Curse of the Administrators

The hardest part of learning offline is experience with working space and how working spaces seek to define us rather than we explore our relationship with those working spaces. It is difficult peeling away from these experiences and extract only those things that are applicable to learning.  The chief stumbling block with these spaces is the heavy hand of functionaries who see it as their duty to talk on behalf of the institution and bring learning down to the level of control rather than freedom.

Whether it is gatekeepers or people whose identities become enshrined in the possession of authority, there is so often concrete people getting in the way of conceptual development.  It is really people dining on authority and who digest all of that authority into their own identity.  In the name of something or their own high minded principle, most people simply take the easier way out and in the process whisper that truth as the practice of organizational bullshit.  At that moment this whisper as betrayed the whisperer.  What should have been possibility can be transformed into abject politics.

The less conceptual an individual is, the more their concrete way of looking at the world can get in the way of an open minded, authentic and honest learner.   There are great administrators who create order and foundation for all, but they are overshadowed by egotistical administrators who cannot separate themselves from their professional label or personal beliefs.  So it is that they say that the best laid plans of mice and men go awry.   No wonder that these people then can relate to this Bible verse translated by the World English Bible :

Don’t give that which is holy to the dogs, neither throw

your pearls before the pigs, lest perhaps they trample

them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

Matthew 7:6

It seems that administrators are not alone in getting in the way of people whose learning and development surpasses the limited vision possessed by concrete administrators.  Not only are we encouraged to level set to these people but we take it for granted that our communication must be dumbed down enough so concrete people can understand.  Yet our own learning and development and experiential development is not meant for concrete people, it is us taking responsibility for our own learning and today the more we live in the cloud, the more opportunities to pursue learning that is more conceptually diverse.

The only thing we can do is a lay down a marker that certain eventualities can rise and then hold on to our purpose as those eventualities interfere with our own freedom to develop our own capacities and capabilities.  There is nothing worse than titles that breed a sense of entitlement rather pursue the power of discovery and learning relationships, where the workplace or an institution or a club is a part of that pathway of learning - and if we embrace this power, then we can switch our focus to empowerment rather than entitlement.