Growing Pains

In Heretics, Chesterton writes:

"When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims." [p 17]

I think that is one of the best explanations for why most process reengineering and process improvement efforts fail to yield the results hoped for them. Most are launched when the organization is failing in the marketplace. Instead of focusing externally on aims, it turns inward to its own processes. It's not that processes are not important, but that it is more important to know why objectives are not being met in the first place and what the aims should be.

I was reminded of this when i read Right Wing News's advice for bloggers and came to this:

-- Do write about the blogosphere because bloggers as a whole tend to be narcissistic and they love to link articles that talk about what they're doing.

I think that is dead on. But to build on Chesterton, maybe an activity doesn't become an important force until it loses the narcissism and self-consciousness. When cars were a novelty, they were just a status symbol. But when they became ubiquitous, people stopped thinking "hey, I'm driving this new horseless carriage" and simply drove.