Have you wondered why there are disputes between individuals, families and clans?
Why can’t people work together for the higher good of the human race?
What causes large scale wars leading to destruction and loss of lives for trivial reasons?
Why do intelligent people end up doing and saying stupid things in the face of evidence?
It boils down to stories.
Stories are not lies.
They are facts interpreted with layers and layers of wrong content and context passed on from one generation to the next.
This is how culture and way of life develops.
Unless we pause, reflect and refresh from time to time, we end up living under a massive debris of historic distortion of facts.
Why should I care?
Why now?
From a historic perspective, we are living in perhaps the most interesting times.
Never in the history of humankind, we can search and find a person on this planet in less than a second. Only prerequisite is that a person should have left a mild digital trace.
If you happen to have a social media profile and with a smartphone, it would take a millisecond to find you.
Why are the vast majority of people not becoming smarter?
Pardon me if I am sounding like an iconoclast.
I am just trying hard to help people be aware of what is happening around them all the time.
Families used to be joint and children would have multiple parental figures hovering over them and there would be stronger bonding between first cousins built on sharing and caring for each other. There was never a situation where parents would feel paranoid about their children.
Fifty years ago, did people employ contractors and beauticians for a wedding?
It was all done by family.
Today, despite all the attention in nuclear families. I know many instances where parents and children are poles apart in their thought process and philosophies. This was seldom the case in the past. Reason is everyone gets their feed of stories from elsewhere and not from their kith and kin.
Therefore we have more counsellors and therapists to treat situations arising out of this disconnect, more than ever.
Why do parents lose touch with their children’s world?
How and when does it begin to happen?
Is there a way to reverse it and who has to take the first step to reconnect?
On the work side too, industries were focused on hard labour being driven by task masters. Then came relatively skilled managers driving their workforce to deliver on their goals of enhanced production from a manufacturing line and more recently the managers were focused on driving their teams to complete the given tasks and produce results without questioning the methods.
Today, the world we live in is different in all aspects. This change happened too fast.
Those task based micro managers can’t survive, even if they survive their teams would abandon them.
Think about it for a moment on what it should be to be effective in the knowledge economy?
Given our experience of the last 30 years, what to expect in the next 30 years?
Is there a need for balancing work and life or is there a need to integrate work and life?
We are living in a world where collecting and processing good quality data is the key thing.
Business owners and leaders need to rely on data to make decisions. Data is generated in the field or in a large operational centre. We need smart tools to convert these field data to meaningful insights. Leadership today is to know the context and relevance from these processed data.
Nothing can be done unless the leader has the ability to connect the dots and convert it into a compelling narrative.
Let us enhance our ability to catch the insights behind the data, agenda behind a narrative and politics behind a social media feed. Time to refresh. What worked in the past is no guarantee it will work in the future, in families. societies and in work places.
Narratives are good but not without checking the context, space and time.
