liability. 🔒

5. Response Regimes in Indie Consulting: What mix of risk and time pressure do you help your clients respond to? A typology of 4 kinds of needs met by indies: strategy, first response, preventative care, and surge capacity.

6. When is a Gig an Engagement?: The importance of not haggling to positioning yourself as a consultant, rather than a contractor.

7. The Clutch Class: Gig workers are neither part of capital, nor part of labor; we are the clutch class. An examination of our role in the politics of work. 🔒

8. The Gigwork Hierarchy of Needs: A combo mid-year review and a diagram organizing indie learning/maturation on a Maslow-like hierarchy.

9. The Price of Freedom: The fundamental choices and consequences of gigwork, in the form of a helpful pick-2-of-3 triangle diagram. 🔒

10. A Self-Image is a Dangerous Thing: A self-image is a dangerous thing for indies to have, because it’s likely to end up an ersatz knockoff of a paycheck role. Instead, you have to be a trickster of sorts, crafting a persona to suit the gig. 🔒

11. Sneaking Away From Yourself: You’re a bad boss, and you should sneak away from yourself. There’s no point taking the gigworker out of the paycheck organization if you can’t take the paycheck organization out of the gigworker. 🔒

12. Training Your Nerves: As a free agent, your nerves matter more than your skills. How do you systematically train them?

13. The McKinsey Affair: Lessons for the indie consultant from contemporary events in the Big 3 world, particularly the gradual tarnishing of McKinsey’s brand. 🔒

14. You Are Not a Parasite: Consultants are often accused of being parasites. Weak organizations always harbor parasites. The question is, are you one? 🔒

15. The Importance of Being Surprisable: The superpower of indie consultants is openness to being surprised. 🔒

16. Basic Consultant Diagrams: I diagram therefore I am. An introduction to the basic diagrams that come up in consulting work.

17. Ten Dimensions of Gigwork: It is important to understand the class hierarchy of the gig economy. Are you a consultant, contractor, or platformer? Ten ways you can tell. 🔒

18. Bootstrapping with Beefs: To find clients, start beefs, a tribute post to Clay Christensen. 🔒

19. Indie Fragility: Indie businesses are fragile. It is important to come to terms with that fact (this was written just before the Covid19 crisis hit). 🔒

20. Your Passion Mission: Arranging your money-making around your soul-feeding. If you don’t do this, your career in the gig economy will likely not be sustainable psychologically.

The Yakverse

If the core articles are the heart of this newsletter, the soul, at least for me, is the Yakverse series. Currently, the series stands at 13 parts, with 2 ancillary special posts.

The series has its own series home page.

The Yakverse is a fictional universe within which I set a series of somewhat absurdist stories inspired by my consulting work/experiences. I will be the first to admit that these are not exactly Dickensian masterpieces of fiction. This series is the most experimental part of this project for me. I’m trying to do several things with it. There’s an element of teaching consulting through stories, and an element of teaching myself world-building and fiction writing at your expense.

But the biggest goal of the Yakverse series, frankly, is just having some fun. The gig economy can be a grim, even depressing place, a place that can turn into All Soulless Hustle All The Time if you’re not careful. I have fun writing the series, even if not all episodes work. I hope Season 2 improves. Maybe I’ll even get a Netflix deal to make an animated series out of it. One can dream 😎

I know from your feedback that for some of you, this is the most fun part of the newsletter, and for others, it feels like hit-or-miss rambling and a distraction from the more “practical” track of core articles. Thanks for either coming along for the ride, or putting up with it, as the case may be 😆.

Tips and Tricks

I am a huge believer in aphoristic, fortune-cookie level wisdom, which I put out on the @artofgig twitter account. Here are compilations of all those tweets, plus the very first proper newsletter, which was also a collection of fortune-cookie sized thoughts.

1. 42 Great Imperatives

2. Consulting Tips Compilation: 1

3. Consulting Tips Compilation #2

4. Consulting Tips Compilation #3

5. Consulting Tips Compilation #4

6. Consulting Tips Compilation #5

7. Consulting Tips Compilation #6

8. Consulting Tips Compilation #7

9. Gig Economy Trivia Compilation #1.

Pandemic Specials

The crisis is a very special condition for the gig economy, and I’ve been writing a series of posts on that, all are public.

