It’s fall and many of us are engaged some form of local harvest. In our home, we have some fine ripe tomatoes and some fresh picking of potatoes from the community garden. It is indeed a time of gratitude and thanksgiving.
I remember potato digging in the fall. They were harvested and then they would spend the winter in my grandparent’s root cellar and in my parent’s dirt floor basement. They were the fall bounty and the promise of something to eat that winter.
You could always find two distinct piles of potatoes. The larger pile was for the winter’s eating. The smaller pile would be the seed potatoes, held in trust down there, until the warm breeze of spring and the new planting.
Generally, it was a fine workable, closed loop process but one factor could throw it off and create big problems.
Hard times.
When times got tough, it required some rigorous discipline to watch that pile of tasty, feed potatoes disappear and be strong enough to hold back the temptation to start eating next year’s seed potatoes.
It was always a bad choice to eat today what we needed for planting tomorrow.
This may be an interesting metaphor for how we tend to handle hard times in our organizations and communities. I knew some hard times. I was sent out the door many times under the fancy words of surplusing, downsizing and the dreaded “your pink slip is showing.”
Hard times, but I could see them coming and I had some good seed potatoes in the bin. My seed potatoes were a youthful practice of continuous learning which helped make me valuable to the next employer. I also had a storehouse of good friends and family who saw me through those hard times. You know I must also credit some progressive government policies recognizing young people in those times as a resource worth supporting. Thank you, Company of Young Canadians, and Katimavik, for example.
My primary business, in my youth, for the most part was to get out of business, do myself out of a job, so to speak. In my work with First Nations, I helped build sustainable education capacity for them to own the work and get me out the door. I was the edible potato and my job was to grow and leave the seed potatoes. (Hey Earl Ermine!)
We are in some difficult and hard times these days and I wonder if we have the wisdom and imagination to keep our seed potatoes. I believe seed potatoes are a metaphor for our youth. As we see cost of living, housing and the lack of working wages deepen every day one wonders what impact this will have on our precious young seed potatoes.
Most working people know how to scramble in hard times, organizations not so much. While people struggle to re-learn, tighten up and re-load, organizations often hunker down, pass blame and unload.
It hurts to see companies and organizations who continue to bring in the hatchet men, downsizing and re-organizing and generally just blindly eating their seed potatoes.
Many organizations continue to measure busyness instead of effectiveness. We stick our fingers down our throats and purge great numbers of people every few years, instead of a more wellness diet of trimming down and keeping fit.
People are often seen as the problem instead of the solution. We do not fully understand and engage them and they become expendable and surplus to the organization instead of the essential core of it. We surely did not fully engage them very often.
Speaking of staff engagement, I often tell the story of the young Intensive Care nurse who at three o’clock on a horrible morning asked me what I did for a living.
As I stumbled an uncertain reply, she snapped back, “I know what you do. You are one of those outside experts who come and sit with our managers, with your flipcharts and such and then come up with a master plan to fix this place.”
I stumbled again for a good reply, but she was soon on a roll.
Why don’t you people ever ask me, she snapped. If you took a minute and asked me, I could tell you where we are screwing up in health care. I could tell you why the lines are long, the staff burnt out and the money wasted.
A seed potato was speaking to me and I will never forget her for that moment and the gift she gave me.
She gave me the perfect plain language vision statement for my life’s work.
“Why don’t you ever ask me?”
So why don’t we ever ask those front-line seed workers how we can be more effective, lose some weight and find our way back to doing great work.
I would honestly say that, in forty-five years of going through hard times, I cannot recall ever being asked, even once, to help figure out where we could truly do some good instead of just, having the “bored” room, once again, downsizing and reorganizing the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Many seed potatoes were sent out or walked out those doors.
Today, we see the thousands of front-line people getting the pink slip and especially our youth, born in the shadows of 911 and now coming of age in a post pandemic world, wondering if that negative sound, that crunch they are hearing every day, might just be the sound of us older and successful ones, eating our own seed potatoes.
What I have learned is simple.
For most of my career, the primary mental model for an employee was “you are what you do.” We have the org charts, strategic plans and job descriptions to show you if you don’t know.
Think about how many conversations start off with that old line, “What do you do Bob?”
So, it seems we believe our importance in those conversations, in those organizations and in the world, most often starts with what you do…not who you are.
What you do is a very tiny box.
Who you are is not a box, it’s a big, whole life.
A life asks…
What do you care about?
What do you know?
What do you want to know?
What do you think?
What can you contribute?
In those days, I thought what I did was a big deal.
Today, those five things outlined above, would be my first priority.
In a knowledge economy, what you do is a long way down the list from what you know, what you think, what you care about and what you are learning. Continuous learning is the biggest tool in a knowledge world, right?
The old cliché, we are human beings, not human doings, comes to mind.
I have learned that until we respect the file clerk for what he or she knows, cares about and thinks, we will never engage him or her in a respectful, fruitful and productive workplace or community conversation.
More to the point, unless we engage him and her much more fully in the whole, not just the job, we are in imminent danger of eating those important seed potatoes.
So, with respect, gratitude is hiring, supporting and fully seeing those seed potatoes. A true AI approach (Authentic Intelligence) would be respecting and keeping them safe and cool for our future.
I would like to acknowledge my good friend and music partner Catherine Checora both for the music and also for her skills and insights into making these writings Substack worthy. Thank you, Catherine! Here is a painting from her collection.
Splendid little piece of shared wisdom, Bob. I see this same concept being applied to a fuller appreciation of taxation and even climate change. Investing in our future certainly puts pressure on present capacity and yet without it, no future is possible.
Great metaphor again, Bob. Unfortunately, we are keeping our seed potatoes in warm spaces these days and a lot of them have gone soft and spoiled. That, combined with expansive corporate greed, has created an environment for “learned” computers to take control of every aspect of our lives.