And end of year thought.. Our work as transformation, strategy, enterprise architecture, etc professionals only exists because organisations become complex as they rise and grow to meet their meaningful purpose. Our work is meant to help manage – and hopefully reduce – the complexity of doing important work at scale.
However this sort of work can become bullshit work (thank you David Graeber) if we lose sight of the meaningful purpose, or get distracted with local optimisation. When we optimise for our discipline (eg enterprise architecture, transformation management, PMO, …) we can very easily make the whole system (our organisation) become a bit less optimised; and we make progress towards the meaningful purpose a bit harder, a bit longer for us and those around us.
Don’t fall into the trap of doing bullshit work, no matter how interesting it may seem. Being good at your discipline is a function of being skilled AND making progress on the meaningful problem.
I find checking in whether a trajectory feels like bullshit or not to be useful, and worth doing before the plan is set ???? .
Life’s too short to waste when there’s so much important work to do, and we get to influence/choose what we do.