Living in the present

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Harold Jarche pulled this chunk from Ekso Kilpis’ post on Complexity. The new world between chance and choice. Kilpis is looking at complexity science and the light it casts on how we should manage in a networked world where change is not linear.

The sciences of complexity change our perspective and thinking. Perhaps as a result we should especially in management, focus more attention on what we are doing than what we should be doing. Following the thinking presented by the most advanced scientific researchers, the important question to answer is not what should happen in the future, but what is happening now?

This complexity stuff can be heavy science, but this makes human sense to me. For instance, I often find the conversation about what’s happening now, in the moment, is much more engaging than intellectual struggles over ideas about the future. For instance, tortuous conversations about how to run some future meeting only become really engaging when the speakers fess up to the feelings of stress and frustration they feel now.

Kilpis continues:

Our focus should be on the communicative interaction creating the continuously developing pattern that is our life

Dense language but I think it means living more in the present, with greater awareness of what’s happening now, what all our senses are telling us, and less fantasising about unmanageable things and people outside our control.

Share Post

More Posts

Singing on the subway

What I learned singing to strangers on the subway, and why emotional connections matters even more in a hi-tech era.

Bunny Bunny

A funny game illustrates what we may be missing in many of our meetings

Leading from the clown

I shot this in a single eight-minute take, which is in the spirit of an experience of Ralf Wetzel’s workshop, Leading from the Clown. Clown training is probably the deepest and most challenging work I’ve done. Enjoy.

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Peer pressure, inverted

I’m a sucker for stories of psychological experiments, especially ones containing the word ostensibly. You know, the ones where the subjects think the experiment is about one thing but really

Johnnie Moore

Process, schmocess revisited

Neil Perkin organised another Firestarters event at Google this week and a good time appears to have been had by all. Neil’s done a very thorough write up here. I

Johnnie Moore

Morale sapper

Kathy Sierra comments on this morale-sapping policy at Mrs Fields Cookies: Employees must throw away ALL unpurchased cookies at the end of the night. Employees are expressly forbidden from taking