Congruent Action

Congruence as a concept dates back a fair bit: back to Carl Rogers in the 1950's.

The central idea is authenticity in interpersonal relationships; to align what we are thinking with our actions in the world.

GeraldWeinberg is the only person I know to have given this concept the salience it deserves in technology.

It is so easy to fall away from congruence. To get a project the funding you know it deserves, you pretend it is something it is not. This will never end well.

I realised recently that the degree of congruence that exists, or that it might be possible to bring to existence, is the main reason why I pick one project over another - and have done for the last 20 years.

I would like to see congruence given more attention. I wonder why it isn't written about more?

Employers don't treat candidates as people, they treat them as a bag of skills. Therefore candidates have to present themselves as a bag of skills rather than who they are. As an experiment I once put out a resume that described who I am and what kind of work I do without any of the skills. I got zero hits on that resume, whereas my skill bag resumes get dozens or hundreds of hits. In fact I have found that the more I describe who I am on a resume even with skills the fewer hits I get. I have even been told that 'this resume tells too much about you'. So congruence seems to be punished by hiring managers.

This may stem partially from the lack of serious InformationOriented models for describing candidates,so hiring managers have to rely on a bag of skills approach i.e. data. The BusinessTalentEndemeSet could be used to partially solve this problem.

When we do not have the technology to properly describe something then congruency would naturally suffer. We don't so it suffers.

CategoryInformationOrientation