It is not innovation that matters, it is agreement. And we might need innovation to reach agreement.
I ask not for good health, but for an alert and discerning mind.
I ask not that things go my way, but that I have perseverance and courage.
I ask not for less responsibility, but for increased strength.
Master Cheng Yen, Tzu Chi
Hat-tip: Psychological Resilience
Chris Jones asked for comments on his blog post about his views on Peter Senge’s work and Chris’ aspiration that
Cultures can, over time, be intentionally shaped and directed by visionary and resilient leaders. But the complexity of organizations, markets and other social ecosystems invariably worsens with scale, raising the bar for mitigation ever higher.
An organization ‘led’ by someone who aspires to impose preconceived ideas is not a healthy place for anyone.
A contextually-sensitive organization also knows when it is time to die. A healthy organization values purpose and will support other purposes when its own is not the most relevant to the wider ecosystem.
We don’t need a specific culture. We need healthy psychology. Losada’s model works for me
This post does not live up to those three criteria.
David WhyteThe antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.
These are the words of contemporary poet, David Whyte, quoting his associate, Benedictine monk, Brother David.
Whatever you plan is to small for you live.
Says the same but in his inimitable harsher style.
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.
don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.
and there never was.
Do you have the patience to do what you can be bothered to do wholeheartedly?
I don’t always but I am glad when I do.
Think you are bound hand-and-foot to task you have to do, should do, and nevertheless hate doing?
Try this exercise. Nightly, add to your gratitude diary a line on
Style. The style you wrote to your life today.
Simplicity. An activity you conducted with aplomb and elegance (or more than you do usually).
Story. Re-write the story of your day in a few lines with you in charge being the person you want to be (I designed this for employees turned entrepreneurs – put your employee story aside and write as an entrepreneur and business owner.)
Simultaneity. Note when you panicked about living wholeheartedly and ask why you cannot make your choice and act your choice at exactly the same time (the way an owner must make a business decision and take the fame or blame or whatever).
Is this impatience? Hmm. I don’t thinks so. It’s just stopping our storyline wandering off into impatience. And we begin to trust the world a little more.
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Happiness IndexWe have to take happiness seriously. Yes, we do! The UK government is going to measure our happiness and as we all know, what gets measured gets done!
Positive psychology has been around now, in a formal way, for over 10 years. That is not long but after all Google has been around for about the same time. And Facebook for a fraction of that.
Of course, happiness is a lot older. To make a more precise statement about ‘happiness’, academic psychologists in Western countries have been studying happiness with a sense that ‘it is right to do this’ for a decade.
So what have we learned from ten years of the formal study of happiness by psychologists?
Positive psychology is little different from other topics in social sciences. It doesn’t tell us answers. It helps us ask the right questions. Most importantly, it helps us put aside questions that are simply the wrong questions.
We love to ask who is more intelligent, who is more good-looking and after all, who is more worthy. We like to line people up with the best in front and thereafter claim they will beat the front of the line forever and because they are in the front, permanently the best, that they are worthy of more respect, more love, more care, and sometimes even more food.
We know this is the wrong question for three reasons.
Yes, some people are better and some people are worse at specific tasks and they keep this rank order for a short space of time. They are also likely to build a portfolios around their strengths of today, but they don’t stay permanently on top. A top cricketer might become a cricket coach in time, for example, but he will no longer be the top batsman or bowler. Sensible people retire from competition at the right time!
If we are going to compete in the happiness stakes, most of our lives we must be losers. Logic fail?
Being good at one thing does not make us good at everything. Indeed, learning a skill takes time (around 10 000 hours of practice as a rule-of-thumb or ten years of organized practice) and we can generally only be good at one thing.
If we think about being good at something, we are going to make a choice. Some of us can choose to be good at happiness. Others will have to make do with being good at something else. Logic fail?
Asking who is the happiest is simply not a worthy question.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that one person is permanently good at one thing and with great good fortune also good at two or three other things: does that make them a more important person than someone who is not very competitive at any activity?
