Angry Forgetting!?
Angry Forgetting!?
Do you sometimes feel like it’s only Tuesday on Friday? Or that your short-term memory lets you down and you easily could be reminiscing about old memories?
You are not alone, but in good company of the many who spent the last months working at home and missed necessary challenges to practice their memory.
Never mind, it’s not that bad?
Unfortunately it is bad, because with the fitness of certain brain areas, the level of perception is also affected and with it the perceived and actual ability to concentrate, focus, reflect and understand complexity. This often leads to a sense of loss of control, and regardless of actual impairment, we then even more crave certainty, control, and power.
My thesis is, that the diminished capacity to grasp complexity leads to a loss of agility, a prerequisite for moving forward in the current situation.
Loss of control versus desire for power?
What is your experience? Has your working world become more hybrid?
How many benefits do you derive from the new situation?
Why don’t I ask about the disadvantages of the same?
What design frameworks does the “new normal” offer?
How do I maintain my perceived and actual capacity to think and remember?
One question can be answered quickly: asking about the disadvantages (for solutions of this kind) is less significant, they block our creativity and memory of successes.
More important to ask: what have you and your organization been successful at? How much agility and how much structure were helpful in reorganizing the world of life and work? How were you able to sustain courage and joy?
And then: how do we influence our ability to focus and quickly recognize, analyze, act, react? How do we maintain our flexibility?
How do we exercise our thinking skills in the context of new digital demands and increased lack of social, empathic interactions?
How do we react to, how do we distinguish between fake and subjective reality? How do we value facts? How “agile” do we manage complexity? How do we deal with uncertainties, volatilities, ambiguities?
What does our freedom consist of?
Certainly, we will all have to learn, develop and reinvent a lot. For today I have three approaches to offer:
- Nora Bateson refers in her reflections on “Emergence” to the assumption that many present results are preceded by developments of several generations and that a solution lies in this understanding without exposing the roots of the development. She calls this understanding “Warm Data” – empathy, intuition and understanding of the “system” – on which shared learning (“Symmatesy”) and solutions are then built on.
- Studies found that actually exercising different regions of the brain not only strengthens memory, but leads to a more relaxed, overall sense of well-being. Studies show that calm, serene engagement of the same brain regions lead to quicker and appropriate memories and decisions. I call it clarity from (letting go) and curiosity about what comes next.
- reflection on one’s own need for secureness and control: Marshall Rosenberg writes in “The Purpose of Anger” that anger and rage are expressions of unmet needs. Recognizing and articulating these needs ourselves and then in others could save us a great deal of effort in imposing systems of control (on ourselves and) others.
How much better would then self-confidence, self-responsibility and sense-making work for complexity management and the development of agile attitudes.
I’m sure you can think of other helpful attitudes and skills.
Write to us. Together, we’ll create a diverse, agile, solution-oriented world in motion.
Oh yes: please let’s not forget to paint this future colorful and meaningful to us. Then it can succeed….
Write us your impressions and answers. Let’s learn and experience together,
Yours
Barbara & Michel
Supplementary literature
https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abc7606
Surprising Purpose of Anger by Marshall B. Rosenberg, ISBN 9781892005151
Nora Bateson: https://warmdatalab.net/warm-data