Day 4: Why Do It?
by Edward Smith
09 Jul 2020
Life is full of challenges. You have good days, and you have bad days. Sometimes it seems like there is nothing you can really do to make your situation better. You feel stuck.
Maybe you get excited about a new creative venture, you work hard to achieve it, you put yourself out there, and then you run into roadblocks that cause the whole thing to come crashing down around you. That really sucks!
When that happens, you have a choice. You can either brush the dirt off your shoulders and figure out the next thing, or you can give up. Giving up is normal. Is that you?
Who Determines Normal?
I've always had a problem with this normal thing. I don't understand it. It doesn't look the way I expect. Every time I ask a different person to define normal, I get a different answer every time. It turns out normal isn't normal for everyone the same way, and common sense isn't common. Both of these things look different to different people. That's why you have to stop what you're doing and start attending business meetings.
Getting Down to Business
If you left everyone in a company to do their own thing without cross pollinating ideas with other departments, you'd come up with a company of mini-companies that looked very much like the one I worked at.
The place was total chaos. To this day I don't know why it stayed in business. The company was not aligned most of the time. There would be fights. There would be firings. Most of the time nobody really knew what was going on.
Things would often change dramatically from day to day. There would be an HR department, then the whole department would be gone.
We'd have an IT department dispute. Then the IT department would split into pieces. It was nuts. We used to describe the whole thing as tribal. Every department had a different chief, and every chief was at war with every other chief.
Managing Misalignment
Don't believe me? Watch your television tonight and see how your government officials say one thing, while your health officials say something completely different. Who is right? They both are.
When it comes to government misalignment, both parties are correct, it's just that their perspectives are different because they're coming from different places and are trying to address different variables.
You get confused by it all, because the different groups are all authority figures, but they don't talk to each other like they should. They come up with their own conclusions, but then they don't meet up on the side to figure out how to align themselves with the rest of the group. You end up with multiple, conflicting messages instead of one clear message.
The point of a business meeting is to put all of the different groups that matter into a room and hash out a better normal. This new normal is bigger and better then anything that the smaller groups could come up with on their own. Business meetings are intended to enforce professional collaboration, and collaboration is how we rise above our own personal limitations.
Conclusion
In this article you learned to question normalcy, and you learned about collaboration. What I'm doing right now is not normal. That was the intended purpose. That's why I stand behind it.
I'm a big proponent of collaboration and I believe in self improvement through action. Collaboration is the hallmark of all great human works. Collaboration works in business. It works in education. It works when you come together as a family and brainstorm.
This blog is collaboration. I share my thoughts, but am limited to what I think I know.
You read those thoughts and think on it. Then you decide whether the thoughts makes sense.
You might share my ideas with somebody else. They in turn might share it or give feedback. The cycle continues. The idea gets reviewed and challenged again and again, but each time it happens, things get better and brighter. That's how great things eventually spread and happen.
Be great. Collaborate!
No comments:
Post a Comment