Category: Happiness

Who should be responsible for happiness?

Mark GouldLeave a comment

I spent last week in a remote Scottish location, which meant that I could catch up on some podcasts that had backed up on my phone. As I listened to a few in succession, some interesting juxtapositions were thrown up. One in particular got me thinking about the balance of power and responsibility between individuals and organisations.

Strathossian ruinI would guess that everyone knows someone who is unhappy in their work, even if they aren’t themselves. There may be many reasons for this, but the prevailing trend seems to be that the unhappy owe it to themselves to find a way to change things so that they can become happier. (Or to manage their own unhappiness.) An old friend of mine, perhaps worn down from years listening to HR complaints, was robust in her assertion that people should leave if they didn’t enjoy working at the firm: “we don’t put bars on the windows.”

So, as I listened to the Thinking Allowed discussion of happiness and wellness, I was particularly struck by comments about the way that this individualistic approach has allowed organisations and even society at large to transfer responsibility for making things better to individuals. This is often dressed up as ‘agency’, even when people may actually have very little power to make real change, short of changing jobs.

A little later, on their excellent Shift podcast, Euan Semple and Megan Murray had an entertaining conversation about navel gazing as a key business skill. Jack Vinson blogged a key point:

The thing that struck me hard enough to do a quick blog post is the idea that some people get wrapped around the axel of self-improvement without thinking why.  On the opposite end are people who have no interest in self-improvement (but who are happy to point out situations in which they are unhappy).

I have always liked the idea that if I am upset about something / someone, it is because something inside me is out of kilter.  It is not the other person / situation is necessarily wrong, but my take on it has me upset.  In other words, it is my responsibility to figure out why that business meeting made me so angry, and then DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

I don’t disagree with Jack’s view that one should always consider whether there is something one could change about oneself. However, I am concerned that when organisations assume that people should always take responsibility, they are more likely to allow poor situations to persist.

People make decisions about difficult working situations for so many reasons that each may well be unique. They may stay because they have built up valuable support networks amongst colleagues and have no wish to let them down. They may have external commitments that make it hard to move. They may feel no such constraints. They may be natural disruptors so they drive change wherever they are. If the organisation has no interest in understanding people and the reasons why they are happy or unhappy, it has no way of knowing whether there are fundamental problems that need to be addressed at the organisational level. (This can produce stagnation, but may also allow unfettered change initiatives to flourish.)

It is time for the pendulum to swing back. By all means encourage people to take some responsibility for making the changes they need. But organisations also need to take more responsibility for being aware that people are unhappy and why this might be, and for making sensible changes to improve overall happiness.

Fortuitously, last week also saw the launch of a new tool that gives organisations a better way of understanding what is really going on. Cognitive Edge’s cultureSCAN can be used to take a snapshot of the way people feel about their work, or it can be used repetitively to test the reception of organisational change (for example). As a Cognitive Edge network member, I can work with law firms (and others) work out how best to use cultureSCAN and the information it produces. Please get in touch if you are interested in knowing more.

A summary of cultureSCAN is provided on the Cognitive Edge site, and I have excerpted it below.

Culture is a crucial part of most organisations’ success or failure – yet, given its complexity, is also one of the most difficult things to influence. The organisational culture, people’s behaviour and the narratives they share when they meet are all interwoven – co-evolving together.   Looking to understand the overall system and see which levers to pull is a futile – and mistaken – pursuit.

Instead anyone tasked with changing a culture must work to understand the narratives – the stories and fragments of meaning – that are exchanged each day in the many interactions that happen at the coffee machine, in the corridor and in meetings. Change then becomes a matter of amplifying the narratives that lead in the desired direction, dampening the ones that draw people away – and looking for opportunities to improve and innovate along that path.

Cognitive Edge’s cultureSCAN is a unique opportunity – a pre-configured tool for online and smartphone users to gather organisational narratives and understand the culture as it stands.

cultureSCAN is a culture-specific set of signifiers allowing users to signify audio/text/pictures quickly and easily (audio and pictures available only on iOS and Android apps).  It uses SenseMaker® – the only software licensed to use Cognitive Edge’s patented signification methods – meaning that organisations have the objectivity and scalability of quantitative data, supported with the insight and richness of qualitative micro-narrative material.

