Sometimes I think all we do is talk. It’s the end of March, the time of year for deep collaboration and involvement. Time disappears. Conversation. Conversation. Conversation. We jam and synthesize. Creep on the walls. Creep lights up my inbox. New Message. New Message. We seek alignment. We chase consensus, a forever dangling carrot that’s impossible to grasp.
Why is it so difficult to get people to agree? What tiny moment in the world have we postponed to seek our so-called consensus?
I’m not sure why this industry places so little value on plain old gettin’ done. We’d rather spend weeks making everyone feel like they’re involved in solving the problem than days working toward an answer.
And what do we really gain from our shared understandings, our arrivals on the same page?
Lately, I’ve wondered if alignment isn’t something more dangerous than it sounds. A dull, middle common denominator, a riskless zone of possible decisions where nothing very bad happens, but nothing great happens either.
— YTL