Storytelling is a way of configuring and reconfiguring worlds; narratives can bring realities into being. I once took a writing workshop with someone who swore by power posing — the idea that adopting a wide stance with one’s arms raised quite literally invokes stature — and she would spend a minute before every reading “hacking” confidence into her body. With her arms above her head and her legs astride, she swore the technique changed her mentality and made her feel like she controlled the room. Without it, she claimed, she would be a gibbering, nervous wreck. However daft you might think power posing is, I was always impressed by her ability to slip fiction into the realm of the real.
What motivates people at work…
Shifting your leadership focus from, “What can I give people to motivate them?” to “How can I facilitate people’s satisfaction of autonomy, relatedness, and competence?
Autonomy is people’s need to perceive that they have choices, that what they are doing is of their own volition, and that they are the source of their own actions. The way leaders frame information and situations either promotes the likelihood that a person will perceive autonomy or undermines it.
Relatedness is people’s need to care about and be cared about by others, to feel connected to others without concerns about ulterior motives, and to feel that they are contributing to something greater than themselves. Leaders have a great opportunity to help people derive meaning from their work.
Competence is people’s need to feel effective at meeting every-day challenges and opportunities, demonstrating skill over time, and feeling a sense of growth and flourishing. Leaders can rekindle people’s desire to grow and learn.
Example - Company-wide message
There are three ways you can share our commitment for implementing green solutions as an essential part of our Corporate Social Responsibility initiative.
1. Join others who are passionate about reducing their carbon footprint for a fun and interactive training session on November 15. (Relatedness)
2. Read the attached manifesto and take a quick quiz to see what you learned by November 18. (Competence)
3. Send us your story about what you are doing at work to be environmentally responsible by November 14. (Autonomy, competence, and relatedness)
(via What Maslow’s Hierarchy Won’t Tell You About Motivation)
Warmth & Competence
Psychologists refer to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively, and ideally you want to be perceived as having both.
Interestingly, Cuddy says that most people, especially in a professional context, believe that competence is the more important factor. After all, they want to prove that they are smart and talented enough to handle your business.
But in fact warmth, or trustworthiness, is the most important factor in how people evaluate you. “From an evolutionary perspective,” Cuddy says, “it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our trust.” It makes sense when you consider that in cavemen days it was more important to figure out if your fellow man was going to murder you and steal all your possessions than if he was competent enough to build a good fire.
Focus on the problems that employees have been trying to solve with the technology
(SOURCE Let Your Social Collaboration Use Cases Lead the Way)
1. Pockets of employees find a tool which meets their need, and suddenly the organization is faced with many different, unsupported technologies. Clearly there is demand for a better alternative to the organization’s existing approved tools, but how do you
A. find a solution that meets everyone’s needs, and
B. get people to switch to the corporate approved choice?2. Employees’ tool choices often lack the scalability and security demanded by corporate IT. They also tend to support very specific use case(s) – meaning that they have limited value as an enterprise-wide tool. Rather than focusing on the tool itself, or finding an alternative that replicates its capabilities in a more scalable/secure platform, organizations need to focus on the problems that employees have been trying to solve with the technology.
3. The trouble is that you can’t just tell someone to be more collaborative, you need to help them understand the advantages to them, identify situations and specific contexts where collaboration will make their job easier, and help them to want to work differently. This is where use cases come in. Showing social collaboration in action in your organization is one of the best ways to show its benefits. If your employees have started using self-selected technologies to collaborate, you probably have ready-made use cases in place already.
