Practical Application

It might be all very well talking about the problems of classification on the way we think, but what can we do about it? Well, nothing, this is not one of those magical self-help books which describes the author's wonderful life, and all because they did X, Y and Z - and you can do the same too. But, are you me? Is my life so perfect and sorted? No and no. All I have done is figure out the root causes of some of the limitations we unconsciously put on our lives, not all of them, and there is nothing I could advise you to do specifically for your life, for your life is beyond what I could imagine. So, what should we do?

My suggestion is that we try looking at our lives in a different way. The idea that we can 'fix' our lives is what I call the Golden Age Dream, where we can achieve some level of perfection as described by one of those fake histories which suggests that at some point in the past we were all happy, or your choice of magazine or film and the perfect life in another country or in a different income bracket they describe. There is also the Me Spiritual approach where, instead of our problems being magicked away, we accept them all with equanimity, as we float above our lives, rippling away from all the punches. The truth is that we are not these people, because their lives do not exist. We are each a watery punchbag where the best we can hope for is better damage limitation and a little wisdom.

The first thing is that we are limited by a small brain that we starve regularly of food, sleep and love, while just as frequently expect it to deal with overdoses of sugar, alcohol and overwork. Even under the best circumstances, it will not remember everything for us when we need it, and changing the way we that we think is not easy, even with professional help. But your brain is your best friend, and what friends like most is when you play with them. Playing is one of the most undervalued methods of improving our lives, in fact it is potentially the most powerful way we have of permanently improving ourselves. Sadly, as we mature we are pushed away from toys and play, and are told that playing is not serious enough. This is particularly prevalent among women that I come into contact with here in Poland, for some reason, where 'running the home', 'bringing up family' or 'doing my job' are the the antipathy of play. I wonder if the same is true of stay-at-home fathers?

Play is the way the brain learns, increasing its store of knowledge, it's ability to understand and to control our bodies with a higher degree of skill or even new skills. The more new things that our brains have to learn, the slower it will degrade over time and the more likely that we will be able to cope with changing circumstances. Play in the workplace is generally frowned upon, it does not appear to generate income and in fact is considered to be a waste of resources. What is going wrong is that we will not take play seriously as an essential learning process, we do not learn how to manage it properly. And when a course comes up that could be useful in the eyes of the employer, employees often do not take the course content seriously because they cannot accept that aspect of play which is the acquisition of abstract, non-job-core or non-traditional knowledge. Putting the training into use may mean a change to some non-serious techniques or the acceptance of non-traditional processes and a resulting exclusion from the group of tradition-users.

This exclusion from the group of tradition-users is like asking a sheep to suddenly become a lone wolf or a football supporter to change teams, to no longer be one of the old herd. Play is one route out of this herd instinct, giving us the opportunity to learn confidence for when we nee to move into new circumstances. This is not something that we can go on a training course for, it is something that, where possible, is practised in the environment where we want the change to occur. Changing jobs within one organisations is similar to playing, and there is no reason why people cannot temporarily swop jobs that are geographically close or where sufficient support is given. Surviving in the new environments for a day or a week is like a game, and along with the confidence building there is a genuine opportunity to learn about how other job processes function and to exchange ideas and views about the jobs.

One weakness of most organisations is that the management never really know what their staff are truly capable of, but by moving people around and creating other types of play, managers can see their staff operating outside of their own area, as can the staff themselves. Not everything that we do at work is something that we have trained for. A lawyer does not spend all day with law, there are other tasks such as report writing, moving furniture around, organising bookmarks on the computer, and other things that it is not practical to go on a training course for. But what if our best report writer is working down in accounts, the janitor has an eye for office aesthetics, or that office manager two floors away could show us a more effective way of keeping our bookmarks - it is unlikely that they are going to write a memo about it, and if we do not here about it on the grapevine and have the right contacts, well, it just does not happen, does it.

Gossip is a form of social play, engaged in by most people and too often the only way that you get to hear about things - it is rarely well enough accepted to be effective, but without it many companies would be in serious trouble because the ability of most managers to communicate is from poor to abysmal. The role of the manager is seen as someone who makes decisions because they have a more global view, but they make decisions based on things their underlings do and which as a consequence they do not understand nearly as well as they imagine they do. The role of the manager is to make things happen, which means being a communication channel that functions equally well in all directions and keeps employees and management adequately supplied with job specific and general company information.

Play should not just happen when the serious work is done, although there is nothing wrong with doing it then. It should also be practised deliberately, during normal working time, although not perhaps during a panic unless we have a solid and reliable methodology for dealing with the resulting problems. This solid structure is largely unexplored, remaining out of practical reach unless we start to explore the potential.

At the end of the day, I continue to play and to experiment, allowing myself to move slowly into new areas. This blog is a visible sign of my intention to play with writing and with philosophy, and already I am using what I have learnt here in other parts of my life. That is good, and about the best that I can reasonably expect from a self-start project, and although the opportunities it might create in the future could change my life, I play for the benefits I can achieve in the now and the near future because these are important times as well.