Freedom to choose isn't freedom to speak or act without consequence.
For there to be social order, there must be laws and leaders.
By all means, leave if you don't like the society you're in.
But if you can't or don't want to, and yet don't want to be a follower, you have to become a leader, a law-changer or -maker, and/or a pariah.
One is not necessarily better than the others.
So make your choice and live with it.
Systems are Designed. Their Flaws Can Also be Designed Away.
It's easy to understand why people in large systems do the things they do.
Because the systems are composed of so many working parts, a tiny error somewhere can eventually lead to a cascade of catastrophe.
Or at least that's what the fear is.
As a result, most of the people working within these systems are terrified that they are going to get punished for causing a malfunction, so they opt for a "better safe than sorry", "have all my bases covered" approach to everything.
This results in blanket policies, reactive strategies, and a general unwillingness to rock the boat, making changes only if absolutely necessary and only after mind-numbingly long periods of time.
Bureaucracy, red tape, infuriatingly inflexible gatekeepers, we've all met them.
And hate them.
And yet, they aren't there by accident. They are there by design.
Which means that they can also be designed away.
Hence the immense importance of thought leadership, safe spaces, and granting autonomy.
"It All Depends..." Depends
"It's raining!"
Depending on who you are and what role you're playing at that moment, you'll have different feelings about the rain.
If you're at home and you just hung the laundry out to dry, you might be a bit exasperated, but otherwise not too disturbed.
If you're enjoying a day out, perhaps at the beach or a park, you may be feeling a bit let down or even upset that your fun has been interrupted.
If it's been a blazing hot day on a dry, sweltering month, you might actually be happy that the rain is finally here.
Who's to say which feeling is "right"?
They all are. Or, perhaps, none of them are.
It all depends, doesn't it?
And, just as we can't command the rain (unless you count cloud seeding), many circumstances around us aren't within our control.
How we feel about them... Depends.
Do Expertise and Experience Sometimes Make You Slow to Change?
The more expertise you have in a subject, the more likely you are to try and ride out a drastic change caused by new contrary / negative information.
It's a good thing to trust your experience and wisdom. It makes you more confident and can greatly improve your competence.
The trouble is, it can also make you very attached to the way you've been doing things.
And when the world changes as fast as it does today, this can lead to problems.
I'm certainly guilty of relying more on my experience than listening to the "signs" around me.
When the pandemic hit, I was reluctant to transit my teaching online because:
a) I had spent months prior to the pandemic, producing my programmes.
These were science-based and centered around a lot of guided experiments and activities.
Not that much "lecturing", as they were aimed at students who were less inclined to sit and listen. So, how was I going to let them do the activities while I'm not present to moderate the flow and give guidance?
If this was a "soft skills" programme, I can modify it easily. But a science-based one?
That would take a lot of work and be nowhere nearly as effective or engaging.
My education partners agreed with my assessment.
b) I had spent 15 years as a trainer, all of it face-to-face.
To have to start messing around with lights and cameras and being unable to read my learners' body language properly (because webcams were, and still are, terrible at their job) seemed so much trouble.
I had spent so much time honing my live presentations that I never spent any time learning to do it virtually, and the notion of doing it scared me.
If I'm honest, point (b) was more of a barrier to me than (a). I could choose to invest another few months changing the curriculum (and I kind of did eventually), but the fear of change was so strong, it paralysed my thinking and, consequently, my actions.
And, as the pandemic raged on, the income loss added to the paralysis. Not just for me, but for a lot of trainers I knew and for a lot of education companies as well.
It's a lesson well-learned.
Trying to get to a point where I'm comfortable running online programmes took me time (partly due also to the fact that I'm a bit of laggard when it comes to technology - certainly not an early adopter).
It also took some useful gadgets and apps, which I'll be glad to share information on in a future post.
I'm still nowhere as proficient in online teaching as I am face-to-face, but I'm trying to get there.