Are You Productive at Lifting Things (labor) or Creating Things (elaborated nature)?

We all want to be productive.  To produce stuff with our creativity.  We vary greatly in what we are creative at producing.  That leads to 2 questions.  First, are you being productive?  Second, are you productive at lifting or moving things (labor) or at creating things (elaborated nature)?  How do you know?

As a human being, you do two things. As a being made out of matter–having a physical body– you move matter around. We measure matter and its movement with calories, a unit of energy.  As a creative being, you transform energy, from one form into another.  You have an idea, which you can choose to transform into a process that becomes a new outcome, a different form of matter.  We measure energy and its transformation with lumens, a unit of energy flow.  Said another way, as a human being, you move energy around and you transform energy.  One is measured in calories, the other in lumens.  

Another way of saying this is that you are both moving things that already exist (labor) and you are adding your labor to what exists (eLABORated nature).  There is a long history of thought around this. You can start with the labor theory of value. 

When you are being productive at work, are you measuring (1) the calories of moving already-existing things around or (2) the lumens of transforming something with your creativity?  Calories-equivalent measures tend to look at the monetized equivalents of inputs and outputs, like wages, hours worked, units produced, units moved.  The inputs and outputs are often in the same units of measurement.  They are usually expressed in the ecosynomic form of capacities and outcomes, also referred to as nouns.  The already-finished.  They all have a direct translation to material forms, often monetized.  Lumens-equivalent measures tend to look at the energy put into changing of form, from possibility to probability, from idea to process to thing, from outcome to insight to new idea.  The creative, evolutionary process. The inputs and impacts of that creative transformation are often in different units of measurement. They are usually expressed in the ecosynomic terms of (1) the development of new capacities and relationships, (2) the possibilities seen and manifested, and (3) the insights gained from observing what happened and evolving to new possibilities, processes, and forms.

If you are measuring the moving around of already-existing things, in calories equivalents, you are probably being productive in lifting-moving things (labor).  If you a measuring the changing forms of energy, as ideas, processes, outcomes, and learning, you are probably being productive in creating things (elaborated nature).  They are different processes, measured in different ways, adding different kinds of value. Which are you doing?

Talent Management or Talent Witnessing?

What do you observe? Do people have talent because an organization gave it to them? Or, do people have talent, and they develop it? Talent is defined in the OED as a natural ability. It comes from PIE *tele– “to lift, support, weigh. It might derive from the value you bring, the wealth you have in what you can contribute.

If talent is a natural ability, is talent something for an organization to manage, to control, or is talent something to invite and witness? Do only a few, special people have talent, or is talent something that everyone has? In an interview with Claudia Tate, Maya Angelou observed:

I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it. Electricity makes no judgment. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it. Electricity will do all that. It makes no judgment. I think talent is like that. I believe every person is born with talent.

Tate, C. (1985). Black Women Writers at Work. England, Oldcastle Books, p.7.

In our ecosynomic research, in 125 countries over the past 16 years, we find many descriptions of people with a very wide variety of talents, unique gifts they have developed. The highest performing groups we have found, large to small, are clear on the purpose they are serving and how to invite and deeply engage the many talents they need to achieve that purpose, in a collaborative way.

In many languages, people around the world describe the experience of these talents in terms of brilliance, of shining examples. Expressions of a person’s inner light, shining out. The term Homo lumens has emerged from this observation to describe a being of light, expressing itself through talents.

If everyone has innate talents, and everyone’s efforts need multiple talents of different types, maybe the task is to find out how to discover the treasures everyone has. That probably starts with asking and listening, with authentic curiosity and respect–the key that unlocks the code of the talent map, showing you where the treasures are. The treasures you seek, and maybe already have in front of you. Just ask.

Your Full-lumens Diet

Your daily ritual. You are a calorie burner, and you are a creative being. You burn calories and lumens, the creative energy. For both your calorie and lumens burning, which are outflows, you need nourishment or inflows. Choosing what you put into your body is also known as a diet. While many think a lot about what calories they put in their body, it is healthy to also think about what lumens they put in their body.