So it is easy to see – and prove – where the organisation is today, as well as delving deeper to understand why – and where it can be taken tomorrow.

All change!

Mark Gould7 Comments

2014-05-22 18.23.58Thirteen years ago, I packed my bags and left academia. In doing so, I swapped one type of institution (where I had been for almost 18 years: undergraduate, postgrad, teacher) for another: a law firm. At the end of May, I left that firm and institutional life altogether. I am now in the third stage of my career — working as a consultant helping businesses find ways to use their knowledge more productively.

It will take a little while for me to settle to the new role. There will be some changes here too. My intention is to build a set of pages for the business on top of the old ‘Enlightened Tradition’ blog. If WordPress works as described, any old links to the blog will still work as before.

I hope also that the frequency of posting will pick up too. The past few years were very busy for me, and it became harder to sustain the blog. I regret that — I have many draft posts that are now too old to be useful.

The blog is important to me because the new venture will build on the thoughts and ideas I have developed here as well as on the institutional experience I have had.

The key point there is that my thoughts and experiences have been shaped by the hundreds of people in my network — those I have worked closely with, as well as the looser connections that come through comments here and on Twitter and LinkedIn. Over the past few weeks, many of those people have also assisted and guided me through the process of parting from employment and into consultancy. There are too many people to thank individually, but I hope they each know that I am immensely grateful for all of their support. The network is indeed powerful, and beneficent.

Is knowledge work what we think it is?

Mark Gould7 Comments

When we talk about knowledge work, I think many of us probably focus on desk-bound paper-shufflers of some kind. Here’s a man who disagrees.

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Matthew Crawford has an academic and work history that could mark him out as an intellectual — perhaps the ultimate knowledge worker. He has a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, after which he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University’s Committee on Social Thought. After that, he was executive director at a Washington policy organisation. Between his master’s degree and his doctorate he worked writing summaries of academic journal articles for library CD-ROMs. His current vocation, however, is to run a motorcycle repair shop. This change in direction is the subject of a book, which is touted in a New York Times article and the appearance on Stephen Colbert’s show that you can see above.

Crawford’s argument is that what we commonly think of as knowledge work is most often in fact just mindless following of process, whereas manual tasks may often pose some difficult mental challenges.

There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process. Mechanics face something like this problem in the factory service manuals that we use. These manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, presenting an idealized image of diagnostic work. But they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure.

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

By comparison, Crawford sees remoteness and a lack of responsibility pervading much of our knowledge work.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions …

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers’ compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders.

I think one of our primary challenges in management (and especially knowledge management) is to instil a culture of paying attention. To some extent, much of 20th century management drove people into places where they did not need to pay attention: they were forced into silos of specialisation where they did not need to worry about what anyone else was doing. The result of this can be seen in many modern workplaces. For example, consider this description of life in a global accounting firm, from Steve Denning’s review of Alain de Botton’s book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.

He zeroes in on the HR director and her activities which include promoting day care centers and animatedly asking subordinates at monthly get-togethers how they are enjoying their jobs; organizing competitions in landscape painting and karaoke to stimulate creativity; and “Employee of the Month” schemes which reward the winners with river cruises and lunches with the chairman. (p.248)

“For most of human history, the only instruments needed to induce employees to complete their duties energetically and adroitly was the whip… Once it became evident that someone who was expected to remove brain tumors, draw up binding legal documents or sell condominiums with convincing energy could not be profitably sullen or resentful, morose or angry, the mental well being of employees commenced to be an object of supreme concern.” (p.244)

Thus it would be plausible but wrong, de Botton says, to judge the HR Director as “an unnecessary sickness”. This would be “to misconstrue the sheer distinctiveness of the contemporary office” as “a factory of ideas”. The HR Director plays a key role in maintaining the mask of shallow cheerfulness that keeps the office running smoothly. It is “the very artificiality of her activities that guarantee their success”, like a party game at a house party that initially invite mockery but, as the game gets under way, participants are surprised to find that the game enables them to “channel their hostilities, identify their affections and escape the agony of insincere chatter”. (p.246)

