I do my best reading in a coffee shop, where I can nestle in with a lovely flat white decaf (ah, the NZ coffee is nearly as beautiful as the scenery) and the energy of the noise around me keeps me focused and awake simultaneously. That’s a good combination.
I wonder what it is about my context that keeps me present or not to my reading. It’s not like the coffee is caffeinated and I’m getting a jolt from it. It’s not like the articles get more interesting as they ride in my bag to the shop. And yet I’m more interested in them, can focus better, learn more. The context changes my interaction with the material.
Not every coffee shop will do, though, and I haven’t found the perfect place yet (although I have one that I’m feeling pretty good about). Too much music or conversation and the paper in front of me becomes unintelligible, and I focus on my headache or the tete-a-tete of the couple sitting next to me.
Today I’ve been thinking about the leadership balance beam, the coffee shop organisation. When we’re too comfortable, we fall asleep. We do our jobs in a daze, mind elsewhere, learning little and not particularly noticing the lack of learning. Sometimes this is called “comfortable”, sometimes this is called “boring”; it’s all a matter of how you see it, really. Too much discomfort and again, we can’t focus. In the coffee shop this is “noise” but there are lots of noises in our organisational lives that would lead to the same outcomes. With too much noise, there’s no space for learning.
And, just to add insult to injury, different coffee shops work for different people. My friend Paul doesn’t like any noise around him while he’s reading; Michael listens to music at all times. If we think of leaders as contributing to organisational culture the way baristas contribute to coffeehouses, how do they get the mix right for everyone? And what about the fact that most leaders don’t even think much about the culture they’re trying to create? They’re just worried about the way the organisation works and hoping to make it work better. But without the right blend of challenge and support, people are unlikely to get into a state that’s anything like flow. How could I, as a researcher, writer, leadership developer, help leaders see this piece of their job? How do leaders come to understand their influence on culture?
Organisations are both more than the sum of their parts and also somehow less. In our Kenning South meetings over the weekend, we talked about organisational structure, leadership, what systems we want to put in place to help us think better together. And we worried about which systems would actually get in the way, break down our practice, inhibit our thinking. In an organisation 50 years old like NZCER, those old systems are harder to break out of—harder, even, to even see. And in a really old organisation, like Harvard, for example, how do you ever make change happen.
Coffee shops are quick-moving and responsive to the clients. This music doesn’t work so we change the CD, this cake doesn’t sell so we bring in chocolate biscuits. People like coffee stronger or hotter or with caramel, so those things get changed, too. In organisations, do people really know what they want? For people who spend lots of their time alone with a computer, like me, what is it that the organisation can add to my understanding? How is it that we can think bigger things together than we think alone? And how does a leader create the culture to do this without being so market responsive that there’s no real leadership at all.
I’m puzzling over what I want to be in this next phase in my life, which work most interests me, and how I might get into that work. Somehow there’s an answer to this in a coffee shop near me.
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