Reflections 16th June

Conversations, Spiders and Guerrilla Gardening....

Photo by Jack van der Spoel on Unsplash

In the midst of our busyness, we often lose sight of the obvious, just as much of our critical infrastructure is based on legacy systems that we forget about. In my work at the moment, as we fumble around in uncertainty, I’m reminded that conversations have the same quality.

They are the spider at the centre of the Web.

Conversation: Origin mid-14c., "place where one lives or dwells," also "general course of actions or habits, manner of conducting oneself in the world."

Etymyonline

In our hurry, much of our conversation has become performative and gladiatorial, a way of winning, standing out, and drawing attention to ourselves and our views. We see it in the puerile nature of our politics and business, where lying and obfuscation have become legitimate as long as they garner attention, and apologies are cursory and blatantly insincere when the mendacity is pointed out.

Our conversation has become dry and shrivelled when, in order to tackle the issues we face, it needs to blossom.

In last Sunday’s post, I listed some of those whose work on conversation has inspired me and informed my work but it’s not enough. In our busyness, they are treated like assembly instructions for flatpack furniture, something that insults our intelligence and capabilities. There is a huge, inspirational body of work on the nature and power of conversation going back to the dawn of time gathering dust in corners of academia that are sidelined in favour of quick-fix solutions, processes and control of media.

The result is that our levels of innovation and productivity have become as dry and dusty as our conversation and our relationships as arid as a desert in the tidy, measured boxes we call work.

I suspect a direct correlation. We focus on wringing more and more of what we already know how to do rather than exploring new areas. We put walls around conversations, cancel those who wander outside of them, and starve them half to death, creating not so much a highway to hell as an expressway to mediocrity, where it becomes difficult to tell the difference between a chatbot and a constrained human.

Deserts, though, are not sterile, and we know what happens when it rains on them. Seeds buried below the surface, waiting for their moment, spring to life. In the concrete cities we create, Guerrilla Gardeners appear, trespassing to create small pockets of beauty that feed the soul and create habitats for spiders.

We can take inspiration and learn from them.

We need to find ways to give those who value conversation room to grow and thrive—if not at work, then outside it. We need Communities of Practice where those seeds that are present in all of us can find what they need in order to grow.

There are those already doing it; those like

Johnnie Moore

,

John Durrant

,

Chandima Dutton

, Dan Parsons, and many others. Artisanal Conversation Gardeners are creating fertile soil because they can, not because it is a “scaleable market opportunity”.

Technology gives us the ability to pull together information in whatever format we want, and we are being presented with new opportunities to feed conversation in pursuit of the new, not just ultraprocessing what we already know and calling it new, like some sort of over-marketed hamburger.

Technology gives us Chat GPT and Perplexity.ai, which, although they are just getting started, give individuals the power formerly the province of big consultancies. We can gather together what is known and use it as a starting point to set off in search of what is not.

I started thinking, like all recovering consultants, in a four-box matrix, with conversations as either synthetic, manufactured, to serve a purpose on one axis, or organic, left to find their own way. On the other axis, conversations are based on logic, the known and provable and at the other end, around “mystery” in all its variety, from the scientific to the spiritual.

I then spent some time doodling on what those conversations might look like:

It’s just a start, but nonetheless, a place to start. You will see things I do not.

Chat GPT tells me “A synthetic conversation is an artificially created dialogue designed to simulate real-life interactions between individuals. These conversations can be generated using various techniques, including scripting, machine learning models, or natural language processing algorithms.”

and that “An organic conversation is a naturally occurring dialogue between individuals, characterized by spontaneity, authenticity, and real-time responses. Unlike synthetic conversations, which are artificially created and scripted, organic conversations arise naturally in everyday interactions without pre-planning or external prompts.”

In my experience, the search for productivity and efficiency relies on largely synthetic conversation, fuelled by need, training and a desire for conformity. That, in itself, is not a criticism, just an observation.

Created to do a job. A tool, like a gun, aimed at something specific.

“But we do not ask. We want to be told. One of the most curious things in the structure of our psyche is that we all want to be told because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by another, whereas to ask a question is to ask it of yourself.”

~J Krishnamurti

Guns, however, have their limits:

“The best way to find out things, if you come to think of it, is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun; bang it goes, and everything takes flight and runs for shelter. But if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone; and if you are very patient, you will see and understand a great deal more than a man with a gun.”

― Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

The conversations we need to make space for are organic, generative, enabled, and allowed to take us where they will in search of what will help us thrive, individually and collectively.

But first, for paid Subscribers, a closer look at the nature of the performative conversations that dominate the workplace: