Resisting pressure to fragment
Are you a systems thinker? Do you regularly encounter pressure to fragment? Do you get questions like “But what is your area of specialization?” Or comments like “But that project was never intended to include THAT.” I do.
So–even though I rarely write blog posts–I started a new blog: www.IslandHealth.Info It’s explicitly about things like healthy food consumption; not about leadership and knowledge work. So I was amused today when I came across a blog post by one of my favourite social media connections: Luis Suarez (@elsua). In this post, he writes: “One of those folks I have been truly admiring for a long while is JP Rangaswami a.k.a. @jobsworth”
Luis embeds a March 2012 TED salon presentation by JP Rangaswami in this post. It is well worth 8 minutes of your time if you care about work in a knowledge era and appreciate the power of metaphor. This TED talk explores the idea: “what would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food.” It left me both inspired, and feeling sheepish about my decision to publicly fragment spheres of thinking, which this authentic thinker has integrated so beautifully and provocatively.
This is just brilliant! Resisting the pressure to fragment – it’s as if it’s a statement or thought coming straight out of my own brain and heart.
‘SimoneWolff’ is btw my alter ego (but also my real – second – names!) It’s me, Claudia Gillberg, writing!
Brilliant concept! Like you, I get the same question regarding specialization and have fought hard to keep everything I do under one umbrella and on one plate. It seems, however, as if people find bite sized pieces – aka: fragments – easier to digest. While I understand the initial thinking of the morsel tidbit approach, what often happens is that the rest of the meal is left untouched. Eventually this leads to an emotional / nutritional imbalance and everything is thrown off.
I believe, as a fellow systems thinker, that everything is inter-related and it is up to us to make sure that we avoid the the impulse to micro-manage ourselves away from our holistic meaning. When we find, and reinforce, our own core nutrients we create a more well balanced and satisfying personal meal.