Day #68

Engineering

Yesterday i walked to a shopping centre: one of the big out of town ones that everyone drives to. And i struggled to find my way in.

Arterial roads and a multi storey car park met me as i walked up, alongside unwelcoming tunnels and some building works. Eventually i found a sign to ‘pedestrian entrance’, which carried me up and down stairs, through a subway, and into a weed strewn patch of gravel, before i eventually made it ‘front stage’ into the landscaped shopping area.

It reminded me of a time when i walked down the wrong street in Vegas and ended up by all the loading bays and staff car parking, and realised the magic was gone.

As patterns of behaviour change (in this case, more walking and cycling), our optimised infrastructure, the build environment, can fall out of synch. We end up hard engineered to fail.

Use your sixty seconds today to consider which aspects of your Organisation, or indeed yourself, are hard wired for a different past?

Some answers may be obvious: the very existence of offices, certain IT skills we hold that are now redundant, even productive methodologies or scientific knowledge.

Then consider how you were engineered: through education, through experience, through feedback. And ask yourself if you have the conditions, the community, around you, to make the changes that you need?