Simply, what mineral elements do you take in to form your physical body? Do you know what the actual ingredients are and whether your body processes them well? It is easy to find out. Eat it and see what your body tells you.

What intentions do you let in to nurture your volitional energy of choice? Do you set those or does someone else use your intentions, your drive to do things? To find out, ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing. Did you choose this consciously? Did someone else? What would you choose? Do these choices align with your Big YES? Try, and see what happens.

Your relationships with others, what you feel in them, and how you support them nurture your social energy field. Witnessing how you feel in these relationships is completely within your power. Are these relationships and how you perceive and react within them nourishing you or taxing you? You can tell by seeing whether you feel better or worse for being in them.

The ideas that you accept into your thoughts, consciously and unconsciously, directly nourish how you perceive what the world is and how it works. Are you choosing what enters your thoughts, or are you accepting someone else’s conditioning? You are exposed to massive amounts of information all day long. Are you choosing what you allow in? And, just because you are exposed to it, does not mean that you have to accept it. Do these thoughts align with your values, with what you know to be true from your own experience? You can choose the thoughts you use to align your perception of what is happening in your context with your values and your deeper contribution.

These are four basic elements of your full-body diet. The minerals, intentions, feelings, and thoughts that directly nourish your body. You put junk in, and you feel junky. You put in elements that strengthen you, you are stronger. It is easy to tell with each of these four elements. Simply try, and pay attention to what your body tells you. Then adjust. It is your choice.

What Are We? Recommended Podcast

Even in the most difficult of contexts, humans are full of potential, which we can choose to engage — this podcast, The 100 Types of Humans, with barrister Dexter Dias QC and broadcaster Nihal Arthanayake explores the depths of what is real now and what can also be real now, in very difficult situations — it is a choice.

Great Places to Work or Great Spaces to Shine? — Recommended Readings

Loehr, Jim, and Tony Schwartz. The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal. New York: Free Press, 2003.

Mankins, Michael, and Eric Garton. Time Talent Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017.

Zak, Paul J. Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies. New York: American Management Association, 2017.

Work.  A word people use a lot, which means different things.  Maybe they are different.  In worker-employer relations, work is the labor power–the work done per unit of time–that the laborer sells to the employer, who applies that work to getting something done. In thermodynamics, work is the amount of energy transferred from one system to another.  In physics, work is the application of a force over a distance, transferring energy from one place to another, or one form to another.  The word “work” comes from the PIE *werg-o-, suffixed form of root *werg- “to do.”  Maybe they aren’t different.  The common thread of these perspectives then might be work as doing something, setting something in motion.  That seems straightforward.  We work.

Work is measured in energy terms.  Compensation is measured in energy terms.  Common terms for measuring energy include metric joules, British Thermal Units, kilowatt-hours, and calories.  This suggests that work is measured in the energy we bring to the labor we apply over a period of time, measured in some form of joules or calories.  The word calorie comes from the Latin calor for heat.  We give our calorie energy to our employer’s activity in exchange for money with which we pay for the calories that nourish us (food) or for the protection from excessive waste of our heat energy (shelter and clothing), which are both defined as our basic human needs.

It is nice when work is pleasant and engaging, though recent global surveys show that work is not pleasant for most people.  Maybe part of the reason so many people around the world are disengaged at work is because of the way we define the very activity.  Maybe the problem is that it is seen as work.  The labor contract pays me for my work, my energy, my calories applied for a period of time.  What if, instead, we saw that I was invited to contribute my creative expression towards a deeper shared purpose, integrating my head (thoughts), heart (passions and relationships), and hands (will, intention, and action).  The unit of measure might then be the creative energy that flows through and from me–lumens–the light we see in the creativity of another’s expression.  These recommended readings explore this other worldview, where creative people most express their talents in the form of energy when fully engaged in spaces of trust.

