Category: Future of Work

…under historical conditions that yield an ambiguous mix of possibility and powerlessness, of desire and despair, of mass joblessness and hunger amidst the accumulation, by some, of great amounts of new wealth. These circumstances, added Gluckman presciently, do not elicit a “reversion to pagan ritual.” Just the opposite. “New situations,” he says, citing Evans-Pritchard, “demand new magic”

Jean and John Comaroff, Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction

Anger is also an understandable reaction to the uncertainty inherent in the pandemic and protests…We know that uncertainty as both a cognitive and emotional state is one that people want to resolve.

Larissa Tiedens, quoted in this Washington Post article

Confused Heads

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.

Czselaw Milosz, A Song for the End of the World

With all the pain, anguish and turmoil in the world at present, there is little surprise that we are dealing with anger, despair and confusion. Even the simplest challenges of working, shopping, exercising or drinking a coffee are now battles with a pandemic and raise ethical and environmental issues for those willing to consider them.

Taking nothing seriously and recognising our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

We are faced with a real danger that we disappear inside our own heads as we grapple with this confusion. Dealing with algorithmic bubbles is one challenge, but a greater one is that in a digitally mediated world where casual interaction is restricted, we have far too much time alone with our thoughts or the media that portrays the thoughts of others as a new gospel.

What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

T S Eliot, Burnt Norton

New Magic and New Rituals

We have added new rituals to our lives as gestures of preservation: the hand washing, the hand sanitising, the wave on a video call and the elbow with which we open doors. Some have gone further and begun to seek comfort or release in older and stranger magic.

Domestic violence is reportedly on the rise and alcohol sales are rising, given the strong correlation between these two and the pressures of the time, it does not bode well as a solution. Weird conspiracy theories are being propounded as people grapple for explanations. We may not believe in evil witches, but evil billionaires, mind-control vaccines, international agents and shadowy forces are widely discussed and studied earnestly. The advocates of these conspiracies have enough confidence to argue ‘do your own research’ because they know their messages will appeal to desperate minds against the facts.

There is only likely to be an ongoing increase is these strange corners of our digital world. The pressures of climate change will continue after the pandemic ceases. Ongoing economic transformation will continue to roil traditional powerhouses and weaken historical centres of employment. Authoritarians will combine populism with conspiracy to offer easy magical solutions and convenient rituals as the solution.

The Stored Magic of Poetry

The Washington Post article quoted above proposes one solution that at this moment feels almost magical: a focus on appreciation, affiliation and aspiration. Each of these offer us a magical way outside of our heads because they challenge us to look beyond now, beyond here and to find something better in others and the world around us. We need to find our own paths to the luminous.

For me in this time of crisis, I have found appreciation, affiliation and aspiration in poetry. Reading poetry is hardly a world-changing activity, but we each can find a place to begin and to start the journey of being drawn out of our own confused heads. We need to find glimmers that lead us out to the edges.

Poetry has been a way to escape the limits of my own thoughts, to search for insights and to appreciate something greater and richer of the human spirit. Importantly, poetry offers a way to reach for something beyond this time and place, Robert Graves intriguingly described its role in human culture as ‘stored magic’.

True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity—a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic.

Robert Graves, White Goddess

Poetry also invites us to explore our human affiliation from the magic of love, to the mysteries of empathy and the warmth of compassion. We cannot read poems without inviting the rich diversity of humanity back into our lives. At a time of social isolation, there is comfort in this crowd that comes and goes at will.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Cselaw Milosz ARS Poetica?

Ultimately, the best way outside of the grip of our own heads is through creative action, ideally collective creative action. That action is the only true solution to our present crises.

 If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. 

TS Eliot, Little Giddings

Ultimately, the best way outside of the grip of our own heads is through creative action, ideally collective creative action. That action is the only true solution to our present crises.

We have seen in recent weeks the power of people coming together to make something anew, to struggle to make things even more perfect, despite the desperation of our circumstances. I have been inspired again and again with the human ingenuity in the face of crisis whether it is teenagers using 3D printers to make medical equipment in short supply or restauranteurs reinventing their business models to support customers, suppliers and survive. We have seen friends and family discover the magic of cooking, baking, solving technical challenges of isolation or coming together to support friends and community.

