Politican vs Politican't
Posted by Sarah Mills on Friday, December 3, 2010
Under: Looking Ahead
At the moment there's a huge drive towards skilling the masses. It's even been referred to as training the 'intellectually disabled'. Now I'm hardly one to get involved in this messy business but this touches on my role as a life coach in this South African cultural advancement. From government funding to NGO sponsorship, the lack of skilled artisans has hardly gone unnoticed. Why it's coming up in the media at this point might be particularly relevant what with all the international scrutiny we're facing. Will we pull through, won't we?
Truely we do need some organisational support for our cultural advancement, however I question the role of the individual in all of this budgeting and forming of committees. Naturally we'd like to see something come of all this fuss, but aren't we the ones ultimately responsible for the level to which we skill ourselves? Apart from the technical skills we pay our lives for, companies need people to fit into their culture if their overall goals are to be reached. My question is how are the unskilled going to learn to adjust their personalities without initially realizing they need a culture of learning in order to do so?
In this catch 22 between wanting to learn and being able to learn, an individual's power gets lost in thinking that this responsibility lies outside of them. Ok so what does it mean to learn, and to keep learning, to be receptive to learning? Really to be open to learning and embrace it requires a cultured mind - one particularly tuned to a level of awareness capable of picking up the relevance of their experiences.
Now how do you culture a generation of minds unaccustomed to embracing cultural change, no matter which culture? Our last decade has our formally organised boards stuck in this question, running in circles tied back within their own cultural boundaries. Breaking through means looking through and pushing on to new ways of being, so that new ways of doing things can emerge. Practically speaking this means negating everything and every way you've known and done things before...almost throwing it all out of the window in order to start on a clean page. The reluctance to do so has been well founded in the importance of recognising the past in order to implement preventative structures to avoid repetition.
And after all of this, taking these structures into account, paying due attention to differences, and ultimately having a definitive plan of action, we're just about due for a cultural revolution for the better - for anything proactive actually. So without further ado, there's nothing left for us to do other than get our act together and put it all into motion.
Truely we do need some organisational support for our cultural advancement, however I question the role of the individual in all of this budgeting and forming of committees. Naturally we'd like to see something come of all this fuss, but aren't we the ones ultimately responsible for the level to which we skill ourselves? Apart from the technical skills we pay our lives for, companies need people to fit into their culture if their overall goals are to be reached. My question is how are the unskilled going to learn to adjust their personalities without initially realizing they need a culture of learning in order to do so?
In this catch 22 between wanting to learn and being able to learn, an individual's power gets lost in thinking that this responsibility lies outside of them. Ok so what does it mean to learn, and to keep learning, to be receptive to learning? Really to be open to learning and embrace it requires a cultured mind - one particularly tuned to a level of awareness capable of picking up the relevance of their experiences.
Now how do you culture a generation of minds unaccustomed to embracing cultural change, no matter which culture? Our last decade has our formally organised boards stuck in this question, running in circles tied back within their own cultural boundaries. Breaking through means looking through and pushing on to new ways of being, so that new ways of doing things can emerge. Practically speaking this means negating everything and every way you've known and done things before...almost throwing it all out of the window in order to start on a clean page. The reluctance to do so has been well founded in the importance of recognising the past in order to implement preventative structures to avoid repetition.
And after all of this, taking these structures into account, paying due attention to differences, and ultimately having a definitive plan of action, we're just about due for a cultural revolution for the better - for anything proactive actually. So without further ado, there's nothing left for us to do other than get our act together and put it all into motion.
In : Looking Ahead