Coming to the end of our holidays here in France and after a short day of walking some 13kms around Monaco, I made it back to our rental to watch Spurs battle Everton in the final Premier League match of the season.
It should never have come to this, but a win or a draw was necessary to stave off relegation and with West Ham winning 3-0, we could not afford to lose.
It was a match which offered mostly one way traffic from Spurs but this season has had enough counter attacking disappointments that the nervous supporter could take nothing for granted. Kinsky made a crucial late save to fully redeem his performance in Madrid and Paulinha’s goal, just barely knocked over the line was the difference between two very different futures.
The Championship is not a league I would have wanted us to play in. A team built to compete in the Championship League was never going to retain the talent we have to play second division domestic football. Roberto di Zerbi did the business keeping us up but his job has been made so much easier next year by being back in the Premier League.
As for West Ham, Jacob Steinberg’s excellent piece in The Guardian describes how West Ham are in serious peril as they fall for the first time in 23 years. We so narrowly avoided that fate although we are much better positioned to return had we been relegated. Still. Sunderland and Leicester and ahandful of other teams can tell you that the path to hell begins at the gates of relegation, especially if your management isn’t up to scratch.
I’ll be home in a few days although travelling again to Ontario for work, but my sporting focus now becomes TSS Rovers as our shortened season enters its final five weeks of play. The men’s team are chasing Langley United for the title agains but we need them to drop points. For the women, a team that has gone through a squad transition sits mid table but even in defeat plays outstanding football. They really are a joy to watch.
Walking and birdwatching on the Camargue, near Saintes Marie
I have just finished reading Frederic Mistral‘s Mirèio in English through a florrid but free translation hosted at Project Gutenberg. I was slowly reading it during the two weeks we spent in Provence on this trip to the south of France. It’s amazing.
It is an epic poem, about the silk maker Mirèio who comes from a a family that owns land and livestock, and who falls involve with an itinerant basket weaver called Vincen. It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet story, of star crossed lovers. The plot is simple enough: boy and girl fall in love but their class differences make marriage impossible. The girl repels all suitors, and her parents angrily forbid her from ever seeing her true love. She runs away across the bleak plains and salt marshes of The Crau and the Camargue until she takes sanctuary in the chapel of the Saintes Maries. She is pursued by her father’s harvestmen and by Vincen but by the time everyone catches up with her, she has succumbed to heat stroke and dies in the arms of her true love.
The poem is structured across 12 cantos. The extended form allows Mistral to slowly move the action across the various regions of his beloved homeland in Provence. The poem is a love letter to the land and is written in Provençal, as an artistic expression of his cultural work, to revitalize the language and tell the stories of the land and the people in their own tongue. It was largely on the basis of this work that Mistral received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1904. The poem is a love story, a geographic meditation, a travelogue, a history and a collection of myths and magical experiences.
Mistral’s very name is soaked in Provencal lore. The mistral wind is the strong cold northwesterly that blows down the Rhone and clears everything away, especially in the winter months. It is the predominant atmospheric feature of the region and even in mid May, as we were walking between hill towns, it blew relentlessly for several days, a few hours at a time, but with a force and character that was unmistakable.
We weren’t walking through the region that Mistral describes in Mirèio; we were walking further north in the Luberon and Vaucluse, but we did visit the Camargue and stayed a night in Saintes Maries de la Mer, the town in which Mary Magdalene and her entourage were said to have been blown to in a storm as they escaped the Holy Land after Jesus’ crucifixion.
Nevertheless, the landscape, the architecture, and the way of life that Mistral describes in Mirèio are all present to this day in some ways in this part of the world. Having his words and impressions, lovingly committed to the page with dedication to his people, history and culture that is unparalleled. It was a beautiful gift to walk with.
Posting a link to Corina Enache’s LinkedIn post, because I don’t think she has a blog.
This one on purpose, with a hat tip to David Graeber’s work, is important. I was ruminating on this post as I walked in the Dentelles Massif yesterday in Provence.
Here is a long quote:
Purpose-driven culture, under [Graeber’s] lens, is a moral vocabulary the organisation uses to manage its people not a gift of coherence, engagement and direction. It reframes compliance as meaning and it asks you not just to do the work but to feel good about it on terms someone else defined.
The tell is what happens when you don’t feel it, when the “purpose” doesn’t land for you, when the why feels thin or disconnected from your daily reality, that becomes your problem. A coaching conversation, a culture fit question. The purpose is never interrogated but you for sure will be.
Here is the alternative: stop writing purpose statements and start asking purpose questions. What do the people doing the work think this organisation is actually for? What would they protect if they could? What makes the work feel worth doing from where they sit, not from the executive floor? You might find your purpose statement survives that conversation and you might find it needs a complete rewrite.
Purpose that is handed down is a message and purpose that is built together is a belief.
This is the best argument for taking a narrative approach to planning work. Many organizations are approaching me these days to get folks clear on purpose and it largely comes from the planning committee or the leadership and a desire for coherence or — shudder — alignment. Of course good leaders can sense a moment when a group of people feels incoherent, when they seem to be at odds with one another or somehow drifting. That’s often when consultants get called.
Enache’s antidote is probably the wisest thing that one can do to begin the process of finding purpose. Purpose hasn’t disappeared. It just shows up at different scales and in different ways. If your organization pays well to keep people around but treats them badly, expect to have a lot of employees who are there for a pay check that funds their lives rather than whatever higher or loftier goals you have.
