I hope you are well.

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In the 1990s, I worked as a business analyst, helping move face-to-face team-building processes onto an online collaboration platform called Lotus Notes.

At the time, face-to-face team building focused on developing a team’s ability to relate as a whole—to become more than the sum of its parts. Because online connection is less dynamic than face-to-face interaction, this relational work could not be replicated online. Instead, I separated the functional aspects from the relational aspects of the team-building process. Online, people could connect at a functional level: they could log in, agree on a collective outcome, and break it down into functions assigned to individual team members. Performance became the effective assembly of these functioning parts. Functional connection is about assembling people to achieve specific outcomes—focusing on which functions each person has or has not completed, and respecting those who perform as expected.

By separating the functional from the relational, I was able to focus on helping young people develop the relational skills they struggled to understand because they were mainly focused on how people functioned.

When I returned to the wider world, I saw that functional connection had taken over. When we experience only functional connection, we become blind to the relationships between functions and to how those relationships work together as a whole. We become automated and rigid in our ways. When we give little attention to the relationships between functioning parts, those parts gradually fragment, eventually leading to systemic failure.

LifeSkills21.club is my way of doing my small part to help solve a very big problem.

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Always happy to chat