meaningful work

Kourosh Dini says that, “Mastery and meaningful work develop from guided play.” This is pretty well the direction behind my personal knowledge mastery framework and the notion of ‘half-baked ideas‘.

“There is an error in our focus on productivity. I may even be labeled as a productivity talking-head. I’ve more than likely made the error myself.

The error is that the focus should not be on productivity so much as it is on mastery.

Mastery is a process, a development over time for something you care about. That could be your family or that could be a craft.

This way, you choose the thing or things you are mastering and the remainder of your world is around supporting those. You don’t need to master everything, so much as take them to a point of being strong enough to support what you find meaningful.

Secondly, I strongly believe that mastery absolutely requires play.” —Being Productive 2022-12-05

The sad reality of many workplaces is that there is not only no time for half-baked ideas but neither is there time for even generalized sensemaking around the key issues facing the organization.

“Many organizations are stuck in an information dissemination rather than a sense-making approach to communication. I’m struck at how often it becomes clear that executives are spending precious time in long meetings, but don’t have a common understanding of the ‘thing’ they’re talking about – this leads to frustration, misalignment and often significant conflict.

The ability to do deep work has been dangerously curtailed. Every week I hear executives tell me that they have no time to think. Many have confided that they have teams of dozens of employees or more and don’t know what they do all day because the executive is barely keeping up with the crushing pressure of a non-stop overflowing inbox.” —WTF is going on?

Doing deep work requires time. It requires time for reflection. Many people found that working from home (or elsewhere) gave them more time for thinking and less stress from commuting. Meanwhile, in Canada we are seeing a move back in time, for more control and less time for sensemaking.

“Several senior bureaucrats in different departments who aren’t authorized to speak publicly expect Treasury Board to introduce a new order that would set the number of days public servants have to work at the office – widely speculated to be two or three days – and spell out conditions for exemptions. Details are still being finalized, but senior officials said earlier this week they were alerted the order could come as soon as this week. That now appears to have been pushed back.” —Policy Options 2022-12-08

If we don’t give back or take back time for sensemaking we will increasingly become less capable of facing complex and chaotic challenges. If those in charge of organizations do not enable deep work, workers need to take it back, whether through quiet quitting or active leaving. People are the means of production, period.

I use the personal knowledge mastery framework to help create ways to make sense of all the noise around us. Active and engaged citizens are our best hope for a better future.