Wandering Strategists.
Centuries ago we had wandering minstrels who would travel from village to village, sharing stories and songs, and spreading news from one to another.
As businesses become more distributed and remote-first, or organisations become more semi-autonomous following models like Tribes and Guilds, internal communication becomes more complex; the signal to noise ratio on platforms like slack becomes impossible to navigate; and what is everyday to Team A could be valuable to Team B, but easily overlooked.
I’ve always had horizontal roles — working across a business to help create more connected teams, ecosystems and experiences, and when working like this, I see so much magic that others haven’t had the opportunity to. Almost every project the feedback is “I loved that we all come together to share, I met people I didn’t know, and learned so much, we should do this more often”.
Who within your organisation is wandering horizontally to find the opportunities of doing better work together, internally?
Do we need to reimagine the idea of the wandering minstrel, and create a form internal journalism — finding, curating and sharing stories from within organisations, so that others may learn and be inspired, or simply … more connected?