If anything is clear after the last few months it is that we need to create a better world. That will take much mundane work and a great deal of the magic of poetry to unite and inspire us. What is abundantly clear is that that better world lies outside of us in community and in the world. The future not to be found in our heads, no matter how passionate or certain our beliefs.

Poetry is knowledge, salvation, power abandonment
An operation capable of changing the world
poetic activity is revolutionary by nature;
a spiritual exercise, it is a means of interior liberation.
Poetry reveals this world;
it creates another

Octavio Paz, Poetry is knowledge

Last week I realised that I was missing the casual serendipity of a busy city in our new found social isolation. Serendipity matters more than ever because innovation depends on boundary crossing, exploring edges and the value of weak ties. We need innovation to get ourselves to a better place, but we need to take care to avoid gimmicks.

Losing the Serendipity of Inspiration

I am missing casual conversation, serendipitous encounters and the wonderful details of people watching in a busy metropolis

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) June 25, 2020

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed

William Gibson

Gibson’s quote is so often shared that it no longer prompts reflection. It has become a trite aphorism to be added to talks on innovation as received wisdom. Soon it will be attributed to Winston Churchill and Einstein by enthusiastic futurists and earnest thought leaders.

Fewer people have taken to heart its advice on the need for search and diffusion in innovation. Our lost serendipity matters, because unless we are exceptional change agents, we have lost the opportunity to encounter an insight or an innovation to be shared. We need to get out beyond our usual boundaries and explicitly look for new ideas and actions. Once we find one we can share it, but more productively we need to act to propogate it.

I stumbled into the phrase working out loud when my path intersected with the members of the E2.0 community. I discovered it was an idea with a long genesis, deep practice and many experts. My immediate sense was that it was an opportunity to address issues of permission, experimentation and psychological safety in people sharing their work. Through various efforts, including International Working Out Loud week, a community of advocates have worked to make it a concept that is widely considered in the future of work.

A solution to a problem that I had been struggling with already existed. I just needed to meet the people who were leading the way. Once I saw the potential of that light, I needed to foster it by joining the forces seeking to promote the solution.

We don’t meet these serendipitous discoveries in our algorithmic bubble. We need to reach out into the realm of weak ties. This distant land out in the edges of our networks is where the shining lights are to be found. Out in that distance there are different ideas, divergent insights, diverse disciplines and unique solutions at play. Our challenge is to navigate to these edges, explore them and add our talent and support to the feeble glimmers out there. The value of diversity is that it is an accelerator in adaptation. We need to embrace the discomfort out in these alien edges because that discomfort is the power of learning.

Exploring the Shining Light at the Edges

Some times a comment resonates deeply with your current circumstances. I discovered this definitions of crisis and catastrophe on the weekend.

The definition of a crisis is a situation where old solutions do not work any more. The definition of a catastrophe is when they're used anyway https://t.co/ow4vv0ICNE

— Discursive anomalies, esq (@sargoth) June 28, 2020

The last months have demonstrated to us that we we need new and better solutions in public health, in politics and in business. Those solutions won’t be in the core of your discipline or a training manual. We need to go out to the boundaries to find them, crossing disciplines, organisations and even continents.

To find these solutions we need to look in new places in our organisations. We especially need to work with those employees who are interaction at the edges, in Customer care or who might not otherwise be engaged as part of the strategy process. In times of rapid change and reduced interaction, these edge keepers are essential part of an organisation’s sense making and strategy development.

We can now look beyond the edges of our organisation and sift for serendipity in the global flow of information. The balance is always to sift the shining lights from the dross. We can get distracted at the edges, especially by social media. In a recent book on gimmicks, Prof Sianne Ngai, highlighted these characteristics:

overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks), but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention)

Social media appears at first as a labour-saving trick. It seems to offer us the ability to bring research to us. However, that experience is challenging unless we keep on our guard. There is little labour saved when we must be working to control our own attention from the ever alluring demands of the algorithmic bubble.