1. Gigging in the Time of Corona

2. Getting to the Reset

3. Murder on the History Express

4. Get Fat

Community Stuff

I haven’t written much about the community side, but I laid out my basic philosophy in Towards Gigwork as a Folkway. About a month ago, I took the first steps towards putting that philosophy to work. There is now a nascent community brewing, which we’ve tentatively named the Yak Collective. The basic community infrastructure is free and open to all, not just paying subscribers.

Right now there is a growing resource database with resources like case studies, a gig exchange page, and a directory. There is a Discord with over 300 members, and a track of experimental voice chat sessions. There is a first significant collaboration ongoing — on a Covid19 reboot strategy deck.

Not all of this will work, but hopefully enough of it will to get a mutually useful and interesting community going. For those of us who have been in the indie economy for a while, this Covid19 period feels like a highly stressful coming-of-age period. The kinds of experiments we try through this period, and the resourcefulness and imagination we bring to the party, will determine whether the pandemic destroys the nascent gig economy, or boosts it to a whole new level.

Thanks to all who have been helping with this early experimental phase, and figuring stuff out: Paul Millerd, Tom Critchlow, and Pam Hobart in particular. Thanks also to all those hosting voice chat sessions and figuring out how best we can be of value to each other, one conversation at a time: Scott Garlinger, Jordan Peacock, Drew Schorno, Sachin Benny in particular. Apologies if I missed anyone.

We will get this stuff much better organized in the coming months hopefully, as we slowly figure out what works by trial and error, double down on things that work, and put better scaffolding around it.

I will also be reinvesting some of the subscription income from this newsletter into the community component, once we figure out good ways to do that.

Year Two Prospects

As of today, this newsletter goes out to 2124 people (thank you!), of whom 380, or around 17%, are paying subscribers (double thank you!).

For Year Two, I had planned out a few big themes to explore, but like all of the best-laid plans, the pandemic has trashed them. So for the time being, I’ll be on an improvisational track, watching and writing about the gig economy and indie consulting as it responds to, and evolves, in response to the crisis.

Many fundamentals of the indie world have changed, some perhaps permanently. But many more fundamentals haven’t changed. The basic game is still drumming up leads, closing the deals, hustling through them, chasing down invoices and getting paid — all while having fun, learning, and growing with each pass through that process.

So I will be continuing to write about those fundamentals too, at all levels from beginner to whatever level I’m at. The pandemic will eventually recede, but most of us will still be here I hope, going on going on, hustling and scheming the same as ever.

So once again, thank you for your support and participation through Year One. Onwards to Year Two.

<< And So It Begins | Yakverse Index | Yakverse: Infinity Gig >>

It had been two weeks since that very odd meeting at Khan’s borrowed mansion. Two weeks in which decades had happened. Both Guanxi Gao and Arnie Anscombe looked tired and careworn in their little video windows.

I said, “Well, I guess I’d better kick us off since we’re using my Zoom account. Did everybody get a chance to open those manilla envelopes Khan gave us? I assume we all got the same thing?

“A photograph of an antique 2×2? I assume Khan has the original,” said Gao

“Yeah, a dumb 2×2,” said Anscombe, “I don’t know why we’re even talking about a stupid project to resurrect some sort of medieval Yak-themed consultant guild. In case anyone hasn’t noticed, there’s more important stuff going on in the world.”

I said, “Well, let’s spend a few minutes on it at least. The pandemic isn’t going anywhere soon. Here, let me share my screen, I scanned the photograph.”

“Well, Rao, you’re the 2×2 expert, what’s your take?” asked Anscombe.

“Hmm… interesting that the right side of the x-axis is labeled future, but the left side is is labeled here and now rather than Present. The y-axis makes sense. Clearly some sort of creative-destruction theme there. The bottom half is preservation behaviors, the top half is growth behaviors. I’d guess it dates to the 19th century.”

