There are no heroes or super-heroes
There are no heroes or super-heroes
We are all super-heroes, one time or the other
With cognitive work, there is often an associated sense of heroes (and heroines) and in a way when I wrote yesterday of my desire to change the world of work for the better, I did not really mean it from a hero's perspective.
My view of cognitive creative work is that it is in the collectives - something that just one can create independently with their own work. This is built upon other skills and competencies learned from the environment. So with cognitive work, I always think in terms of a “Collective Cognitive Creative”. Something like a flying skein (or wedge) of geese as pictured below…
While flying, one of the geese takes the heroic lead for a while, whilst others follow. And when tired or when the turn is done, some other goose from the team takes over. There is no metric to see which goose takes how much leadership (to create) and to what extent of time. And this might vary based on an innumerable amount of factors - age, the energy of the geese, weather conditions, etc., etc. What matters is the collective heroship of the gaggle.
Similarly, in time, the teams change. The leaders change. Some fall away. Some change teams. The weak sometimes are unable to cope, get left out and drop down and die. But the collective creative moves on. Such is life.
So, when I write “I” want to engineer some change, I imagine in the collective and in playing my part along with others to see whether such change can be dreamt upon, imagined, shared, spread across, seeded, and practiced - to have an impact of the collective social utility of sorts.