The challenges of innovation are known. Boundary riding is never safe nor easy. The answer is not to give up. Surrender and apathy are old solutions. Our health, our businesses and our society depends on new solutions and new approaches. Six months ago we had never heard of ‘bending a curve’, now it is a common part of global health policy in response to the pandemic. Six months ago, governments around the world were reducing benefits, now they are expanding them in creative ways. The Overton window of acceptable solutions has become volatile and expanded in this crisis as people look out for better paths and it is time for some creativity in the policy solutions and business ideas to manage our circumstances. The next phase and the next phase has yet to be invented but is lurking somewhere waiting to be discovered in the edges. We have the crisis. Let’s go looking for new solutions.

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before

Rahm Emmanuel

It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The times may be dark, but we will see ourselves better through the luminous glow of relationships. When we can’t revel in the rays of the sun, at least we can bask in the shine of relationships and enhance that glow for others.

Wintry rainy days have surrounded us, changing the landscape and increasing our isolation. Our friends, family and connections have become a source of light in these times. I am still surprised how many new business meetings over a videoconference, begin with both parties sharing their experiences, light and dark of the recent months. In our struggles with the pressures of isolation, we have discovered the light that shines from others.

Everybody shines, just not in the way of the cheesy self-help books. The play of light is simple physics. Everybody reflects the light they receive. Without light reflecting off them to our eyes, we wouldn’t see them at all. Like bokeh to a camera lens, every single person is a amorphous and luminous glow in our landscape. The way we engage with others sharpens them into focus. Everyone has the potential to bring a moment of brightness into our day.

Fish in the sea are luminous so that they can recognise one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?

Angela Carter

Not everyone does. Some people manage to defy the simple physical laws of reflection. Many people make a room, a call or a conversation darker than it was before. Like an anomalous event horizon they absorb light, happiness and energy and let none escape. This is not always aligned to the topics they discuss or their mood. There are those who make the place darker sharing their joy and good news. The light is trapped by the black holes inside them. Those blackholes are usually their self-centredness, self-interest and self-regard. The best we can do with these people is leave them to their own darkness.

We can instead move towards those who are luminous, making them brighter in our lives. We can take the feeble bokeh blur of our incipient relationships and reach out to these bright lights with questions. We can listen to their circumstances, experiences and emotions. In the growing understanding we will discover a growing light. We will bring their light into focus.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

Jeanette Winterson

We can find, foster and engage more with those who can shine brighter. We all know these people. Even in the distance or in a moment they bring a glow to a conversation, an interaction or a moment. This glow is not a consequence of status, power, charisma, topic or emotion, it comes from their energy and enthusiasm for others and for the world. It comes for their care, concern, and understanding of us and others. This is the light of engagement, empathy and compassion.

Many of those who glow brightest are grappling with sadness and challenges. Despite, or because of, their challenges, they still give their light to others, reaching out beyond their own circumstances. Our task is to help them to sustain the light that they share by repaying their illumination with our own care, concern and understanding. The light we share with our concern will be reflected many times again.

A muddled distant light can offer a destination in dark times. Only when we reach out with understanding will that light resolve into the luminous potential of a new and richer relationship.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato

“If I have caused offence, which was not my intent,…”

Every apology ever in the age of outrage

The law of torts has a concept of the eggshell skull, which means that if you carry out a tortious act you take your victim as you find them. You deal with the consequences of your actions whatever they may be. If it happens that your victim is unduly sensitive, then you must bear the consequences of your action. The guilty party doesn’t get to determine an acceptable level of damage.

Authors don’t get to prescribe the meaning of their texts. Whatever they might have meant, the text is open to interpretation by a wide and diverse community of readers who will read the lines, between the lines and through the lines. Readers will project their own experiences and interpretations into the text. The classics are often those that are most open to this projection and interpretation. Like a good constitution, their meaning evolves through the evolution of its community, their values and practice.

Angry people on social media will often seek to blame their audience for its lack of size, enthusiasm or understanding. They are failing to take their audience as they find them. Noboday is entitled to an audience. Nobody gets to project what an audience can think or feel.

Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them

Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

We commonly see this problem of projection when we fall in love. To choose to take another into our lives often involves first falling in love with our own projection of who that other person is. Great relationships navigate the projection to truly understand the other as they are. Many failed relationships have at their heart two people who never reconciled the difference between the projection and the other.