Should one child be loved more than another? How corrupting is that for the child who is supposed to be so much better? Lets not go there for if we do it is a case of morality fail, not so?
If asking who is the happiest is the wrong question, then what is the right question?
All these discussions about who is happy and who is not begs a simpler question: what is happiness?
Most of can recognize happiness in the same way that we recognize the difference between a good meal and an indifferent meal. We just can without necessarily being able to create a good meal ourselves.
Partly we fail to create good meals because we don’t want to learn the skills and do the work that goes into making a good meal. We try cheating with recipes. We add ready-made sauces. We can work on one or another principle ideas – for example, buy good ingredients (would we recognize them?).
The truth is good meals are produced by many factors brought together by someone who understands the issues, who has had a lot of practice, and who is paying attention on the day. Happiness is the same.
• We work with what we have in the moment
• We understand the issues
• We pay attention adjusting as we go
Positive psychologists and management theorists in a related field, positive organizational scholarship, have settled on a checklist of FOUR issues to guide our thinking at any moment. The four issues have been compressed into an acronym PERMA.
• Positive emotion
• Relationships
• Meaning
• Accomplishment
Positive emotion simply means play nice – not only with others but with ourselves.
A simple trick is to review each day and after reviewing what we feel and the stories we are telling ourselves (and others), we look over our stories and highlight what we went well.
It is astonishing how negative processes are allowed to crowd out positive processes. In part, it’s a survival thing – we attend to what scares us.
The trick to restoring a positive outlook is to make a (written) checklist of what did go well and mark what we would like to repeat and expand.
We are intensely sociable animals. Even the most introverted among us like to do things that make sense socially.
Sometimes an activity done alone, like writing poetry, really is sociable, as is the commute of a person who treks long hours to earn an income for his family. We will always prefer the activity that links us to the people we care about.
Indeed, we care about the people when we do things together. We like the people we do things for and with. Games designer, Jane McGonigal, suggests we like people better when we play games with them, for this reason. Sports bring us together, etc. etc.?
Giving mental space to our relationships makes even the most introverted of us happy.
Life also makes sense when we are working on something bigger than ourselves. Sometimes that means commuting for the sake of our families. Sometimes we use the ‘bigger than’ line as an excuse, e.g. when we go to university because the system requires us to. But we know the difference because when we don’t care about the wider meaning, we hate what we are doing and feel exhausted.
We have limitless energy when we really care about the ‘story that we are writing’. This is a good exercise as well. Write a few lines of your autobiography each night and ask whether you are writing about who you want to be – or about someone else. In a previous post, I’ve suggested that (necessity) entrepreneurs rewrite their story nightly. Writing our story coherently helps orient ourselves to what we care deeply about.
How we love to achieve! Solving problems is lovely. Triumphing over adversity is invigorating. Dreadful jobs are dispensed with so much more easily when we set them up as little challenges that we can tick of – there! there! there!
Setting little hurdles for ourselves improves the day.
If you haven’t already seen Jane McGonigal’s presentation at School of Life (sermon actually) on 26 October 2010, it follows below.
Jane McGonigal is a games designer. She explains the theory of positive psychology. She explains how she used the theory to accelerate her recovery from concussion. She illustrates the theory by replacing the dreary world of ‘to do’ lists with the PERMA checklist. She weaves her vision for the world into the template of sermons as a children’s story.
It’s fun to watch and shows you where this happiness stuff has got to and where it is going.
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The perils of necessity start upsIn 2011, we are going to see more ‘necessity start ups’. A necessity start up is what it says on the tin. The proprietor would prefer to be employed but finds themselves in a situation in which they must make a living. And they know what I am going to write next. The odds are stacked against them.
I’ve been involved in a number of start ups and still find it psychologically hard.
Here are the 4 things I find hardest and what I do to ‘work around them’. You could try them to see if they work for you. I’m telling it how it is, so don’t be frightened – just try.