Expressing lumens energy in terms of calorie energy, to make it easier for business leaders to apply, management consultants Michael Mankins and Eric Garton find that, “talented people show up for work every day, but then something happens and they can’t get as much done as they believe they could or should.  We think of that something as organizational drag, a collection of institutional factors that interfere with productivity yet somehow go unaddressed.  Organizational drag slows things down, decreasing output and raising costs.  Organizational drag saps energy and drains the human spirit…While the level varies, nearly every company we’ve studied loses a significant portion of its workforce’s productive capacity to drag” (p12).

Psychologist Jim Loehr and journalist Tony Schwartz suggest that, “The ultimate measure of our lives is not how much time we spend on the planet, but rather how much energy we invest in the time that we have…We have far more control over our energy than we ordinarily realize.  The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not.  It is our most precious resource.  The more we take responsibility for the energy we bring to the world, the more empowered and productive we become…Human beings are complex energy systems, and full engagement is not simply one-dimensional…To be fully engaged, we must be physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focus and spiritually aligned with a purpose beyond our immediate self-interest” (pp4,5,9).

Neureconomist Paul J. Zak finds that, “Managing people as human resources to be exploited for maximum gain produced workplaces that confirmed economists’ claims that work provides disutility.  Or, in the vernacular: Work is a drag.  Except sometimes it wasn’t.  There are organizations in which employees love what they do, where they are satisfied professionally and personally by their work…You have humans at work, not machines…It turns out that both trust and purpose activate regions of the brain that motivate cooperation with others, reinforcing behaviors essential to meeting organizational goals…Trust acts as an economic lubricant, reducing the frictions inherent in economic activity” (pp4,5, 10,11).  “A Deloitte/Harris Poll shows there is a serious worldwide Purpose deficit.  Sixty-eight percent of employees and 66 percent of executives said that their organizations do little to create a culture of Purpose” (p175).

While we would prefer to spend our time in great places to work than being disengaged in awful places to work, it seems that we would far prefer to fully engage our creativity in spaces of trust, great spaces to shine.  Which do you prefer?  It is a choice.

The Costs of Empathic Inaccuracy — Recommended Reading

Tashiro, Ty.  Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome. New York: William Morrow, 2017.  Read an excerpt of Chapter 1 here.

When it is appropriate, most people like being seen.  Seen for who they are, for what they contribute, and for their creativity. Appropriateness depends on the context.  In contexts of trust and support, people tend to like to be noticed and supported.  This seems obvious.  And, in many situations, people do not experience being seen.  They are disconnected from others in those contexts.  Recent global surveys seem to indicate that where people spend most of their time, at work, is one of those contexts where many people experience not being seen.  What is the cost to creativity, to innovation, to organizational resilience and impacts when people are not seen?

To experience being seen, someone else has to be doing the seeing.  What capacities are required for this seeing of another?  What happens when people lack these capacities or fail to use them in specific contexts, like at work?  In his recent book on awkwardness, psychologist Ty Tashiro explores the world of empathy, those who lack capacities for seeing another, and how the particular ways that they look at the world bring other gifts.

The World of Empathy.  “Empathy is defined as the ability to understand another person’s emotional state and to deliver an appropriate response” (p71).  To be seen is to be in relationship, a basic need of humans.  Research finds that “humans’ psychological drive to maintain a few gratifying relationships was as fundamental as physical needs such as food and water…When we satiate our need to belong we feel a surge of positive emotion…The strongest predictor of happiness is not our job, income, or attaining our fitness goals, but rather the presence of gratifying social relationships…People with gratifying interpersonal relationships have better physical health and longer life expectancies” (pp9-10).

Specific contexts, and the ways that we agree to enter them, are making many of us more awkward.  That we are always plugged into our devices, completely oblivious to what is happening around us, we become socially awkward, in a high percentage of the interactions we have with others.

