Content area
Full Text
David Megginson: Research Fellow, Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK
Self-developers often emphasize that their approach is holistic, valuing the whole person, the whole organization and the whole community. In this article I examine what such a perspective might offer us, and the challenges which it would present.
This exploration was triggered by a session I initiated at the Brighton Open Space Conference in 1995. I called the session "In praise of idleness", drawing the title from Bertrand Russell's essay of the same name written in 1932[1]. He argued that many people did too much while others were forced to do too little. He proposed that we should move towards a society where we all did just enough. I have a sense that in the intervening years, and particularly in the last ten years or so, work has become much more polarized, rather than moving in the direction that Russell advocated.
Coming to the end of writing this article (on a Sunday afternoon, it must be confessed), I have found out what I mean by idleness. It is not leisure, or being entertained, or switching off, although all these provide idleness for some people. For me idleness is that delicious, glorious sense of timeless joy when you are doing exactly what you want, and not feeling a pressure to do it or being conscious of a time limit after which it will stop. Interestingly, I have spent six months not writing this article, although I felt I ought to - it has been on and off half a dozen to-do lists in this time. It was only this afternoon, after reading a book by Daniel Quinn on Friday night, and spending an hour this morning just thinking what it might mean for me, that I have come to the place where the article can be written in a spirit of idleness. There is no work here - I am doing what I want. It has gone dark outside; that's fine; it is done.
The place of idleness in work
As developers of ourselves and others it seems to me to be useful to ask, what is the place of idleness in our own lives? What would we like it to be? When I...