The Power of Not Knowing

I’m learning to crab walk. I decided to try something new to combat my reduced physical activity that began with working from home a few years ago. I chose an exercise program that includes a lot of familiar activity, and a little bit of unfamiliar activity. Most of the unfamiliar activity came naturally to me, but the crab walk seemed to break my brain at first. I found myself connecting this to some of my worries of late. As the geopolitical contexts of our lives are changing drastically and rapidly right now, I’ve been worrying that the approaches we’ve been taking toward our relationships and communities and visions of shared healthy peace will not be enough.

Don’t Underthink It.

Knowing what we hope for in any given situation – or undertaking, or conversation, or relationship – plays a big role in whether that hope will be realized. And yet there is a common way of thinking about this which assumes it only applies to momentous, major stuff – there’s no need to be mindfully intentional about the run of the mill, moment to moment minutia of life. Even those with mindfulness or meditation practices may relegate the practice to non-working time.

In workplaces, this might look like carefully crafted values statements, formal retrospectives on projects, and shared agreements for meetings, but… no intentional practices around informal, in-the-moment ideation or feedback.

The Urgency Audit.

The organization may stop encouraging or rewarding needless urgency, but if it hasn’t mapped out and implemented the corresponding structural or process supports (resource allocation, incentives and performance metrics, accessibility supports, roles, workflows, policy) to enable this shift, it will either become less effective or it will continue operating in perpetual urgency.