I am sometimes amazed at how well our human-trained valuation network system determines most interactions, and how precisely it governs our perception of life in general — with a special focus on personal relationships. I believe we truly develop a customized personal schema for each individual (if meaningful) connection that helps us label each interaction by special means and specialized interpretation on the meta signals.
I have just finished reading a Linkedin post of a good friend concerning risks associated with a sudden job change – by just seeing the length of his message, I instantly thought: this content feels like deep introspection, and that for sure it will bring an honest & valuable sharing context — something, again, very typical for his life philosophy, personality and his way of normally communicating in general.
Reading ahead, I realized it was something serious and probably hard to put into words due to multiple (and somehow opposing) bounds. However, some realities need to be dealt with and acknowledged. The context he was describing is not isolated — it has become an almost detectable process pattern, truly aligned with the latest trends of political correctness, growth and profit interpretation, and the general re-adaptation of humanity to a newer state of affairs.
This new reality seems to have forgotten the good old values of consistency and steady growth (via the well-referenced compound effect), as well as true leadership — the kind that implies educating younger layers through personal example and commitment. Instead, it is focused mainly around this “NOW”: a reduced sliding window that filters out many of these dusty old concepts and recalibrates today’s teams into a new framework. One that constantly seeks attention, fosters competition among peers, enforces the need to always stay connected so as not to miss the next train, and creates a dependency at the management layer to project this new type of reduced attention span – this becoming the new rewarding layer of the initially mentioned value network.
Based solely on my own interactions and struggles, I came to the following conclusions: this constant level of stress is unhealthy for individuals and teams alike. People fail more often and fall into cycles of disconnect and reconnect, which further amplify stress and valuation-doubt spiral models. Management, meanwhile, seems to believe that solutions for this reality lie in team augmentation (thus creating an amplification effect) or outsourcing — effectively moving the issue somewhere else. This does not resolve the matter. As summarized within his post narrative, unsolved problems carry their own potential energy, which will later translate into kinetic impact – usually from the unresolved context towards the new one that inherits the package.
Fundamentally, people are wired to live in tribes where each member has a defined role and where experience is a key asset. Experience naturally shapes the valuation network of the tribe, leading it to cherish seniority — not out of nostalgia, but because of the enduring compound effect that an entire span of experience provides to the group.
I believe most of us would like to return to a foundational layer where individual roles are genuinely recognized and promoted based on a steady, time-based growth model. A model in which the promotion scheme is pre-determined and constructed to provide psychological safety — allowing the employee to develop while knowing they are growing a meaningful part of the team’s essence. In this model, the individual competes only with their own potential, not with other essential elements of the team. And yes, as part of this growth — which often masks promotion — the individual will naturally give back their knowledge and experience to the team, because the role itself will require a formalization process for passing it forward within a steadily built hierarchy.
I would like, in the end, to align with the inspiried writing element ahead. Therefore, I would also like to close with a quote. For this context, I thought of John Nash’s equilibrium, which elevated Adam Smith’s old rule:
“The best results for a group come from each member doing what is best for themselves and for the group.”
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