Category Archives: Philosophy and culture

Happy at work? Part 2

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The story so far:

Two receptions. A university starts a conversation about creating a happy, positive workplace and is ridiculed by staff and observers alike. A business magazine publishes an article suggesting employers thank employees for their work and an online leadership forum reacts with dismay and fury. Both audiences assume the employer is being false and manipulative, and is asking them to be false and manipulative too. What is going on here?

Here are some speculations.

I hear a couple of unexamined assumptions in the audiences’ reactions. The first assumption is that work is work and it’s not supposed to be enjoyable. The old Protestant/Calvinist streak is alive and well in our thinking here. We might have had “The Sixties”, to the faux despair of conservative or Tory politicians, but no matter how much love was free and how many bongs were smoked, they are a pimple on the bottom of an elephant in comparison to the depth and breadth of the Calvinist mindset and its commitment to joylessness.

The second assumption is that it’s not possible to enjoy work. Possibility can certainly occur like this. Damn infuriating! Talk to someone luxuriating in some beautiful, faithful misery of their own, suggest it could be different, and then see what happens. All I can say is you’d better watch your eyes. As for some poor schmuck who comes along and suggests it is possible, and, moreover, as in the case of the university, “we’d like you to do it”, well, the fury will be untrammelled.

This second assumption is starting to approach another factor, a deeper one, which may be what’s really running the show. It concerns the fear of blame, and the confusion about blame and responsibility.

We are enraged with the idea work may not have to be hard, disagreeable and coercive because it raises the spectre that our suffering may not be inevitable and this is a problem.

If our suffering is inevitable, then we can feel ourselves free from the fear of blame. Because it’s always blame, the premonition of blame, that’s lurking in our consciousness. Our Western culture is weaned and steeped in blame. We are all scarred with it almost from birth, and we will do anything to avoid it.

If, however, our suffering is not inevitable, well then that’s when things start to get tricky. If we were to admit the possibility that our suffering at work, our suffering in any sphere of life, were not inevitable, then a question would arise: who is responsible (or in the terms we’d hear it, who is to blame) for our suffering?

And then we may start to see, out of the corner of our eye, that we are there. We may start to see we bear responsibility for our lives and our experience in this moment, including our happiness and our suffering. Around the same time the stoppers in our ears, placed there by our own hand, might fall out and the call to give up blame and resentment and do something different might reach us at last.

***

In summary, my theory is that we ridicule the idea it might be possible to be happy and satisfied at work because we prefer the prospect of our suffering to the prospect of taking responsibility. The former is familiar after all; we know how to play that game. The boss is the boss, and we are the bossed, and if each of us just plays our respective roles, the world will go on turning. We may be miserable, but we’ve survived this far, and we’ll continue to survive.

For many people, however, there comes a day when the bankruptness of this stance is no longer tolerable. On that day, an opportunity presents itself. The opportunity to be a leader. When that day comes for you, what will you choose? To be a whinger, or a leader?

***

Image: Painter on the Road to Tarascon, Vincent van Gogh

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Happy at work?

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Two reports. The first in a national newspaper, the second in an online forum on leadership.

First report. The newspaper reported a major university had just published a document, prepared on their behalf by a big consulting organisation, which urged university staff to adopt “positive” behaviour in the workplace. Staff were furious, the article said.

Everything about the newspaper article was sneering, from its title – “So happy together” – to sentences such as this:

So far all RMIT’s 12-page, dot-point cajolement to be happy at work has succeeded in doing is raising the ire of its academics …

The commenters duly chimed in too.

Most were furious, scornful. They viewed the university’s discussion of “positive” behaviour in the workplace as coercive and requiring staff to pretend or suppress their real feelings.

Few, if any commenters could conceive that being happy or satisfied in the workplace could be a real experience. The concept “happiness at work” occurred to them only as “pretending at work”, and they viewed the university’s raising of the possibility of positive attitudes as demeaning and insulting.