On the other hand be wary of using purpose to coerce people into working for you and putting up with poor job conditions or underpaid labour. I see this in non-profit and other settings where an appeal to a person’s sense of duty is sometimes used as a cudgel to get them to settle for a lower standards and pay.
Mary Parker Follett famously said that “purpose is the invisible leader.” This is true. But it is true in the sense that purpose is everywhere and unless you can surface it in some way any attempt to superimpose a purpose on what’s already there will set your people at odds with one another and with the strategic decision makers. They are already being led by purpose. Do you know what it is?
Starting with a narrative capture doesn’t always give the results leaders want. One organization I worked with did this as a prequel to some focuses planning and they learned a lot of uncomfortable truths about why their staff worked the way they did and especially, why their senior staff seemed so individually focussed. It had to do with how much control the executives held. There was nothing room for anyone else to contribute and so each person just didn’t their own thing. No amount of conversation could undo the structure of the field that had been laid down for many years.
For that organization the retreat became a pro forma offsite, with the leaders unwilling to have the conversations that needed to be had. But the narrative work we did offered a repository of questions and insights that they can back to over the years and helped them let go of the control they held so tightly. It let the organization evolve through successorship phase as a few left and a few felt the shift in an invitation to step deeper into stewarding the future of the organization.
The lesson is that purpose lives in the texture of the field, not in the aspirational statements people sometimes use to structure accountabilities. Surface and explore it and it becomes possible to work with it.
Above Calanque Port-Pin looking back to the Cap Canaille near Cassis.
I’m in the south of France on the first leg of a holiday that combines a few days in Cassis, a seven day walk through the villages of Provence and then some travelling and visiting of places like Arles, Avignon and elsewhere in the region. While we are in Cassis we have been hiking on the sea cliffs, which is my very favourite form of walking. Around here the cliffs are limestone escarpments that rise up out of the Mediterranean to heights of almost 400 meters. The Cap Canaille that I’m looking at now is considered the highest sea cliff on the French coast.
Last year we visited the west coast of Italy and although I have been to the Mediterranean several times, each time I visit I am more struck and more taken with the history of these waters. Of course its all around you, in the architecture, the most notable of which is the defence constructions because this place has long been the sight of conflict, war, invasion and piracy, and those things last.
But especially here in The Calanques, a set of limestone inlets that serrate the coast east of Marseille, the more ancient history is at play. Geologically, the Mediterranean is interesting becasue it has experienced cataclymisc floods and events for millions of years. There were times it was cut off from the Atlantic, giving rise to what is know as the Messinian salinity crisis . This was followed by the Zanclean deluge when the Atlantic Ocean rushed in and filled the basin in a mega flooding event that are almost unimaginable at scale.
And there were ice ages that lowered the sea level by hundreds of meters.
Now the coolest thing I thing I have learned on this trip so far has to do with the rising and falling sea levels induced by the ice ages and the nature of the limestone all around. Limestone of course is porus and highly soluble, and when water drips through it from the surface it can carve out vast cave complexes. All over this region are caves which have been used as hermitages, wine cellars, protection and food storage up to the present day. Some of these caves were formed when the sea level was much lower, and now that it has risen again, these underwater caves are incredible grottos for divers to explore.
There is a cave not too far from here that was discovered 37 meters below the surface of the sea, at the base of a cliff by a diving guide called Henri Cosquer. He discovered the cave which now bears his name through a series of solo dives. The cave has a small opening and is big and long, and extends for 175 meters, slightly upward until you come to the surface of the water, which forms a small lake inside a cavernous hall. Cosquer spent many years following the cave to this lake, nearly dying a few times. Mostly he did this solo and kept the location a secret. When he finally found the chamber he was amazed by the limestone formations inside. There were the usual stalictites and stalagmites that one associates with limestone caves. There were mushroom shaped rocks and all kinds of interesting features. Cosquer and his friends kept exploring the cave and enjoying these sights privately.
One day in 1991, accompanied by his niece and two members of the local diving club, he was exploring the cave when they found a stencilled hand print on the cave wall. This moment, when they realized that they were not the first people to have been here must have been absolutely hair raising. Here is a cave millions of years old, submerged beneath 37 meters of water on a rough part of the coast, requiring a treacherous and technical swim into the dry gallery and here was evidence that a person had been here already. I keep thinking about what the feeling must have been like. Words cannot describe it.
It turns out that the handprint they found was not singular. This cave was ornately and liberally decorated with hundreds of prehistoric drawings dating back to between 19,000 and 27,000 years ago. There are 65 hand stencils, and 177 animal drawings all made when the sea level was lower and access to the cave was easily made one dry land. There are remnants of fires built for illumination and warmth and there are tools sitting where they were placed by the artists that carved and drew on the wall. Cosquer reported the find to the government and from that point on it was protected, studied and recognized as an archeological marvel.
All of this is captured in a museum in Marseille we visited that offers a kind of kitschy amusement park ride through a simulation of the cave. The story of Cosquer’s rediscovery of the cave though is incredibly compelling and I simply can’t shake the feeling that he must have had upon seeing that first hand print in the dark. Terror, awe, confusion, reverence…all of it probably. There is something about connecting beyond massive epochs and moments of history and geology that, as these most intimate scales, seems so profoundly deep.