For millenia, human beings have survived by learning, then applying our learning to different contexts. We’re so good at it that we’re driven to find those patterns, even when they don’t exist. Our desire for the predictable suffuses everything we do; our beliefs, our behaviour and even our identity, to the point that we treat even the most complex of systems as if they might be machines too... and our language, which we use to model the world around us, reflects that.
In this talk we look at the "metaphors we live by", and how we typically treat work as boxes and substances to be passed around. By breaking the boxes and considering the relationships between the people doing the work, we can see possibilities for change and improvement that we might otherwise miss, making value streams out of the people involved in them: not from the sum of their parts, but from the product of their relationships.
Video & Slides