Weeknotes 2. Week ending 26/3/21
One thing I’ve been thinking this week
Is that “driving” is a terrible metaphor to use when talking about how to bring about cultural change in an organisation. It makes me think of cattle.
Are these farmers “driving cultural change”? No — they are coercing behaviour. When they stop driving the cows will go in whatever direction they like.
The other type of driving is mechanical. Again — the tractor has no agency — it is controlled by the person doing the driving.
I much prefer more gentle metaphors: cultivating or nurturing, which acknowledge complexity and don’t imply coercion. But they still have a major problem: they place the person doing the nurturing or cultivating outside the change.
What metaphor could I use that would place me within the complex system I want to change?
Podcast rabbit hole of the week
The new episode of Cautionary Tales about the Dunning Kruger effect, led me to a related episode of You are not so smart. While browsing the You are not so smart archive I spotted an interview with Gretchen McCullock who wrote Because Internet (which is an excellent book). That interview led me to Lingthusiasm, which Gretchen presents with Lauren Gawne and which I have been binging:
- 34: Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
- 52: Writing is a technology
- 51: Small talk, big deal
- 39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation (both this episode and the previous one have some excellent, actionable advice about improving conversations).
- 53: Listen to the imperatives episode!
- 29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
- 31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Maori — Interview with Ake Nicholas
- 54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language
Something I learned (although not this week)
One thing I picked up from Because Internet is how the meaning of punctuation in chat messages is different for different generations. I am old, so I automatically put a full stop at the end of a sentence, even in chat, but I learned that for younger people that full stop reads as abruptness/ disapproval (I may be mistranslating, ask a young person!).
I try to treat people as they would like to be treated, so I make an effort not to use full stops when talking via chat to the younger people I work with. It’s surprisingly difficult to remember, so I end up putting them in and then deleting them. I was going to leave the full stop off the last sentence of this post, but I can’t bring myself to. That’s fine though, because this isn’t chat. As usual — context is everything.
