The dissonance present in today’s business culture is crushing us all. How is it that we cannot more clearly understand, collectively, that no method, no tool, no system, no process, no policy, no standard, and no rule will ever SOLVE an issue that is not actively and honestly engaged by every sentient affected and all relevant data at hand?
This article is an attempt to unpack the conceptual mass of the above paragraph by defining its terms and their contexts to deliver the fullness of the problems and outline the potential solutions involved.
Much of this article assumes you have a basic comprehension of English language; some of this article assumes you have moderate to high probability of looking up terms and phrases that are not familiar to you. Indeed, this author assumes you are interested in understanding different means of expression and communication as a gateway to truly understanding different perspectives. Because of this, no attempt to cater to, coddle, or otherwise (quite literally) “talk down to you” is made. This is mentioned early so you can select out of wasting your time… intended as a convenience and courtesy, so if you must make a judgment about it, please try to use the one I’m giving you, as it is the only accurate item.
I’m going to use examples of both study and real-world instances, but they are going to be delivered as a fictional tale in which there are fictionalized products and company, etc. If you’re interested in finding out more, the search engines will easily provide! (I can too, but you’d have to pay me a lot and I’m pretty sure the value proposition is not obvious to anyone, given my abysmally continuous unemployment, so I refer you to the search engines… again, intended as a courtesy, not a derisive thing.)
And away we go….
I work as a solution stylist for Zygometric, a technology consulting firm.
If you’ve never heard of us, congratulations! You are crushing it.
If you’ve only heard of us, congratulations! You’re about to start crushing it.
If you know us generally, congratulations! You’re right where you belong.
If you know us intimately, congratulations! You’re back on track.
Basically, we are the people who only show up when the business is on the hard-rail or in the process of critical, cascading collapse.
We know we could be there earlier, but since trying to help someone who didn’t ask is generally frowned upon in most cultures and societies, we’re slow to attempt pro-actively trying to shift that rock on our own time and dime. Some of us try for a time, because we’re idealists and visionaries by DNA, but our elders will tell you, the story upon return is sorrowfully consistent: We find that we are no longer willing to run at full speed into a brick wall.
We tend to hire people who have left the tech industry, which means our recruiting efforts look NOTHING like any other “tech company” in the world. By. Choice.
We only hire those without a degree; they must agree to succeed in obtaining at least one within the first five years with us.
We require full psychiatric and metabolic profiles every five years; you may choose to offer them more frequently, it will only improve the quality of your free, complete, and total well-being (cost covered by us).
We don’t care what you’re doing when you’re not at work, so long as every one understands and has accepted (as part of our new hire process) the literal distinction between you as an entity, and us, the people who signed their legal autonomy to the corporation in exchange for being completely supported by the company.
Willing wage slaves. You know, it’s almost funny how well the analogies continue to work: Railroad chit and towns are making a comeback, but because no one considers history with an eye toward identifying empathy points (and therefore, access points to lessons that present a chance to choose differently).
There is an irony of dramatic as well as poetic manner underpinning the various crisis, challenges, and chimeras facing business (and indeed, the world) today:
- All problem statements of humans eventually resolve to issues of competitive culture,
- All issues of competitive culture contain requisite rigidity of command and control, acting as protectorates of cost and waste by humans.
- All instances of command and control contain both human waste and human cost, both in implementation and support and maintenance and sustainability.
- The additional overhead of dissent and rebellion are prohibitive to positive progress on ANY front; therefore, as a business of self-minded tribes that consider all other tribes “competition” or “prey”, we choose to profit from this chaos rather than waste time and money attempting to course correct for progress.
- We care about our human resources only to the extent that it sustains their ability to operate as robotic executors of the current collective and political will.
Ultimately, we progressed to more unitarian and humanitarian, more pluralistic futures. The irony being that, had we simply accepted that our ultimate ability to positively progress as individuals is intrinsically linked to the competency of all components within our surrounding existential network, all “corners” of this triangle of schedule, budget, and resources refine and inform the probability of success!
All failures are cascading, but rare few are connected or impacted in proximity and this, frighteningly, is the only reason we do not see significantly higher critical failures (and tragedies) around us.
As the world continues to shrink in every context of which we are currently aware, not only will those cascading failures be more visible, they will be more impacting.
Currently, humanity on the whole is of the “walk one million miles to avoid running 5” mindset. It stands to reason, really, given that in the ultimate timeline of the known universe (as pitiable as that sentence is), we are still trying to draw breath to scream in response to the sensation that lit us up and demanded that we interact with our surroundings.
We are infants who think ourselves gods.
You tell me, does that ever really work out well for anyone?
Shifting gears…. we find that:
- Current business order and operations are built upon foundations of control and command inherited from the industrialization of culture via labor and its workplace.
- All solution statements require repair/regeneration of culture at expense of cost figuratively and literally. Systemic repair requires downtime.
- All solution statements, therefore, require moderate to total dismantlement of command and control to seed, grow, and thrive.
- Very few of the waning generation are capable of shifting to a context that embraces all of the above.
- Even fewer find it a comfortable or enjoyable space in which to contemplate existing.
- But there are significant numbers who would volunteer under the right circumstances and criteria.
The problem? There are far more humans willing to volunteer to profit and not enough willing to volunteer to bolster the total number of volunteers (i.e., “Why should I help others if I didn’t get help and I cannot assure they will ever choose the same?”).
This is the only problem humans ever seem to have; everything boils down to some version of that parenthetical.
We, as a company, spent every conscious moment of our lives trying to our absolute, utter maximum to be that collective of bolstering volunteers. But we live in a world where this is neither the common nor the popular choice.
Why it happened, how it happened, and who is to blame are really kind of irrelevant.
The only thing that matters is how we answer to these questions:
What I can do, right now, to contribute positively toward the environment that surrounds me?
What can I do, right now, to hear pain and respond with empathy and kindness?
What can I do, right now, to most fully assist and aid my friends? My co-workers? My supervisors/managers? Theirs?
To a one, we found that the answer to those questions were, “Nothing.”
Which brought us to the fundamental crux that revealed the zeitgeist that inevitably draws us together.
Virility is not a human method, but a natural one. Competition is not by human choice, but by genetic mandate. The hard science is in, and even the soft ones support it. You don’t get that kind of unified answer with bad data, especially given that all access points to the conversation are, themselves, competitive.
Positive progress within a competitive system requires a compelling preference for compromise and collaboration.
The Ant Bridge (https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=ant+bridge&cat=video&nj=0) is but one amazing example in the natural world.
We are evolving. Constantly, albeit slowly. Spontaneity is possible.
Think about that – a spontaneous mutation that isn’t terminated is permitted.
Mother Nature is must more to the point than we are, and we suspect she knows much we do not. We certainly trust her to know more than we.
This is why we pay for the complete, proactive healthcare of every human who will let us. We need the data to understand it all. The cost of getting more data into the system is high, but not progressing in our understanding is unacceptable as a species.
We conclude that this is the template of the “pure seed form”… a pure seed form (PSF) will produce success and progress, eventually. We know this because every successful (i.e., living) component of the known universe displays it.
We also know that any PSF that fails to do so actually fails because it encountered a form that critically inhibited it’s ability to progress.
Understanding that failure without dissonance is the only requirement a PSF needs to return to optimum progress.
The degree of dissonance, therefore, acts as a mutation upon PSF.
Infinite progress along a vanishing point…. universal.