For example, in the mining world, there are gold deposits for the taking. The reason the deposits have not been taken and remain available to the smaller players is that the ground is unstable, the mine is prone to flooding, etc., etc. In brief, the costs are likely to exceed the returns.
Or as the old saying goes, there may be a gap in the market but is there a market in the gap.
Necessity entrepreneurs are not going to make as much money as they used to and nor will their niche ever allow them to. The simple but not so easy trick is to think differently about money. Take pride in paying yourself the minimum wage only and give yourself a bonus when you can afford it. That’s life in real business. You don’t waste then money that you took such trouble to earn. You spend every $ wisely and yet with great pleasure.
Changing your mindset in middle age is hard though. Here is the trick. Keep a diary of your frugality and watch how to jettison the mentality that sloshing cash around makes you the ‘big man’,and how you start to find small business really enjoyable. You’ll stop judging your success by the amount of money you have to spend to buy your lifestyle; and you’ll start judging yourself by your personal style?
What did you do today that was sincerely stylish (and independent of money)? What did you try and what did you really enjoy doing?
In a large corporate, so much is done for you. Like a student whose mum has always done his cooking, suddenly you have to fend for yourself without instant photocopy repairs and other armies of people to do everything from raise capital to deal with angry customers.
The skill of a necessity entrepreneur is knowing the simplest way to get anything done with the fewest people possible. You’ll feel sad at first because so much of your life has been about complicating everything! You’ll wonder how you managed to fill your days with such complications and how you have so much time now to do whatever you like!
The trick? Keep a diary of all the hacks you have discovered to do anything and everything easily. And count up how much time you have to do what you really believe is worthwhile! Enjoy having free time to go for a walk and spend an hour with someone who needs the company.
This is a tough one that took me a long time to explain. We all invest in our story and many people ‘sold themselves’ as a dutiful wage laborer for a long time.
Selling oneself as a business person is hard for two reasons. First, we don’t have the track record. Second, and more importantly, we have invested in the story of ourselves as employees and we are reluctant to water that story down – just in case.
A necessity entrepreneur needs to keep a diary of all the tasks they performed that day as a business owner. If you try to write your story ‘in one go’, you will freeze. You need to get a diary and write up each night what you did as a business owner.
I have not done this before but as an experienced work psychologist, I know this will work. You will start to see results within an month and within a year, you will wonder why you ever had an issue. A daily diary of your tasks as a business owner.
Very simply, at work, we are often doing what the boss has asked us to do. Emotional responsibility and execution are split. If the task doesn’t work, we can blame the boss – at least emotionally. The boss will blame us too, of course. And then we can have a competition of who is to blame.
A lot of energy goes into the blame-shifting game. We need this energy now to cope with the possibility of making bad choices. This is a new game and we don’t have teacher to guide us through.
Our diary each night should include a list of our technical work and the risk we have taken. We need to revamp our mental models into bundling risk and task. It comes ~ but only with practice. I haven’t done this either, but I am going to because it will work.
Grab a diary. An A5 will do. And every night, write up your day under four headings.
And let me know how it goes!
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Primer on Bion’s group experiencesRobert B French and Peter Simpson have just published a primer on Bion’s group experiences in Human Relations.
Central to Bion’s ideas, in my words, is group procrastination or the illusion of busy-ness.
If I read the article correctly
My best guess is that had French and Simpson looked for this behavior, their positive groups would also have been more questioning.
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Knowledge capital accountsIn a capital account, we know the money we spent on an item and we know how long ago we spent it.
For the nation’s knowledge, we need need to be able to map its contours in some way.
Most of the time, we are fussing about literacy levels. Literacy levels are important
But our competitiveness depends on our collective performance at the top level. Are we abreast of new ideas? Are we keeping up?
It’s a simple truism in HRD policy, even in the lowly firm, that we have to think ahead to the changes in knowledge that loom on the horizon. We may not know exactly what changes will bring but we can usually anticipate their form. Will they be little incremental changes that we can absorb easily, or, will they be discontinuous changes that require major investments in thousands of people so that we have the shared knowledge to create the new frontier?
