Admin Note: Joe’s Jots are supposed to be quick, spontaneous shares of thoughts that I note down for myself. Given that my professional life is becoming so image-based, I need a place where I don’t worry about including an image that may or may not have any meaning to the post.
So, going forward, Joe’s Jots will be my image-free safe space.
There I was, looking across the room at the vintage pie safe in my office in which I have some books in the slots.
Side Note: Right now, I’m realizing now that I’m a photographer, I need to clean it out and reload it with a variety of papers for photo printing instead. Future project!
Anyway, back to the original point to be made.
The binding of the book reads, “Testing Business Ideas.”
It immediately spurred a thought related to the professional transition / transformation I’m going through and my reflections on making our life systems more human.
What’s largely missing from education and work are human ideas.
Everything in education and work is so incredibly over-indexed toward the business concerns. It’s literally like these business ideas…which are literally a dime-a-dozen and so full of repetitive mimicry…are more important than the human lives that create and serve these ideas.
In my 15+ years of corporate experience, experience when we attempted to make work better for employees and customers, we always tried to improve some business aspect about it. Hell! I worked in life sciences. When organizations decided that patient centricity should be part of their mission statement, they made it all about the business of appearing more patient centric.
You can’t get needing to be more human than listening to and taking care of a patient and caregivers…and you make patient centricity the responsibility of a single person or very small group within an entire organization, across multiple drug products, across multiple clinical trials, etc…etc…?
Crazy!
We can’t make work more humanly better by working on the business stuff.
This is the epitome of “doing the wrong thing more right…and becoming wronger about the whole idea of improvement or change throughout the process.”
Attempting to fix or improve the business aspects of a system when addressing some flailing or malfunctioning, core human aspects it literally doing the wrong thing. Doing it even more or harder because it’s not worked to date is doing the wrong things more right.
The net effect is becoming even more wrong about the real underlying challenge.
If we want more human education and work experiences, we have to work on more human ideas for these systems. We need to test human ideas…and then test the business ideas that will augment a more human experience.
Testing business ideas is fine when we have a paradigm and model in place that prioritizes the more foundational concerns of what it means to do “work.” With a more human foundation in place, we can be more certain that what we build from a business perspective will be more in service to the humans making it and the customers using it.
But if we think we should keep productizing our future under the guise of improving life for humans, more human systems won’t ever happen. We’ve been in a rampant, technological productization model for at least 20 years and we are starting to witness more pushing back on what’s been going on. People are pushing back because our systems are feeling less and less human with time.
Let’s start testing more human ideas for education and work.
Joe’s Jots is where I share observations, opinion, and potential thought-provoking posts in and around change and innovation (not product, system innovation) for our major life systems like education and work…or life in general.
My observations are rooted in…
15+ years of corporate project and change management in the life sciences industry leading “digital transformation”
Taking sabbaticals during layoffs to discover other great disciplines like Systems Thinking outside of my normal thinking routines
Most recently, learning to reconnect with consciousness and curiosity through art thinking (via photography)…and all of the lessons I now see for myself and others
More than more subscribers, what I’d love to occur here is more dialogue about what I propose or challenge here. Deeper vs. broader.
Please share your own opinions, call me out (in a respectable way), offer your own opinions, things you’ve tried to make a system more human, ask a question, etc…
But of course….
Or….