The Costs of Empathic Inaccuracy.  Empathic accuracy is the agreement between (a) what you think another person is thinking and feeling and (b) what they are actually thinking and feeling.  How well are you perceiving what is actually happening in the other person?  This is a critical capacity for being able to interact with others, to seeing and inviting their unique contributions, to being able to collaborate on creating something unique together.  The lack of empathic accuracy leads to the costs of empathic inaccuracy.  When we ignore others or talk at them, we have no idea what is actually happening inside of them.  When this happens, none of their FREEE energy is being engaged towards the purpose we are inviting them into.  Despite the obviousness of this, most people in most processes in most interactions seem not to do this.  It requires curiosity, inquiring into the other, which most people, especially at work, seem not to do.  The costs of this are huge.  The potential energy that is always there does not engage.  People get exhausted, contributing nothing.  The lack of innovation and learning decreases resilience and increases the likelihood of becoming obsolete.  The problem, and the resulting costs, do not seem to be a problem with the individuals, per se, rather with the ways people consciously choose or unconsciously accept to interact–the rules of the game, the agreements field they interact in with others.  This is the good news, because we can agree to change our agreements much more easily than we can agree to change the basic nature of who we are and how we function as individuals.

Other Gifts.  While social awkwardness seems to be increasing rapidly, and its costs are huge, we should not be too quick to judge all awkwardness.  Some types of awkwardness bring other skills.  “If you think about the vibe that characterizes your interactions with awkward people, there is often an agitated energy that underlies the interaction, which can make them appear nervous, irritated, or generally upset.  But if you view the awkward person as someone who is experiencing the interaction as particularly intense, then the unusual vibe they give off starts to make more sense…Avoiding eye contact helps them avoid the strong emotional cues conveyed by faces and especially the eye region” (p75).  This type of awkwardness results from a high capacity to focus, on very specific, reduced sets of information.  One term for this is “localized processing style, which describes people who tend to narrowly focus on some of the trees rather than the entire forrest.  When people are disposed to a localized processing style, they tend to create social narratives that feel fragmented and incomplete…Although awkward people are missing important social information that falls outside of their narrow aperture, what they do see is brilliantly illuminated and this gives them a deep nuanced perspective about things that no one else takes the time to notice.  The parts of the world they can see are seen with remarkable clarity.  They become experts in all things stage left and their clear, focused view on their specialized interests give them a unique view of that part of the world” (pp21-22).

Whether the social awkwardness we might experience in ourselves or in others is due to the way the person is or to the way we agree to interact, greater empathic accuracy can help us.  More accurately interpreting what is happening in the other person’s thinking and feeling has great benefits in both cases, and it greatly reduces the costs of empathic inaccuracy.  It is a choice.

 

 

2 Insights That Rocked My World in 2018

Looking back on 2018, there were two insights that changed how I see everything.  First, everything we need, for that which is in front of us to do, is already right here, available right now.  Second, the people who are figuring this out are no longer just the lucky, weird few; there are lots of them everywhere.

FREEE energy is everywhere.  The energy we need to do whatever we can imagine is right here right now, right in front of us, and it is FREEE.  The amount of energy each human being releases  in any given moment is huge, and our current forms of engaging it are very weak.  They don’t have to be.  We can learn from social experimenters who are learning how to engage people in purposes and processes, consciously choosing collaborative agreements that release this massive energy available, transforming it and transferring it into a far greater impact with far greater resilience.  It just depends on what you give your energy to.  The tools of pactoecography let us see this energy, where it is, how it is released, how it is transformed, and how it is transferred.

Positive ecosynomic deviants are no longer deviants.  They are now normal.  15 years ago I was able to find only a few, seemingly rare groups that were working with abundance-based principles for how they approached life and the impact they wanted to have together.  Today I see them everywhere, and lots of people are talking about them.  I will be co-investing in 2019 with the Global Pactoecographic Collaborative to map the social topography of the planet, through the Global Initiative to Map Ecosynomic Deviance and Impact Resilience.  We know about the topography of the Earth’s geology and biology: now it’s time to understand the topology of human agreements.  What do they look like around the world, at their best and at their normal?  Where can we learn from deep and successful human experimentation in healthy agreements?  Let’s see.

We have the energy we need, and lots of people are figuring this out.  Let’s get with it.

FREEE Energy: Use It or Lose It

All the energy you need, for whatever you are doing, is Forever Right-there in Everyone Everywhere Everyday (FREEE).  [It is free, with an extra “e” thrown in, at no extra cost.]  It is all there.  If you engage it, you use it towards the purpose you invited it to serve.  If you don’t engage it, you lose it, usually at great cost to yourself.  Engaged energy is FREEE, lost energy is not.  Lost energy comes with a cost.

