Weekly Journal
If I had to name the biggest issue facing us as individuals and organisations, it is the lack of time to stand, stare and think. We have become attuned, and in many ways addicted, to efficiency and productivity measures as though they are economic deities.
Before COVID, the water cooler had become the Temple of creativity, spontaneity, and progress, as though a hurried trip to it had moved us onto a different spiritual plane (cheaply and efficiently, of course)
Adapting to the pandemic broke the trance. Zoom became a means to talk without a water cooler or a corner desk in sight. What is more, we could talk to people we didn’t work with about things that mattered to us and which provided fertile ground for insights beyond intellect that the water cooler knows nothing of.
Having watched and facilitated these conversations for over three years, first outside the organisation's walls, and latterly inside them, I’m convinced that if we really want to improve operational productivity and creative originality, we would do well to not just enable but encourage these conversations.
Conversations where status has no place, our investment is in our confidence in each other, and there are no expectations.
What I notice most about the “back to work” conversations are their poverty of ambition, as though the pandemic was an anomaly and not a signal to take the other messages more seriously. Conversations are engines of change. We need to give them more space in our lives. Maybe give up one meeting a week and instead take an hour on Zoom with people you trust and talk about what you notice.
What I notice most about the ones I have are the insights, the seeds that grow into the shoots of ideas, that would not survive for a moment in a meeting room. In the meeting room, ideas are scrutinised and interrogated and asked to justify their existence. Safe and ideas rarely make good company.
As we approach the end of the year, I am beginning to think we have things the wrong way around. I watch organisations taking shelter in what they know, preferring doing more of what they know as though they are a James Bond franchise to making interesting safe-to-fail explorations and wondering what is happening that kills real imagination and connection to what they do.
The same problem rarely exists with people once you get them out from under their role constraints. The imagination, fire, and energy are there but have no place to grow. Between the gruelling reality of corporate existence, running the day-to-day priorities of their personal lives, and dealing with the stresses both involve, there is no quiet place for ideas to grow. No space to take a pause and wonder.
We would do better in finding ways for organisations to serve people, rather than the other way round. Under the pressure they are under from often remote shareholders and exhausted, scared managers they easily become lifeless places.
Rituals are symbolic acts. they represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.
The disappearance of rituals. Byung-Chul Han
Rituals and ceremonies are becoming more important than ever. Carving out a time to be together, held by simple ways of doing things, for the sheer pleasure of just being together. Time to connect, not just with each other, but our surroundings and notice what we otherwise might miss. Time to recharge, and let the ideas surface and talk with them, rather than interrogate them.
My week is punctuated with small rituals and ceremonies, from morning journaling (before the day starts, with a cup of tea, writing on good notepaper with a fountain pen to capture what’s on my mind) to scheduled weekly calls with individuals and groups on Zoom (coffee in hand, check-in, notice what we’re noticing, check out). Same time, same place.
The foundation for the important conversations about “work” which take place separately.
In our addiction, imposed and self-imposed, to “productivity”, we are in danger of not paying attention to what we produce.