***

Second report. A participant in an online forum on leadership cites a report in Forbes magazine about the benefits of employers saying thank you to their employees. An innocuous enough proposition you might think. Not at all. Commenters were scathing. One commenter was incensed enough to write her own blog post on the mistake of saying thank you.

Like the university staff and the readers in the first example, readers in this second example assumed without hesitation that having an employer say “thank you” could only be a ploy and a hateful one at that.

The blogger went so far as to say actions such as this – saying thank you – were responsible for an absence of employee engagement. “It’s no wonder,” she said,

we have such an issue with employee engagement, where 72% of American workers alone are disengaged.

It’s a pretty pass we’ve come to, isn’t it?

Investigating how staff can have a positive experience at work, or recommending people thank others, is viewed as damaging or threatening, while cynicism is allowed free rein. Neither group stopped for a moment to consider how their cynicism might be affecting the workplace. The issue is all over there, with the employers.

What is going on here? What is using these readers when some simple propositions are raised?

To be continued …

***

Image: The Sower, 1888; Vincent van Gogh

Plagiarism and integrity

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Yesterday, I said I considered it wasn’t my business if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. I view it as a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and, anyway, they’re welcome to it because there’s plenty more where that came from.

The power of the integrity point is not to be under-estimated, as I learnt a couple of years ago.

A student in the US wrote to me offering me money to take my blog offline for a week or two. She was about to submit an essay for her college course on the writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, and she had used some of the points from two posts I’d written about him. Before I had a chance to reply, she wrote to me again asking me to disregard the previous email. She apologised, and said she had changed the essay to make it clear she was using quotations from this blog.

I still find this pretty thrilling. Someone taking the time and effort to make her actions and the breach of integrity crystal clear, and giving up her ordinary human concern for looking good.

Did you know the word “integrity” has from time to time been the most popular search term on Google?  Integrity, in ourselves and others, is  immensely attractive and compelling.

***

Image: Shoes, 1888; Vincent van Gogh

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Blog readjustment

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It’s been bothering me that writing a book seems to demand I hold back the best ideas and insights gained by talking to people being leaders in the world until some as-yet-mythical publication date. If my book is published by a publisher, it may be years before it is published. If I publish it myself, it may be years before it reaches the audience I want it to reach.

In the meantime, as Goethe said, life is sweeping by, and all the while, remarkable people are living remarkable lives, transforming themselves and the most unpromising of circumstances into pure gold, while another group starves for want of joy and power and meaning in the world, the kind of joy and power and meaning available to them too if only they could know it was possible.

It’s seemed to me for some time that another type of book publication is needed. Something that allows instalments to be published and content to be written on the fly, as in the time of Dickens. Or something like the literary or political pamphlets that were previously a staple of publishing.

For these reasons, I’m choosing to take a different approach to this blog. From now on, I’ll be sharing more of the content I have previously been reserving for the book. I’ll also be using, with their permission, the real names of leaders and their organisations I’m writing about.

This might mean some content in the book will have been first published on this blog. I don’t foresee this will be a bar to book publication because the paradigm of book publishing is being entirely re-written, and it’s becoming routine for content to exist in a blog form and then a book form. I don’t foresee it will be a problem for potential book readers because the material will be integrated in a different way and there will be plenty of new material.

I’m also creating it that the book material will occur as entirely fresh and compelling, regardless of whether it’s been previously referred to in some other form.

As for the potential hazard of people borrowing ideas or stories, I choose to follow Seth Godin’s line on this. He is great in many ways, and his renunciation of the stance of proprietorialism is one of them. It’s never much interested me if someone were to copy or plagiarise my thoughts. For one, it’s a matter of integrity between the person and themself, and secondly, they’re welcome to it, for as George Gershwin reportedly said when he lost a song he was working on,

There’s plenty more where that came from.

Besides, it’s not as if I’m originating this stuff. I’m just a conduit for writing that wants to be written. I’m shepherding into words material that already exists, even if it hasn’t yet been said.