4. These use cases should form the basis of any enterprise-wide technology selection, as these individuals are potentially your early adopters; your champions; your ambassadors. Meeting their needs first will give you a powerful platform of adoption from which to grow, so understand
A. Why they looked for a new tool in the first place and
B. what they are using it to do.
It may take a little convincing to persuade them to switch to an alternative, but if you can’t convince these people that your enterprise-wide solution meets their needs, you can probably forget the rest of the organization.5. Lead with specific use cases in your rollout process. This means avoiding deploying the full, all-singing, all-dancing social collaboration platform on day one. Focus on the necessary features for your first one or two use cases. Not only will this help to avoid confusing or distracting users who are trying to get to grips with a new application, but it may also help you to deploy more quickly. Your enterprise-wide solution not only requires a breadth of features, but the flexibility to deploy the solution in a modular way, allowing easy prioritization of the features that support your leading use cases.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): ‘I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am.’
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We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community. Relationships inform self-understanding.
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Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend.
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So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. ‘Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction,’ Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1929).
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There is a Zulu phrase, ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, which means ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ This is a richer and better account, I think, than ‘I think, therefore I am.’
(via Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ | Aeon Ideas)
Regulation comes naturally for small human groups but must be constructed for large human groups
Smith was critical of Mandeville and presented a more nuanced view of human nature in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but modern economic and political discourse is not about nuance. Rational choice theory takes the invisible hand metaphor literally by trying to explain the length and breadth of human behavior on the basis of individual utility maximization, which is fancy talk for the narrow pursuit of self-interest. For the general public, unfettered competition has been turned into a moral virtue and “regulation” has become a sin.
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Actual human preferences are all about regulation. A microcosm of America’s economic collapse can be created in the laboratory in a single afternoon. Yank a group of people off the street, give them a task that requires cooperation, and most of them will play along as solid citizens. Unfortunately, a few will game the system if there is any way to cheat. Once the solid citizens realize that they’re being ripped off, they withdraw their cooperation as their only defense. Provide them with an opportunity to punish the cheaters, and some (but not all) punish with zeal. Even the cheaters punish other cheaters with zeal! Once the capacity for regulation is provided in the form of rewards and punishments that can be implemented at low cost, cooperation rises to high levels. Regulation is required or cooperation will disappear, like water draining from a bathtub.
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the metaphor of the invisible hand should be declared dead. Let there be no more talk of unfettered competition as a moral virtue. Cooperative social life requires regulation. Regulation comes naturally for small human groups but must be constructed for large human groups. Some forms of regulation will work well and others will work poorly. We can argue at length about smart vs. dumb regulation but the concept of no regulation should be forever laid to rest.
(via The Death of the Invisible Hand: Why the Narrow Pursuit of Self Interest Always Fails - Evonomics)
Braided design model
The difference with design-driven companies is that they seek to go far beyond understanding what customers want to truly uncovering why they want it. They recognize that while data are important for understanding customer behavior, they’re woefully short on empathy. Design-driven companies turn to ethnographers and cultural anthropologists. These “empathy sleuths” conduct contextual one-on-one interviews, shopper-shadowing exercises, and “follow me homes” to observe, listen, and learn how people actually use and experience products. They plot out customer decision journeys to understand exactly what motivates people, what bothers them, and where there are opportunities for creating delightful experiences.
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One essential to running a design-driven company is making sure the right people with the right skill set are in the right place. To start, that means ensuring a chief design lead has a seat at the table where strategic decisions are made. That person could be a chief design officer, a chief digital officer, or a chief marketing officer. All that matters is that whoever has the responsibility is the primary customer advocate. He or she must bring the customer’s point of view to business decisions, translate business goals into customer-friendly initiatives, and build a culture in which employees think about how what they do affects customers.
European philosophy has long prioritised ‘seeing’ over ‘doing’ as a path to understanding
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According to Merleau-Ponty, however, ‘consciousness is originally not an “I think that”, but rather an “I can”’. In other words, human thinking emerges out of lived experience, and what we can do with our bodies profoundly shapes what philosophers think or scientists discover. ‘The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world,’ he wrote. Phenomenology of Perception aimed to help readers better appreciate the connection between the lived world and consciousness.
