Manuel Küblböck on models for self-organisation at Gini

Lisa: So Manuel, Gini is a self-organizing organization, and that means different things to different people. So what does self-organizing mean to you, and what does it not mean?

Manuel: I like to distinguish because there are three terms that get thrown around a lot, mostly synonymously. I’d like to distinguish between self-management, self-direction, and self-organization. What I understand under self-management is that people decide how they want to work together or how they are working together as a group. Then the self-direction bit is more deciding on what they want to work on, so the direction they want to go towards.

Self-organization for me is on a higher abstraction level, so it’s more about the decision-making as such. I would say self-organization is making decisions within predefined boundaries and processes but without any central direction or control through any one individual or subgroup. In that sense, it’s another word that’s thrown out a lot: emergent. That’s already… you can’t really predict what exactly is going to happen, where no one person can completely control what’s going to happen. So it’s really a collective behavior of this group.

Where it gets into leadership then is where, depending on the situation, one person leads when they’re competent to lead but also follows when someone else is more competent to do so.

Lisa: If you were to describe how Gini is structured to someone, or how it works in practice, how would you describe it?

Manuel: A model that’s not as popular as I think it should be or could be is called Beta Codex, or as many others know it, it is the Peach model. We depict your company as a circle, and outside the circle is the market where the people you want to serve. Then there are basically two layers: there’s the center and the periphery around it. The most important part is the periphery because they are close to the market and they basically create value for that market and are steered by the market even because they’re in such a close relationship. They are mostly autonomous by making their decisions local to where they are needed.

Then you’ve got the center that basically serves the periphery to serve their market. So it’s an indirect connection to the market. And that’s how we are structured as well. We use our own terminology around the personified Genie, that magical system that takes away ideas/tasks.

We’ve got in the periphery “academies,” which are these autonomous market teams that own a mission end-to-end. Then in the center, we’ve got people to help these academies to serve their market. Then, pretty much like what you’d call a matrix organization, we’ve got “faculties,” which are basically the functions in our value chain—the functions that we need to function as a business as we want to. We’ve got 18 of those, and they are basically dispersed around the company. Each of these academies in the periphery are cross-functional, so the people working in one function or faculty, as we call it, they are dispersed around the company.

And then as a third entity type, we also have something that we call “clubs,” which are basically communities of interest, and they are a lot more volatile. People can enter and leave as they want to. They are different than faculties, where the faculties are the core functions of our business. Clubs are more about what people do on top—I think they’re important for our culture but they are not essential for the business. So those are the three things we have: academies, faculties, and clubs structured in the Peach model type layer.

Lisa: And were you always quite flat as an organization, or did you sort of transform into this current model?

Manuel: It was very much a transformation. I’ve been with the company for a bit over two years now. The transformation basically started—or the implementation of the transformation started—with me joining the then-leadership group of four people. They spent about nine months beforehand getting to grips with self-organization and what does that mean, why do we want it, is this a good idea, what could it look like. So they did the pre-work, but then we basically transformed the whole thing when I started with my help.

Before then, it was actually very hierarchical. They had plenty of levels in the hierarchy with, you know, 25 people at the time. The company had a bit of up-and-down in the previous years, so they have been up to 40 people before. The company is now seven years old, and then basically with me joining was in the middle of the next upward trend where the business side of things might evolve.

Lisa: So are there managers currently or people in leadership roles that have kind of decision-making authorities distinct from other groups, or is it more distributed than that?

Manuel: The term “managers” is there—like I shouldn’t call people that. There are certainly people who are fulfilling roles that have more decision-making power than others. I think that’s totally okay as long as everyone has equal opportunity to get there and influence things, which I think is one of the things that the whole agile movement and now self-organization/new work movement well oversimplifies in terms of “that’s the villain, that’s the bad stuff, we don’t want that.”

I think as long as it’s made explicit and not set in stone, it’s totally a good thing to do where necessary—a thing you need to do. So yes, I think there are people at Gini who have more decision-making powers than others.

Lisa: So on that note, I know that you’ve been kind of pulling together some of your thinking and some of the discussion around leadership in Gini and what leadership looks like in a self-organizing company. So where are you at with your thinking, and how is leadership evolving in the organization?

