The cartoon has been all over the place.
There is a sad side of the funny side and the clever side. And we have many of these people in organizations. We do know them. They will always find an angle that is wrong, a ‘too bad that we didn’t’, a ‘we should have done’.
We also have the opposite people: there is always a positive side, an angle that allows us to learn, a way forward.
Both are contagious.
Negative cultures are toxic. Extreme positive cultures are often dismissed as artificial. The art of balancing the arguments and exercising critical thinking is paramount.
Both, failures and successes are a source of grow. It is not true that we mostly learn from mistakes, even if the phrase is a ‘default thinking’. Entire psychological approaches are based up the opposite: we learn more from our own successes and strengths.
Frankly, it does not matter as long a we learn, we grow, we redirect, we discover the new in front.
As for the negative folks, a bit of that dose won’t hurt anybody, but, when the culture starts smelling that way, even just a bit of smell, we are closer to a big problem.
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