Before I offered services: I endeavored to understand the industries, sectors, and ecosystems.
Time invested in procurement platforms, forums, roundtables – alongside establishing internal frameworks – helped me to clarify:
- My fit / immediate value-add
- Capacity / bandwidth for serving others
- Discernment for maintaining directional integrity
Visual identity: the aesthetics I want to evoke through representing myself.
- Elephant logo – a nod to both multi-cultural ‘conservation, stewardship’ symbology and Alabama
- Color palette – laid back, beachy vibes; to diffuse anxiety that follows complexity
- Scottish tartan – a nod to my Scottish genealogical heritage
- Scotland’s contributions to sciences, innovation, and governance
- Mary Somerville, the Scottish female, that inspired the first use of the term ‘scientist’
- Two tartans (Grant Ancient and Gordon Old Ancient) aligned with my color palette – fortunately, Gordon is one of my familial clans
Communication frameworks: decision systems and archetypes easing ‘flat’ black/white storytelling and/or instructions:
- Decision systems facilitate communicating perspectives and their competing incentives and constraints
- Archetypes facilitate my ability to portray the collaborative efforts informing stewardship
- SOPs – establishing standards and consistency, for if / when I decide to hire out some of the supporting activities; thereby – successful performance is reasonably possible. “What good looks like” is legible and stewardable.
Behind the scenes and analog activities: stewarding the development of myself and others:
- Steward planner – preserving proactive posture, mitigating reactionary responses
- Establish the immovables – annually, quarterly, monthly; setting 90, 60, 30 day reminders
- Sketch out the months and weeks
- Journaling on stewardship daily – this is where the reference to the dodecahedron shines
- 3-D representation inspired by Mark Divine’s “3 spheres, 5 mountains” in his ‘The Way of the SEAL’ book
- I created an evaluation tool to aid in my planning and development
- SONAR – Signal Over Noise: Adaptive Reasoning
- I’m in the early stages of ideating creating SONAR, a ‘community of practice’
- Steward planner – preserving proactive posture, mitigating reactionary responses
Before I ask for trust: I wanted to become a better steward.
Stewardship isn’t restraint – it’s preparation.
The time and space invested into experiencing and vetting the full scope of Porteolas’ operations, allowed me to:
- Draw from and incorporate the spectrum of acumen I established through educational and professional developments
- Experience first-hand what organizations are navigating and/or preparing to navigate – first applying those same disciplines to my own practice
