This Human Business

It's possible to both be in a place and to be absent. This episode explores the experience of emotional distance and emotional presence.

This episode concludes the three-part exploration of the emotions of pilgrimage, moving from the feeling of the second wind to the experience of having arrived.

The uncertainty of the beginning shifts into an emotion that becomes dreadfully familiar: The feeling of being weary. The emotion of weariness is a child of long paths, whether they are literal or figurative. Much of the experience of a pilgrimage is negative, and purposefully so. It’s about loss, and pain, and the things that cannot be had, cannot be done.

As the first emotion of pilgrimage, trepidation is the unsettled feeling we get when we are about to begin something of importance, and are filled with both the urge to begin and the wish that we could abandon the journey altogether.

This episode marks a transition for This Human Business, away from a focus on business reform and into an emphasis on the human experience through emotional granularity. This episode explores despair and feeling grounded.

With this episode we have reached the end of the second season of This Human Business. It’s time to ask the most important question of all: Is a human business even possible?

What if we thought of a business not as a machine, but as a living garden? Thousands of years ago, nomads gathered together in many places around the world and settled down to create the first gardens, which were also the first world’s businesses. The cultural template established in these gardens provided the basic structures for business that are still in use today.

Business needs to get beyond the narrow UX scope of the customer journey. It’s emotional movement accompanying physical movement that makes a pilgrimage a pilgrimage. Applying this experience in business opens an escape hatch out of commoditization.

Time is at the heart of the struggle over the culture of business. This episode discusses the conflict between mechanized clock time and alternative forms of time, as well as the consequences of the need for speed in corporate life.

With business culture sinking lower and lower, we need tools to aim higher. Poetry and fairy tales help us to imagine what could be instead of leaving us in the morass of what is. Poet of business Fateme Banishoeib guides us through the mental experience of verse, while Gwion Bach escapes a sorceress to give an ancient business proposal his own form.