Category: Quotes
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Mindfulness and aliveness
We are only alive when we are alive!1 —Jon Kabat-Zinn Notes: 1 Jon Kabat-Zinn, The Healing Power of Mindfulness, YouTube (6:23)
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Work is not just work
Work is not just work, it’s the place to experience the love of your life.—Daniel Siegel 1 Note:1. The Human Mind and the Cultivation of Well-Being, https://youtu.be/T6tZ4VC6zR8?t=1349, YouTube. Accessed: 2022-09-15. Published: 2011-09-17. Update 2022-09-15: Link updated. Text converted to blocks.
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Dee Hock on rules
Countless times over the years I have asked diverse groups of people to reflect very carefully on their work within organizations and to make a simple balance sheet. How much time, energy, and ingenuity did they spend obeying senseless rules and procedures that had little to do with the results they were expected to achieve?…
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Homo sapiens is a small-tribe species
Here’s the core of the issue, as I see it. I think of homo sapiens as a small-tribe species. The large social structures we’ve learned to build are not agile, or resilient, or people-friendly. They don’t suit us. And mostly they no longer work well. The evidence that they are not working has been around…
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Agile software development in the 1970s
Here is Dee Hock’s own story of the development of VISA’s first electronic authorization system (BASE 1) which was launched in 1973. We were determined that the needs of our members and cardholders would be served, not the needs of technology or vendors. That required internal responsibility. We decided to become our own prime contractor,…
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Dee Hock on control
Life is not about control. It’s not about getting. It’s not about having. It’s not about knowing. It’s not even about being. Life is eternal, perpetual becoming, or it is nothing. Becoming is not a thing to be known, commanded, or controlled. It is a magnificent, mysterious odyssey to be experienced.1 … I have long…
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Harrison Owen on control
Here are quotes of Harrison Owen from an email to the World wide Open Space Technology email list August 30, 2015. (My highlights in bold.) It has taken me a lifetime of living. But. I have learned two things, or maybe better, come to two conclusions. 1) All Systems are open. 2) All systems are…
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A vision for the future
We can either… Allow humans to become harnessed…so they become just more effective… Or Re-assess our world view and work…towards human needs. —Charles Tolman1 Note 1 Charles Tolman, ACCU 2013 Exploration of Phenomenology of Software Development, p. 19.
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Fritz Perls on change
… deliberate change never, never, never functions. As soons as you say, “I want to change” — make a program — a counter-force is created that prevents you from change. Changes are taking place by themselves. If you go deeper into what you are, if you accept what is here, then a change automatically occurs…
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Fritz Perls on control
Every external control, even internalized external control—”you should”—interferes with the healthy working of the organism. There is only one thing that should control: the situation. If you understand the situation you are in and let the situation you are in control your actions, then you learn to cope with life.1 The less confident we are…