Time and again, we human beings have had to find out that what we took to be most secure and most solid, was nothing of the sort.We put down roots, build houses of bricks and mortar, make plans for ourselves. And then, perhaps, we find them swept away in a storm or flood, in a war or earthquake, in political or economic upheaval, in illness or accident, in the ever surprising turns of life.And sometimes we realise this is how things are for long enough that we remember to turn towards the people around us, our travelling companions on this most audacious and risky of journeys, and appreciate their beauty and magnificence, their sadness and their love, and are able to just be with them for a while.
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Once, perhaps not so long ago, we had a sense that there were activities worth doing for their own sake.But perhaps without realising it, we've more and more taken on an understanding that the only value worth serious attention is economic performance.It doesn't take too much looking to see how much of human life is of an importance far beyond any number we can put on it. People try, but can a figure placed on the value of friendship, a walk in the park, a forest, or time spent in the presence of great art or beauty ever hope to express its true value in our lives?And when the nurturing and sustaining of human relationships with friends, family and community has little measurable economic value, but long hours of office work apparently do, is it any wonder so many people, without realising how they got there, now find themselves so painfully, terrifyingly lonely, even in a crowd?
There's a myth in many places of work that emotions aren't part of it."We're professional," you might say, "no place for feelings here".And in saying that, you've bought wholly into an enormously unhelpful misunderstanding: mood as an essentially corrupting, messy, distracting element of human life - better left alone than faced, better ignored than talked about, better suppressed than felt.But moods didn't go away just because you're pretending they don't have a place, and they didn't stop shaping the world of possibility available to you just because you don't want to look at them.Somehow, we're going to have to start talking to each other, in even the most 'rational' of organisations, about personal and organisational mood, and about the way gratitude, resentment, anxiety, resignation, love, shame and cynicism shape what's possible for us and those around us.And that's going to entail widening our understanding of what human beings are, and what it is to engage in work together.
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In so many organisational settings we seek to turn human beings into measurable things, assessed for productivity, efficiency, and for ability to match a prescribed list of behaviours. Yes, I understand, we have to measure in organisations. The era we're living in, in which economics is the narrative by which we account for the worth of just about everything, demands this of us. And there are solid reasons to track, with rigour, how things are going.But most of what's most important about human beings can't be reduced to an objective measure, a behaviour chart, or a figure to put on your balance sheet.If you treat people as resources, you call on them to act as if they are resources.Resources don't exhibit wholeheartedness, care for the people around them, or a capacity to discern and dedicate themselves to a noble pursuit that genuinely matters. And the resource narrative does much to reduce us to individualistic, self-serving shadows of ourselves, pursuing the measure rather than doing what's of enduring value.We're going to have to do better than this if we want to create organisations that have people - and society - flourish. And we're going to have to face up to our fear of all the things that could happen if the people around us were freed up to be fully, fiercely, and uncompromisingly alive.
Human beings - endlessly creative, filled with stories, explanations, hopes, dreams, fears, our minds able leap into an imagined future or remembered past and time-travel effortlessly between them.Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that we have so many millions of ways of being anywhere but here, and in anytime but the now of our lives.
We live in stories. We breathe them. They're an inescapable part of being human.Our stories tell us who people are, what life is and what's possible for us to do.Our capacity to delude ourselves with stories that cover up what's true is most on my mind today.We tell ourselves stories that bolster our self-esteem and blind us to the consequences of our choices. We tell ourselves stories that ignore our own actions or interpret them away. We tell ourselves stories that make the world about us alone, and stories that explain things as we like to explain them, because we feel better that way.And while every story opens up a world of possibilities, it closes down another, so the stories we tell ourselves matter.So often, we'd rather believe our familiar stories than look at the world and what we're up to in it with wide open eyes.
Take a look at the many ways the threat of shame is used as an almost-invisible shaping hand in your own organisation. Or in your family.Can you see its unspoken possibility embodied in the way you do appraisals, award bonuses, promote people, speak to your colleagues, give feedback?How do your organisation's values, frameworks, and stated mission work to keep people in line because they'll feel shame if they stand out?What about all the ways you keep people feeling insecure about their positions - working harder and harder, but not necessarily more creatively or effectively, to avoid the shame of redundancy or losing their job?And how about the ways you quietly support people working crazy hours, giving up on their family life, and being seen to do the 'right thing' even if it's not, actually, right for them or for the situation?Or do you support a culture in which people are instead very nice to one another, and so are unable to bring up what they see that might be troubling, upsetting, or challenging to the cosy picture you're promoting?Shame must be almost invisible, but not quite, for it to have its powerful effect. Its invisibility means many of us simply get on quietly - not standing out too much, taking it as a given part of the background of working life.Wouldn't it be a wonderful act of leadership to start to point out the hidden threat of shame everywhere you see it, and to begin to undo it so that the people around you can at last begin to flourish?