What’s up by Stelio Verzera

We hear so much talking about “edges” in these days. There seems to be so much happening at “the edge” of your market, of your organization, even at the edge of your identity. So you should listen to the experts of “edges” and equip yourself with the latest methodology to enable and influence all this edge-value to somehow get to you. Sounds cool, and even fairly easy if you know who to ask to for help. Except, in reality, there is no edge. Edges are no more than a mental model, a misused metaphor. Since your body has edges, it seems plausible that also your market has them, or your organization, right?

While I am comfortable with the concept of “core”, meant as the focus in which we apply the lens with which we chose to read a given reality, I really do not like the concept of edge. I’ve felt this disconfort clearly in many conversations, but quite recently even stronger in my own evolution, as I had a child. In fact, a few months ago it stroke me how even the edge of my body is even more clearly an illusion now that I am physically continued in his flesh. Let alone the edges of my feelings, of my thoughts, of my tribe.

Almost everything I know in the real world is a complex and implicated ecosystem of ecosystems. The borders we think to be real are instead zones of sharper changes in patterns oversimplified by our reductionist thinking. Life does not have “edges”. She has horizons. And the difference is quite crucial: what you perceive as an horizon depends on your eyes, your position, your line of sight, not on the form of the thing itself. Once we understand this, we stop believing in separation, we stop looking for experts of edges, and start working to expand our many horizons. Actually, life is pretty much all about this. Isn’t it

This article was first published in our Cocooners N° 5