We don’t live on a chess board. Life is never so simple as to be either black or white and it’s time that we stopped thinking of everything in a binary way. Our creativity is stifled by the belief that an ‘I’m right therefore you’re wrong’ culture is what we should strive for where the use of conflict and argument will solve all of our problems. No one is ever really completely absolutely truly right or wrong.
Where there used to be a clear cut delineation in our lives there is now just overlap and confusion. At work these days for example, a lot of people do home stuff at work, online shopping, networking with their friends using social media and then do work stuff at home on their smart phones or on their laptops. The work life balance is not a simple on off switch and where there used to be separation there is significant convergence. (Smart phones, well there is a grey area in itself. Are they phones that can take pictures or are they cameras that you can ring people from? Indeed are they something very different that transcend the restrictive confines of our language?)
But we get into real problems when we try to simplify complex issues into sound bites and Twitter feeds. The simple can easily become simplistic. Take a couple for examples that are being played out in the politisphere at the moment: the relationship between the private and the public sectors and the argument about back office and front office services.
The premise of this blog is not that the balance between the public and private sectors is right or wrong but rather that the two are not mutually excusive. Those in the public sector buy things from the private sector and those in the private sector rely upon services in the public sector. Creating an argument, a belief system that private is good and public is bad does nothing to help resolve an obvious financial problem.
The same is true of the front office / back office approach, where the front office does the useful work with the customers and the back office does the unnecessary administration and processing work. All businesses need customers and so need people to interact with them but all businesses need to collect cash and pay their bills and pay their staff. Again we need to think about the balance between these functions and the relationship between the differing parts of an organisation but a business without either one is dead. They are not mutually exclusive.
Instead of binary thinking we need to consider organisations with all their issues and problems in an holistic way and focus on a greater understanding of relationships and interactions within a single entity, in way that is mutually inclusive.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 