Mumblings

 November passed me by in a flash. A long awaited birthday came and went, and I can now call myself a lady of leisure, although leisure is not exactly what is happening at the moment. Things tend to happen in ways we don't expect. Lacan, again. Real, symbolic and imaginary.

We spend a lot (most?) of our time imagining the future, even our present. We plan for events and imagine our place within them, we mentally prepare responses, and some of us even practise in front of a mirror. That's why we don't like change.

We spend much of our time attempting to make things predictable so that we can know our place in the world, or at least gain an inkling, a notion, an idea of what it might be. We start the moment we are born, and we don't stop until we die. So if someone in the organisation we work in tells us that we need to change, we have to adjust our picture of what we imagine our reality might be (real is not real, except incidentally). It is so much harder than you might imagine.

I have never regarded myself as a team worker, I find it an odd concept. After all I work(ed) in an individual office with my name on the door, the same way as most people did. Incidentally I worked on projects with others, was sent to different places on the planet to do a job, mostly because someone else thought I should, hopefully because of my talents and/or skills and whatever else made him (always a he) think I could do a good job. I went on my own, met others, sat at tables, meeting or dinner or bar tables and talked a lot. When I went back to where I left from I hoped that what I had said mattered.

My attitude is not likely to change, mainly because I no longer work in an organisation. From what I hear, neither has anyone elses. Names on doors are no longer the done thing except if you're really important, but we still draw boundaries around our flexwork space, and make every attempt to personalise it so that no-one else will want to invade that particular space.

There is a lot of hype about change - and how we all need to innovate. There is a lot of hype about team work - and how valuable it is.

There is a limit to innovation and how much the human spirit can deal with changing visions of what a personal future might be. There is a limit to what a team can do. The limit is set at individual capacity and capability, and the fact that so many of us are simpy better alone.