5‐Dot Interviewing Exercise

Some ideas fit in a headline. 5‐Dot Interviewing Exercise is one of them. A number, a line, and a whole lesson hiding behind it.

Strip away the number and the idea is this: life punishes vagueness. A figure forces you to say exactly how much, exactly when, exactly who. Once you have said it, the work is half done, because the argument is now with reality and not with your mood.

Strip it to the floor and you find an old instruction: look carefully, judge slowly, act decently. The new name exists because the old instruction keeps being forgotten.

Picture the government office at four in the afternoon. The file moves only when someone owns it; until then it is everybody's business, which is to say, nobody's.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. The name is new; the wisdom stood at bus stops long before either of us.