I know that in my field that we aren’t doing very well. Not only has the average person in my field not heard of ideas that were common place 20 years ago in other parts of the world, not too many of the leaders have either.
What is even more worrying is the shallowness of many debates in institutions like BBC Radio 4 which is charged with keeping us abreast of new ideas. They can’t know everything, of course. But they don’t really seem to know the right people to find out.
The happiness index might promote debate about happiness at least. Maybe someone can devise some knowledge capital accounts to measure he quality of the chattering sector?
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HolisticWhen I first encountered the term, holistic, or rather when I first realized that I needed to know what holistic meant, I was at sea. It’s proponents tend to be strident, insistent. They chide us with ‘Holistic . . . ‘ and the pained looks on their faces suggest that there is something they intuit but don’t feel able to explain.
Today I found a news report on a marketing alliance between sister firms Ogilvy and WPP who have are now offering an end-to-end consulting service to marketers branded JWP Action.
“The joint venture is to be a new model in shopper marketing, designed to help brands and retailers reach and influence consumers at every touch point along the path to purchase, linking brand strategies, shopper insights and retail opportunities.”
The press release misuses the word holistic and gives me an opportunity to dummy up a tutorial for people trying to get their head around the term.
Holistic doesn’t mean comprehensive or multi-faceted. Holisitic is a philosophical perspective based on not separating object and subject. For example, red is not red. Red is our experience of red.
Holistic begins with “I am experiencing red.”
What would holistic mean in terms of helping marketers? It might mean representing consumers.
Indeed someone was quoted along these lines
Bidwell said: “This move was based on client need. With all the changes in the retail space and consumer buying habits, clients told us their brands now require a wider range of resources and a truly holistic approach to shopper marketing, brand activation and integration.
“The joint venture is not focused on a marketing discipline, but instead on what a client needs. Then we build a media agnostic program from that base.”
Ah,but no. Holistic is not about getting results because getting results is about using this to get that. Separation. Holistic is not about separation. Holistic thinking suggests that consumers would like to enjoy products for what they are.
This is tough to understand when our belief system rests on ‘winning’ or ‘taking’ financial gain.
Quite possibly, though, people enjoy financial exchange as much as they enjoy consuming a good ice-cream?
From this perspective, we might declutter the consumer experience to allow us to savor more directly what we set out to savor. Elegance. Appreciation. That might be what consumers are looking for.
How dull. So we know the answer already?
Holistic is all about possibilities. The unexpected discoveries of world with a mind of its own.
Holistic is about what emerges from time we spend together.
Holistic is about letting go and not insisting on perennial success. Maybe the occasional shriving would be a relief to you too?
. . . gets crowded out by ‘wanting to win’ (that is, wanting the other guy to lose).
Holistic is about concentrating on what we value and helping if flourish.
More and more clutter hides what is really enjoyable (and creates more work).
Cherishing the heart of an activity brings it alive.
Deciding what must happen in advance feels focusing but is so limiting.
The magic comes from what was only possible when we join forces.
Imagine an advertising agency that helps us
• Articulate and visualize what we really hold dear and to profile our hopes and dreams clearly over and above the distractions of threat?
• De-clutter and get to heart of what really brings us alive and makes us feel ‘ a welcome guest on this planet Earth’?
• Create shared experiences where we emerge with shining eyes invigorated, refreshed and astounded by what we created together.
I am imagining the difference between shopping at my supermarket that has everything I don’t want and very little that I do want with shopping at my deli.
• Where am I able to imagine a delightful meal?
• Where do I buy less but of higher quality and with more enjoyment?
• Where do I arrive with a simple idea and depart with a better idea?
This is what holistic means
• Whole (not divided into antagonistic parts)
• Valued for its essence (not its frills)
• In the space between us
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In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
From Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching
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