A little reinvention

By issue 169, we thought The Clec deserved a fresh look.

Our website has recently had a refresh, with The Clec at its heart. This is where we write for ourselves, follow our curiosity and share what we find. That spirit helped shape the website’s design. Now some of its colour and energy are finding their way back into the newsletter.

It’s shorter, brighter, and gives our writing more room to shine. We know people open The Clec for Daniel’s fabulous images. We want our words to catch your eye straight away too.

A new look, then, with the same curious spirit

Keeping a newsletter going takes effort. Luckily, we like the work: writing, dreaming up themes, hunting for stories that bring them alive. There’s always something to discover.

And that eclectic reading does more than fill a newsletter. Exploring beyond our usual tech world gives us fresh perspectives to bring to our clients’ work. It helps us join the dots, spot patterns and make unexpected connections.

Creating The Clec is good for us

We hope reading it is good for you too.

We imagine you’re as curious as we are. That you enjoy a sideways look at the world, an unexpected connection, an occasional trip down a rabbit hole.

Which brings us to reinvention. How do you decide what needs to change, and what deserves to stay? After 169 issues, we’re attached to The Clec. But we also want to give it room to grow. And the more we look around, the more we notice that reinvention rarely happens all at once. Something changes. Something carries on. Sometimes the most important work happens out of sight.

It’s got us thinking about reinvention in other places – in nature, in business, and in ourselves.

Keep the roots. Grow something new.

It can take certain species of bamboo around 6 to 7 years to reinvent itself after flowering. Phyllostachys vivax, a Chinese timber bamboo, goes through a dramatic cycle after flowering, which can exhaust it. 

Above-ground it appears to deteriorate and die back, but the underground root system survives and gradually produces new growth. It regenerates itself. The established root system remains. What changes is what grows from it.

Back to the brick

In 2004, LEGO was in crisis. Years of expansion into theme parks, clothing, video games and increasingly complex products had taken it away from the simple idea at its heart — the humble brick. Sales were falling, losses were mounting and the company was facing bankruptcy.

A new CEO stripped away the complexity and refocused on what had made it special in the first place — the brick and the endless possibilities of play. Within five years revenues and profits were growing strongly, and LEGO went on to become the world’s largest toy company. Yet it remains predominantly family-owned, with 25% held by the LEGO Foundation, which focuses on helping children learn through play. 

Sometimes reinvention isn’t about becoming something different. It’s about rediscovering what made you special in the first place.

The six year taxi journey

Some destinations take longer to get to than others. It took Uber six years to get from disruption to reinvention. In 2010 it disrupted the taxi industry, not by inventing anything new, but by connecting existing dots — cars, smartphones, GPS, payments and ratings — to create a better user experience. 

But by 2017 the disruptor needed disrupting. The founder resigned in controversy with Uber facing a major reputational and regulatory crisis, with losses of $4.5bn. The new CEO began reinventing its culture, leadership and relationship with regulators. Six years later, Uber recorded its first annual operating profit of $1.1bn. Sometimes even reinvention needs reinventing.

The seven-year itch

OK, so this is more of a myth than a fact, but apparently every seven years you become a completely new person. Except you don’t! The myth probably stems from the very real fact that our bodies are constantly renewing themselves — old cells die and are replaced by new ones. It’s just the neat seven-year timeframe that’s wrong.

Different parts of us renew at very different rates — from days for some cells to years for others, while some stay with us for life. Perhaps that’s a better metaphor for reinvention anyway. You don’t have to replace everything to become something new. Some things are worth keeping.

338 weeks later

Which brings us neatly to The Clec — 169 issues in, one every fortnight for almost six and a half years. Long enough, it seems, for bamboo to regenerate, LEGO to build back, Uber to reinvent itself and, according to myth at least, for us to become entirely new people.

So perhaps it’s time for a little reinvention of our own. Not ripping up the roots or changing things for the sake of it. But taking a fresh look at what we’ve become, keeping the things that still matter and making space for something new to grow. 

Same roots. New growth.