Let's give ourselves permission to value the in-between things, personally and professionally

I am ashamed to admit it, but one of my favourite ways to spend my time these days is wandering through the aisles of my local supermarket, buying the next week’s stuff. I feel a bit embarrassed admitting that, not mainly because I feel like I should value other things more, but because it feels like an activity we are not supposed to focus on. It is not a main thing, it is an in-between thing. A necessity. A chore. A lubricant. In one of my favourite essays, “In Praise of Shadows”, about Japanese aesthetics, the author Junichiro Tanizaki talks about the supreme spiritual pleasure of sitting on a traditional Japanese wooden toilet performing his daily bowel movement. An in-between activity that it feels almost illegal to admit enjoying. The unusual book “Conversation: How Talk Can Change our Lives” by Theodore Zeldin identifies conversation as an in-between thing. We think about formal meetings, but we don’t give much weight to informal, unplanned "corridor" conversations, where there is often even more value. When I did research on the nature and structure of teams, the same thing arose. A lot of the real capability in organizations is in teams that have learned to work together effectively, yet we routinely break up teams, arguably destroying lots of team capital. Teams are treated as an ephemeral, disposable, in-between entity. Unlike the 'serious' stuff: products, processes, lines of business. My friend and ex-colleague Mark Raskino worked in the airline industry, and clued me in to the unusual nature of airports as ‘non-places’, where officially no one wants to be. They are an in-between space between your origin and destination, which creates unusual design challenges. Slightly more amusingly, when I was young, the (not very good) band “Sigue Sigue Sputnik” were the first (and maybe only) band to sell advertising space in the space between tracks on their 1986 album “Flaunt It”. A concrete example of the overlooked value of in-between things. Let’s all give ourselves the permission to enjoy and focus on our personal and professional in-between things and spaces. #unthink #unask #unlearn