I have learned that there are two foundations, without which my intention to cultivate a life characterised by pleasure, betterness and meaning remains a fantasy. In my personal manifesto, section two is about these two foundations, the first of which I call ‘community’. I think that community is both critical and dangerous.

Community: a place to belong

My pursuit of pleasure, betterness and meaning almost always happens with other people. The most enjoyable sensual experiences tend to be shared. Of course I have great experiences on my own, but I would feel impoverished if my best encounters with the beauty in the world were always solo. I tend to gravitate to doing fun stuff with others, it is in my nature as a relational being.

The same can be said for our efforts to improve ourselves (betterness). Whether it is scrap booking, space travel, mastering a rubrics cube or playing cricket, we find a community of people who share our passion. In the context of that community we encourage each other, share information and tips, and enjoy the comradeship associated with shared achievement. We do better together than individually. Team sport, is an obvious but potent illustration of how this works in our lives.

If collaboration, comradeship and community are hallmarks in our pursuit of betterness, it is even more foundational in our pursuit of meaning. We find a group of people who believe the same as us when it comes to what is most important in life, and we ‘join up’. Whether it is a young mothers group, a faith community or environmental activist collective, we find in community a collective voice that stirs and fortifies us. Sometimes, in values driven organisations, it is our workplace.

Communities are not, of course, necessarily mutually exclusive. Some of us are sufficiently fortunate to live or work in places where communities associated with the three drivers (pleasure, betterness and meaning) intersect. In some cases family features in one or all communities too.

Community is the place where we determine our social identity in the world. It is where we form answers to the important question of where we belong; who are the people like me? Where is my ‘tribe’?. We understand who we are in the world by how we answer these questions. This is generally a natural and a good thing.

Two things to note about the power of tribes. Firstly, the risk of fundamentalism. When we experience each of pleasure, goodness and meaning within the same tribe, and we live virtually exclusively within that tribe, we can begin to believe that we are objectively ‘right’. This is not just about religious fundamentalism, it also applies to food fundamentalism, exercise fundamentalism and of course political fundamentalism.

This can sneak up on us. At face value, belonging to a community where I experience pleasure, betterness and meaning is a good thing. When the three things combine it becomes a potent attractor and can be intoxicating. Problems emerge however when I live exclusively within that community. I socialise and contribute within a particular homogeneous context. My view of the world, potently formed and reinforced within that community, goes unchallenged by voices that I respect. (Because everyone I truly respect also identifies within the community.)

Secondly, especially when it comes to our pursuit of meaning, we tend to believe we have thought our way to a particular ideological position. In practice, what happens is we adopt the worldview of those with whom we identify as significant others in our lives, those we respect within our chosen communities. This does not mean we don’t develop robust apologetics for our cause, just that we tend to select the data to affirm the position we already hold.

However, the key point here is that a life well lived is lived in community. Community is the context within which we experience pleasure, become better at being ourselves, and contribute meaningfully to the things that matter most to us. Community is where we know we are (meaningfully) part of something bigger than ourselves. Without community my pleasure is empty, my pursuit of excellence is pointless and my contribution is futile.

Questions to help me understand my communities

1.  Who are my kindred spirits?

a. With whom do I do fun stuff?

b. With whom do I share the journey of personal (including sports and hobbies) and professional development?

c. With whom do I collaborate in seeking to make the/your world a better place?

2.  What will I do to improve my relationships with people in these groups or communities?

3. How would I describe my ‘tribe’? What other communities in my life provide a healthy challenge to the dominant perspective within my tribe? To ensure my growth and development is characterised by wisdom alongside commitment, do I need to intentionally experience pleasure, betterness or meaning with a broader range of people? If yes, what will I do?

In every stage of my life, amidst the clutter and noise; the busyness and status anxiety; the rules and the ideologically driven pronouncements, I’ve wondered about what was most important. And then came the integrity question: under scrutiny does my actual living match what I say is valuable?

The harder I tried to write a book about what I was learning, and I tinkered away at it for many years, the more uncomfortable I became with the presumption that my reflections on my own living would be transferable and applicable for others. It seemed to me that the peculiarities of our individual experiences and identities make ‘self development’ material a loose net that only catches people who are already similar to ourselves. So I stopped trying and made peace with the reality that my ideas wouldn’t have a broad audience.

And then I realised that I was actually the main audience for the content. What I was trying to do was to capture some ideas that had formed and been really useful over the years. This recognition liberated me to go back and reframe what I had done as a personal manifesto.

