crank it up brain

everyday at the course, they try to cramp our (or rather, my) miniscular brain with big thinkings, high-level big picture stuff. Well appreciating it is no problem, but to critiquing and asking the right questions warrants either a very inquisitive mind, or someone very motivated to ask questions. I know that I appreciate the broad-level stuff they throw at us, but i have this bad habit of terminating my thoughts prematurely when I make presumptions that the panel will not be able to answer my questions the way I think it should be. It's time I acknowledge that there are just some questions that do not have answers, but lead to more questions. And that is a learning experience as well.

It's halfway through the course, and one thing that strikes out is really that moderation is immensely difficult to achieve when you are steering a big institution. A REALLY big institution, with long, far-reaching tentacles, but yet one that is unable to control everything. Sometimes (and often), the tentacles tangle themselves up because they each have somewhat a mind of their own. Concerted efforts to move in the same general direction are needed, but often hard to achieve. Success in small terms are easy to construct. Mega successes are hard - you need the TOP brains to command and steer together. So it begets my dumb question of why bother. A bottoms-up approach is almost always seemingly futile if you are thinking of a viral-like change. Even free agents, with the autonomy (and strong backing), do probe and question existing structures and processes, they also have to navigate their way around them to carve and bundle the right resources for their causes. There's no such thing as ramming down walls of rules and processes. You need to work with them. Perhaps it is just meant to us to emphathise on work of people on other tentacles, if so, I guess I do and I am indeed now very much more aware of the difficult work of the institutions that tries to serve us all. But yet, it is a given fact that you can't please everyone, and your job is to minimise the gaps.

I really like the zoom out-zoom in-zoom out approach of adjusting perspectives shared by the coordinator. It's like using a camera with super lenses. Effective officers are able to zoom out of their daily work to understand where it fits in the big (big is a matter of perspectives, different people view different things differently) picture; and then zoom in again to see if their way of doing things is the best way; (does it fit into the bigger objectives, can it be done better) and zoom out again. But I suspect I am getting altitude sickness from the zooming in and out of work (yes I am required to do so everyday because of the nature of my portfolio, deep-diving into technicalities and helicopter view of big pictures). Altitude sickness. Puke.

Also a key thing that stuck in my mind today was when one of the presenters shared how it is a systemic issue (I suppose it is true for any big enterprise/system as well) that because everybody has different views and perspectives, the same stimulus will result in different responses in different people. And we can't run away from this even though we are one human species: our experiences, thinking etc etc shapes the way we think and creates a different context/mental model/mindset for everyone -- and we respond differently. Hence everybody is right, and everybody is wrong at the same time (example of getting a few blind people to describe a HUGE elephant). The fact is that no one person can see the big picture. We need to communicate with one another what we see, to piece our little pictures together to form the holistic big picture.

But yet it is also important to know when enough information is enough, so that we can decide what we want to achieve with part of the big picture that is formed.

Ok I've dumped enough things here to absorb more tmr...