Simply Being Helpful?

What if, more than anything else, we valued helping each other out? What if this was the ultimate praise, not the best technologists, not an ability to hit deadlines, not production stability. What if the ultimate accolade was to consistently help others get things done? Is that crazy? It’s not always natural; we innately divide into groups, building psychological boundaries. Conflicts can erupt from trivial things. And what about the business? How would we ever deliver anything if we spent all our time helping each other out? Well maybe we’d deliver quite a lot.

If helping each other out were our default position it would simply be more efficient? We’d have less politics, less conflict, fewer empires and we’d spend less money managing them.

We probably can’t change who we are. We’ll always behave a bit like we do now. Conflict will always arise and it will always result in problems. We all have tempers, we play games, we have biases and egos. We frustrate others and react to slights and injustices.

But what if was simply our goto position. Our core value. The thing we fall back on when we’re not sure where to go. The thing we used to define our success. It wouldn’t be a silver bullet, but it might temper some of the torrid inefficiencies that dog large organisations.

… right back to the real world

Posted on May 30th, 2012 in Blog


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