‘Tomorrow, we begin a new tomorrow.’ So sounded the clarion
call for the dystopian nightmare of Mitt Romney as the world’s most powerful
leader. That was yesterday though, a
pile-up on the track avoided as Obama won by being the car least likely to
explode. Somewhere between the
‘Yesterday’ of the Beatles, and Romney’s almost Annie-like threat of ‘Tomorrow’, we find the real challenge:
staying conscious to the moment, being present, creating now, making change
happen here, living life in this reality.
People, seize the day! But no one uses that slogan, not in this (human)
race.
Truth is, we rather like the grand narrative of yesterday
and tomorrow. One allows us to bask in the power of nostalgia to reshape our
history; and the other allows us to dream a future better than where we are
now. Both have their positive uses; but both are used too often to negative
diversionary effect. We are a humanity that seems incapable of facing up to the fact that we
are what we are now – and what we are now, and what we will be tomorrow just like we were yesterday, looking at the state of inequality
and ecological decline in the world, is not an image many of us would want to
see reflecting in the mirror. The now
that is lost in yesterday and tomorrow needs a stronger and more honest focus
in our actions.
Let’s call a new approach that counters these narratives ‘Managing Now’. The ability to target resources to the need
and goals of the moment in a way which keeps the past alive and builds the
future. In other words, our ‘Managing
Now’ isn’t the crisis management of a moment without connection to time; it’s
the intelligent and authentic management of what is happening, has and will
happen. Exactly not how most organisations
and institutions run.
Just think how many strategic, operational, delivery and
project plans you have lived through, where the delivery of the perfect future
has been packaged up with seemingly little regard to the in-your-face ‘gap’
between the rhetoric and reality. Just imagine how many staff are employed to
plan for a tomorrow which doesn't come while missing its seeds in the
today around them. The logical thinkers will keep building their Stalin-like
plans without realising that the plan they obsess over is the problem. There is
no plan to solve where we are. There is
no magical plan that can function on its own merit. We’d like to think that planning is a
sophisticated development tool, but truth is, it’s as false as Mitt Romney’s centre-ground
rhetoric. It’s an illusion of complex
logic, a car that drives our minds into circles. It’s a plan asking for another plan to plan
a plan by.
Managing Now thinks more about people, about creating the
autonomy and authenticity within us all to make now happen so that tomorrow can
change through it. The art of
inner-vation. The responsibility that we are only 'all in it together' if we are conscious and autonomous to create the 'it' we are together in. Without that, the rest, as a modern Hamlet may pronounce, is soundbites, spreadsheets, and tweets.
Which is why we need to stop singing about tomorrow and yesterday.
The talent is already in the room, the real
race that matters is not the cars but us. What are we doing to live this? It's all happening, right here. Roll up, roll up...
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