Humans In The Loop

It’s time we rebuild the rhythms of our organizations around the substantive bits instead of the knee-jerk ones. What happened to virtues like discipline, contemplation, care, and reflection in our work lives?

Back in the old days of ‘slow traditional culture’ there were plenty of conversations, music in the parlor and even daydreams about dating. But we didn’t count those. The real stuff was the solid stuff, the informal didn’t truly matter.

And now we live in a time where the previously informal is easy to measure.

But just because it’s measured doesn’t... See more

We’re not just bits of intelligence bouncing through the world. We have complicated emotions, and nuanced and unspoken social hierarchies. We act irrationally and pursue goals that may not be in our best interests. We don’t exist within the clean confines of an operating system or a laboratory—we act and react in a highly variable world. Creating a... See more

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books (Dostoevsky and Dickens) that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves... See more

Most traditions are solutions to forgotten problems.

“ resisting the pull to work endless hours is as much about keeping ourselves able to sustainably do the work [...] as it is about leaving space in life for other sources of fulfillment.”

Guardrails on the work day — on the work week! — make it possible for you to do the work for longer . Not longer hours, but, like, longer in life . It makes... See more