Manuel: I’ve spent a bit over six months now—not just me, but we as a company—thinking about what does leadership look like at Gini and what does it look like in self-organization on a more abstract level. I think we now have a mental model that is kind of well-shaped for us, it makes sense, where we have some solid terminology to talk about things. It doesn’t mean that we necessarily agree on every single detail on it—there’s still discussions about what this exactly looks like within the company, and that’s probably going to continue indefinitely. I think that’s not a bad thing either.

So our mental model of it at the moment is that there are these three key aspects to it. One being the definition of power: what is that even, how is it exercised, how do people get to it. The second being the aspect of hierarchy: are some people above others and why, and is that localized, is it everywhere, is it permanent, is it not. And the third part is stages of autonomy: so how much autonomy can be given to an individual or group, and how do you decide which level that is, and how do you recognize if that individual or group is ready for it or if they will want it, and what’s the explicit difference between them, and what are the responsibilities and accountabilities that come with it.

So with these three things—power, hierarchy, and autonomy—I think we have a good mental model to talk about things and then break it down into what does it mean for specific roles, what does that mean for teams within the organization.

On a bigger note, I think we are working with a tension that we want people—and if you will, you can call them in this context “leaders”—we want leaders to have the power to make things happen while at the same time no one is being forced to do something against their free will. And those two things are in tension with each other. Defining our way of leadership is basically dealing with that tension, knowing that it can’t be entirely resolved, that there’s always going to be times where an individual or group will feel like they’re hampered in one way or the other, depending on which side they’re looking at the situation.

Then we break it down into rough roles that we don’t have explicitly assigned at the moment, but at least it gives us kind of a model of “this is where leadership is happening.” So we came up with a grid to basically locate where leadership is happening.

Lisa: I quite like my understanding is that you have a process of sort of experimenting and seeing what emerges in terms of practices and processes and ways of collaborating together, and then someone will start to craft a blog which becomes a Google Doc that you share with each other and you kind of jam on it together and sort of debate about different things. And then you kind of share it with the world—it’s like a work in progress, like a working out loud. I know that at least that’s what you did with this leadership piece that you wrote recently, and I think that’s quite a nice way of trying to codify something without making it too rigid or creating too much bureaucracy.

Manuel: It’s my favorite part about my work—trying to make sense of very complex situations that seem to have too many moving parts and there’s no clear definitions of, like in this instance, leadership—what does it even mean—and then trying to come up with a definition that fits our context and using my network, discussing or even debating at times with other people about it. Like, why do you see it that way, or what’s your take on it, what are my blind spots—I like that type of interaction.

With this post, I’ve actually been sitting on it for way too long. I was very anxious if I need to get this out into the world to get some more feedback on it. I mean, like, I contacted you at the level of the Google Doc, but then it’s always just a handful of people, and really publishing it on the blog helps get a wider sense of: is this something the community out there is resonating with, or is it off somehow? Usually, the community doesn’t tell you when—or it tells you in terms of, at least in my experience, it tells you in terms of if it’s not resonating because it’s neglected, no one cares. It doesn’t really tell you why they don’t care, but you can at least tell that you didn’t strike the chord here, there is something—something is still missing. So I like that part of my work very much.

Lisa: Did you get any feedback or did you generate any debates from publishing this latest piece about leadership in self-organization?

Manuel: The feedback has been mostly positive in terms of “this resonates, it puts a lot of definitions and terminology into a shared context that makes sense.” So I think it helped some people get a workshop in their old mental model about the topic. I think there was nothing in there—very little bits and pieces that might have been new for people. I mean, most of it I gathered from other sources—I think there are very few of these things that are original thoughts of my own.

I think the main contribution from this piece is really structuring it in a way that makes it easy to comprehend and understand for most people. And even that took me a 16-minute read—I was hoping to condense it down even more, but I couldn’t leave anything out without losing information that I thought was necessary.

Lisa: One of the parts that I really liked in your article was about power in self-organizing teams and organizations and kind of different types of power. Could you say something about what you’ve learned about power and the tensions around it and how to navigate those in a self-organizing context?

Manuel: Sure. So I picked up—well, first of all, I found an interesting definition of power being “power is the ability to get others to do what you want,” well, even without the others, so “power is the ability to get what you want” if others are involved or not.

And I like that model that I’ve found of three different types of power. The first being authority, so the power to direct others, the power to tell others what to do, and usually do that through some kind of reward or punishment depending on a result that’s delivered. There’s another model that calls that “power over”—so I have power over others. So that’s the first one: authority.

