Hi.
It’s a bit of a crazy week, with the launch of a new talk and workshop Thursday night in Fairborn, Ohio. If you’re in the Dayton area, you can join us at The Spark in downtown Fairborn, Ohio. Get the details here. Paid subscribers will get a special link to the live stream as soon as I have it, so watch your email or Substack app for the details later today. Edited video will be available for those of you outside the Dayton area soon.
In the process of developing this talk, I found myself returning to this piece that I initially wrote many years ago. The metaphor of sailing, and of adapting to the wind and the waves to get where you want to go, continues to resonate with me, and I think it remains a powerful model for how we can best manage in an era of change, and often tumult, that we can’t directly control.
The kinds of sea changes that I talk about aren’t good or bad — they just are. The choice we have is to figure out how to work with them, or to fight them.
One of those strategies has higher odds of success. The other has higher odds of capsizing.
Having capsized more than once, I know which one I prefer.
This selection is from my 2021 book, The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived. Get your copy here, here or here.
That sea change concept that I threw out in the title of this chapter probably needs some unpacking, especially if you’re like I was until I married a guy who lives to sail. Because it’s a central metaphor for what we’re trying to do.
When you are captain of a sailboat -- whether it’s the Sunfish that my kids learned to sail on, or an America’s Cup catamaran -- what you can do and where you can go is constrained by the wind and the water. And the first lesson of sailing is:
If the wind is coming straight from the direction you want to go, you can’t go directly there.
A sailboat always has to move at an angle to the direction of the wind. If you point the bow of the boat into the wind, you stop moving. So if the place you want to get to is in the same direction that the wind is coming from, you cannot just go there. You have to “beat,” which means to go back and forth at an angle to the wind, zigzag-style.
You might say “damn it, I am going to go straight there!” You can try as hard as you want, but it ain’t gonna work. Your only choices are to beat upwind, or go somewhere else. And if the wind direction changes, as happens about every 30 seconds on the little lake where we often sail, you have no choice but to change either your tactics or your plans about as often.
So there’s wind. Water changes, too. If you’re on the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, and a storm is coming from the northwest out of Canada, the wind will pile up the waves across the whole lake. By the time it gets to your harbor where you’re trying to get your little piece of flotsam in the water, those waves look like mountains. You can have a lovely sunny day with a perfect wind, but those waves mean you’re stuck… unless you change to a bigger boat, or change your destination.
Not so many people learn how to sail anymore. If we did, maybe we would learn to rely less on command and control approaches to our communities, and pay more attention to how we can shift to work with the sea changes in the world around us.
This is a very nice chart of how you can position a sailboat and its sails in relation to the wind. Note the blue segment of the circle that says “no sailing possible.” If you’re pointing in the direction of this segment, like the boat at the bottom, you are “in irons.” It’s not hard to figure out what happens there. And if you don’t have an iron stomach, being in irons can be pretty unpleasant.