Unfinished
There’s an unfinished painting on my desk. It’s been there since week 1.
This week reminded me of it. And why maybe the finish is not the point.
Week 14 of life post-MAS. (Links to past weeks in my newsletter.)
The familiar. A friend and classmate who now looks at the ISO 42001 certification process. A regional head of AI governance. A director at a training institute. A professor in a US university. A business developer from a training company.
New connections. A room of senior executives from a global leadership programme. The audience at an ACAMS conference. Regional regulators at a dinner, and the training institute’s faculty. The group head of innovation at a bank. MBA students and faculty at a US university. A former media CEO figuring out what’s next. Someone who was a teacher and civil servant, now independent, like me.
It was a hectic week of speaking. Four rooms. I prepared for each of them. But I had to remove the finish in each case.
The rooms
The week started with an executive class for a global leadership programme that ran a full day. The silence of the class troubled me. So I deviated from the finished presentation. Switched to more questions, and a game. Not really sure if it worked during the class. But the enthusiastic questions at the end left me less troubled.
I was supposed to play the role of the ex-regulator at the ACAMS panel discussion. But midway through, something switched, and I went - screw it - let’s forget boring regulatory perspectives and go for the technical and conceptual ones. Not sure if it worked, but I’m pretty sure I made a slight splash. Not sure if it was a good or bad splash though.
The dinner for the regional regulators. I had prepared a fairly pretty deck of slides - fit for a dinner talk. But the projector failed when I arrived. No slides. Slight panic. So the 20 minutes of sharing was pure riff. But I managed to get some participation from the audience. Less troubling than the executive class that started the week.
The last one was a talk to MBA students and faculty at the College of William & Mary. By the time I did this, after a long week of speaking, I no longer liked the original finished deck I prepared a week earlier. Made major changes just before it. Riffed a little. I hope it worked.
The prepared versions were finished. None of them survived contact with the room.
The painting
Back to the painting. It’s been on my desk since week one. Untouched most weeks. I used to worry about that.
But I’ve learned from years of creative practice that fallow isn’t drought.
Come back after a long gap and the work is different. Usually better. Something one couldn’t have made before the pause. The finish is not the only goal.
The painting will get done. But not by forcing it.
Last week I wrote about gradient descent, finding the flow.
I suspect the universe wanted to teach me a lesson this week. To show me what it meant to really follow the flow, and not force it. From unresponsive classes, impatient pivots, to equipment malfunctions.
The takeaway
Less resistance. Less reliance on the finished prep. More listening to where the room is going, and trusting that what’s underneath is enough.
I liked this week.
#Flow #AIRiskManagement #Transitions #Reflections #Art