It’s been a while.
Having a gap in the writing daily date helps to gain perspective.
I went through a journey with a departure point in ‘I need the break’, then visited places such as ‘do I really need to come back to it?’ and ‘who cares about this after all’, ending in ‘I have an obligation, let’s go back’.
Obligation to whom is not really clear. It seems like the word in itself carries a weight that frees you from answering that question.
The gap was not a holiday gap. Lots of things happened in the business and I did manage to film a few hours of my next-book-not-a-book ‘Mobilize! Masterclass: a blueprint for social movements. An audio-visual masterclass cut in pieces like a Chinese menu. It’s now in what teckie people call post-production.
So where am I? From all things I do as organizational consultant, I am still hooked in the question of ‘scale’: change at scale, mobilization at scale, make better things, do better things in the organization and ‘outside the tent’ (the world…) at a scale.
I have come across a quote by physicist Allen Bartlett that I use in the opening credits of the masterclass: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
I am interested in the exponential function of organizational change, the exponential function of management and leadership, and the exponential function of social change.
Late New Year resolutions? I also think I will write sharper and shorter, and … I will brush my teeth before bed, and will eat my veggies, and will wash my hands, you know, all those promises triggered by a date in calendar.
I have no other statistics than the ones the engine of the email distribution system provides, but I’ve met so many people recently who refer to the Daily Thoughts as to make me believe that, out there, readers are reminded by my frequent rambling that there are somehow different glasses to see the organization.
But different from what? Different from HR/OD/L&D/Management Mechanics, a discipline that tells you that if you inject happiness you’ll get productivity, that if the CEO is a good role model, fifty thousand employees will be just fine, and that Millennials come from Mars and all of us from Jupiter.
I’ll get my daily veggie rations is you get your daily self-questioning. For example, in front of all our collective default positions in this Human Capital territory (managers, leaders, consultants…): is this the best we can do? Is there a better way?
The greatest shortcoming of the ‘human capital industry’ (pardon my French) is our inability to understand the exponential function.
One my books has a subtitle: 10+10+10=1000. The maths of Viral Change™. My contribution to Bartlett’s worry.