Abstract
What a journey it has been. Five years ago I would have had a hard time believing a commuter flight from Sydney to Melbourne would fill my mind with iguanas and send me on a pilgrimage.
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What a journey it has been. Five years ago I would have had a hard time believing a commuter flight from Sydney to Melbourne would fill my mind with iguanas and send me on a pilgrimage.
Describing my pilgrimages as two round trips to the International Space Station (1679 km) tells only half of the story. The other half is best told by the signposts. The irony here is that after questioning if it really, really, mattered where we work, I now have 34 different ways to think about why it matters where we work.
Putting aside the sheer number of signposts, what stands out the most is how different they are from each other. They range from the way we exchange ideas, to existentialist commentary with a whole lot in between. Their variety becomes even more apparent when they are listed out as you will see in Appendix A: List of Signposts.
There is one other thing about these signposts.
They were not written retrospectively as enigmatic breadcrumbs leading to a place I had already found. I forego such literary licence because pilgrimages don’t work that way and I wanted you to join me as a fellow pilgrim. I am as curious as you might be to find out where all these signposts lead.
Six months have passed, probably more.
For that long I have been searching to see where Signpost 2, the one which says that the workplace should promote absurdity, will take us. How does it work? Maybe a workplace that promotes absurdity doesn’t work at all.
I have also tried to reach the final destination of the signpost about adversities promoting innovation, and the one on boredom as a thinking tool, and…well… I have tried to reach the destinations of all of them. After following their directions for months, I’ve reached a dead end and find myself at the spot where the trail ends and the signposts continue to point to the horizon.
I can’t go any further, nor can I walk away. I have tried equally hard to find the answers or forget about the questions, but I can’t.
The consequences of indulging in ever bigger questions about the workplace have caught up with me.
Eventually, I come across a seemingly frivolous distinction between trails and paths which turned out to be very useful in helping me find my way out of this dead end: trails extend backwards, paths extend forward [78]. To reach the destination of the many signposts I’ve created, I need to start laying paths from where the trails end.
Reference
Moor R (2016) On trails. Aurum Press, New York
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Chevez, A. (2022). Following Signposts. In: The Pilgrim’s Guide to the Workplace. SpringerBriefs in Business. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4759-9_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4759-9_28
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