***

Image: Farmer sitting at the fireside and reading; by the glorious, inimitable Vincent van Gogh, courtesy of biblioklept

Out with “hard”

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At the beginning of this year, I was complaining to my coach about an ongoing personal issue. It’s a well-rehearsed subject this one, and I was giving it yet one more turn around the block. She put it to me that I was always having to have the issue “handled”, always feeling I had to be dealing with it in some way, and she asked me to consider a proposition.

Say if you were to declare a holiday from the issue? Say if, for this year, you were to say you were not “doing” the issue? By all means, communicate and respond as normal with the people involved, just don’t be “working on” or “doing” the issue.

This was startling to me, and very exciting. And so I did it. I declared I was not dealing with the issue in 2012.

Four months later, the results are remarkable. I’ve discovered nothing actually happens when I don’t deal with the issue. It doesn’t all go to hell; in fact, it’s the reverse.  Since I’ve given up trying to force or fix the matter, things I’ve wanted to have happen in the area have arisen of their own accord. In addition, I’ve got back the time and energy I previously spent dealing with it. I hadn’t realised how much of myself I was giving to the issue, and all to no avail.

The other day I saw another way to use this practice.

There’s a general agreement out there in the world that writing is hard, and unless it’s hard it’s no good. There are umpteen blog sites dedicated to the issue, and the stand-out is Steven Pressfield’s.

Pressfield has it that writing is hand-to-hand combat in the trenches, and he named his book on writing accordingly, The War of Art. He talks every week on his blog about the struggle, the beast he calls “resistance”, the hard. His commenters do likewise.

It’s a very common view; Pressfield is only the keeper of its flame. It pops up everywhere, and I’d been getting more and more seduced by it until the other day.

The other day it occurred to me I could simply do what I’d done earlier in the year with the other issue. I could just declare I wasn’t “doing” hard for a particular period of time. So I have declared for the month of May I am not doing hard. If I’m writing or contemplating writing, or doing some other task, and it starts to occur as “hard”, I will do one of two things:

  1. lay aside the task and do something else
  2. do the task in a way that does not occur as hard.

At the end of May, I’ll assess how it went and make a declaration for the period beyond or another declaration entirely. I’ll tell you how it goes.

***

MONA revisited

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Went back to MONA on the weekend because I enjoyed it so much the first time round. Said hello to my favourites, Peter Buggenhout’s The Blind Leading the Blind, looking blacker and bigger and more sinister than even I remember, and Wang Qingsong’s Dream of Migrants. Marvelled all over again at the beauty and imagination of the presentation of works, including the tall inky cabinets of antiquities. Got a sob in my throat seeing the silhouette of a exquisitely carved cat, four inches high, an offering to a god from an ancient Egyptian tomb, cast against the cabinet’s side.

Looked in vain for the eye-high row of c*nt sculptures in the “Catacombs”. They’ve been replaced with a row of the pretty, lyrical drawings of Hungarian-born, New York-based Balint Zsako. His modern Kama Sutra, leafy and vaporous, is very relaxing. It requires only the eyeballs.

In the meantime, three of the sculptures have been turned into soaps one can buy in the gift shop, in the fragrance of Bianca, Angelique and another.

The one shot I managed to get off with my iPhone before the signal was lost in David Walsh’s underground kingdom is the first image below, which I believe is a medieval burial stone from Turkey. This dumb fellow moves me greatly. I could weep over him too.

***

* For more information about Balint Zsako, go to his website here. Note, the works above are not necessarily featured at MONA but ones very like them are.

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Fear? Oceanic.

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We never know the truth by being told it.
We have to experience it in some way.
That is the abiding grace of history.
It is the theatre in which we experience truth.
~ Greg Dening, Performances, 1996

I want to tell you about my week. Not much happened outwardly. Inwardly, I had a revelation. I started to get present to the fact I’m not present to the world.