The second one being exchange, so I can negotiate and trade some kind of reward for a desired result. Again, what’s happening in every company in that regard is that the company rewards me with money—my salary—for the time and effort I bring to the company. So that’s a typical exchange power dynamic. In this other terminology, this is called “power by”—so I have power by giving you something you want, and you’re giving me something that I want.

And then the third one being integrative power, whereas as it’s called in another terminology, “power with”—so I have power with a group of people or with integrating ideas from different people into my own thinking. So that’s the power to attract others to your ideas. So I might inspire them through a presentation I give or a cause that I find worthy, and then they find it worthy as well.

And then there are some interesting dynamics that are going on with these three types of power. I don’t think any of those is evil per se. I don’t think you can get rid of any of them entirely. It’s more a matter of maybe recalibrating when we use what. And it definitely seems like the third one, the integrative power, lends itself much more to this whole self-organization type environment, whereas the authority and exchange power is very much how we traditionally organized within companies.

And then the interesting aspect is that this authority and exchange power is scarce and subtractive, meaning there’s a limited amount of it. If there is one position for head of marketing, then if we both aspire to that position, it can be either you or me. So that’s the typical zero-sum game—one of us has to lose for the other to gain—whereas the integrative power is very much abundant and additive in terms of, well, if I’m convinced of some cause that I want to convince others to follow me on, and you’re also convinced of that cause, then we together can have even more power than we had individually because we’re basically making each other louder in that sense.

When I first read that, I did think, “Well, that sounds too good to be true. There’s something missing.” So there’s gonna be some limiting aspect of this integrative power. And I think there is one that I haven’t read anywhere, so maybe that’s one little piece that I added to the conversation. I think the limiting aspect of integrative power is on the receiving end.

If we put that example from earlier where I have a cause that I believe in, I want to convince others of it, then this time, you don’t have the same cause but a different one. That doesn’t mean that my integrative power limits your integrative power, but we’ve got the attention of the people that we want to address—their attention is limited. So it doesn’t mean that integrative power is the solution to everything and everyone suddenly agrees—it just means that my integrative power doesn’t limit us, it’s more on the attention side that’s limited.

Lisa: I think your piece is really timely because I have so many conversations with people about this tension between, on the one hand, not wanting to be sort of old-school top-down command and control management-leadership style and, on the other hand, swinging too far in the opposite direction and having, like, “Oh, we’re all equal” and “We decide everything together” and “No one’s a leader”—and that has its problems too, right?

So there’s somewhere on that continuum that works, and it will be in different places depending on the organization, I think. But I like what you’re saying—those three types of power, for example, not sort of vilifying any of those or saying one is better than the other necessarily, but saying having an awareness of when I’m accessing which type of power perhaps, like choosing it more consciously or making it explicit, as you said.

And I also agree that “power with” seems to be more conducive to self-organization, but of course, there are pros and cons of everything. And I think a lot of self-organizing companies struggle with how to—well, how to get things done, how to have a culture of accountability without reintroducing that kind of power over people in a way that you don’t want. And yet you do want leadership, you do want people to share experience or skills or knowledge that they have if they have some expertise there, or you do want people to drive things or have visions. So it’s like this really tricky tension all the time, I think.

Manuel: It’s also something I experience—people who dive headfirst into self-organization almost have this aversion to the word “leadership” even, or the concept of it, because they want to be all equal. And I appreciate what they’re trying to get at, but I think the pendulum is swinging too far if that means that we have to reach consensus with everyone on every single topic. Because that leads to an environment or situations where you’re at a standstill, you can’t move anymore because it’s just too hard to reach consensus. And it’s also not necessary in most cases.

It’s much easier to go more into what has been very influential to us—to think more about consent and local safe-to-fail experiments. We don’t have to all agree; it’s just about making sure we don’t shoot any holes below the waterline into the boat, but the other ones we can just fix as we see that that wasn’t a good idea.

Lisa: Well, let’s talk about decision-making because I think that’s one of the core practices of when a company decides to become self-organizing or more decentralized. And I know at Gini, this is something that you’ve given a lot of thought to as well, and I often share the blogs that you’ve written about decision-making because you’ve articulated it in a really nice and visual, clear way. So how do decisions or different types of decisions get made at Gini?