This is the exact opposite of what we are usually taught.  We are told that it costs something to use energy, and that not using it costs nothing.  Let’s see.  You already have the people in the room.  You have invited these people to work with you–to co-ordinate, co-operate or co-llaborate–towards a deeper purpose that you want them to share.  The ones who are there with you showed up.  Each person generates massive, seemingly infinite, energy, on any scale we can see.  They generate this energy by their existence, whether you engage it or not.  Now you need to engage that energy.  How you engage it and how much of it you engage depend on the agreements field you have generated.  Weak agreements fields engage very little of the energy available.  Strong agreements fields engage much of the energy available.  The point is that you are completely responsible for the use or loss of this energy, as well as the benefits or costs that come with it.

There is a massive cost to not engaging that energy.  The law of the conservation of energy, aka the first law of thermodynamics, applies here as well.  You have to account for all of the energy generated.  It has to go somewhere.  Purposeful energy, that which humans generate continuously, goes to one of three purposes: (1) the invited purpose; (2) another purpose; or (3) self-preservation.  Analogously, the energy will go into the invited activity, diffused towards other activities, or dissipated as heat.  The energy generated by the people in the room that is not engaged towards the invited purpose has high costs.

If the energy is diffused towards other activities with other purposes, it disengages the people present, which recent, global studies have shown to be very expensive.  They are not actively engaged in the activity, the purpose, for which you invited them.  Just because they are in the room physically, does not mean that their energy is serving your purpose.  They are thinking about something else.  And, that is for the diffused energy towards another purpose.  The energy that is dissipated as heat comes from those in the room who are trying to serve your invited purpose, or their own, and yet the agreements field you generated does not allow either form, yours or theirs, to engage in a healthy way.  This ends up in dissipated heat, which serves as self-preservation, which can be very destructive.  You know this form of energy loss as burnout, fatigue, distress, active disengagement.  It comes with huge costs, such as the costs of turnover and presenteeism.

So, there are no extra costs to engage the energy available in the room, and there are huge costs to not engaging it.  The difference between engaging it and not engaging it is a function of the agreements field you have generated.  There are 8 guiding principles for the strength of an agreements field.  While each principle, on its own, is relatively straightforward, strong agreements fields require all 8.

1. Is the deeper shared purpose clear and inviting?
2. Are the people invited into the room clear about and continuously connected to the deeper purpose? Is it consciously shared on a continuous basis?
3. Is it clear to each individual why they and everyone else is in the room?  Why their individual contribution is unique and important in the service of the deeper purpose?
4. Is each person clear on their experience of this relationship to their own self, to the other, to the group, to the creative process, and to the creative source?
5. Do the group’s collective agreements consciously invite, acknowledge, and engage the potential, development, and outcomes available to the group?
6. Does the system they work in leverage the efficiency of their direct actions, the effectiveness of the feedback dynamics they interact with, and the coordination of those different dynamics towards the deeper purpose?
7. Are the agreements, that are embedded in the impact they generate for other stakeholders, agreements that the stakeholders want to and capable of engaging with?
8. Does the system have the capacity to engage the amount of energy it needs to generate its desired impact, towards its deeper purpose?

All the energy you need is already available, right there in the people who are already there with you.  As Einstein showed over 100 years ago, the amount of energy in a very small amount of matter is far more than we typically understand.  The energy is there, in potential.  You just have to learn to work with it.  And, if you bring it in the room, it is there, and you have to account for it.  Use it or lose it, to your own benefit or detriment.  The only thing that is not cost-free is not using it once it is there.  Said another way, it costs you greatly to not use it.  How to use it is well understood and easy to do, as millions of people demonstrate every day, everywhere around the planet.

Huge Hygge — Recommended Reading

Russell, Helen. The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country. London: Icon Books, 2015.

