Quantum fluctuations and healthy meetings

Process matters, even if you're not into ops, because it's how things get done. I've increasingly a believer that more important than the work of strategy, is the way of working around strategy. And indeed, around anything that is designed to help us punch above our weight, stand out, and make the same resources work harder.

But process matters at a much deeper level too. The literal fabric of the universe is born out of an ongoing cosmic exercise of perpetual motion, of which we are a part. We think of ourselves as people. But we too are processes. Our atomic compositions change all the time. We are physically different bodies every 7 years. Introducing ​quantum fluctuations​:

“In quantum fluctuations, there are no fixed points in space in time. Why do things seem relatively stable? Entropy is what happens as the cosmos spreads out, energy dissolves, until everything is thoroughly mixed like coffee and milk. When they run out of energy, they forms dissolve. At every scale of reality, energy flows, solids vibrate slowly close together, liquids faster and further apart, gases even more. Reality isn't discrete things or people, there are only processes and patterns of motion. When people destroy one part of an ecological process, other parts die too. Social and economic inequality ripples through the whole system, e.g. growing patterns of migration. We consume energy, circulate it through our bodies, and release it. Our atomic structures change every seven years. When we're treated as discrete and inflexible individuals, it can create psychological distress. Specialisms and a box.”

Our jobs, as leaders and advisors and thinkers and sparkers of other people's thinking, is not pure advice. It's to follow a clue from the universe and trade on energy instead. Not by telling people what to do, though there is a time and a place for that. But to generate the right level of energy where the doing becomes subconscious, a natural part of the process, perhaps it becomes so obvious you'd wonder why you haven't thought of it before.

As Alex Smith argues, proper strategic work makes individual decisions less important because the strategy decides. But to get there, you need to generate the right level of energy where that work can emerge from a collective of smart people. And to do that, you need to do full body listening and teach others to improvise too. We are all processes and all we have is process. Create environments for healthy energy flows, and all else follows.