This is very interesting.
“The new product — called “Microsoft Edge for Business” — natively separates work and personal browsing into dedicated browser windows with their own favorites, separate caches and storage locations.”
Check out the episode. There’s some interesting discussion. Sadly, even when asked for something positive to end on, the guest had nothing. That’s kind of what working in tech feels like, doesn’t it?
But in other areas of life, that’s not at all how the game works. War, business, education, etc. are not finite games. It’s not clear who all of the competitors are, the rules change and there’s no one “score” that everyone has agreed upon. Maybe most importantly, it doesn’t end at the allocated time, it goes on and on with some of the competitors giving up over time and dropping out of the game.
The problem Simon identifies is that when the game is infinite, but you play it as if it were finite, you end up in a quagmire.
She uses these stories as a jumping-off point to talk about goals and failure. When the goal is to finish the marathon, anything other than that is a failure. Despite the change in circumstances, the risk of doing more damage to themselves, and the fact that no one would find fault in them for stopping, they went on with this myopic focus on hitting their goal.
It got me thinking about OKRs. You know, those quarterly, semi-annual, or annual goals we set for employees during performance reviews, and then measure them solely on whether they hit those goals or not. As if the world doesn’t change in the middle of the time period and forces us to react in a way that might not be part of our stated goals.
It also got me thinking about company-wide goals like market share, revenue, etc.
So, while I wouldn’t place the blame for all of our anxiety coming from a pandemic, climate, racism, sexism, and violence, I do believe the workplace has a role to play when it comes to supporting the human beings who work for you in dealing with all of that, and a responsibility to not add to it. Unfortunately, I see a lot of leaders who don’t seem to care about either of those things. IMHO, they don’t deserve to have employees.
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