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From a Cartesian perspective, the mind moves the body like a puppeteer pulls strings to move a puppet. To learn to dance, in this paradigm, a person needs to memorise a sequence of steps. For Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, the way to learn to dance is to move one’s physical body in space: ‘in order for the new dance to integrate particular elements of general motricity, it must first have received, so to speak, a motor consecration.’ The mind does not reflect and make a conscious decision before the body moves; the body ‘catches’ the movement.
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At the farm, my children learned from being around the animals, trees, pastures, streams, stars and other physical objects. Things became more real, more immediate, than they would have been if a screen had mediated them. However, the experience was as deep as it was because of the relationships we formed with our hosts. The farmers would hold my children when placing them on horses or look them in the eye when explaining how to move sheep from one stall to the next. Our children had fun with their children while playing by the stream at dusk before dinner. When we drove away from the farm, my young son had tears in his eyes; he didn’t want to leave his new friends.
School should be about finding out who you are, not about “doing well in school.”
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No one learns how to do something they want to do by listening to lectures. They just try doing things and they ask for help. We need to implement that model of education: do it and get help.
The government won’t provide that because book publishers don’t make money that way, and test makers don’t make money that way, and teachers would have do something different and many would resist.
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Stop teaching. Parents don’t teach their children, they help their children follow their interest. Stop talking at people. No one is listening. People listen only as long as it takes them to have their own ideas and then they want to react to what they heard.
Start having conversations and stop teaching.
It has long been known that social connections are vital for a person who is experiencing depression.
Now, though, new research finds that it’s not just social groups which help those with depression, crucially it’s identifying with that group which helps alleviate depression.
Brian argued that since natural, social or economic systems are best understood as complex dynamic systems, we can finally give up our ill-fated pursuit of ways to predict and control these systems. We are not supposedly ‘objective’ observers outside these systems, trying to manipulate them more effectively; we are always participants. He suggested that the insights of complexity science invite us to shift our attitude and goal to our appropriate participation in these systems, as subjective, co-creative agents.
Our goal should be to better understand the underlying dynamics in order to facilitate the emergence of positive or desirable properties — emerging through the qualities of relationships in the system and the quality of information that flows through the system. We have to befriend uncertainty and ambiguity because they are here to stay.
#debtlife
Municipalities and regional governments now must borrow to provide the services that tax revenues once funded before industry fled to the places of least regulation and lowest wages in the global “race to the bottom.” Students now must borrow to attend universities that were once heavily subsidized by government.
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When growth stalls, lending opportunities disappear. Since money is essentially lent into existence, debt levels increase faster than the supply of money required to service them. The result, as Thomas Piketty described so clearly, is rising indebtedness and concentration of wealth.
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Positive money refers to money created directly without debt by the government, which can be given directly to debtors for debt repayment or used to purchase debts from creditors and then cancel them. Negative-interest currency (which I describe in depth in Sacred Economics) entails a liquidity fee on bank reserves, essentially taxing wealth at its source. It enables zero-interest lending, reduces wealth concentration, and allows a financial system to function in the absence of growth.
Colonial domination of the future
…The Scottish philosopher was convinced that the institutions of government – such as political representatives and parliamentary debates – would serve to temper our impulsive and selfish desires, and foster society’s long-term interests and welfare.
Today Hume’s view appears little more than wishful thinking, since it is so startlingly clear that our political systems have become a cause of rampant short-termism rather than a cure for it. Many politicians can barely see beyond the next election, and dance to the tune of the latest opinion poll or tweet. Governments typically prefer quick fixes, such as putting more criminals behind bars rather than dealing with the deeper social and economic causes of crime. Nations bicker around international conference tables, focused on their near-term interests, while the planet burns and species disappear.
The 3 problems
…One problem is the electoral cycle, an inherent design flaw of democratic systems that produces short political time horizons. Politicians might offer enticing tax breaks to woo voters at the next electoral contest, while ignoring long-term issues out of which they can make little immediate political capital, such as dealing with ecological breakdown, pension reform or investing in early childhood education. Back in the 1970s, this form of myopic policy-making was dubbed the “political business cycle”.