“How do you get that?” asked Gao.

“Labeling each quadrant became common in the 20th century. Here we have just blocks of text. It’s an early 19th century style. I’d guess late Edwardian or early Victorian England, since it is in English. English ones are rare from that period. It was more of a German thing then.”

Gao said, “Soldiers, physicians, nurses… clearly from some sort of wartime period. Maybe the Napoleonic wars? Crimean war?”

“WHO CARES!” Anscombe said. “Why are we talking about this? Why aren’t we talking about, I don’t know, THE PANDEMIC?”

“Hmm… maybe this IS from a 19th century pandemic period. There were a few cholera outbreaks then, right? Some smallpox? And there was a plague in China too.” said Gao.

I looked at Anscombe, “So what do you want to do? Rush out and investigate the N95 black market? Tweet an offer to donate one hour of pro bono consulting to a nonprofit for every hour a client buys? Our skills are not, you know, particularly useful right now. It’s not like we are holding up anything important by focusing on something else.”

“Speak for yourself. I’ve been scraping data, running my own analyses on flattening the curve, and my own simulations of test-and-trace protocols. I’m also reading virology papers.”

“And you think that is the best use of your time and energy right now?”

Anscombe sighed. “I don’t know. I just feel like, you know, I should be doing something productive to contribute. It’s not like I have anything better to do right now.”

Gao asked, “Didn’t you say you had a bunch of new leads for contingency planning modeling work when we met at Khan’s? You were even offering to hook me up.”

“It’s a total bust. All those leads dried up. I guess the situation evolved and escalated too quickly. Half of them went into radio silence, the other half said they had sudden cost control measures kicking in and had to back out.”

“No business continuity plan survives first contact with the coronovirus, old Chinese saying,” said Gao philosophically.

“I guess we could talk about the 2×2 a bit,” said Anscombe grudgingly. “It’s not like everybody and their uncle isn’t building curve flattening and test-and-trace simulations. The marginal value of anything I could do is probably zero. I guess I was clutching at it because it’s at least something I could do. I’m feeling pretty useless right about now.”

“Never let that bother you. The trick to consulting is to own your default uselessness. You’re always useless until suddenly you aren’t. It is nobody’s Plan A to rely on consultants as an essential resource. Our role begins where Plan A ends.” I said.

“And it’s not like we’re not all in the same boat here. I started some community stuff for the gig newsletter I write, because it was something I could do, not because it’s a huge game-changer that will magically solve coronavirus.”

“I’ve been trying to get better data from my contacts in Wuhan,” said Gao. “It’s not working very well.”

“So to summarize our collective status: when there is a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. Great. Maybe I should just go volunteer at a food bank or something. Or offer statistics tutoring to kids stuck at home,” said Anscombe.

“The second best use of a book is as a doorstop, old Chinese saying,” said Gao.

“Well,” I said, “maybe this 2×2 will spark some better ideas. If we’ve guessed right that it’s from some sort of 19th century wartime or pandemic period, then I guess the top right with the yak is where the old Order of the Yak thought consultants should operate in a crisis?”

“Renew and Grow and Future. A bit banal isn’t it?” said Gao.

“The interesting thing, for me, is that there is no text there. The other three quadrants have text. Future and serve-and-protect is basically opportunistic, cynical politicians. Here-and-now and serve-and-protect is what they’re calling ‘essential services’ just now. And I guess, the top left is the escapist corner of the response. Renew and grow in the here-and-now. Baking sourdough and playing Animal Crossing basically.”

“Gotta protect those precious, fragile middle-class psyches,” said Arnie sourly.

Gao asked, “Was the top right quadrant the best quadrant int he 19th century? Like it is now?”

“I think that default emerged after World War I. The 19th century 2x2s usually positioned the bottom left as the most valued quadrant. They usually had a pretty moralistic tone like this one. The bottom left tended to be the devout, god-fearing, virtuous quadrant. The top right was viewed as the profane quadrant. So makes sense that the old Order of the Yak would cast themselves there. They had a subversive view of their role in the world.”

