When our situation calls on us to be relentlessly productive in delivering results and cooperative and collaborative, it can often be experienced as confusing, stressful, ambiguous, complex and uncertain. I sometimes imagine these kinds of experiences as like a borderland in which feelings, ideas, anticipations, expectations and possibilities are jostling and competing for attention.
The individualism inherent in contemporary work appear to be placing us under more and more stress as we are forced to choose between competing commitments based on seemingly incompatible logics about what constitutes wise and effective individual and collective action.
Although we hear a lot about living in a VUCA world the use of the acronym doesn’t help much. What if the contradictions and disquiets we experience are actually the seeds of new possibilities which can only be discovered at the conversational frontier?
Getting down among the trees seems to me to involve a process of “reading” the situation or circumstance. By that I mean something different from an instrumental or informational reading. I suggest that a more tentative, slower, sensual reading is required.
Everyone is familiar with the saying “I can’t see the woods for the trees!” What do we do, though, when this happens at work? Conventional advice suggests that we should take a step back, perhaps by “getting up on the balcony”. In this article I want to explore a somewhat counter-intuitive idea – getting down …