I caffeine-ranted at Susan this morning.

I complained about how much the work-world goes on about the importance of passion, while ignoring the personal nature of passion. It behaves as if it is a moral duty of every employee to care on command, and that it is the duty of every leader to get employees to care, or, failing that, to put on a convincing performance of caring, or failing that, to weed out those who are unwilling or unable to care or pretend to care.

And education reinforces this cultural delusion by insistently assuming that every child has exactly the same potential to be the same exceptional student, equally great at everything and passionate about whatever someone needs them to passionate about. Every child has the same potential as every other to be the same conveniently effective and efficient human resource, quantifiable as a man-hour in a man-week within a man-year. If only the world were more just, managers would have a more uniform supply of talent to utilize. Human work could be more like electricity or plumbing instead of delivered in the painfully inconvenient form of a human being.

The “social justice” of K-12 edu-activists and managerial convenience are the twin convergent goals of education, in direct service to the corporate world, which is insatiable for a supply of human resources of maximum amorphic convenience. Oil is “black gold” — human resources are red oil.

I like to think of service design as reasserting personal specificity.

The premise of service design (as I practice it) is that each person lives to provide specific kinds of services. These services give that person a sense of purpose in life, and rather than consuming their energy and making them feel depleted, used and exhausted, the work taps into inner energies. Other services, however, feel onerous or meaningless, and they prefer to receive these services from others.

In other words, people are more like organs with specialized abilities and needs than as generic plastic materials which can be formed into whatever shape is required. A corporation (etymologically, this means “body”) is an organ-ization, a system of organs arranged to exchange services and co-operate as a living being.

The core mission of service design is to understand the ideal service exchange of each personal “organ” and to organize them into something organic and effective within a service-exchanging ecosystem.

Education should complement this mission by helping each student understand their own organic ideal — the service exchange embedded in their being.