Last week my twitter friends, @Robin2go and @bpanulla, and I had a conversation about deja vu and I (@NikkiMK06, follow me, if you want) alluded that perhaps it was the Matrix resetting itself. Reading my RSS feeds, I stumble upon on of those "Matrix moments" courtesy of Bob Sutton and Penelope Trunk:
- Bob Sutton's post is a reaction to a New York Times piece about an experiment where doctors apologized for mistakes and actually found that claims in lawsuits dropped. Bob Sutton has often talked about the virtues of admitting mistakes. People needs to be free to admit they made them so they can take risks, analyze where they went wrong, and improve.
- Penelope Trunk's post was about the importance of self-knowledge. To do any real self assessment, Trunk argues that taking action is more important than taking correct action because overly-cautious people fail to act and bad decisions are good learning experiences.
It's human nature to hide our mistakes. To erase them. To revise them in secret. To sweep them under rugs. To keep dysfunction within the family. Within the organization. To smile. To talk a good game. To dress up and put on a good show for the company.
But what if there is no us and them? There is no my work and your work. There is no departmental slio. There is no boundary. There is no company. This is a global economy. This is is the Internet. This is Web 2.0. This is the Internet. This is collaboration.
If the old boundaries don't exist, why not benefit from this new community. Why not use their collective brainpower? Why place barriers around your works-in-progress, your internal dialogs, etc., when opening them up to a collective, subjective third party might be just the remedy?
So you are not a perfect person. Neither am I. So you are not a perfect organization. That only means you are opening yourself up to self-assessment and continuous improvement, like any other organization. You are the Matrix resetting yourself, adapting to the next change, and change is good.
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