A Mason's Work

At its systemic level, the plum is all about this non-negotiable reference point, this

non-negotiable grounding.

The all systems that are designed to create lasting change and improvement, all systems

that survive the test of time, have a grounding to a moral purpose or a moral orientation,

that those systems, without it, that are just delivering, you know, whatever they might

be, they're delivering something that does not speak to that grounded sort of human

condition, the grounded human experience, the moral connection between kind of the

overall world outside and the sort of design intent of that system.

Without that, external pressures will essentially force those systems to collapse.

When you have a grounded system, when you have a system that is aligned to values, what

happens is that system is allowed to change and adapt.

The values remain the same, but the situations and how it responds are allowed to move as

needed.

So, if we look at this in the form of company, right, a company that essentially focuses

on providing high nutrition, for example, will be able to adapt through ingredient changes,

through weather changes, through all of the kinds of things that would impact an organization

that's trying to make food.

If you're instead focused on making burgers, right, if there is a wheat shortage, your

ability to make burgers may be jeopardized.

If there is a beef shortage, your ability to make burgers may be jeopardized.

When you're focused on the outcomes, rather than a design intent, you lose a bunch of flexibility

and you become rigid and rigid systems tend to collapse.

Which is strange, right, because it seems like there's this almost dualistic interpretation

here that that rigidity of the system and alignment of values both seem like rigid things.

They seem like rigid concepts.

But that alignment to values allows those values to be expressed through the way the organization

operates.

And it allows the outcomes of that organization to change and move, whereas being attached

to the outcomes you're creating or being aligned to creating a specific X or Y or Z in

your culture does create this organization that's going to have a hard time sort of standing

with test of time.

I'll give you another example.

When you're focused on, for example, the core value is let's say housing, right, you

create a nonprofit and its entire purpose is to essentially house the unhoused.

That that task seems, seems huge, right.

But at the same time, it has a built-in end date.

During the unhoused is in theory a endable problem.

And when that outcome is achieved, you're going to get to a place where that organization

essentially will have to redefine a new one.

It doesn't have that same center of gravity.

It had a purpose-driven direction, but it did an outcome-driven direction, but it didn't

have a values-driven direction.

When we talk about an organization of similar nature, we might talk about somebody that

has a nonprofit to create a sustainable housing that pays homage and respects the environment,

that quest is likely never ending, right, because science and technology is going to allow

us to adapt to the housing needs.

You can still have the objective in your pipeline there to make sure everyone has housing,

to give everyone housing.

At the same time, that sustainability component, the fact that you want it in harmony with

nature, creates this perpetual chase for the harmony in nature, but it also aligns

to essentially that strong value proposition, that strong core value, that the organization's

going to essentially have this built-in flexibility to achieve that objective however they

see fit.

If I design, if I define housing as a 200 square foot studio or 300 square foot studio apartment,

you know, make sure everybody has one of those.

Again, rigidly locked in, whereas if I say, I want people to have a place to live that

is in harmony with nature, and I'm not going to define what that is, I'm just going to

suggest that we're going to pursue this as a direction.

I now have an organizational line to a sort of a gravitational pull that does have that

flexibility that we're looking for.

This systemic understanding of the plumb is moving from, again, almost like an outcome

driven mission statement to a values driven mission statement that allows the outcomes

to flex as they need to.