Memory
Pictures of the past
The original is lost
I keep my copy close
Memory and imagination travel together. They are infused with perceptions and emotions. Sometimes laid down as a true representation of events as they were experienced, but most often distorted by previous experiences that push through to the present.
We preserve our pictures of the past as moods, feelings, emotions, and passions.
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But memory is embedded in the structure of our experience, and imagination can free it through re-interpretation. The original can be lost through re-interpretation.
Perceptions of cause and effect can be re-examined. A place where ‘facts’ can become flexible.
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Emotions in memory are grounded and visceral. Joy, anger, gratitude, sympathy, guilt, and shame are hard seams running through our perceptions.
Our emotions reflect our passions and stay with us for longer. Evoke the emotion to reawaken the memory. Run with the passion to enliven the imagination.
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I see leaders at war with the past. They are sweeping away the perceived inadequacy and failure of those before them. There is nothing for today’s transformation to learn from other’s failures.
I see leaders diminishing the importance of mood, feeling, emotion, and passion in the workplace while seeking to weld together those same sensations and motivations to press people toward higher performance in the service of the greater organisational good.
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I see a path where human tradition and connection are thoughtfully renewed.
The bloodless and soulless absurdity of rational managers demanding passionate commitment through over-engineered statements of purpose, vision, and mission that are passionless, impenetrable, and unintelligible.
We need a leadership commitment to casting aside the bland, inconsequential, and banal.
The art of transformative leadership is not found in breaking tradition or wiping the slate clean. Rather, the art of leadership is found in uniting memory and imagination. Recover the human in work through meaning, emotion, passion, and purpose.
This is the challenge of leadership. This is the necessary transformation.