Our current focus on racism is a consequence of systemic forces that prescribe dangerous new meaning for people of colour. Running through a neighbourhood, shopping, working, interacting with police, protesting, living at home, and even birdwatching are experiences that can be situations where others begin to define them and trigger consequnces without any consideration of that individual, their intents or actions. We must remember this when we feel entitled to say ‘but I am not a racist’. We are projecting meaning. How is it ours to determine this?

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire

Slavoj Žižek

This desire to prescribe meaning is all around us. We see gurus prescribing what others should think about ideas, speech, work or lives. We see advocates projecting all manner of meaning and intent on others, sometimes genuinely and sometimes as tactics. We see politicians reducing complex situations to ambiguous catchphrases and dogwhistles. Like reader and author, failed lovers, or tortfeasor and victim, these prescriptions have real consequences even if in the most generous and neutral interpretation the outcomes are accidents of time and circumstances.

The commonest fight on social media is a fight to project meaning. Someone feels entitled to prescribe the meaning of an event, action or concept for others. Someone else wants a different meaning assigned. As their purposes are mutually inconsistent no constructive progress follows. There are two consistent barrier to progress.

“I never forget that a book is not an end in itself. Just like a newspaper or a magazine, a book is a means of communication, which is why I try to grab the reader by the throat and not let go to the end. I don’t always succeed, of course; readers tend to be elusive. Who is my reader?”

Isabel Allende, My Invented Country

To engage in these acts of projection takes two circumstances in every case:

• the ability to treat the other as a blank screen on which to project meaning (or a stereotype): Projection takes a canvas that is capable of receiving our image. If we truly looked at others and sought to understand them, we would find projection far more difficult. True empathy and understanding differentiates an individual and requires us to treat them uniquely, with their own entitlements and actions.
• the sense of entitlement to prescribe meaning for an other: I might want to tell you what to think to be a ‘right-thinking person’ like me. However, it is foolish for me to think that I have the entitlement to tell you what to think, believe or act. To go further and seek consequences for your failure to think, believe or act as I require is an act of violent subjugation.

Nobody is entitled to define matters for their audience. We need the empathy to see others as they are. Only when the projection stops do we step out of the movie in our head and back into life with others.

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out

Martin Scorcese

My eldest nephew graduates from high school in the US this year (though without the usual fanfare) and will be heading to college later in the year (at least virtually). He is going into a rapidly changing and uncertain world. It is hard at this juncture to promise that the world he will be entering as an independent adult is one that is full of opportunities, friendly to his ambitions and supportive of his success. Over the weekend, I sat down to write a note to go with a small gift to recognise his achievements.

The gift was a biography and core of my short note was the following advice:

I chose this book because it is one man’s effort to succeed, to learn all his life and to keep trying to improve. You can learn from other’s success but remember it worked for him but you will need to learn your own way to your own success.  You will make your own rules and own principles to live, love and succeed. My only advice is keep learning, keep exploring and don’t give up. 

We need to mark milestones, particularly moments of academic success, but the best learning is lifelong. Most of us at 18 barely know ourselves let alone what we want to do with our lives. We have to learn our way there. There are no shortcuts to success. As much as we would like to follow some thoughtleader’s 5 easy steps or see the miracles that flow from a 5am start, success is highly contextual, created anew and hard won. Always.

Anything that worked in the past cannot be guaranteed to work again now or any time in the future. There are no shortcuts to success. We must contine to respond to our changing circumstances, our growing capabilities and the needs of others. Testing, learning and growing is lifelong work.

To cope with this change, we must develop our networks to help us learn faster, to help us understand and learn more and win the support of others in our efforts and our success. Developing mentors, frienships, collaborators and personal learning networks is essential to support lifelong learning. Growing network is slow personal and methodical work. There are no shortcuts. Nobody succeeds alone. Nobody is an island.

The best learning is practice. Doing is where we stretch our skills, see the gaps and learn anew. Again there is no shortcuts to success. We have to put in the effort. We can use our whole lives to develop new skills through practice. So much of success is interpersonal skills that can be developed across all aspects of life. Hobbies and interests can develop into new opportunities so retaining and practising curiosity is essential.

The hardest thing to learn about success is that even when you have learned all the things and have all the elements to succeed you may not. Life is competitive. Life is not fair either. There are no shortcuts. You have to ‘plot, plan, strategise, organise and mobilise‘ just to stay in the game. Giving it your best shot is not turning up on the day skilled. It takes all you can do to turn up armed with support and the best plan to succeed. It also takes luck.

Last, but no means least is the importance of persistence. Learning is hard. We have to explore our weaknesses. We have to find new strengths. There are hours and hours of practice and we are guaranteed disappointments as our feeble skills strengthen, as we find new ways and as we learn more. Hardest of all learning means we need to change. We need to shed our comfortable old ways of thinking and acting and embrace the new ways that lead us to success. That can feel like grief, like disappointment, like embarrassment or like discomfort. There are no shortcuts. We need to change the hard way our whole lives long.

If only learning didn’t require us to change it would be more popular.

— Simon Terry (@simongterry) June 9, 2020

It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We are familiar with the concept of willing suspension of belief from poetry, fiction, theatre and cinema. It is at least as old as the ancient greek philosophers, but many know Coleridge’s phrasing, if not his ‘poetic faith’. We lean back in our chair and accept the illusion offered so as to enjoy the narrative. However, the same ‘poetic faith’ is what we need to disrupt and find again in any major change we want to make in our lives, our work or our society. We need to suspend the disbelief to go to work and to live anew creating a new narrative and supporting systems, engaging for all.

The Comfortable Illusion

There has been much discomfort to be faced in these last few weeks. Much that we look at in disbelief. However, the smartphone video and global connectivity has helped focus our attention on the cracks in the bubbles of our comfortable illusions. It has helped us to begin to see much that is ugly, unjust and unfair.

We don’t see these things normally because we willingly suspend our disbelief to enable us to live with the comfortable narrative that our system is mostly working. The system, flawed as it is and brutal as it can be, is working exactly as intended. The prejudice, the injustice, the unfairness aren’t flaws. They are our outcomes. Most of us can’t live looking directly at the system’s outcomes. The illusion fits the comfort of our privilege. We have a reassuring heroic occasionally cinematic vision of societal progress to admire, if we ignore the occasional cracks and inconsistencies.

This desire for comfort reaches its apogee when we’d rather hear a leader’s words lip-synched by a talented comedian than focus on the reality, when brand put out empty statements unsupported by action and when empty black squares drown out the messages of those they purport to support. Clicktavism reigns supreme. The next moment of comfort is only a infinite scroll away.

I know I have sought that escape in lightness, a chance to let art do the work I was resisting. Searching in art for a new and better illusion and an escape from slogging one foot in front of the other.

There is a crack in every thing God has made.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Creating the Illusion Anew

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Maya Angelou, Still I Rise

We need to find a new illusion that will restore our poetic faith and inspire us to improvement beyond our current systems and illusions. We need to suspend all the reasons to disbelieve and re-engage with the hope that can inspire others to join in making change. Hope that can give people something to plot, plan, strategise and mobilise towards.

The term “politics of prefiguration” has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded…This has been an important belief for activists who recognise that change happens as much by inspiration and catalyst as by imposition.

Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

This is not a quick fix. We won’t find this hope in our comfortable bubbles or in the work of thought leadership. Sadly this new hope seems absent from our current politics that is focused on leverage of tribalism. The hope that leads us forward is not lying around nearby to pick up or going to arrive miraculously in a later act. We will need to do the hard and uncertain work together to bring it forth.

I don’t have answers but I do have questions. What we can do is the work of discourse in civil society. We can work ourselves in discussion from the raw to the cooked creating new shared meaning as we do so. We can listen to new voices and look for new stories to celebrate and amplify. We can look for understanding beyond the bounds of our current context. We can listen to the irrational, the yearnings and the lightness for inspiration too.

Respect that is conditional on narrow practices can easily be withheld. It is different, qualitatively, from the respect that is given and received between people who believe in the inherent worth and integrity of other human beings.