By world I mean my experience of the world. As I started to glimpse this huge and fundamental fact I also started to get what was the stuff of my experience of the world. And I’m stunned to report it is fear.

Fear of other people, fear of not being liked, fear of losing love, fear of disapproval, fear of failing, fear of succeeding, fear of not doing what I want to do, fear of getting old, fear of the weather, fear of going to the shop and not getting a parking spot, fear of not having anything to wear, fear of having a bad hair day, fear of this and much much more. Fear of everything, fear on principle.

My fear is oceanic, and somehow I’ve completely missed it till this week.

There were a few things that came together to make it possible. I want to tell you about one because it may give you something too.

***

I was talking to a friend and she asked if the word “coward” fitted for some way I’d been being in a situation we were discussing. I easily turned this down. “No”, I said, “I’ve always known myself to be courageous.” Courage was the one thing I knew I could always count myself for. I may doubt myself in various ways, but never on this score.

Afterwards, I got curious about the discrepancy. How could it be, I wondered, that that word had presented itself to her and yet I had utter confidence in its antithesis?

The next day I happened to pick up a book on leadership I hadn’t yet read and the book fell open at a page entitled “fearlessness”. The author* made a distinction between courage and a quality she translated, from a Buddhist concept, as fearlessness.

Courage, she said, was the ability to act in the moment, to do what was required, with little or no thought. To save the drowning child, run into the burning house, speak up in the face of danger. Fearlessness, on the other hand, is the ability to go through fear to the other side. Not to dispel fear or overcome fear, but to experience fear on a sustained basis and break through it into a space beyond it. The Buddhists, and also I think the Hindus, call it abhaya.

When I researched it further, I found this sentence from a Tibetan monk:

Cowardice is not being present to fear.

Which was not at all how I thought of cowardice, if indeed I’d ever thought of it.

Here was a way in which both possibilities – courage and cowardice – could co-exist. One could know oneself as being courageous, and yet suffer an absence of fearlessness.

Around the same time I had a deep, bodily reaction to something that with my new attentiveness I now recognised as fear and sadness, and I saw I never usually let myself feel it. It’s unpleasant and shocking, and usually it’s ruthlessly suppressed by some aspect of my being, covered over, in my case, with boredom, restlessness or irritation.

This covering over, something I’ve not even been aware of, has made me oblivious to my fear. It has made me a coward.

***

As crazy as it sounds, I’m exhilarated and intrigued to know myself as a coward. It’s an entirely new thought and it offers ways of being I didn’t know were available.

Over and over, I learn that in order to see something new, one first has to give up what one knows.

***

* Margaret Wheatley

The sexiest thing

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A little while ago, my coach on the book project, who’s also my coach on everything, got engaged to be married. I asked her who her fiancee was for her and this is what she said:

When I wake up in the morning I just know that ahead of me I’ll be laughing and having fun for most of the day. He’s someone I can absolutely rely on, he’s calm and laidback and complements my tendency to driven-ness, and he’s a great father [he has a young son from a previous relationship].

Wow! Is that not the description of the man every woman wants? As for that “someone I can absolutely rely on”, that idea of integrity, is that not the sexiest thing? For men and for women, even though we might not be used to thinking of it as an attraction, especially in the case of the latter.

***

Image: Another sexy thing: Harry Connick Jr, who popped up on Law and Order: SVU the other night. Finally, a man the match of Olivia.

Making strange

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When I first moved to Melbourne from Sydney 12 years ago, I heard a saying I’d never heard before. “NQR”, people would say with a wink, and the conversation would end.

“NQR?”, I asked one day.

“Yeh, you know, Not Quite Right.”

Turns out there was a bulk grocery store of the same name that sold food in damaged packaging. Cans with dents, sacks with tears, that kind of thing. And the name of the store had been adopted as the shorthand for communicating something was “off” with a particular individual. Sort of like saying “he’s a few sandwiches short of the picnic”, only without the effort.

