Given the modern world’s stresses and distractions, a lot of people like myself are turning to meditation podcasts, videos and apps, in an attempt to bring some mental balance to our IT feelings and perceptions. It’s a popular New Years’ resolution for many.
Whether you practice in the morning or before bed, it’s a usef/ul habit, and so I think there may be some value in calming down the digital transformation discussion in these chaotic post-COVID times, with some good digital transformational transcendental meditation.
So here’s the first free sample lesson of our Intellyx Digital Transcendental Meditation ‘app’, er, podcast. (Subscribe today for just 99.99995% a month!)
The Intellyx Brainwave Meditation App – Lesson 1: Digital Transcendence
TRT: 5:52. Your host: Jason ‘JE’ English (solo). If you like, hear it on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/qPXcSCby6yY
Do we need another meditation app for the age of Digital Transformation?
Since the journey requires each of us to look inward as well as outward, why not meditate on that This introductory Lesson 1 includes everything you need to kick off your New Year’s resolution to meditate, and become a little calmer and maybe focus on what needs to be done most.
I’m neither a psychoanalyst, nor a guru. Therefore, you may wonder why an IT analyst would bother making this meditation podcast.
OK, first of all, it’s all in good fun. But making this episode did cause me to think deeper about it.
Working in startups, and much larger companies for too many years now, I certainly have a few exciting successes and times I just felt lucky to know certain talented people. But I feel just as many scars from failures, along with the rather useless feeling of regret for decisions I may have made or deferred.
Clearing the mind leads to equanimity about one’s feelings in any given situation, allowing us to perceive events as they really are, rather than making on-the-fly interpretations or experiencing gut-level reactions due to some ‘inner voice’ in our heads.
Missing the inner voice for organizational IT decisions
A healthy, non-judgmental perspective can allow us to preempt bad decisions with clearer objectivity, but more than that, it allows each of us to better accept and learn from the results of such decisions.
Some of the most progressive development shops are already incorporating this thinking into their organizational IT process.
Take for instance the DevOps best practice of blameless retrospectives. When an organization fosters blamelessness, all stakeholders can start to look at software errors and system failures as opportunities for optimization that should be shared and discussed openly, rather than cause for covering up and avoiding punitive consequences.
By assuming all team members are honestly trying to do the best work they can in the interests of the business, the incentives are aligned for innovation, since trying and failing offers far more potential value than failing to try.
This blamelessness should be applied to ourselves as well — if we really want ourselves to succeed as well as others on our team, our inner voice should be supportive of taking risks and dealing with the resulting consequences with aplomb.
Quieting the organization’s inner voice with a shared consciousness of digital transformation allows it to transcend technical debt much faster, and focus on continuous improvement to meet customer demands. In other words, this clarity gives us organizational observability.
The Intellyx Take: The Need for Calm
The world IT professionals and executives operate in is constantly undergoing seismic shifts.
The job market is volatile, in-demand skills are constantly changing, acquisitions happen fast, and projects that can’t accommodate change are scuttled overnight.
Just like the move from client-server architectures, to service orientation, to microservices and Kubernetes, the world places high expectations on keeping up with too many new technologies to fathom.
If it seems like too much to handle, when you think about it, that next big sea change in IT is really just another layer of abstraction. The next big wave will introduce its own new challenges, true, but it will wash over most of the complexity and barriers to working with today’s bleeding edge tech.
While IT professionals will have to continually evolve and learn new technical skills, the innate talent of metamorphosis you have cultivated over a career will remain very relevant.
The capacity for clarity has always been there, in each of us.
Fortunately, I’m not your guru. You are your own guru. So breathe deep, and relax.
© 2021 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Cloud-Native Computing Poster, the weekly Cortex and Brain Candy newsletters, and advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this document. No parties mentioned in this story are Intellyx customers. Image sources: Image source: bluefug, Port Douglas, Australia.
