Shape Up

A while back I read an article about poverty in The Conversation. There was a hypothesis that poverty is the result of lack of self-control. The author refutes it by adding more context to poverty. Poor people live in a “permanent now”, one day at a time. We often describe self-control as choosing long-term over short-term outcomes, or delayed gratifications. Worrying about tomorrow is a luxury if you don’t know how you’ll survive today!

But what if we are living in a “permanent now”?

That got me thinking about organizational poverty. It is a good thing to have self-control, discipline, predictive timelines, and product quality. But what if we are living in a “permanent now”? What if the problems around us are so overwhelming that we don’t get to plan for the long term? What if we are piled up with urgent and important tasks and we don’t get time to think forward? What if every task & feature are super-important to some or other, that we cannot say no or later? What if we understood agility as a series of never-ending sprints and stand-ups?

Interestingly, there is also a concept called “time poverty”. We often understand poverty as a lack of wealth to meet the needs. What if the situation is a “lack of time” for all we need to do? That’s called “time poverty”.

People might be wealthy, but “time poor”. Organizations might be profitable, yet “time poor” at the same time. One can observe that from the instincts shown by the people - between hunters and gatherers. Hunting for bug fixes, hunting for deals, and hunting for people! As against refactoring code, building relationships and grooming talent.

We have maturity models for everything - for digital technology adoption, for project management, for manufacturing processes, for quality control, and so on. It might be an interesting idea to think of an organizational wealth model (or poverty model), in dimensions of money, time and knowledge.