Square Waves
Just like countries swing between left-wing and right-wing governments, organizations oscillate between centralized and decentralized management. Just like couples break-up and get back together, only to break up again.
We navigate between cycles produced by our own decision-making, individually or collectively. Often, short time passes between switching opposing extremes, describing almost perfect square waveforms.
Oscillations are clockwork in motion. A build-up of something quantitative or qualitative takes place until a force which grows stronger the further the system deviates from equilibrium creates some sort of restoring action which puts what’s been accumulated into flow towards another (usually opposite) state where the cycle repeats: stock, saturation, flow. Back to the beginning. Just like a pendulum exchanges kinetic and potential energy back and forth while being pulled by the tension of the chain, many aspects of our lives are as pendular.
The cyclic aspect of our decision-making tends to signal some sort of active search for an equilibrium which we may never be able to see except for brief flybys. We try things, they don’t work, we roll back into what’s safe and known, only to realize that we still don’t like it, so we try again. This hit-and-miss sequence can take several cycles until we learn it is -or it is not- the way to go, but not forever: after all, our square-waved patterns may be aperiodic (damped) in the mid and long run. We may settle on one rail or another.
Perhaps the most important thing is to actually realize we are in oscillatory motion, and consider: a. If there could be a potential third state we might be overlooking b. How many iterations until we realize there’s no hope going down that road, again.1
As the frequently misattributed phrase goes:
“Insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results”
Listening to “La Ritournelle” from Sebástien Tellier, sparked this writing.