The Productive Pessimist

  I don't usually write personal accounts. That's not what The Productive Pessimist  is about, I tell myself. Problems are universal. Problems don't have names. We're here, as a company, to solve anyone's  problems. But The Productive Pessimist also claims to provide the solution by living through  the problems.  We talk about how our lived experience informs and complements our professional expertise.  Which means, sometimes, personal accounts are exactly  what The Productive Pessimist is about. The recent EHRC legislation around access to "single sex" spaces is deeply personal. So is Kathleen Stock's recent musing on "why are  so many young people using walking sticks, hmmm?" I won't be linking to either of them. They'll come up easily enough on a Google search. I'll be speaking on both of them, because of both of them bring up problems for businesses, and both of them are deeply, brutally personal. The advisory in the title isn...

  Image shows the UK Houses of Parliament shot across the river Thames . The EHRC guidance on several  groups' rights - not just the "headline" of trans peoples' rights, and the entitlement to violence and abuse it has given people who aren't (yet) having their  rights "discussed" at government level. . "Simpler Recycling", and the "You're getting  more bins! We will  leave you with stinking, rotting refuse, and  fine you if you make one single mistake about what goes where, or some passerby dumps a crisp packet in your cardboard bin! No, we don't care  how little space you have to actually house all these bins!" . Constant media frothing about "young people who are unemployed and aren't even in any kind of training scheme!" and "how much it's costing the country!" These things seem very different and distinct from one another - just as many of the problems we face in business, or in our individual ...