"Poetry is not a luxury" - following on from business jargon

‘The dichotomy between beauty and necessity has always been a false tension. Yet as a distraction, it has been extremely effective at crippling our power to bring full-bodied, earth-rending change. And those of us who are most intent on justice, those of us who are activists, and those of us who stand in the barrage of steady societal critique perhaps need to drink in more art than anyone else. In our line of work, the task of stoking our vision and constantly imagining possibilities is absolutely essential.

We can be so harsh and ascetic as we fling ourselves against the needs of the world. Art is accused of being bourgeois because much of the creation of art takes time and solitude and staring out the window. And how can we give ourselves permission to do that when people are starving and there is work to be done?

I think of Judas bemoaning the fragrant ointment that could have been sold to feed hundreds of hungry people but instead is poured in that single lavish, revolutionary gesture onto the head of Jesus. He views the profligate gesture as sin, and feeding the poor as the only good.

I know that voice. it comes from my own lips. But if we always see only those who are starving, we will continually wander the desert of the frantically working and overwhelmed. What we need - desperately - is to not be overwhelmed. And the single thing that keeps us from being overwhelmed is imagination…’

- taken from ‘How one justice-seeker was redeemed by beauty’, Dee Dee Risher, in Geez Magazine Spring ‘08 edition.

Business Jargon

I've been hearing people in the organisations to which I belong, including the Church, using more & more business jargon.
So, I did a quick on-line read of George Orwell's famous essay from the year I was born (1946) titled "Politics and the English Language"

Orwell argued that the aim of this sort of language was to mislead. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink". But if thought corrupted language, he said, language could also corrupt thought. "Every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of one's brain."

Mira Katbamna wrote recently in "The Guardian" that such language " ...can be a two-way street. I have to talk to a client about why we don't want to go ahead with their proposal, while making it sound like that's exactly what they proposed. Talking while saying nothing is bound to come in handy, so I dial the number and launch in. I refer to the perspective from 'my side of the desk', about how I am keen to ensure there are 'take-home actionables'. I point out that because we are 'singing from the same hymn sheet' we don't have to 'reinvent the wheel'. In fact, in order to 'make it happen' it might be better, just as a 'starter for 10' to 'park the issue' and then 'take it offline'. That way we'll get a 'helicopter view' before we do a 'proof-of-concept'. As the conversation continues, I realise that far from being a victim, my counterpart is a willing participant. He talks about the inappropriateness of an 'out-of-box solution'. Why we need to look at our learnings before we go any further. We agree that without increased granularity we can't decide if we have enough bandwidth. Ultimately, we agree to do nothing while making it sound like we are doing something."
So, how do you feel about the following?

.. low hanging fruit, pre-prepare, forward planning, in this space, go forward together, close of play, actioning, get all my ducks in a row, bandwidth, stakeholders, paradigm shift, cascading, challenge, in negative territory and drill down.

Add to that the buzzword bible that is trotted out at meetings. Jargon includes: on the same page, skin in the game, thought leadership, quality action team (QAT), paradigm shift, take that offline, out of the loop, go the extra mile, result-focused, client-focused, total quality, ballpark, ticks in boxes, value-add, touch base, core business, thinking outside the square, stretching the envelope, putting this one to bed, closing the loop, at the end of the day, hot button, interface, guesstimate, key players, killer apps, focus collectively as a group, user-friendly, bells and whistles, benchmark, declining core technology, slippery slide, fast track, win-win, game plan and human capital.

So, I came across real "snail mail"

The people at 'Boredom Research Labs’ have designed ‘the world’s first webmail service using real live snails.’

Yes you read that correctly.

Actually, the thinking behind the project, or at least post-event justification, is to slow technology down, as a form of discipline or meditation. You send your email in the normal way, and this is then stored in a device in the snail’s tank. When a snail, fitted with a RF chip, crawls by, the data is loaded onto the chip. When that snail eventually passes another device, the information is passed from the RF chip, and the mail is delivered as usual. You therefore have no idea when your message is going to eventually be delivered.

