I’m reading Gordon MacKenzie’s brilliant book, Orbiting The Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide To Surviving With Grace. There’s plenty to love in this little book that extrapolates beyond the corporate cubicle. This morning I laughed heartily when he compared two organizational systems, the pyramid and the plum tree. Traditional versus Holistic. Mechanistic versus Organic.
For me, the point of his Fool’s argument, sketched on yellow-pad-paper, comes down to this: the traditional pyramid, a hoosegow of compartmentalization, kills collaboration and snuffs the creative. It is purposeful division. The holistic plum tree, an integrated dynamic continuum, enhances collaboration and stimulates the creative. He draws an arrow pointing to the words “Enhancement of collaboration,” and writes, “This is radical.” [his underline]
It might seem radical to suggest that a system that intends collaboration is radical until you consider our current state of affairs. The latest attack on “the woke” by “the traditional” is, in essence, a pyramid that fears a plum tree. Pyramid people have an investment in exclusion, in standing on the top. Supremacy, white or otherwise. Keeping the cubicles intact, keeping the hierarchy in place.
Plum tree people, the proudly “woke,” reach across and eliminate division because they recognize the truth and power of the continuum, “integrated in a single creative ecology” otherwise known as a “community.” It is the opposite of supremacy. Float all boats.
There’s a race to the bottom in these un-united united states: the recent scrubbing of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the banning of books, red-legislators knocking themselves out trying to bleach our history, bury our past, snuff a questioner’s right to question (i.e. to learn), eliminate a woman’s right to choose; to squeeze gender-identity into a too-tight-airless-box…
In this environment, to suggest a system that intends collaboration, a system that enhances collaboration, is radical. Of course, democracy, by definition, is a system that intends collaboration. It is a system that needs collaboration to survive. It is a plum tree. The real and present danger of the pyramid, as Gordon MacKenzie points out: a pyramid is a tomb.
Democracy is radical. That people of diverse backgrounds and orientations might come to the table together with full respect for their differences – in fact a celebration of their differences, and intend to create “a more perfect union” is-as-has-always-been, a bright star to follow. It is a radical dream that demands open eyes, the capacity to ask questions of ourselves and each other, to tell our full history, to consider the perspective of all the human-beings sitting across the shared table. A radical dream, an ongoing creation stewarded into the future by the radical collaborators, keepers of the dream, the proudly woke.
read Kerri’s blogpost about PROUD BUTTONS
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Filed under: Edges, Merely A Thought Monday, Metaphor, Perspective | Tagged: artistry, collaboration, community, corporate systems, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, democracy, Gordon MacKenzie, holistic, intention, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, mechanistic, organic, plum tree, pride, pyramid, story, studio melange, systems, the melange, traditional, woke | 1 Comment »
The Direction of Intention 