Organisations develop elaborate processes to control imagination, socialise it and constrain it. They have a talent for ‘grinding out diversity’. Consciously or unconsciously, the organisational systems and processes relentlessly ensure nothing changes.

In a transformation, we must never lose sight of the possibility that our actions today will be the ‘ripples of hope’ that lead to better outcomes. Otherwise, why bother? To Hope is a reasonable response to an impractical aspiration.

The art of the possible comes alive in planning, whereas strategy is uncompromising in its demand for the impossible.

In uncertainty, trust, relationships, and community are front of mind.

Imagine living in your car and having to prepare for a job interview.

A home can be described as safety, security, and stability. But a home is also much more than that.

Leadership, what it is, how it is done, and its value are deeply embedded in our history and culture. Leadership is a social relationship grounded in historical knowledge. It is developed and refined through judgement and interpretation.

Does our unhealthy desire to be seen as pragmatic, task-focused, can-do, action-oriented, heroic leaders grind out the diversity of thought in our organisations? Does it grind out possibility and opportunity?

The leaders of organisational change and reform must be Pitchmen. They must constantly persuade the workforce to engage intellectually with the idea of change, but most importantly, they seek a voluntary commitment to change behaviour.

Management does not have a deep sense of time or history, so we will continue to re-learn age-old behaviour, work, and organisation lessons as we build the new machine. However, we can be sure that people will always be the critical and essential element of work and organisation. 

The solution to our sense of personal dislocation is not to focus on the fracturing of our work experience but rather on the philosophy and principles that have always been important to our work and organisation.

We induct new starters into the mystic rites of our workplaces. We treat them as lost innocents requiring special knowledge of processes and relationships to fill a place in the machinery of work. 

The word disruption is losing all meaning through indiscriminate overuse. This is particularly true for the phrase ‘digital disruption’. It is also becoming true for the phrase ‘future of work’, which maps out disruptive forces impacting the workforce and organisation.

The future of work is a mystery, not a puzzle. Not only don’t we have enough information about the future of work, but we may not even have the tools to help us frame the problem correctly.

The force that drives human behaviour and progress is imagination. Rationality tests and validates.

A lot is being written about the future of work. Not a lot of it is interesting or challenging. It should be, but it’s not.

As with all new technology, the underlying concern is: do we know what we are losing? 

Specialisation is impossible, or specialisation is necessary, which is it?

We live in democratised version of the tall poppy syndrome? A world in which the moody mob rules.