Aeon magazine frequently publishes articles that makes me stop and think, but in a good way. The best articles make me reflect on what is relevant and what is just distracting. In a way, that in itself is distracting, but I digress.
Dougald Hine discusses a very relevant topic in his recent article on Aeon. Many people expected boredom to be solved with the advent of the Internet. If everything you ever want to read or see is at your fingertips, how can you still be bored?
“(Meaning) requires, among other things, space for reflection – allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge.”
Not only are we still bored, we started trolling. Hine points out that it’s not just a few antisocial elements who become aggressively bored. He recognises the tendency in all of us. It turns out that more raw information wasn’t the answer to boredom. Meaning is.
Meaning can be found when connecting the dots. You don’t just get meaning by filtering out the noise. You get meaning when you take a break from more information and reflect. When you finally get the time to do some processing, you can transform information into meaning: “It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience. No matter how experienced we become, success cannot be guaranteed.”
I see a similar tendency in organisations today. Most organisations keep themselves well occupied. HR, like most other departments, spends quite some time fighting fires. Whatever the problem is, more mails and meetings seem to be the answer. I’ve been in companies where thousands of mails were sent every day. But the most common complaint was that “we should communicate more.” In such a rat race, you either try to keep up, or you drop out with a bore-out.
The solution is to put some meaning back into your organisation. Take a look at what you are achieving. What is the impact of how you work? How is the quality of projects, the contacts between colleagues, and of your time spent inside your offices? Is this what you want for your organisation? If it’s not, you should spend some serious time to reflect. Don’t just do it with your management team, but make it an organisation wide exercise. The result is unknown. But it may be one of the most important journeys you can take with your organisation and your co-workers