Thinking is shaped by the words we use. Management thinking is shaped by the words managers use and are used to. If we want people to change their mindset, we must stop to use words that carry a history of bad meaning with them. Let’s start to create a new language to talk about development that explicitly avoids mistakes made in the past.
Resources
People are human. They are not interchangeable. Don’t call them resources, because this term suggests they are.
We will miss your inspired and inspiring mind. You’ve been the narrator of an awesome story.
My favourite of your many quotes:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
I started to write about our amazing organisational model two weeks ago. Before that, we created a vision using StrategicPlay, wrote about What’s In It For Me… Yet still people keep asking WHY. As I value the persons asking me highly, I take this as a clear sign that our purpose has still not been visible enough. I’ll give it another go.
Some of My Agile Friends
What Did I Miss Before ALE?
I joined the agile community two years ago. To not repeat myself, I’ll only summarise the outcome, and do a perfection game.
In January 2011, I would have given the Agile Community as I perceived it 5 points out of 10.
To create a movement, someone has to start and become the leader. But as long as this someone stays alone, s/he is not yet a leader, s/he’s a lone nut. There’s a specific person who transforms the situation: the lone nut becomes the leader when the First Follower joins hir and they start forming a movement or tribe. Derek Sivers did an amazing, 3min TED talk on this:
The basic idea is simple: when we listen to a statement of another person, we assume a certain context, in which we would have made such a statement.
Assumed Motivation—drawn by Derek
Derek had a nice example: Joe comes home and finds that Jim has thrown the plates on the kitchen floor. They are broken, and he shouts, “why did you break those plates, are you crazy?” The situation escalates…
Brene talks about the personal ability to feel connected. She identifies shame as the fear of disconnection, not being worthy of connection. In order for connection to really happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. She found in her research there are two groups of people:
one with a sense of worthiness, feeling worthy of love and belonging, and
one struggling for love and belonging.
Courage
What do these people who feel worthiness have in common? She found they’re whole-hearted, they have a sense of courage, the courage to be imperfect. They share the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others.
These people have connection because of authenticity, and they fully embrace vulnerability. They share a willingness to invest in a relationship without knowing if it will work out.
Vulnerability
To me, her talk boils down to: people who realise that vulnerability is important, who say, “I’m enough”, surrender and walk into it, will be happier. Because:
You can’t selectively numb emotions. If you numb your vulnerability, you numb joy, gratitude and happiness too.
Real Options
To me, this connects with Real Options. Allow uncertainty back into your life—accept you have real options, and that these have value. Stop being certain, start having open conversations. To do that, you need to be vulnerable.
