Deep Work Culture

March 16, 2015 Leave a comment

I’ve long said that the ways in which work and organizational life are changing should be advantageous to those of us committed to social movements. Our organizational imperatives should never supersede our movement’s imperative. We should be willingly able to discard any organizational structure that does not serve our ultimate purpose.

Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of Stowe Boyd and his thinking. I’m specially appreciating his thinking on the future of work. The following quote speaks to what should be our shared values and therefore to the way in which we should be organizing our work in order for our movements to thrive:

 

“Deep work culture is based on embracing dissent, not slavishly pursuing consensus. It embraces widespread democracy, and rejects oligarchic control of the many by the few. Deep culture is based on distributed and emergent leadership, where any and all can step forward to lead when it makes sense, instead of leadership being limited to an elite caste.”

 

I like the idea of “deep culture” and I think it is consonant with the Interaction Institute’s commitment to Big Democracy. We’ve inherited organizational cultures and work norms that are steeped in the industrial revolution. These come to by way of the same corporate ideology that undermines so much of what we are trying to achieve.

Let us be bold enough to work differently. Movement leaders should be the ones inventing new ways of working together. The way we work has everything to do with the way we live. Work is what we are doing most of the time!

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