My son started boarding school yesterday, 35 years after I moved into the exact same dormitory. His bed is about 5 metres from where mine was.
My bed was steel, the next dude was about 2 feet from me, and there were 25 of us crammed together with no separation, privacy or storage space. It was army-like.
My son’s reality is different. A closed-off cubicle, a fan (that shoots out mist, no less …), a desk, a thick comfy mattress, a desk lamp, drawers and towel rails.
It’s safe to say that boarding school life has been re-imagined.
Before I get into sharing my thoughts about re-imagination, I made a commitment to myself over the Christmas break to speak more boldly about my ideas that relate to business, leadership and work. I’ve probably been a bit reticent about sharing the fullness of my beliefs historically on account of not wanting to alienate or offend my readers. But, hell, I’m 54 now, and if I’m going to make the mark I wish to make, now is the time.
So, back to re-imagining.
I write this with empathy and understanding, but there is so much that is unnecessarily wrong with business. It breaks my heart to keep watching the same patterns play out year after year, despite very strong evidence that these patterns no longer work optimally.
’Optimally’ is actually the operative word, because businesses don’t work so badly that they shout for change. Rather, these sub-par approaches whisper away and get lost in the noise that everyday-business creates.
Here’s the point: businesses don’t work very well. They might still generate profit, sometimes even a lot of profit, but a more holistic view of business would reveal just how badly they operate, just how much is left on the table, and just how much damage is being done to the people who work in businesses.
Your first response might be ‘That’s not the case with my business!’. And hopefully it isn’t.
But it probably is: you just don’t know it. And the reason you likely don’t know it is because you’ve become a casualty of the institution you inhabit and have become dulled. Your happiness levels have probably been numbed, your expectations lowered, and your joy shoved to the side.
Dulling is more insidious than ‘hurt’ or ‘broken’ because dulling is subtle, and it doesn’t get noticed easily. It just creeps in and stays there, muting everything and making things look just a little grey. And the knock-on effect on business is extreme, because this dulling holds back each and every action or process or initiative inside a business, from strategy to onboarding to recognition to office design.
I don’t want this for you, and I don’t want this for anyone who works in business. I want businesses to be places that thrill, renew, re-energise, and enable flourishing. And with this new energy, business performance on a whole new level follows.
You don’t have to be dulled. And if you feel dulled, you’re completely capable of becoming undulled.