Teo You Yenn, This Is What Inequality Looks Like

We can’t rely on tokens or a narrow suite of practices. We know from bitter experience that these cannot sustain our desire for a new illusion. They are too easily swept away. We need to base our new comforting beliefs on the inherent worth and integrity of other human beings. We can celebrate the rich creative potential in every person and our collective ability to leverage this human potential for mutual gain. Surely if nothing else that can bring forth a vision that can inspire us all to better things.

You can add up the parts; you won’t have the sum

You can strike up the march, there is no drum

Every heart, every heart to love will come

But like a refugee.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

Uluru Statement from the Heart

We can all learn a lot from Killer Mike in the art of advocating change. Listen to his advice to the Atlanta community.

Some themes of his advice are summarised below, but I’d recommend everyone listen to the whole speech.

Acknowledge reluctance.

Show empathy.

Know your history.

Focus righteous anger.

Accept responsibility.

Plot. Plan. Strategise. Organise. Mobilise.

Hold others accountable.

Make it better.

Celebrate your community.

Overcome opposition and adversity.

Show thanks.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Bells were tolled in 17th Century England to mark deaths and to share the news with the whole community. In that pre-industrial era, community connections were embedded into the work and life of towns. Each death diminished the community and given the mystery of disease, might well be a warning to all. Nobody worked or lived alone. Being isolated at that time was a punishment akin to a death sentence.

As much as we might reinforce individualism in our society today, the last few months are a reminder than nobody lives and works alone. Nobody is an island. Our lives and work exists in chains of connection too. Remove those connections and our work stops or is impeded. Individuals may be able to sustain personal productivity for a while but without the connection to others over time motivation, inspiration, knowledge and capability declines. We might be able to continue our lives longer but only by depending on the work of others to support our communication networks, to pack and deliver our needs and provide other essential services.

For over a century, it has suited our organisations to divide, to simplify, to measure and to standardise our work such that it feels separate and distinct. However, all the efforts to bring machine efficiency to our work don’t exclude the human connection inherent in our working lives. This division and simplification depends on certainty and predictability to work. Yet the greatest challenges we face today are complex and uncertain.

All our work is part of and shapes a continuous community whole. A century ago, Mary Follet described community as a process. Follet describes the process of continuous evolution of purposes, ends and means when people come together in community. We don’t need people to subjugate themselves to others, to goals or to process. We need people to contribute their talents and capabilities.

We are capable of creating a collective will, and at the same time developing an individual spontaneity and freedom hardly conceived of yet, lost as we have been in the herd dream, the imitation lie, and that most fatal of fallacies the fallacy of ends

Mary Follet, Community as a Process

Whether, we hear them or not the bells of community shape our ability to deliver our purpose, our collaboration and the value of our work. We work on the mainland or at least an archipelago. Nobody is an island.

Creating Value is Always Collaborative Work

We need to recognise that the highest value in our work and our lives is collaborative community work. We have organisations and government exactly because there is more value we can accomplish together in community than alone.

The highest value challenges aren’t changes that you can order or solve with brute force or heroic action. We don’t solve big challenges, complexity and uncertainty on our own. We need to share, discover, learn and adapt together.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has

Margaret Mead

Addressing these challenges requires the best of our human knowledge, talents and capability in community. Importantly, as Follet notes above, addressing these challenges also brings out the best in us and creates new opportunities for others to realise their potential through community. We must ensure that our work and our lives are diverse and inclusive and that we are tackling systemic barriers to people participating in realising their own and collective potential.

When we fail to do so, the bell tolls for all of us.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere

Martin Luther King

Happiness doesn’t create itself.

Empathy doesn’t care itself.

Love didn’t happen by itself.

A pandemic doesn’t cure itself.

Your potential won’t find, grow and realise itself.

Your strategy won’t execute itself.

The economy won’t reset itself.

Your organisation won’t change itself.

The harmed won’t all save themselves.

Racism won’t end itself.

Structural inequality won’t remove itself.

The government won’t make itself more effective.

The climate won’t fix itself.

Ignorance won’t cure itself.

A mountain doesn’t climb itself.

It won’t fix itself. They won’t fix themselves.

Time heals wounds. It doesn’t prevent them.

We can’t rely on other nouns, other entities and other people to solve our problems for us.

If we want change, at any level, then we must make it happen. Ideally together. Alone if we must.