Add to this the ability of special interest groups – especially corporations – to use the political system to secure near-term benefits for themselves while passing the longer-term costs onto the rest of society. Whether through the funding of electoral campaigns or big-budget lobbying, the corporate hacking of politics is a global phenomenon that pushes long-term policy making off the agenda.
The third and deepest cause of political presentism is that representative democracy systematically ignores the interests of future people. The time has come to face an inconvenient reality: that modern democracy – especially in wealthy countries – has enabled us to colonise the future. We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please. When Britain colonised Australia in the 18th and 19th Century, it drew on the legal doctrine now known as terra nullius – nobody’s land – to justify its conquest and treat the indigenous population as if they didn’t exist or have any claims on the land. Today our attitude is one of tempus nullius. The future is an “empty time”, an unclaimed territory that is similarly devoid of inhabitants. Like the distant realms of empire, it is ours for the taking.
Committee for the Future
A more fundamental point is that there may be ways to reinvent representative democracy to overcome its current bias towards the here and now. In fact, several countries have already embarked on pioneering experiments to empower the citizens of the future. Finland, for instance, has a parliamentary Committee for the Future that scrutinises legislation for its impact on future generations.
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Perhaps the best-known contemporary example is in Wales, which established a Future Generations Commissioner, Sophie Howe, as part of the 2015 Well-being for Future Generations Act. The role of the commissioner is to ensure that public bodies in Wales working in areas ranging from environmental protection to employment schemes, make policy decisions looking at least 30 years into the future.
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Future Design is partly inspired by the Seventh Generation Principle, observed by some Native American peoples, where the impact on the welfare of the seventh generation in the future (around 150 years ahead) is taken into account.
A simple tool to find value creation opportunities
Absolutely amazing business driver question framework developed by Simon Terry to help elicit value creation - from this dialogue a vision (goal) is articulated - the strategy expands on the vision by detailing the objectives by driver - then we formulate tactics by driver (how the collaboration technology and behaviour change can fulfil the objectives.)
Below is a snippet from the blog post
From Strategy to Use Case
The CEO approaches you to improve Innovation in line with the new corporate strategy. The strategy is a little unclear on how innovation works in your organisation so this responsibility is a little daunting.
You have a conversation with the CEO and ask some questions to explore the drivers:
- Growth: What outcomes do you hope will grow through Innovation
- Effectiveness: How do you see Innovation enable us to do things better?
- Velocity: What do you want us to do faster through innovation?
- Protection: How do you see innovation help us to avoid risks?
The discussion is long and involves a lot more back and forth but together you clarify that the CEO is interested in how the organisation can more quickly bring products to market based on insights from customers. She is worried about being disrupted by a new competitor.
You develop a strategy for the innovation initiative that is based around a series of new use steps that demand different ways of working:
- Growth: Increase Sales and Retain Customers by Delivering New Products
- Effectiveness: Better Convert Insights to new Product Features with higher value for Customers
- Velocity: Deliver Products to market Faster using better interactions in product team and the rest of the organisation
- Protection: Reduce competitive threat of disruption
With these tangible steps you can now approach users to discuss how they might achieve these steps by changing the way they work:
- Growth: Better train sales people on new products and help them to better pass on customer feedback and insights directly to the product team. Allow them to collaboratively work together to develop new sales strategies for the new products
- Effectiveness: Enable the product team to work to a product backlog with more customer insights and involving more interaction with the customers and the rest of the organisation
- Velocity: Reduce the number of meetings and approval steps to bring a product to market. Shift from exhaustive approval to transparent experiments that are monitored by all stakeholders
- Protection: Alert the whole organisation to the disruptive threat. Engage all employees in the search for customer insights and competitive intelligence. They can come from anywhere.
Source: Simon Terry