There is an intro and 16 short chapters. Over the next little while I’ll post some of it. If I am the primary audience, why am I posting it? This blog has always been a journal; packaging my observations and experiences into reflective little thought bubbles has been therapeutic for me. Looking back through the hundreds of posts is like looking through an old photo album. This little book is no different, so while I needed to write it for me in this season of life, I’m happy for others to engage the ideas if helpful.

What are the dimensions of a life well lived? What kind of life am I living? What choices can I make to insure against future regret? I’ll post the intro next week.

This osprey lived near our place on the Sunshine Coast.

Vocational communities are characterised by self-management (see previous post). Most people assume this is about empowerment. But as Frederic Laloux explains in Reinventing Organisations (p137), self-management is much more than that. If employees need to be empowered, it is because power is concentrated at the top of the organisation. Empowerment is the process by which those who hold power, delegate its use to those lower down in the organisation. Self-management happens when decision-making rights are distributed and held by everyone.

Make no mistake, empowerment is a great improvement on the authoritarian hierarchies of most organisations. Empowerment is the healthy processes whereby people have the capacity to give input and shape the decisions that affect their work. But the authentic self-management of vocational communities is something entirely different.

Allowing anyone in the organisation to make any decision sounds completely ridiculous from within the conventional organisational paradigm. Surely it is unworkable in practice. When Dennis Bakke was CEO of AES, a global power company with 40,000 employees, anyone could make any decision including: what they did, the salary they took, investment decisions … The mechanism used for decision-making was called the Advice System. In essence, it was mandatory to seek advice for any decision that affected others. Obviously the bigger the decision, the wider the consultation. The nature of the decision dictated the kind of expert advice sought. Importantly though, no one, not even the CEO could veto a decision.

Bakke recalls the story of Shazad Qasim a recently hired financial analyst who sought advice from him about relocating to Pakistan to expand AES’ work into that region. Bakke was sceptical given the market research the company had already conducted which had concluded AES would fail in Pakistan. However, Qasim designed a role for himself and (with extensive advice seeking with Bakke and the board) decided to invest $200M in a new power plant. Clearly this is an extreme case, but I share it to illustrate that this approach is not “Mickey Mouse”. It unleashes innovation unimaginable in conventional hierarchies.

Extraordinary injustices still exists in our society but most are widely acknowledged. In the workplace however, it is still considered, not only normal but necessary to limit the influence of voices. Self-management is not about unleashing foolishness; it is about a profound acknowledgement that extraordinary intelligence and competence is untapped in conventional organisations because of the restrictions the power hierarchy imposes on people’s ownership of the outcomes and their capacity to implement their best ideas.

It need not be so, but it will take some courageous leadership effort to change it. The future belongs to vocational communities.

I get frustrated with myself sometimes when I shrink from advocating passionately for contentious issues. People I respect write fiercely provocative essays, attend rallies or pepper their social media streams with political, religious or social ideologies. And I hold back. My defence is usually, ‘It’s not that simple’, or ‘Of course you’d say X because you’ve never seriously seen the world from the perspective of people who experienced Y.’

When I was a Uni student I sat listening to a talk by a Dr Ian John. I wrote about that talk, the first time I’d come across the idea of a paradigm in this post four years ago. More recently, I came across this quote by Clay Johnson, American technologist and political campaigner.

“Who wants to hear the truth when you can hear that you are right.”

Over the years I’ve come to see that we tend to believe the things that ‘significant others’ in our lives believe. Or, in other words, we identify with a community and adopt the belief system of that community. Of course we tell ourselves we have thought rationally about our beliefs, but we usually read apologetic material from people we already believe are ‘right’.

Twice in the last month I’ve flicked through a newspaper and been genuinely shocked by the editorial pieces on climate change. Recently a full page article was mockingly pointing out that the ‘climate was refusing to rise’. If you read the Herald Sun that day, then chances are you might not have watched the ABC News the night before, during which an item discussed the records showing that 2015 had been the hottest year ever recorded. Hmmm.

In a business context we are typically pretty poor at debate too. I think it is because we hold our views too close to our professional identities. Somehow, being persuaded by a better argument is a sign of weakness. Unfortunately, what often happens is the strongest personality wins. In his excellent little books Death by Meeting and The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni goes as far as to say that unless there is conflict and debate in meetings where important issues are on the table, they are a waste of time.

