One of the things we are seriously short of in Northern Ireland is ‘trust’. Trust, argues Simon Sinek, is not reliability, it springs from you share with others:
What’s a nation? A single group of people with common set of values and beliefs.And the single biggest challenge that any culture or any organisation will ever face is its own success.
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This he says works fine at the beginning. But as time goes on:
The problem is why they do it starts to go fuzzy. And this is the biggest single challenge any organisation will face, the thing that I call ‘the split’.Symptoms of the split inside an organisation are when stress goes up and passion goes down.
Symptoms of split are things like when the old-timers, the people who were there from the founding, from the beginning start saying things like, “It’s not like it used to be. It doesn’t feel the same anymore.”
Other symptoms are when the organisation starts focussing more on what the competition is doing and worrying less about what they are doing. When they start asking outsiders, “Who should we be, how should we talk to you?”
At the beginning they never asked anybody, they ran on their own passion, on their own energy.
After a short potted history of the last three generations in the US, he comes to now:
The only thing that happens, the only thing that really grows in organisations and societies without going through a split is that distrust increases. We become distrustful of each other inside our own organisations, we become distrustful of management, we become distrustful of our politicians.
And now we find ourselves here today wondering what to do next.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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