Manuel: So on a high level, it’s focusing on consent instead of consensus or majority vote or any other way of making these decisions. So making sure no one has a reasoned objection, as in “I see something that you don’t seem to see, and I think it will harm us or prevent us from reaching our goal.”

We have, over the course of a couple of years (we didn’t start out with this), a four-step escalation process in terms of thinking about how should we make a decision on this. The first step is: is it safe to fail? And there are two aspects to it. Is it easily reversible? Then yes, that’s safe to fail, because if I do something and someone else says, “Oh, this is harmful, we shouldn’t do this,” then okay, I’ll just take it back and do something else. And the second one is: does it have low consequences? It’s also safe to fail.

I usually use the example of buying an adapter for my laptop. And funnily enough, I just had the same conversation last week with a colleague of mine, because she’s going to work from the US for a couple of weeks, and she was thinking about getting a different adapter for a different plug over there. And I just said, “Why didn’t you just buy another extension piece of the cable? It’s 40 euros—that is really low consequence. We shouldn’t have this conversation; this conversation costs more than those 40 hours.” So that’s step one: is it safe to fail? If yes, just make the decision as an individual, by the way.

If that is not the case—so if it is not easily reversible, if it does have high consequence—the next question is: do I, as an individual, have the mandate to decide this, or rather, do I fulfill a role that has the mandate to decide this? An example would be a recruiter at Gini who does the first screening. We want that person to make the decision: is this candidate going on to the next level of the process or not? She doesn’t have to ask anyone if that’s okay—that’s explicit in her role.

I mean, of course, she can ask someone if she wants to. She shouldn’t feel prevented from getting feedback on a decision that she’s finding hard to make, but she also shouldn’t feel that she has to double-check with someone else. So that’s step two: is there a mandate?

If that’s not the case, then the next question would be: is there a group that has a mandate to decide this? And within that group, we use the consent decision-making process that we basically word-for-word copied and implemented from Sociocracy. So it’s a guided, facilitated group process with rounds and hearing reasoned objections to come to a decision.

And then there’s a fourth step, if that’s not applicable or if it doesn’t work. Kind of two reasons: either the group’s too big and you don’t want to do this facilitated process, and that’s usually around what a sensible team size is as well, so usually below 10 people, or if you did try the consent group process but you couldn’t reach an agreement, but you feel like you have to come to a decision on this one. And in either of those two cases, we use the advice process. So we basically give the decision to an individual again, with the task: we want you to try to reach consent within the group that’s affected.

The advice process is also described in some other places—I think the “Reinventing Organizations” book has a good description of it, and I’m sure there are other places as well. So we fleshed that one out in a bit more detail because it seems straightforward and simple in theory, but it’s—yeah, it’s simple but not easy. So you can mess up a whole bunch of things.

An easy one to mess up is: when you did everything right and you heard all the right people to make the decision, but then just sending out an email with your initial decision, and that might contradict what someone else told you. Because then it’s—yeah, it’s not very nice for them to just read an email and not get your reasoning behind it. It’s much better if you maybe again try a one-on-one and say, “Hey Lisa, I understood you favored option A, and here’s all the reasons why you’re against option B. Did I hear you right? Do I understand you correctly?” And you say, “Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly—” “Well, however, here’s all the other reasons why I still decided for option A. Can you understand my reasoning for that?” And then usually what you get is those nods.

And then it’s—that makes all the difference. As long as you make people feeling heard and understood, and you’ve got this healthy relationship of respect and trust, then basically any decision is okay. That’s at least from my experience.

Lisa: I want to talk about—because you’ve brought up something there about listening, about respect and trust and the relationship—what are sort of some of the human skills, you could call them, that you’ve found are really important in order for self-organization to work effectively at Gini, and how do you nurture those?

Manuel: It’s a good question. I think a lot of that is not very clear in my mind yet, at least not as clear as now some other topics. I think that as a broad term, emotional intelligence rather, and empathy and understanding emotions, and being aware of your own and others is a crucial aspect or a set of skills to make this work. But I don’t have a clear mental model on how it exactly influences each other or what interplay exactly is.

I think it is part of what I mentioned earlier, that having these real-life relationships between each other and nurturing them is a crucial bit. I think that’s actually one of the aspects that self-organization brings to companies that’s different to more traditional setups—is to focus less on the agents in that system and more on the relationships between the agents.