Hygge.  Danish for something cozy, charming, or special.  It is also the art of creating intimacy.   Author Helen Russell explores how hygge might be one of the secrets of Denmark’s perennial position in the top ranks of the happiest countries.  To understand her experience, over a year-long journey of living in Denmark, she shares many funny anecdotes of her daily life, and she uses her journalistic skills to meet and interview Danish experts in the many aspects of daily life that she explores.

She uncovers widespread attention to the environment one creates in one’s home, to being comfortable on one’s own, to being honest with and supportive of others, to respecting and supporting the many contributions people can make to society, to the creative process and getting feedback about what one is learning, and to celebrating the creativity that is everywhere, if one looks.  In ecosynomics terms, these are co-hosting the five primary relationships.  The global Agreements Health Check survey (from 124 countries) shows that as people get better at co-hosting the five primary relationships, they experience greater vibrancy, more hygge.  I highly recommend this fun, well written discovery of the secrets of living vibrantly every day, even where it is very cold.

Honing Our Axiology of Homo lumens — Recommended Readings

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. 1689.

Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 1797.

Lewin, Kurt. Principles of Topological Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1936.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

Bartow, Jef. Resolving the Mysteries of Human Consciousness: Volume II God, Man and the Dancing Universe. Sarasota, FL: New Paradigm Publishing, 2016.

What is a human being?  What does it mean to be a human being?  How do we know?  How do we know when human actions are good, beautiful, or true?  Big questions.  Questions the answers to which guide what human beings do–everyone, everywhere, everyday–whether they are aware of this guidance or not.  If these questions so deeply and continuously impact everything, maybe it would be good to be aware of what they are, who is asking then, what answers people are coming up with, and how those answers impact each of us.  Maybe.

The above books, in chronological order, provided a highly recommended excursion through the development of a way of looking at these big questions.  In his political philosophy, Locke provides an early view, in the 1600s, of human beings capable of making healthy decisions on their own, without divine guidance from the king or church.  Locke’s Essay provides the moral-philosophical foundations of this view of the human being–what a human is, how humans understand the world, and how this knowledge influences what humans are capable of deciding.

Kant provides a very logical structure, in the 1700s, for understanding what a human being should do, based on reason, an expression at the end of the age of enlightenment, furthering the idea that human beings are completely capable of developing their own moral philosophy.  Kant explores, through reason, the emerging terms of freedom, the rights and duties of people and of the state, and their relationship to the law.

Lewin applies the emerging concepts of energy fields and topology in the early 1900s to the behavior of human beings, finding that there is both the inner experience and an outer structure or environment, which mutually influence each other, and, to a great part, influence the behavior of the human being.  The human being has its own internal processes and is influenced by and influences its external environment, a region around it, and this interplay influences the human’s behavior.  This takes the purely rational human or the purely influenced human and blends them.

Bauman in the new millennium brings the fluid nature of reality into the question of what humans are and what they are capable of, finding that both the descriptions of humans and the structures that support them are based on static, stable frameworks, whereas reality is fluid, and so should be the understanding of humanity and structures of the individual, work and the community.

Bartow brings back the questions of long ago to today, developing a picture of the human as the natural manifestation of spirit, conscious and unconscious of the reality the human being interacts with and as part of.   This framework blends what is known from modern science and the wisdom traditions about what makes up reality and the role of human beings in it.

Building on the foundations placed by the lines of this evolution of thought about human beings, we are developing today a picture of the human being, of Homo lumens, as a being full of potential, a potential that the human being can choose to manifest.  Homo lumens experiences value in life through the vibrancy of five primary relationships (self, other, group, nature, spirit).  We know this from our own experience.  We can also see, from our own experience, which we can validate with external evidence, how well our agreements support the experience and outcomes we want from our efforts together.   We see that most of these choices are unconsciously accepted, and they can be more consciously chosen.  The start of a moral philosophy based on the abundance of potential in humans and nature, towards a more vibrant experience in more harmonic interactions that lead to far more interesting experiences and far more impactful and resilient social forms.  

While these are challenging reads, they are well worth the effort, to see where we have come from in our understanding of being human, where we are now, and where we might be heading.  Honing our axiology of what we are, and how we can live the life available to us.