Month:January 2024

six wishes for 2024 (6/6): truth

One of my highlights of 20231 was an open air live concert by Cat Stevens / Yusuf at Stadtpark Hamburg. After the concert, my son and I played many of his songs for a couple of weeks, and one whose lyrics stuck with me was “In the end” where each verse starts with: “You can’t bargain with the truth”2. Of course not, we’ll all say and nod, it’s the truth. But then, being truthful: We all cover small blunders with pretty little lies; we all package unpleasant feedback in ornate narrations; we all push the big inconvenient truths of sickness, old age, death, or climate collapse to the margins of our minds. All these non-truths helps us function in the world, and we rightly call them smart, kind, or practical. But the truth within doesn’t go away – just like in that other famous song fragment: There is a truth in everything, that’s how the light gets in3.

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six wishes for 2024 (5/6): emotional literacy

One of the hardest tasks in my consulting work1 is the assessment of the emotional landscape in a given room at a given time. It’s always a mixed bag: Firstly, my own emotions, secondly, others’ emotions, thirdly, emotions arising from the interaction, and fourthly, leftover emotions lingering in the space. There’s the pride I experience when a chosen method works like expected, there’s the passion a client brings about growing their business, or their envy of a competitor’s recent marketing success, there’s (almost always) the greed to get more done than can possibly be squeezed into the allotted workshop time, and there’s (quite often) some unused anger littering the workshop room’s ugly carpet. Seeing, sorting, and purposefully including (or excluding) these emotions is heavy lifting, over and over again.

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six wishes for 2024 (4/6): action & reaction

In the musical ‘Hamilton’1, when prearing for the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson twice refers to the third Newtonian law: “Every action has its equal opposite reaction”2. In the context of the election, this points to the emerging two-party system of the United States. In the context of the ongoing rivalry between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, it prepares the audience for the escalation of their conflict, ending in the fatal duel on July 11, 1804. In the context of the inner struggles of the musical’s characters, it reflects on the bitter fact that those who take sides, by that very act, always also create enemies.

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