That’s probably still something that I want to get a lot better at, and I want to say I’m not a native in that area. I’ve done a lot of self-study and learning the last few years in terms of even understanding my own emotions. Looking back now, I find it shocking how illiterate I was, knowing what’s going on in my own body and mind. I didn’t even have different terminology for many emotions.

The one where it gets most obvious for me was this very popular retrospective technique of mad, sad, glad. The shocking part is that people in—I would say in probably half of the teams—they would say, “What’s the difference between mad and sad?” So that’s the shocking part—that they wouldn’t know what the difference is. And the even more shocking part is that for many years, I didn’t have an answer for that.

So today I know—I am planning to publish that actually—a couple years ago, I came up with a retro technique that I called “empathy retro” that brings a lot more terminology to this technique and also different intensity levels. Because, you know, you can be mad at different levels—it can be slightly annoyed or irritated, or you can be fuming or outraged. And there’s a big difference depending on where you are on that intensity level.

Because on a low intensity, I think awareness of these emotions, which I understand now as triggers of my body telling me to do something, is very helpful. There are no negative emotions—they’re just emotions that are useful if you are aware of them.

Lisa: Feedback, exactly.

Manuel: But on a very intense level, any emotion is counterproductive, even so-called positive emotions—as in, you know, if you’re in ecstasy all the time, that’s probably also not a very healthy state to be in.

So long story short, I think the whole topic of emotions is definitely one to be aware of and to try to cultivate within a culture that wants to be self-organized. In terms of the second part of your question—how do you make sure this is tended to enough, or how do you foster it—I think what I’ve done at Gini and previous companies is to just share my thinking about it and get a common conversation started. I’ve done this in the past with just brown bag lunches or open space sessions.

Now a month and a half ago, we actually started a club—the 3C Club at Gini, being Compassionate Communication Club. And we actually wrote a little handbook on empathy as well, which we didn’t widely publish, but if you want, I’ll invite you to the Google Doc.

Lisa: I love that—the CCC. I guess I was talking to Edwin Jansen from Fitzii the other day, and he was talking about their sort of transformation to becoming teal self-managing, and he talked about the “messy middle,” the kind of heart of self-organization, which I think is touching on all the stuff you’ve just mentioned—that you get confronted with things like, “Oh wow, I’m really not that aware of my emotions,” or “I discover blind spots about how I’m being or how I interact.”

Especially if I’m in a leadership position, what would you say has been the most challenging part of Gini’s transformation towards becoming self-organizing?

Manuel: Well, there is the bits and pieces of identifying what all the processes we need and trying to come up with minimal processes and structures to take care of those. But I think that’s not the hard part, even though that’s the one that’s most visible and that’s the easiest to describe in blog posts and talked about.

But the harder part is more what’s called the messy middle. I would phrase it or look at it from the lens of: how do you decide the right level of self-management and self-direction? And that has different aspects—there’s at least three I can name right now, and there’s probably more.

The three being—I think it depends on ability. And again, there is no one way that’s right—it depends on the individuals involved and the teams and the groups involved. What level are they? So I think self-organization or organization development in general is always tied or intertwined with development of individuals and groups. So they can only grow together.

There’s no—if I take now this what we have at Gini—organizational level and processes, how we operate—and I just dumped it on some other company, it won’t just work magically. It works at Gini because it has been developed together or co-created, I could even say, with the people there. You can’t just transfer it by writing it down in a book and handing it over to someone else, unfortunately. Or fortunately, if you’re a culture trying to make a living off of it.

But so that’s the one part—the abilities. Another aspect of it, in terms of deciding what’s the right level of self-organization, I think, is also happiness. I think in our community, there’s always the thinking and notion that more autonomy is always better, but that doesn’t reflect my experience. People also—when they have too much autonomy, they show this behavior of interaction fatigue or just saying, “Well, why do I have to deal with this? Couldn’t someone else take care of this?”

And sometimes the answer is, “No, that’s part of what we want you to be involved in, to decide yourself.” And sometimes like, “Yeah, we probably don’t have to take care of what pictures are hanging on the wall—someone else can really take care of that.” So this question is: how much overhead do you burden people with, and why, and do they understand why, and do they agree that that’s an essential part of how they want to work together?

