Cutting
Growing
Grinding
Pruning
Irrigating
Sanding
Cultivating
Grafting
Pressuring
Polishing
Shifting
Feeding
Bending
Welding
Celebrating
Melting
Burning
It works better when we choose with intent.
This post from Seth is taped to the side of my computer monitor. During meetings I try to glance at it to figure out which verb I want to use for the moment in front of me. I don’t always get it right. But trying to apply these physical world verbs to the digital work world reminds me that “leadership” can and should traverse many distinct modes.
The past few days I’ve been thinking especially about the last word on that list:
Burning.
I hadn’t really considered how I might apply that word to my work - until last week.
I was reading Michael Kimmelman’s glowing review of the new LACMA galleries, designed by the architect Peter Zumthor.1 Kimmelman ends by describing Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Mechernich, Germany.
photo by Arch Daily
Local farmers Hermann-Josef and Trudel Scheidtweiler wanted to make a chapel in the middle of their fields, dedicated to Bruder Klaus (Nicholas of Flüe). Zumthor worked with them to create a wigwam of 112 spruce tree trunks:
Once a month for the next twenty-four months, Zumthor and the farmers gathered to pour another fifty-centimeter layer of concrete around the wigwam. What a beautiful ritual!
When the concrete was finished, the group gathered once more. This time, they lit the wood on fire.
Contained in the concrete, it smoldered for several weeks. And then:
Photo from thisispaper.com
Kimmelman writes:
What remained was a cone-shaped void, large enough to accommodate a few worshipers, with an oculus where the logs had been tethered, open to the sky. A single door led through a tunnel into the chapel.
The concrete bore the blackened impressions of the burned wood and retained some of its smell. A number of winters ago I found myself alone in the chapel. The light was blue and soft. Snow drifted through the oculus. The silence felt visceral. It seemed to vibrate.
I felt like I was vibrating too. Ah. This is what “burning” can mean.
Often when we destroy something it is with the intent to remove, erase, forget. But this was destruction with the intent to create - and remember.
The original structure is gone yet immensely felt.
The outer remnant stores the inner essence and makes it available to be seen, touched, felt, smelled.
The chapel is beautiful because of what once was.
I wonder if many of us are building our own Bruder Klaus Chapels without realizing it.
Every new thing starts with a scaffold. The first instincts, the early clients, the spreadsheet before the database, the clunky process.
If they work well enough, they become load-bearing.
Month after month, we gather to add layers to the original.
And if we keep going long enough, sometimes the new shape becomes the one worth keeping.
When that happens, perhaps we have an opportunity to fully burn away the original structure. Clearing it out to let more light in at the top.
A kiln, not an arson. Destruction with the intent to create - and remember. Keeping the original ideas and energy without the original structure.
Most businesses that have been around long enough could use some of this.
What remains might astonish us.
Tool of the Week
The era of Claude making slide decks for you while you sleep has arrived, with the releases last week of Managed Agents (4/8) followed by Routines (4/14) followed by Design (4/17). Anthropic’s pace of shipping this stuff is just 🤯. I haven’t had a chance to do it yet but I want to try having Claude make a short slide deck for me every morning reviewing what happened yesterday (across email/Slack/Clickup) and then presenting Top Three for Today in terms of what I should focus on. Will report back.
Awesome Startup of the Week
Briefing reader Ted Kriwiel launched Honeystack last week! It’s beautiful and needed. Check it out!
1 Does anyone else read architecture reviews as inspiration for how to build a vibrant workplace?? Just me?