We must stop holding people to commitments and measuring them on meeting them.
The very idea of “‘commitments” is simplistic and reductionist. Nobody can commit to anything worthwhile in the real world. Too many factors are randomly chaotic or beyond an individual’s control for anyone to be held to a promise of an outcome. To do so is unreasonable. Usually they didn’t make the commitment by their own choice. Often it is bullying or gaslighting to make an employee feel inadequate and hence not deserving of reward, despite having given their all.
Meanwhile someone who got lucky gets praised, demotivating everyone else.
it’s not about finite vs infinite. Whether the system is bounded or not, it is complex. The future is unknown and unknowable. Nobody can commit to anything and nobody controls the outcome.
And in my feed today:
“Of course you define what you want to have happen, then work backwards from there to deduce what you need to do.
But when you’re working in complexity, which is most of the time — as soon as you’ve got people in the equation, BOOM, complexity — it’s literally impossible to know in advance what’s going to work.”
People who understand the complex nature of the real world, and have finally moved on from the 20th Century’s simplistic causal models, understand this as a basic principle. It’s hard to get there but it’s essential. The approximations of the past don’t hold in the volatile present.
tomkerwin.substack.com/p/a-trip-into-the-estuary