And the third part is effectiveness. What’s still effective? Is it effective that a team decides themselves what pictures they have on the wall? And maybe for one team, the answer is yes, because that’s part of their team-building exercise—the process of understanding each other and getting to know each other and seeing what other people like. And for other teams, totally no—they don’t really care, and no one in that team cares, so why should they come up with that decision? It doesn’t make sense.

So I can see those three things—ability, happiness, and effectiveness—in deciding what’s the right level of self-organization that you want to have. And there’s probably more—I haven’t fully made up my mind or dived into that topic.

Lisa: I think it’s a really good way of looking at it because I think a lot of people venture into self-organization for self-organization’s sake rather than, how does it help our organization serve its purpose better, or why is that important to this particular group of people, or why is it meaningful? So I think those three categories are helpful.

Manuel: Unfortunately, I think that’s true for really any movement that’s going mainstream—is that the late majority is just doing it because everyone else is doing it, not because they understood why they should do it or what it would even give them if they did.

And the last cycle I participated in was the agile movement, where that is happening, and where I see a lot of people in the HR community being discouraged or even disgruntled that people don’t know—that the term “agile” lost all its meaning because everyone these days is agile, and they don’t know what that means anymore. Or they don’t know—they have never read the Agile Manifesto, which is a one-page document, but they haven’t even gone through the length of doing that. And even though that describes the essence of what the movement was about, today it’s all about tools and processes, even though that’s the exact thing that it says in the manifesto that is secondary.

But again, those are just the things that are easy to describe, easy to sell, easy to start with, and then you get to the messy middle, and that’s much harder work.

Lisa: And finally, who or what is inspiring you at the moment, and what do you think—you know, have you got a next blog post kind of brewing, or something that you’re developing at Gini that you’re interested in?

Manuel: There are probably a few smaller ones that I have been on my list, that I want to get out. It’s the topic of appreciation—how do we appreciate each other—a couple other small ones.

I think the next big one, but that I am only just starting to dive into, is strategy, which is another one of these big terms, like leadership, that has no clear definition. There are a hundred ways to do it, and the question is: what’s a good way to do it in a self-organizing company—that brings with it all the good pieces of everyone feels involved, but you still are effective, you still make movement. It’s probably a good chunk of overlap with the decision-making and leadership bit, but it’s more about the “what do we work on, how do we have impact as a company?” So those are the things that I think are coming up within Gini.

Beyond that, what I’m interested in at the moment, or what I’m following, is the recent developments in climate activism. Very interesting what’s happening with Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion. I’m anticipating the rebellion week—I’m gonna be—it’s gonna be interesting what’s coming out of it. It feels a bit like “this is Occupy 2.0.” What has the community learned from Occupy, and how are they applying it to this next big global movement? Or it doesn’t happen at all, and it’s definitely gonna be interesting to see. I’m not quite sure what my role in that is—probably going to be more of a bystander and spectator on that one, and maybe a little bit of participating.

And even beyond that, I find the topic of development in society, or development stages rather, in the context of society, very interesting. So where did we come from, what’s where we’re heading, why is stuff happening the way it is? I find that lens very useful in terms of interpreting geopolitical happenings and why do certain people get elected as presidents where you would think, “This can’t be possible, this doesn’t make any sense.” And using that development stage model of society suddenly gave me a way to make sense—doesn’t mean that I like the outcome of it, or that I still often say this doesn’t make sense, even though on a high level I know that it does.

So those are the things that are currently occupying my social media streams and reading lists.

Lisa: Yeah. Are there any final words of wisdom that you’d like to share with listeners, people who are on self-organization journeys of their own?

Manuel: I’d say stop trying to find the one—the one description or the one model that’s perfect. It’s very cliché—it’s all about the journey, and there is no destination. So definitely get involved in the community, exchange with others. I find that very helpful, and then take any model that sounds reasonable and start experimenting.

Lisa: It’s good practical advice. Well, that seems like a good place to finish. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I mean, I found your blogs so helpful, and I think people—I point more people to find them and read them, and more people to hear these stories and these insights and these practical lessons that you’ve learned at Gini. It’s really helpful. Thank you for sharing.

Manuel: You’re most welcome. I’m always happy if the things I publish have helped anyone else. For the most part, I actually write for myself, to clarify the mess in my own head, and then if it helps other people to get some clarity on things, all the better.