“Makes sense. The bottom left is doctors, nurses, soldiers. Not very different from today. Anybody you’d label a hero in a crisis.” said Gao.

“That’s a good idea, why don’t we update the 2×2 to a more… modern idiom, and add some quadrant labels. Here… lemme take a stab at it.”

I pulled up my Keynote scratch deck, duplicated my 2×2 template slide, shared my screen, and sketched one out.

“How’s this?”

Gao and Anscombe leaned forward to peer at it, and then leaned back.

“An improvement in clarity I guess. Still doesn’t tell us what should be in the Yak quadrant, and whether we should be operating there,” said Anscombe.

Gao said, “That original is more concrete. So I guess the yak question is: what does future-oriented renewal work look like inside a crisis?”

“There’s a definitional problem there,” I said. “A crisis is pretty much defined as a condition in which all positive futures seems foreclosed. When the only futures you can see clearly are the doomsday ones. When serendipity has shut down.”

“Zemblanity for the win!” said Anscombe, with perhaps a little too much dark glee.

We pondered the new 2×2 silently for a bit.

“It is obscene to work on anything other than immediate, pressing concerns and pain alleviation in a situation like this. You shouldn’t talk of growth and renewal until the crisis has passed. That is all,” Anscombe declared, a touch piously.

“And if growth is the only way out?” Gao asked, in an uncharacteristically quiet voice.

To my surprise, Anscombe seemed to find the thought calming. He said, “That’s a nice paradox. You can’t work on growth until the crisis has passed. The crisis won’t pass until growth returns. You can’t reopen the economy without stopping the virus, you can’t stop the virus without reopening the economy.”

“Out of paradoxes arise the right questions. One must stay with the questions, until they are ready to seek answers.”

“Old Chinese saying?” asked Anscombe sardonically.

“And that,” I said, “is a good paradoxical note on which to adjourn the first meeting of the new Order of the Yak.”

Scroll to the bottom for the community update.

On a walk a few days ago, I spotted this sign on a shuttered restaurant front that I thought really captured the indeterminacy of the state we’re in:

Somebody, possibly the owner, had scratched out the speculative re-opening date and put in ?? question marks. Depending on what ?? ends up being, this store is either in hibernation, in a coma, or already dead. A big part of the answer depends on how much stored fat the owners had in the system when the pandemic hit. Your ability to endure uncertainty in planning horizons is almost entirely a function of fat reserves.

Here’s another sign on another restaurant/store, this one showing evidence of some fat in the system: wine available for sale.

Do YOU have awesome wine for sale? I have some (metaphorically speaking) that’s been aging in my cellar for a while, which I might break out and sell. We’ll see.

For normal people and organizations, planning horizons are extrinsic things they do not control. For normal people and organizations, the lack of well-defined planning horizons is a disastrous condition.

For example, restaurants have daily, weekly, and seasonal expectations of demand levels. Large companies operating in mature markets have quarterly horizons and earnings expectations. They have long-lead-time product launches and production schedules based on those expectations. For normal people and companies, the world has currently fallen apart.

For normal people and organizations, horizons are necessarily extrinsic because operating states are lean by design. Predictable flows over accumulated stocks. Just-in-time over time-banking. Inventory as inefficiency rather than creative insurance against weird conditions. Low-slack dependencies on others in a value chain assumed to be intact, over high-slack ones capable of enduring some disruption.

These expectations of normalcy have fallen apart in nearly textbook ways.

For those who have been in the gig economy for a while on the other hand, horizons are intrinsic things, largely a function of internal state.

You have a cash position. You have a burndown rate. You have certain robust expectations of “passive” income. You have accounts receivable. You have a certain limited ability to move revenue events around in time. You have a certain limited ability to take on debt, depending on your creditworthiness and eligibility for various relief programs. You have some wine available to sell. You have a certain learned flexibility in things you are willing and able to do for money. Once you run out of those structural options, your next line of defense is friends and family.

