Monday, 27 September 2010
Monday, 20 September 2010
PCC - Psychology of culture change - Sustainable Organisational Change: What caused me TO THINK today? http://t.co/GYK4wkr
What caused me TO THINK today?
That 1000’s of people were affected by a fatal accident on the M6 last week – it delayed us, but that was as bad as it got, we still had our meeting (albeit late), but we saw people stranded for hours with small babies in their cars, two people are dead, their families have lost them, the lorry driver that hit them is potentially traumatised for life and has been arrested for suspected dangerous driving ….. his whole life is impacted.
We might speculate about the origins of such events …
Did it all start with some small mechanical or electrical fault in the car they were driving which caused it to stop? maybe it was fitted badly? someone in a factory made it poorly? perhaps they didn’t follow procedure because they had a row with their wife over mud on the carpet or forgetting to feed the cat? maybe they forgot because of the pressures at work …
Or it may have just been the elements corroding something, because a designer somewhere decided for one type of plating over another, or was told to design within budget forcing him to specify 3 microns on zinc & yellow passivated plate over 10 microns.
Did it all start with some small mechanical or electrical fault in the car they were driving which caused it to stop? maybe it was fitted badly? someone in a factory made it poorly? perhaps they didn’t follow procedure because they had a row with their wife over mud on the carpet or forgetting to feed the cat? maybe they forgot because of the pressures at work …
Or it may have just been the elements corroding something, because a designer somewhere decided for one type of plating over another, or was told to design within budget forcing him to specify 3 microns on zinc & yellow passivated plate over 10 microns.
Maybe the lorry driver didn’t see them because his wife had made a special packed lunchbox for their anniversary and he was reaching across the cab to grab a sandwich, ensuring he was seen to be driving on the Tachometer when he was supposed to be driving, because of the measures his company use to ‘judge’ their drivers performance?
We might consider what he was carrying, why was the trip being made? Was he transporting food, because we want everything in a packet because it’s convenient and profitable to have people gorge themselves without putting in the effort to grow what they eat ….. ???
A billion trillion possibilities and choices that span millennia sit behind such incidents – a lorry wouldn’t exist if, ..... the car wouldn’t have stopped if, ….. IF....
We might consider what he was carrying, why was the trip being made? Was he transporting food, because we want everything in a packet because it’s convenient and profitable to have people gorge themselves without putting in the effort to grow what they eat ….. ???
A billion trillion possibilities and choices that span millennia sit behind such incidents – a lorry wouldn’t exist if, ..... the car wouldn’t have stopped if, ….. IF....
The point being every thought and related action we take can have enormous consequences over time – this is what the Japanese mean by the butterfly effect – this is how we are all connected, we can see it looking backwards, but looking forwards!
This is our level of responsibility – every emotion we cause in another by our own action and choices, (as parents, partners and employers) that leads to their own emotional decision making and subsequent behaviours, may or may not affect others in turn, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes horrifically often many years later, even decades or centuries later, sometimes long after we are gone.
This is our level of responsibility – every emotion we cause in another by our own action and choices, (as parents, partners and employers) that leads to their own emotional decision making and subsequent behaviours, may or may not affect others in turn, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes horrifically often many years later, even decades or centuries later, sometimes long after we are gone.
The irony being, that we rely on logical processes like Six Sigma, design of experiments & FMEA’s etc. to ‘predict’ what might go wrong. In "mis-match of complexity" terms, this is like asking a snail to resolve the contradictions between quantum physics and relativistic physics – we ‘Risk assess’ based on logical data, but cannot start to even consider how attitudes and emotions feature in every single logical aspect of life.
On our Journey up the M6 to Manchester that day, we initially stopped approx. 2 miles behind the accident at 11:00am. The scene of the accident was still closed at 19:30 at night – driving back past the green screens covering all three carriageways for the length of a football pitch, driving on the southbound side, made me want to hug those I love and thank god they are safe … then I realised when writing this, by the time I got home, I’d pretty much put it out of my mind …. Complacency, taking people for granted, the human being can be so horrifically selfish sometimes; myself included.
We are largely pre-conditioned by the method by which we disseminate news with no meaning across technological systems we largely but loosely refer to as ‘communication’ – systems don’t communicate meaning, feelings or emotion, they disseminate logical data and we become used to it, so much so, that within the space of 3hrs I am conditioned, just like many others, to forget a double death and walk back into the house like it’s been just another day at the office – which on reflection is quite a serious social condition to address! (and I consider myself an ‘emotional’ person!).
This is the attitude toward caring for others we are up against on an international / social scale – everyday peoples lives fall apart and all that they knew yesterday will never be the same tomorrow – it’s part of life; how we react to large events like this, just as how we react to small events, defines us, and, of course, ‘life goes on’ – but I’m convinced we would be a better and wiser species able to consider our communication choices and how it shapes us neurologically as well as those we interact with, if socially and culturally we encouraged more empathy along the way.
It is ‘all of the above’ and a thousand other things I’ll never be able put into writing that I want leaders in all sectors must exist for, to help improve the level of general awareness of such things at some distant tomorrow, to a degree that levels of responsibility rise relative to educated beliefs about our interconnectedness – if we can get others to generically address ‘Beliefs-thoughts-feelings and actions’ as equal in importance to Profit and logical technical control systems, then some of these issues, which evolve to create the quality of human existence may at some point in the future feed into the prevailing and cultural degrees of wisdom with which the human race makes it’s choices.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Monday, 13 September 2010
Massive change facing UK public sector. How will unions and government come to terms with the changes that lie ahead? http://ping.fm/S0M5v
Friday, 10 September 2010
Thursday, 2 September 2010
PCC received over 1200 hits in the first 2 weeks on their new discussion forum/ ideas factory http://ping.fm/oUpOx come and join us!
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
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