So, seeking out alternative views, although uncomfortable, will strengthen our thinking incredibly. If an important issue is gaining momentum I believe it is an important role of thought leaders to appreciate alternative views. For example, if you find yourself agreeing with the increasingly mainstream arguments for euthanasia, then do what I did and seek out a robust alternative perspective. (Karen Hitchcock’s piece in the Monthly makes a strong case against the prevailing wisdom.)

There is nothing wrong with identifying with a community and telling each other stories that affirm our worldview. In fact, it a great thing, belonging and shared meaning. There is something unhealthy though, about so filtering our mental diet that we believe that everyone who believes something different is either stupid or evil. If you want to seriously understand the dynamics of why smart people end up being divided on important issues, I highly recommend Jonathon Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. If you haven’t got the time or headspace for that, and you think euthanasia is a no brainer and anyone who thinks otherwise belongs in the past, then just read Hitchcock (above).

I am still learning on this, but increasingly I find myself asking, not whether a particular view is right or wrong, but rather, ‘what are the values that either consciously or unconsciously lead to that perspective?’ Or, put another way, focus less on ‘what I think is right’, and more on ‘why I think what I think, and why others think what they think.’

If we believe what we believe because of our experience, then it follows that the only way to know whether our beliefs hold up to even our own scrutiny, is to expose ourselves to alternative perspectives and experiences – let them go. If our convictions come back to us we will hold them very differently than if we’d never let them go in the first place.

image copied from http://blogs.thenews.com.pk/

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has helped us appreciate that we never really free ourselves of our addictions. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. The impact of some addictions; drugs and alcohol, gaming, porn etc are pretty well understood and acknowledged. What about the fundamental adherence to a belief or idea?

I was thinking about this after reading Adam Kahane’s courageous, Collaborating is not the best option. This from a man who has built a career on helping solve tough problems through thoughtful collaborative processes. Maybe I’m over-reaching a tad, but think with me about this process that has been played out countless of thousands of times in management thinking and publishing.

• We observe or experience, something that works really well.
• We get enthusiastic about seeing it happen again. Eventually we have a vision of applying it more broadly.
• We distill, deconstruct or abstract the solution into a ‘formula’ or set of principles.
• We figure out how to scale it through training others, writing a book, rolling it out at greater scale.
• Sometimes it works great, other times it doesn’t. When it works, we feel great, because the data supports our belief that we’ve got a great ‘belief’. When it doesn’t, we typically dismiss the data, convinced that other factors must be at play. (b/c there is nothing wrong with our solution!)

About six months ago I started using a little self constructed tool we can call the ‘wellbeing grid’. Every week, on the whiteboard in my Melbourne apartment I start a clean grid. Down the left hand side are the days of the working week: Mon-Fri. Across the top I have a set of commitments that I tick off each day. They are eclectic. There are a couple of different kinds of exercise (swimming and stretching/strength), I couple of food related commitments (portion size and sugar related), some personal writing and learning (journalling and Italian language), and another more general wellbeing commitment. I have figured out, that at least for this season of life, if I can maintain my daily / weekly commitments in these areas it significantly helps my general sense of wellbeing.

It’s a great little tool, simple and flexible. I’m sure others would find it helpful too. But there is a subtle and very significant difference between saying, “This works for me”, and “This works.” Now no one wants to waste time re-inventing the wheel, so it makes great sense to learn from what works for others. The professional services economy is built on the scaling of tried and true systems and processes. But, I suspect we too easily become fundamentalists for the systems and processes, and the beliefs that have helped shape our professional identities.

It takes courage and insight for an Adam to stand up and say, maybe we’ve presumed too much about the approach we’ve been promoting. The point is not that collaboration (in this instance) doesn’t remain the best hope in solving tough problems, or that my little wellbeing grid is not a helpful tool to stay centred in a busy urban life. The point is that each scenario is deeply unique. Perhaps the test is our emotional reaction to someone stating, “Well that [insert your pet approach] wouldn’t work for me/us.” Are we prepared to engage that meaningfully, or do we assume they’ve misunderstood the ‘power’ of what we are offering and that they’ll come around if they allow us to convince them?

Addictions are things we can’t say no to. Are we addicted to an approach to solving a business or social problem? The word that probably suits the situation more aptly is fundamentalism, where we have somehow got to a point where we believe our perspective has a one to one correlation with absolute reality.

So what does this mean? In a world where the challenges we face require new ways of thinking, let’s be suspicious about our own presumptions that what has worked for us locally can be scaled to solve the world’s problems. Does that mean we can’t participate in large scale ambitions? Of course not. But let’s do so with humility and wisdom rather than presumption and fundamentalism.