Position, Velocity, Acceleration, Jerk, Snap, Crackle, Pop

Thats a heavy title for an essay. Hang in there with a little patience and you will see what I am trying to get to... I know few people who have slept well the night before the Calculus exam or even the advanced Physics test whether it was in high school, college or even in applying to grad school problems. Rest assured this will not get as complicated!

The essay has its genesis in a email I drafted to friend and colleague regarding organizations and my motivational drivers that attract me to a role. I have written about the concept in the past through the tag Talent Management, although over time I feel like I have graduated to a relatively higher level influenced by the concept of Emotional Intelligence.

Anyway back to the topic I started thinking of... It is fascinating how organization are designed based on positional measures. Let me explain what I mean by this comment. You read any job description or even a company value proposition when attracting talent. The message is usually focused on tasks, actions may be outcomes and behaviors. Nowhere will you even find a mention of the first order differential - Change and Rate of change (the gradient).

At a worldly level I am motivated by Challenge-Recognition-Compensation but once a role begins to deliver on my threshold of expectations the bar rises. The best part of this human expectation model is the bar rises faster and faster as we continue to get better with managing single dimensional worldly into the multidimensional worldly and in multidimensional surreal (philosophical changes, behavioral and attitudinal changes in people around us and those that matter to the desired results).

So why is it that so few organization talk about this gradient? We already know the basics from Physics -

• Rate of change in Position/Location is Velocity - first order difference
  
• Rate of change in Velocity is Acceleration - second order difference
  
• Rate of change in Acceleration is Jerk/Jolt - third order difference
  
• Rate of change in Jerk/Jolt is Snap - fourth order difference
  
• Rate of change in Snap is Crackle - fifth order difference
  
• Rate of change in Crackle is Pop - sixth order difference
  

I don't expect us to get to the 6th order differential ever but I don't see why we could not get to the 2nd? This needs a new mind, a new philosophy and new measures.

(the physics terminology has been drawn on the article - Third derivative of position)