Curious questions about rigid systems

When there's dissonance due to an orchestrated way of being that stops us being fully ourselves, it can be felt.

The architecture of the systems in which we operate has a huge impact on our capacity to be aligned and to flourish (or not). It was only when crafting the content for a poetry talk that I gave this week alongside neurodivergent author, Abigail Yardimci, that I realised how much in my earlier career particularly, I internalised rigid systems within society as a failing on my part. 

In more corporate and commercial environments I shut down the sensitive, expressive parts of myself having taken on board casual comments and concluded that I was 'too soft for a hard world'. I was so immersed in the system that I hadn't learned to question it. Like an unassuming goldfish, it was simply the water I swam in.

I'm learning that these things aren't binary and that there are shifting concepts of leadership that step outside of accepted archetypes. In the last week my approach has been described as 'gentle and strong' and 'compassionate and knowledgeable' and I feel so much more at home in these adjectives, but it's been a (non linear) journey.

Systems and societal scaffolding provide necessary structure and clarity for our ways of being. Yet it's fascinating to see how little some of our core systems have shifted, despite vastly evolving social change and technology advancing beyond all recognition. This year is the 100th anniversary of the 9 to 5 working week, introduced by Henry Ford in 1926 to boost factory productivity and create a consumer economy based on a weekend of leisure.

Life has changed beyond all recognition with the passage of a century, yet we still seem to be tied to a system designed around a production line concept, where family life revolved around someone (mostly women) being at home. Employment law may have tinkered with parts of this scaffolding to enable more flexibility, but there's a strong case for a fundamental redesign. An often unspoken outcome of this is that we individualise and internalise issues that are not personal failings, but are symptomatic of systems that aren't designed with everyone's interests in mind.

It seems sometimes that the evolution of societal systems - including education and health among others - rarely happens at the same pace as our understanding and awareness of what makes us thrive as humans. Technology is advancing with unprecedated momentum, but are we creating space and curiosity to ask, who specifically does this benefit? And perhaps also how does this support human beings in general? 

Perhaps by virtue of working within the confines of the rigid systems many of us don't wish to perpetuate, we don't always have the courage, energy, platforms or capacity to ask pertinent questions? Or maybe sometimes we don't even realise it's the water we're swimming in. Yet perhaps there's still scope to open up conversations and create spaces to reflect on how we are living - because maybe these conversations matter more than we think.