Most and Few.
Many are perfect in the planning.
Most are near enough in the doing.
Few are there for the learning.
Blameworthy.
Say what you will about Blame.
But there’s something virtuous about being worthy of it.
There’s Always One.
I opened my first meeting with new staff with: ‘I'm not going to give you a speech about loyalty or commitment to the organisation. I’m guessing I know why we’re all here, and it’s not because we’re motivated to serve the boss. I suspect if any of us won the lottery tonight, we wouldn’t be back here tomorrow.’
Then Bob said: ‘I would.’
Sit at The Elbow of Power.
The best apprenticeship to learn the value of good decision making is to sit at the elbow of power.
To vicariously make decisions with the luxury of distance, time, and non-accountability, and the benefit of seeing the results.
To discover for yourself the steps to a good decision.
Breakwater.
A good decision is like a breakwater or sand bar dissipating the strength of emotions and assumptions rushing in with the momentum of quick resolution.
Hit Pause.
A Good Decision is a Pause button.
Freezing our life so often carried forward by pure momentum and habit.
Allowing us the opportunity to ask:
What am I feeling?
Where am I headed and why - and how far have I come?
What information is available to me that I have been ignoring?
What unthinking biases have I been operating under?
Who else is in this with me?
Hard questions.
Which is why few ask them.
The World at Our Feet.
The world wants us to be the best we can.
It delivers water to our taps, electricity to our devices, collects our rubbish and keeps our homes and streets largely free of threats.
Shops and markets and restaurants and cafes and convenience stores.
It paves roads to our doorstep, builds parks, gyms, courts, and boat ramps.
Schools, universities, libraries, and internet for us to learn.
Hospitals when we’re sick, airports when we need to travel, and highways, ports, flight paths and shipping lanes de-conflicted and open for our exploration beyond, with passports and embassies and vaccinations.
The world wants us to succeed.
Whether Two or Two Million.
The duty of every organisation - whether consisting of two people or two million - whether two thousand dollars value or two billion - is to direct its superior size and resources towards elevating each person.
Yet it is almost a rule that the opposite is true.
The organisation - meaning people within it - uses its power to suppress the individual.
A Key Challenge.
A key challenge … is how to distinguish early grooming behaviours from normal care-giving behaviours, and thus how to detect and intervene in CSA before the problem is fully established.
Smallbone, Stephen; Marshall, William L.; Wortley, Richard. Preventing Child Sexual Abuse: Evidence, Policy and Practice (Crime Science Series)
The majority of children who are abused suffer it at the hands of a family member.
How do children and young people learn to distinguish between ‘grooming behavours’ and ‘normal care-giving behavious’?
Where do children and young people witness and experience ‘normal care-giving behaviours’ that do not lead to sexual or other intimacy?
Schools.
We Think. They Think.
We think: ‘This is not right’.
We think if for a minute, hours, days, months … years.
A leader thinks:
‘This is not right.’
Then acts.
The Bigger Picture.
You don’t understand.
You’re peering down a straw at a pixel.
Blind to the bigger picture
Restrictions.
In 500BC all Persian texts were about the king, his priests, and bureaucrats at large.
The Ottoman Empire did not allow printing presses until half a century after the Western Europeans.
Some organisations still practice the same restrictions on information.