“Is New Artisans Transformative?” is a question I will only be able to answer in retrospect with evidence. That said, I believe it is for the following reasons:
Organisations change episodically. We change every day.
Organisations strive for performance and efficiency, both of which are lagging indicators. In order to achieve them, we have to do better today than yesterday and be able to measure it to provide evidence. It needs processes, protocols, policies and management, making the change process inevitably “sticky”.
The result is short-term improvements at the cost of increasing obsolescence until, at some point, the gap between what the organisation is good at and what its clients need becomes stressful, and we embark upon a “change management programme” and start all over again. If we were to map it, instead of a smooth curve, we end up with something that looks like a flight of stairs in a very old house.
As individuals, however, we change every day. We may do the same job, constrained by the same processes, protocols, policies and managers, but the person who does them changes in ways that what is measured cannot detect. We see things differently; we feel differently, the conversations we have gradually change us, and the bond between the organisation and us starts to fracture.
It is as though on day one; we convince ourselves that the story the organisation is telling us, and the one we are telling ourselves, are close enough to warrant travelling together. As we travel, however, our stories evolve differently and at different speeds, and it can feel as though we’re on a train going to the wrong destination, that we cannot get off until the next station stop, and we don’t know when, or where that will be.
No wonder it’s stressful. We’re earning a living going somewhere we don’t want to go and want to work out what to do at the next station stop.
I think addressing that is transformative.
Seeing ourselves differently.
We have been brought up and educated with an implicit contract in mind. We become the “hard-working people” our politicians exhort us to be, they will provide the jobs, and all will be well. For a while, that worked, but no longer. For many reasons, the contract is null and void.
This means we need to see ourselves differently. To move from dependence on a contract that is no longer valid, to a level of independence that means we can pull the emergency cord on the train to get off where we want in the knowledge that we have the skills, connections and networks to get to where we want to go.
I think moving from dependency to interdependence is transformative.
And seeing others differently, too.
I noted yesterday Churchill’s observation that “first we shape our buildings, and then they shape us” and that organisations are similar.
If we want to move to independence and chosen interdependence, we need to actively shape organisations around us, more than shape ourselves to fit into what no longer serves us. That means, amongst other things, seeing people through a lens of cooperation more than competition, finding common ground, building a network of purpose and practice, and paying attention to skills that not just serve us but magnify our lives.
Achieving that would be transformative.
I see New Artisans as a space, what I think of as a “Third Space”, that we can step into to have these transformational conversations.
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
―Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
On the point about our buildings shaping us: I was recently made redundant. As part of my package I get "help" with CV writing. I have a self-written CV that tries to express something of who I am and what I want to do, which is inevitably different from who other people are and what they may want to do. At my age I have some idea of how to express myself...I got back a boilerplate document optimised for keyword search, with helpful comments explaining which terms to use to get through Applicant Tracking Systems. The sad part, of course, is that they're right - the CV that was written by a machine will do much better at getting through a selection machine. You have to go to special lengths to find a human connection between two souls (definitely not a word you should use in a CV!)