Yet the success is relative. He notes, tellingly, how little time, amid these systematic efforts at contrived conviviality, is actually spent on real work, and how much is devoted to “daydreams and recuperation”. (p.258)

Perhaps knowledge work is actually too easy for people to engage with it properly. By documenting processes in excruciating detail, organisations have simultaneously suppressed creativity and innovation, and created the conditions for inadvertent (but inevitable) error and failure.

What do we talk about when we talk about work?

Mark Gould3 Comments

For too long, I have had Theodore Zeldin’s little book, Conversation, on my wish-list. Prompted by a colleague’s comment I finally tracked a copy down. (It is out of print, but extremely easy to find on Amazon or Abebooks.) I wish I had done so sooner.

The word ‘conversation’ is scattered throughout this blog. Like many others, I have made the assumption that people at work converse readily with each other and that one of our challenges in making knowledge use at work better is to capture those conversations or their product in as simple a way as possible. Zeldin’s argument is that in fact we do not know how to converse.

[T]he more we talk, the less there is that we can talk about with confidence. We have nearly all of us become experts, specialised in one activity. A professor of inorganic chemistry tells me that he can’t understand what the professor of organic chemistry says. An economist openly admits that “Learning to be an economist is like learning a foreign language, in which you talk about a rational world which exists only in theory.” The Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies [sic], established to bring all the world’s great minds together, was disappointed to find that they did not converse much: Einstein, a colleague said, “didn’t need anybody to talk to because nobody was interested in his stuff, and he wasn’t interested in what anybody else was doing.”

No wonder many young people hesitate to embark on highly specialised careers which make them almost feel they are entering prison cells. … Even a BBC producer I met in the corridors of Broadcasting House, when I asked how his job was affecting his brain, said, “The job is narrowing my mind.”

Poor quality conversations don’t just happen at work — Zeldin sees the problem manifested (in different ways) in the family, in love and generally across our social interactions. Our focus, however, is work. What is Zeldin’s prescription?

Almost everyone says that the more varied the people they meet at work, the more fun it is, though often they exchange only a few words. But creativity usually needs to be fuelled by more than polite chat. At the frontiers of knowledge, adventurous researchers have to be almost professional eavesdroppers, picking up ideas from the most unobvious sources.

Zeldin’s book was published in 1998. A year later, David Weinberger made the link between good conversation and KM.

The promise of KM is that it’ll make your organization smarter. That’s not an asset. It’s not a thing of any sort. Suppose for the moment that knowledge is a conversation. Suppose making your organization smarter means raising the level of conversation. After all, the aim of KM was never to take knowledge from the brain of a smart person and bury it inside some other container like a document or a database. The aim was to share it, and that means getting it talked about.

This view puts KM at the heart of business since business is a conversation. … It’s not just that good managers manage by having lots of conversations… All the work that moves the company forward is accomplished through conversations —oral, written, and expressed in body language.

So, here’s a definition of that pesky and borderline elitist phrase, “knowledge worker”: A knowledge worker is someone whose job entails having really interesting conversations at work.

The characteristics of conversations map to the conditions for genuine knowledge generation and sharing: They’re unpredictable interactions among people speaking in their own voice about something they’re interested in. The conversants implicitly acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers (or else the conversation is really a lecture) and risk being wrong in front of someone else. And conversations overcome the class structure of business, suspending the org chart at least for a little while.

If you think about the aim of KM as enabling better conversations rather than lassoing stray knowledge doggies, you end up focusing on breaking down the physical and class barriers to conversation. And if that’s not what KM is really about, then you ought to be doing it anyway.

One of the ways that we can encourage good conversations is to expose people to a wider variety of experiences and inputs than they would expect for themselves. I mentioned in a previous post how important this is for designers. It is important for all professionals. Likewise, one of the key factors improving people’s collaboration and knowledge sharing through better conversations is familiarity with other people. In most workplaces, it is obvious that different groups engage with each other in different ways depending on how their physical proximity and familiarity. We can influence these factors architecturally.