“NQR?”, one would ask. “Yep”. Enough said.

***

If you’ve ever had any dealings in the professional craft sector you’ll know people talk a lot about what makes something art and what makes something craft. Usually, they end up rolling out a very old and tattered premise: that craft is about the useful and art is not.

It occurs to me now the real distinction lies in the “not quite right”. Making the “not quite right” is what all artists, consciously or unconsciously, are setting out to do.

This isn’t an original idea. It has a long provenance. The Russian formalist literary critic, Viktor Shklovsky first used the term “defamiliarisation” in 1917 to refer to the strivings of the poet, the painter, to make strange the familiar.

The European philosophers of the 20th century, people like Heidegger and Derrida, standing on the shoulders of people like Shklovsky, deliberately sought to extend and exploit language that was defamiliarised. If language could be made strange to us, they speculated, what new things might we glimpse outside its usual remit?

The idea extends all the way to the field of artifical intelligence and computer programming with the postulation of the “uncanny valley”, the small region of human perception lying on either side of a norm, which I’ve written about previously in relation to Michael Jackson. The not-quite-right of art is about creating in the uncanny valley, and the best art has happened upon the sweet spot in that place.

The best, the most successful art has an indisputable effect on us. There’s no gainsaying it. We’re hooked and mesmerised in front of it, and it has everything to do with the tension between the familiar and the strange.

***

Image: One of the famously disturbing works of Australian artist, Patricia Piccinini; photo taken by me at Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, Australia

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Context is decisive

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Rosamund Stone Zander* tells an anecdote about going on a skiing trip to improve her skiing. On the very first run her plans went awry.

I slipped and fell on a patch of ice. From then on I became vigilant, tensing up in resistance whenever I spotted ice, and, unfortunately, there was plenty of it.

She was having a miserable time and was about to abandon her project and come back another time “when real skiing was to be had” when it suddenly occurred to her she was operating under an assumption:

that real skiing is skiing on snow.

She saw immediately that if she were going to be “a New England skier”, she had better include ice in her definition of skiing.

Thereafter, she says, she “redrew the box” in her mind so now she had it that “skiing is skiing on snow and ice.” The next run, and all the runs after, were very different. Her physical self now “coordinated easily” with her new way of thinking and she “welcomed the ice.”

***

The box in her mind, and the one in ours, is our context. It’s essentially what we delineate as ours or “it”. Everything outside the box is not-ours or not-it. Dealing with the not-it of our lives is exhausting, futile and disempowering and yet we spend a lot of our lives doing precisely that. We regularly fail to get that we are the ones who drew the box and we can re-draw it at any time.

I used the distinction of context on a recent consulting engagement. Never the most patient person, I was getting frustrated at the glacial pace of the project. Tasks that would normally take hours were taking days, and whole weeks were going by with very little progress. No matter how I tried to hurry along my various colleagues and the client, nothing worked. And yet every time there was a hiatus I would stop earning income because it was a time and materials job.

At first I considered ending the engagement and walking away. Technically, I had fulfilled the terms of the contract because the contract end date had already past. In my heart, however, this wouldn’t have been honouring my word. I may have signed a contract formulated around time, but the unwritten clause, to which I’d also signed up, was that the job be finished.

As soon as I got that walking away was not an option, I saw what hadn’t been working and it had everything to do with my context.

The context I had had was that completing the project meant completing the project as quickly and smoothly as possible. In this context, the glitches, delays and misunderstandings were not “mine”, not “it”.

Yet say if I re-drew the box to include the glitches and delays and misunderstandings? Say if I invented a context that said completing the project meant completing the project in the face of glitches and delays and misunderstandings?

As soon as I got this new context, the frustration fell away. And, wouldn’t you know it, the project re-started almost immediately.

The glitches, delays and misunderstandings didn’t necessarily go away; what went away was my resistance to them.

***

* Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, The Art of Possibility; this book just keeps on giving.

Image: Alpine skiing by Leroy Neiman

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