The vegetarian who eats jamón.
I know a vegetarian who eats jamón — Spanish cured ham — and not just any ham; the kind that shows up at family tables and refuses to be ignored. He eats it a few times a year, at his parents' table, without apology and without crisis.
The lazy reading is: hypocrite. The better reading is: a person.
That plate of jamón isn't a failure of principle. It's love, memory, belonging. And here is the part we miss: this imperfect vegetarian has actually changed something: his plate, his habits, most days of most weeks, for years. Meanwhile, the perfect vegetarian — the one who will start once he can be fully consistent — doesn't exist yet. He is still preparing.
Individuals and teams don't struggle to change because they lack plans. They struggle because quite often they are waiting to be perfect first: the complete strategy, the right moment, full alignment, zero risk. Perfection is the most elegant way ever invented of never starting.
Look at where attention actually goes in most organisations: not to creating value but to avoiding mistakes. Double-checking, covering, four-eye proof, waiting for sign-off. All of it makes sense once you see where it comes from: the long memory of being used as machines. A machine is judged by its error rate, so we learned to optimise for not being wrong instead of for being useful.
And while we wait, we complain. We say remarkably little, but we complain a great deal — in corridors, in chats, everywhere except where it could change something. What is not said does not die. It stays, and it harms. Saying it badly today beats saying it perfectly never.
Nowhere is this clearer than in how we decide. We have fallen in love with "data-driven decisions" — we ask the data to decide so that no one has to. But that is not how decisions are made:
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”
The heart decides; the data writes the justification afterwards. Most teams I work with share the same pattern: decisions tend to come back — made in a meeting, quietly reopened weeks later.
The anthropologist Xiang Biao observes that we have organised work in a way that treats people as machines. Most of our systems are built to correct human error. Very few are built to work with human nature. Perhaps that is the real work of change: not perfecting people until they fit the system, but building systems that expect imperfect people — and that are better because of that imperfection.
Be the vegetarian who eats jamón.
What is the imperfect first step — or the imperfect conversation — you've been postponing until you're ready?
AtThe Human Atelier, we work with leaders and teams who are ready to use it properly. Not to extract faster answers, but to build the conditions where better thinking actually happens — together.
Sometimes that requires an outside presence. Someone who has no stake in the answer, and whose only role is to make the room safe enough for the real questions to surface. That is what we bring.
If you feel your team is ready for that kind of conversation, let's talk.