I’ve been meaning to post about this for literally months, but never seemed to find the right reflective moment. I still don’t think I have, but I was talking about this in an online community – here’s what i said over there – relating to a conversation about fostering innovation in organisations.
I saw (heard? :-) a wonderful talk by Theodore Zeldin who seems to have spent his Academic career wondering about the benefits of something as straightforward as conversations. He felt people didn’t talk to each other as people and this led to the inability of people in organisations to be creative, to change and think radically.
His conclusion? Organisations treat people as a resource (he hated the term ‘Human Resources’) and therefore people acted as such, regarding themselves not so much as a multi-faceted person, but as a role/skill-type. People’s inate curiousity and creativity gets subsumed into their ‘role’.
Zeldin argues that companies should have biographies of all their people – nothing about work, but themselves and their wider interests etc. A cv for the soul, I suppose.
Is this a bridge too far? Is it neccessary to change busines culture so radically to achieve the innovation/creativity culture that is so badly needed??
UPDATE: I totally forgot, there’s a webcast of Zeldin’s talk that I saw – here’s the link. Hey, does this update count towards my 3 posts a week target?