Utter fruitloops, completely mad, and the rest of it. But rather an interesting gesture.

(forwarded to me by a mate in UK)

Hirsch on "invisible fields" of organisations

In the last few decades, organizational behaviorists have begun to see that organizations themselves are laced with invisible fields composed of culture, values, vision, and ethics. “Each of these concepts describes a quality of organizational life that can be observed in behavior yet doesn’t exist anywhere independent of those behaviors.” They are invisible forces that affect behavior for good of for ill. We can ‘feel’ the vibe of an organization can’t we? Sometimes in a group of people, we feel obliged to behave in certain ways, even though no one has told us explicitly how to behave. To learn the impact of such fields, just look at what people are doing. They have picked up the messages, discerned what is truly valued, and shaped their behavior accordingly. So when the organizational field is filled with inconsistent messages, when contradictions inform the organizational culture, then invisible incongruities becomes visible through troubling behaviors.

Alan Hirsch again on "Leadership"

In our day I believe that the predominant, top-down, CEO concept of leadership has co-opted the apostolic so that many who claim apostolic title actually function like CEO’s. In the Scriptures the Suffering Servant/Jesus image informs and qualifies the apostolic role, not that of the Chief Executive Officer. Apostolic ministry draws its authority and power primarily from the idea of service, calling, and from moral, or spiritual, authority and not from positional authority. Perhaps a useful way of exploring the nature of apostolic authority is identify the distinctive form of leadership involved and see how this creates authority.

In a relationship based on ‘inspirational’ or ‘moral’ leadership both leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality by engaging each other on the basis of shared values, calling, and identity. It involves a relationship between leaders and followers in which each influences the other to pursue common objectives, with the aim of inspiring followers into becoming leaders in the own right. In other words, influence runs both ways. Inspirational leadership ultimately becomes genuinely moral when it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leaders and led, thus having a transformational effect on both. In this view, followers are persuaded to take action without threatening them or offering material incentives but rather by appealing to their values. They use moral persuasion rather than material reward to influence their followers, appealing rather to higher values and calling. This can be clearly seen in the way Jesus develops his disciples as well Paul’s relationship with Timothy, Titus, and the other members of his apostolic team. But it is forms the basis of his letters to the churches.

Perhaps we can best call this type of influence ‘greatness.’ To be a great leader in this sense is to inspire, to evoke, and to nurture something correspondingly great out of those who follow. Through an integrated life, great leaders remind their followers of what they can become if they too based their lives on a compassionate notion of humanity framed by higher moral vision of the world in which we live. We seldom call a leader with significant technical or managerial ability ‘great.’ And it is with understanding in mind that we can identify spiritual ‘greatness’ as the basic substance that provides genuine apostolic form of leadership with its authority. And it is the strongest form of leadership available because it awakens the human spirit, focuses it, and holds it together by managing the shared meaning.

Power, Leadership & Communication

Thoughts via Kester Brewin in his book "Signs of Emergence" that I'm currently reading.

In other words, the debate continues to rage, and usually follows the same line: those in power want to preserve power structures because, from their perspective, it's the only way to get things done, while those outside those structures see the world very differently and realise things aren't working as well as those in power think they are.

I've been into this in detail in the book, but, to summarise: power and leadership are about facilitating communication or, in the governance situation, creating environments within which the best possible outcomes for people are likely to emerge. You can't legislate for decency, but you can create the kinds of frameworks within which people are more likely to be decent to one another.

I think this is the tricky situation which both government and certain wings of the church find themselves: they feel so threatened by some external power (terrorism / biblical liberalism) that they panic and want to legislate hard in an attempt to protect us. I currently feel that I'd rather enjoy freedom and decent human rights / civil liberties and be blown up a free man, than be safely cocooned in a tight-assed, Orwellian world.