Paying Attention to Butterflies

something about productivity

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

I’ve always found Elizabeth Gilbert’s imagery that we don’t have ideas but rather that they are already out there, like butterflies, waiting to be noticed.

That they choose us, and if we don’t do anything with them, they go and find someone who will.

Links are at the bottom of the post.

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I’ve been noticing a few of those butterflies. An IPPR report claims we lose £100 billion a year due to lost productivity from workplace sickness. A post today by

Anthony Howard

on the idea of bringing our “whole selves” to work, and myriad conversations that reflect the same basic tenet: that the organisations we have created to leverage efficiency and productivity are absolute crap when it comes to capturing ideas.

We demand creativity yet give people butterfly nets full of gaping holes, instruct them to swish ever faster, and only to capture safe ideas that can be quickly implemented—to “capture” butterflies rather than let them settle of their own accord.

What, I wonder, might happen if we had a better way of considering butterflies? One not under the direction of remote shareholders and goal-weary managers but a space where ideas could settle without being burdened by expectations of ROI and where we could just consider them for their beauty and potential beyond the sterile limits of profit.

Month by month, our approach to productivity is creating organisations more akin to Victorian workhouses than workplaces. Constant surveillance, measured by the moment, and reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s line:

“Fox hunting is the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible,"

“A Woman of No Importance” Oscar Wilde

There is a better way: conversations that allow ideas to settle, dialogues between those who are interested in ideas for their own sake rather than what they can be sold for. A space for them to let themselves be known and see what they require of us, more than what we require of them.

Somewhere a very, very long way from meeting rooms and organisations.

I’m taking a sabbatical for the next month to give myself some space to think about that and let an idea settle.

I’ll be back in September.

go well

Richard

IPPR Report

@Anthony Howard’s substack