Brad Bird (director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille) makes this point in an interview in The McKinsey Quarterly. Talking about the Pixar studio building, he said:

Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put all the mailboxes, the meeting rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center — which initially drove us crazy — so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. He realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible not to run into the rest of the company.

That’s great if one has the opportunity to influence architecture. What can we do otherwise? Zeldin might be able to come to the rescue. He has created The Oxford Muse: “A foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life.” One of their projects is Muse Conversations:

At the invitation of the World Economic Forum held in Davos, we organised a Muse Conversation Dinner. The participants sat at tables laid for two, each with a partner they had never met before. A Muse Conversation Menu listed 24 topics through which they could discover what sort of person they were meeting, their ideas on many different aspects of life, such as ambition, curiosity, fear, friendship, the relations of the sexes and of civilisations. One eminent participant said he would never again give a dinner party without this Muse Menu, because he hated superficial chat. Another said he had in just two hours made a friend who was closer than many he had known much longer. A third said he had never revealed so much about himself to anybody except his wife. Self-revelation is the foundation on which mutual trust is built.

Even short of this, there are all sorts of small things that we can do. I think the important thing is to be aware (and to spread the awareness) that there are always more interesting things to know than what we already know, and that the people who know them are interesting in their own right. We just need to seek them out.

[A credit and an apology. The latter is due to Raymond Carver for corrupting a title of his. Mary Abraham is owed the former: colleague mentioned Conversation after I referred him to Mary’s post, “Confessions of a Corporate Matchmaker”, which underlines the point that those responsible for KM have an essential part to play in generating good connections from which good conversations should flow.]

The space between the trees

Mark Gould3 Comments

I had a phone conversation with my father a couple of weeks ago, which ranged over a myriad of subjects, as usual. For some reason we ended up talking about happiness, especially (Buddhism-influenced) view that you can only be happy when you stop seeking happiness. He had been unable to find the source of this idea, and I have not been able to improve on his research. (If anyone knows, tell me and I will pass it on.)

Even if we can’t find the ultimate source of this view, what is the reasoning behind it? It goes a little like this:

  • We can’t help but define our happiness by reference to the things that make us unhappy.
  • If we concentrate on being happy, we are in fact concentrating on not being unhappy.
  • Thinking about our happiness will inevitably make us unhappy.

It is a bit like being told not to think about apples. In order to remember not to think about apples, you have to think of apples. However, without realising it, you probably spend hours every day not thinking about apples. (Until you just read that sentence, of course.)

The analogy that I find most useful, though, is one that a former colleague once used. Apparently, skiing through trees is extremely dangerous, but very exciting. Every year people are killed and seriously injured when they ski at speed into trees. This colleague was an avid skier (which I am not): he said that the only safe way to ski through trees was to relax and concentrate on the space between the trees. As soon as you think about the trees, you become tense and increase the risk that you start to steer towards them. I use a similar principle when driving — it is better to think about the gap between cars than to worry about hitting their door mirrors.

Something similar happens when we concentrate on excellent service. Many businesses use a range of metrics to judge how well they are doing. Some of these are admirably suited to the job — especially if they involve feedback from customers or clients. However, even when approval figures are really high, there is usually more to be done. A good performance this year is not a dependable predictor of excellence next year. How can you motivate people who are clearly doing well (the figures prove it)?

The answer, I think, is that concentrating on the figures is like trying to be happy. The figures tells us that we are clearly doing a good job, but there is still a feeling of discontent. Feelings cannot be measured. The figures tell us what great looks like, but they can’t help us say what excellence feels like. That feeling is like the one you get when you emerge from the snowy forest, having avoided all the trees because the only thing on your mind was the space between them. It is the feeling you get when you realise that you have achieved something (happiness perhaps) without focusing on it to the exclusion of almost everything else.

I am sure the Buddhists have a name for it…