Reflections 26th November

Pausing

Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

Something is exhausting and debilitating about being in the presence of groups of people whose response to uncertainty is to move faster. Watching companies whose response to uncertainty is to cut costs and hoard cash, even as they have no idea what to do with it, and see their stores of knowledge, relationships and goodwill leak out invisibly but inexorably like an internal bleed.

Or, on the other hand, to witness those organisations who have found something that works scaling it frenetically, mindless of what will happen if circumstances change and they have to contract.

It can feel like the film “Speed”, where if the bus with the hostages on goes at less than fifty miles an hour, it will explode, with us as those hostages.

When our businesses, and increasingly our public services and politics, measure themselves in terms of “performance”, they become the same and similarly unattractive. Were one to disappear, we know another would be along in a moment, i…