Normal in the gig economy is the ability to create and sustain a planning horizon between 2-6 months out. Far enough out to avert panic, not so far out as to induce complacency. We have this ability to create time horizons because we naturally, out of necessity rather than as a matter of strategy, run somewhat fat. We are the feral camels of natural economic deserts.

By the gig economy definition of normal, not much has changed.

Of course, a long enough desert crossing will kill any camel. But it’s nice to know that we inhabit an operating structure that was kinda built for this.

This is important: you are lean to the extent your business depends on extrinsic planning horizons. You are fragile to the extent you are lean. You are fat to the extent you can create your own horizons. You are robust to the extent you are fat.

To acquire, and retain, the ability to create your own horizons, get fat. It can feel really hard, but the good news is, the more fat you have, the more ability you have to create more fat, so store your surpluses in the coming weeks and months, even if they are very meager. Even if you have to buy time hours at a time rather than days or week (pop quiz: do you know how much your life costs to sustain, per hour? Do the math, you may be surprised).

I’m going to sound like a bit of a broken record through this pandemic, repeating the same thing in as many different ways as I can think of. Get Fat is the same idea as the idea of Cash, Control, and Community. Cash and community are two important forms of fat. Control is the ability to create your own horizons.

Community Update

Prompt of the week: Find and add a good business case study to the Covid19 Case Studies page on our Roam database (there’s several good ones there already that I recommend reading. The HEB case is particularly good).

New Gigs Available

• DBA needed to move SQL Server 2008 to SSIS.

• Groupmuse needs a full-stack web developer

See the Take a Gig/Leave a Gig page for details. Take or add a gig if you can.

We now have a Discord Chat Schedule and a steady lowkey stream of activity developing. There have been 5 chat sessions in the last week already. There’s a chat scheduled almost every day (there’s one tonight at 10PM hosted by Jordan), and of course you can also just show up and see if there’s someone hanging out who might want to chat. I’ll try to tweet out upcoming chats on the @artofgig account, but you may want to put a couple of the scheduled chats that fit your schedule on your calendar, so you can drop by when you are in the mood. Right now, these chats are running in trial-and-error mode, experimenting with various formats. We’ll double down on the good ones as we identify them.

Here is the Discord invite link if you haven’t joined yet.

I’ll get the community stuff organized better next week, but in the meantime, do share your ideas on the Discord. We’re taking a sort of laissez-faire approach to evolving this thing based on what people actually need and use. So trial-and-error ideas for things to experiment with are particularly welcome.

I hope all of you are taking the appropriate measures to weather this crisis we’re in. If you haven’t, my March 12 post, Gigging in the Time of Corona might help you triage your personal situation. This week, I want to take a somewhat broader view of the unfolding drama, and our place in it as members (or potential future members) of the gig economy.

Here’s the headline behind the headlines that few people are shouting out loud as yet: there has been a murder on the history express. The old Industrial Age world just died, murdered so suddenly by Covid-19 that most people don’t even realize it is dead.

The murder happened while the world was already in a weakened state — economically, politically, culturally, spiritually, ideologically, demographically, climatologically. A new world — the young software-eaten one that is frankly not ready for the responsibility — is taking its place with such rapidity, most of us are not aware that a succession event, not just a temporary substitution event, is taking place.

The world is dead, long live the world.

Why does it matter to us in the gig economy? Because for better or worse, the gig economy is firmly a part of the new world being pushed center-stage, and is suddenly being called upon to play a much bigger role in the crisis than it is used to. Instacart, for instance, is suddenly trying to hire 300,000 new gig workers. Some towns are shutting down public transit and are in talks with rideshare companies to backstop transportation. And much to my pleasant surprise, politicians have been trying to include self-employed people, gig workers and contractors in unemployment relief schemes. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s going on.

While there are elements of the succession that are both orderly and long-predicted — for example, the rise of remote work, and the growing dominance of a delivery economy over a retail economy — this is not a controlled and orderly succession event. The situation is nowhere near being under control, much as governance institutions try to reassure us that it is. The industrial world was not ready to die such a sudden death, and people invested in it are still fervently hoping it will come back.

There may be a bit of a dead-cat bounce (dead-world bounce?) as immediate relief measures take effect in a few months, but don’t be fooled. Long-term, the old world is dead. This blow has been too severe. Don’t mistake the corpse jerking around due to resuscitation measures for a live entity.

On the flip side, the digital world was not expecting to step into the industrial world’s shoes so suddenly (one of the darkly funny things going on is the whiplash being experienced by tech critics — the so-called “techlash” is suddenly dead, now that app-based shopping and virtual work tools are kinda saving the world in the B-plot while healthcare workers are fighting the virus itself in the A-plot).

This unplanned succession story is part of the broader go brr story, as my meme above suggests.

To take just the piece of this chaotic succession of relevance to us here in the gig economy, consider what’s happened to the labor market.

In the last week, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment, almost 10x the previous record in 1982, and bringing the current total to around 10 million. The picture in other countries is going to be similar. To put it in perspective, that’s about 6% of the workforce, or comparable to the number of jobs the economy normally sheds/adds in any given normal month, but as with the comparison of Covid-19 to the flu, the direct comparison is meaningless. This is not like the normal evenly distributed transitional unemployment that the system is designed for. This is a very unbalanced surge, much like the surge hospitals are experiencing.

This graph of unemployment claims from the New York Times looks like a vertical straight line. I bet ER admissions curves are looking similar in hotspots. And unfortunately, we don’t know how to flatten this curve. There is no obvious mechanism like “social distancing” to smooth this thing out.

These are not just big, record-setting numbers. They’re fundamentally numbers that are beyond the reach of all available governance mechanisms.

To use a control theory concept, the severity of this disturbance has caused all available actuators — fiscal deficits, interest rates, stimulus checks, unemployment relief strengthening measures — to saturate. They’ve topped out far below the levels required to correct the situation.

Unemployment claims are something like Covid-19 tests: they cover only a fraction of the infected, and disproportionately reflect those ill enough to go to a hospital, and procedurally enabled to do so. In other words, 10 million is a very conservative ceiling. I would estimate that perhaps 10x as many are actually “infected” by the economic contagion and will end up experiencing some form of mild to severe economic distress before we’re done. That’s 100 million, or 2/3 of the American work force. The relatively safe 1/3 that might survive unscathed and perhaps even thrive? The tech economy. New baby world go brrr.

Some calibration. During the 2008 recession, workforce participation rate in the US fell from a high of about 67% to 63% and stayed there even though GDP recovered (the so-called jobless recovery — nominal employment bounced back, but participation rate did not). The difference was people who either gave up looking, or ended up in the gig economy in undocumented ways. That was a relatively modest structural shift. The shift that will follow this time will be much more radical, but it is unclear what form it will take.

Don’t extrapolate initial responses too naively. For example, sure Instacart is trying to hire 300,000 new gig workers even as the regular paycheck retail sector melts down. But that sort of initial natural market response may not be a valid indicator of the shape of the eventual outcome. We may see the creation of some sort of vast public works/employment program for instance, and a wave of nationalization of critical infrastructure sectors. In the US, the healthcare sector and health insurance models will almost certainly be transformed in response, for better or worse.

But to repeat my main point, the situation is not under control. The available mechanisms simply do not have enough control authority for anybody to be in control. Not central bankers, not political leaders (authoritarian or non-authoritarian), not people sewing cloth masks and baking bread at home to do their part, not libertarian preppers realizing that they stockpiled the wrong things.

The collective governance problem here is a bit like trying to steer the Titanic with a kayak paddle, after it has hit the iceberg.

The industrial world was simply not designed to be governable through such a crisis. When you look at previous crises the industrial world got through alive (relatively speaking) — World Wars 1 and 2, the Spanish Flu, the 70s oil shocks, the collapse of the Soviet Union — you always find a period where essentially nobody was in charge for a while. Luck, momentum, and emergence effects shaped the outcome and averted the apocalypse, not the designs of people who thought they were in control.

The digital world on the other hand, is capable of governing through such a crisis I suspect, but is simply not mature enough in the relevant capabilities yet.

