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Writer's pictureRichard Lipscombe

Where is your mind while you work?


You are here but your mind is over there.

Corporate strategists face a huge problem as they attempt to match the workplace culture with the worker's mindset [see photo]. They try to map the internal corporate culture to the one the live in when not at work. They have struggled with this problem for over 30 years.


The current strategy is to equalise the demands at work with the narratives that prescribe life beyond the workplace. But the world beyond the workplace is fragmenting at a rapid rate so there is an embedded practical issue to face here. This is a wicked problem fuelled by complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty and perhaps this is the real reason that progress on it has been so slow.


Given that corporate strategists have no universal solution that will match their workplace culture with the social culture which supports the workforce they must cheat. As you might suspect the way they cheat is extremely clever. They have decided to match the corporate culture narratives with those that run wild on social media. Perhaps this is why the folks in HR are pushing strategies for "diversity and inclusion" [although this seems to be tautological it is a modern myth] as the way forward.


An interesting but underlying issue is that the workers cheat too. They cheat in a less sophisticated way than their corporate masters. They cheat because they lie to themselves in the first instance and then they repeat that lie in workgroups or teams. The effect of this lying syndrome is collective myths form and propagate both inside and outside the workplace.


Richard



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