Humans Were Never Designed To Be Boxed

Today we have innovated. We have broken barriers to technology. As humans, we went from walking to taming animals to riding them to building cars, airplanes, and rockets that broke the sound barrier. Let us congratulate ourselves; we have come a long way.?

Yet the concept of embracing another human and having a respectful interaction that is genuinely gracious regardless of their packaging seems to elude us.?

I have been musing this thought for a while; then, as I was traveling, I saw boxes, lots of boxes. I realized that was our issue. We insist on putting humans in boxes. We can only do this, and we must do it this way. Boxes have a flaw; they only have four corners. It is not flawed if you are using it for storage, to store things, but boxes were not designed for people, their talents, and their many expressions.?

As an agilist, I promote and believe in Collaboration. True Collaboration is impossible if humans don't form an authentic connection. Connection, Conversing, and Collaboration evolves a community. I like to call it the 3C's of effective communication.

However, the application of 'boxing humans' creates a need to stack. There will always be a box on top, a box underneath, a box in the middle, and a box on the bottom that never gets to the top.?

Covid affected you and yours because it didn't see the boxes of countries, politics, social constructs or race, or whom one chose to share intimacy with. Even if your box was on the top of the stack in the past. Covid taught us lessons that we need to treat as treasures of great value; we are all humans before anything else.

As we approach the future of our organizations, let's ask the hard questions what are we afraid of? What do we feel the need to control and why? What if we approached decisions from a human-centric mindset? What if we allowed ourselves to be the vulnerable humans we all are?

In our agile world, agile was conceived because there was a need to unite and find a collaborative mission. The first value of this mission is Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools. The answer to business agility, racism, sexism, all the isms. The answer to breaking free from boxes is simply this. "Individuals and Interactions."?

Let us work at empowering and facilitating human interactions rather than finding new material to create more robust and less apparent boxes.