The next 18 months will see a rapid and serious increase in the systemic capabilities of the digital world, but it won’t be enough, or quick enough, to regain control of this situation. The digital capabilities we are acquiring in war-mode right now will make the response to the next pandemic (and there will be a next pandemic) better governed, but this one is going to be a hugely chaotic succession/transformation event.

Next time we’ll have fancy blockchain based pandemic surveillance tech on our phones.

Next time we’ll have better unemployment and health insurance models.

Next time we’ll do this social distancing thing without throwing a third of the work force into unemployment.

But this time… not so much.

As every political leader is saying, we’ll get through this. But not because anybody has a plan or is meaningfully in charge.

We’ll get through this because the evidence of history suggests that the new world will emerge rapidly to take the place of the dead old world in an unplanned emergent way. In a nature-abhors-a-vacuum way. In a way that doesn’t satisfy the Brave New World design urges of any of the ideologues currently salivating over utopian reconstruction possibilities.

I am belaboring this point because I am bemused by the analysis posture adopted by so many otherwise smart people: that while this is a bad situation, it is in some sense a situation that is under control.

A reassuring picture is being painted that between global public health agencies, central banks, political leadership (however inept) and corporate agility, there is enough governance authority to actually meaningfully steer the situation. We are talking of vast deficits, radical shutdown measures, grounded airline fleets, and an emergency mode reshaping of the economy from brick-and-mortar to virtual as though they collectively constitute a thoughtfully planned response that’s proportionate to the situation.

It is not.

Nobody is in charge. Not Trump, not Wall Street, not central banks, not Dr. Fauci, not the WHO, not Xi Jinpeng, not 3M churning out N95 masks, not Amazon, not Instacart, not motorcycle gangs LARPing Mad Max futures. Not your favorite Cassandra exulting in a dark sense of their own prophetic told-you-so rightness.

Agency does not equal controllability. All these actors are doing things that will shape the emergence of the new world, but the bulk of the emergence will be ungoverned. It will involve all sorts of weird random things that get locked in as new defaults. Strange initial conditions nobody chose will turn out to be crucial in setting new directions and creating an anatomy for the new world.

So pay attention. The outcomes will not match the blueprints.

For us in the gig economy, this is the most important thing to remember as we plan our individual next moves through the turbulence. Perhaps you’ll get really lucky and your corner of the world will sail through the crisis peacefully, and perhaps come out on top. Perhaps you’ll get really unlucky and your entire life will get destroyed by this. Most of us will land somewhere in between those two extremes.

But what none of us will have is the luxury of a clearly defined role within a larger plan coordinating the response, with clear instructions on what to do next.

This is a condition we in the gig economy are used to. We are used to there being no plan. We are used to navigating open waters and ungoverned conditions. We are used to the economic wilderness in a way most of the world is not.

But that doesn’t mean we’re in a sustainably better place than the paycheck world. It just means we’ve bought ourselves a little extra time compared to most.

In a fast-developing crisis, a little extra time is worth a lot, and easy to waste, as world leaders have shown us. Use it well, or lose it.

I’ll keep tracking this situation as it evolves, and I’ll be doing my best to provide some hopefully useful running commentary on the gig economy subplot. But the bulk of what happens to you depends on you.

Art of Gig Community V 0.1

Over the last 2 weeks, we’ve gotten two community things going. It’s a bit rudimentary and hastily slapped together so it can be of some use in this situation, but hopefully we can make it better in the coming weeks.

1. A publicly editable Roam database. Start with this Welcome page.

2. An Art of Gig discord server. Here is an invite link.

I’ve also been doing a prompt of the week. Here is this week’s prompt.

• If you’re willing to volunteer to host a weekly 30 minute voice chat session on the Discord server, add your name, day, time, and time-zone to the Discord Chat Schedule page on the Roam database. I’m planning on hosting one on Friday mornings, 9:00-9:30 AM Pacific time.

I hope to grow this community infrastructure into a useful resource, especially during this tough period we’re entering. But you’ll need to pitch in for that to happen.