Author: Selena

How do we hold on to the insights and worldview shifts that the past months have sparked in many of us? How do we stay committed to “building back better”, to resist being seduced into the comfort of what was before?

In an online event I participated in earlier this week, someone responded by sharing a phrase that lingered on in my mind long after:

Remain in a state of blessed unrest.

An internet search revealed the source – Martha Graham, as recounted in her biography by fellow choreographer Agnes de Mille on the creative artist never being satisfied:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. […]

No artist is pleased […] There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

I had to dig a little to find this, and I love that the first result that popped up was actually environmentalist Paul Hawken’s 2007 book Blessed Unrest: how the largest social movement in history is restoring grace, justice and beauty to the world. He explains in a short video – worth watching in its entirety – why he chose it as his title, weaving a thread from the abolitionists through to today’s social and environmental justice activists, all committed to “acting in such a way that allows others to be free”:

It seemed to me “blessed unrest” was a term that had arms big enough to hold the diversity and the depth and the heart of this movement.

I’ve always been in a state of unrest, often searching, rarely satisfied for long. I used to worry that something was wrong with me, until my sister a few years back said in one of our protracted intercontinental conversations: “it’s what makes you who you are”.

And now I can put a name to it.

What are you doing to remain in a state of blessed unrest?

I’ve been faced in recent weeks with deciding which meta-stable states to hang out in as the lockdown here in France has been progressively lifted.  

Between the two extremes of social isolation and joining in the summer festivities – and I have people in my network pulling me in both directions – are a myriad of possible balanced approaches.

To help clear my mental fog before taking a decision on how to act – whether that be voicing my discomfort in a group at the lack of physical distancing, wearing a mask when noone else is, or visiting older family and friends – I’m asking myself these questions:

What are the facts?

What stories have I been listening to, what emotions have they surfaced, and how might these affect my risk perception in this moment?

What other blind spots do I need to consider, especially the power of social norms?

What is the risk of not acting to myself and others? What is the benefit?

What is the risk of acting to myself and others? What is the benefit?

What is the level of risk that I’m currently willing to accept, knowing that there is no zero risk?

What is my inner compass telling me to do?

Am I ready to let go of the outcome?

What questions are helping you navigate through risk and uncertainty?

“I don’t mix personal and professional.”

That’s how a colleague from some years back memorably introduced herself to me, only to become shortly after, and while we were still working together, a close friend.

Just as our professional relationships can benefit from integrating some of the moral and social norms that are implicit in our lives outside the workplace, might our personal relationships also benefit from thoughtfully applying some of the thinking that makes us so effective at work?

Alain de Botton explores one aspect of this in a short animated video, with his unique blend of gentle humor, subtle melancholy and deep optimism:

Our attempts at friendship tend to go adrift, because we collectively resist the task of developing a clear picture of what friendship is really for. The problem is that we are unfairly uncomfortable with the idea of friendship having any declared purpose, because we associate purpose with the least attractive and most cynical motives.

He goes on to illustrate his argument for why getting clearer about what friendships are for can lay the foundation for genuine bonds, using four examples: networking, reassurance, fun, and clarifying our minds.

Friendship is, of course, so much more than its purpose. As C.S. Lewis wrote beautifully:

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself [. …] It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

How might clarifying its purpose enrich a relationship you currently have with someone whom you consider a friend?

What might our economy look like if our professional relationships were based on norms such as assuming positive intent and appealing more to people’s oughts rather than their wants?

Some version of this thought floated around in my head throughout my corporate career, but especially over the few years that I was involved in intense negotiations in a sometimes complex web of clients, partners and suppliers on large infrastructure projects. I tweaked what I could within what I felt was my already overstretched sphere of influence. Surely, I thought, there must be a better way of doing this?

More recent explorations into the spectrum between personal and professional relationships led me to a field that looks like it may be a solid step in the right direction: relational contracts.

While we may sometimes dream of returning to a time when society was largely governed by implicit mutual obligations, most of us would acknowledge that this is hardly feasible to put into practice at scale with the complex interconnectedness and interdependency of our modern world. And yet the transactional nature of the majority of our professional relationships can often leave us, or me, at least, with a bad taste in my mouth. Just as in the case of the Israeli daycare centres, when moral and social norms are removed from our relationships, we can all too easily justify our behaviour as “nothing personal, it’s just business”.

Relational contracts aim to strike a middle ground between the two, by formally embedding those moral and social norms into the contract itself. Instead of seeing the contract as a weapon, it’s used as a tool to fulfil a shared vision between partners who are asking: “what’s in it for we?”.

Vested Way, hosted by the University of Tennessee in the US, offers a practical methodology to construct more relational contracts. They also provide several case studies across the private, public and nonprofit sectors (including a fascinating – for me – example in which the US Department of Energy successfully transformed, on time and within budget, a military plutonium site into a wildlife environmental refuge), demonstrating that making contracts more relational leads in many cases to increased impact and profitability.

They’ve selected six guiding principles to base their approach on: reciprocity, autonomy, honesty, loyalty, equity and integrity. If you’re thinking that these principles sound like a good basis for any relationship, you won’t be surprised to hear that there is academic literature out there drawing comparisons between relational contracts and friendships (but that is a subject for another day!).

What’s one contract in your life that might benefit both sides by becoming more relational?

Few of us would disagree with the vision of a society in which decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance are valued.

What if I replace “society” in the sentence above with “economy”?

I’d wager that you may have started thinking something like “Well… if only. But that’s just not possible. Everyone knows that the economy doesn’t work that way. At the end of the day, people are motivated by their own self-interest. And, by extension, businesses are motivated by making more profit.”

It’s true that this has been the dominant dogma in capitalism ever since it was launched in the late 18^th century, resulting from a very selective reading of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Only recently are economists who have studied Smith’s work in full beginning to make their voices heard. We see from the first line of Smith’s other seminal work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that his view of humans was far more nuanced and in line with our modern understanding from social psychology:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

That is, humans are motivated by self-interest and by “moral sentiments” such as altruism and empathy. Or, as British economist Paul Collier puts it pithily in his brilliant 2018 book, The Future of Capitalism, we are motivated as much by “oughts” as by “wants”. And judging by what we regret most – which we intuitively recognise as a measure for what is important to us – oughts seem to trump wants. I know that I will regret for the rest of my life not having visited a dear friend before she passed away after suffering for years from a chronic illness. The exciting job offer that I reluctantly turned down because I knew that it would make life more difficult for those closest to me? All but forgotten.

Most public and organisational policies today are still based on the narrow vision of the self-interested human. So we see financial incentives and penalties – carrots and sticks – used widely, from motivating employee performance to getting people to stay indoors during recent lockdowns.

Behavioural economist Samuel Bowles argues in his 2016 book, The Moral Economy, that this approach often backfires, that “people often act in more self-interested ways in the presence of incentives than in their absence” and that “incentives cannot alone provide the foundations of good governance”. He uses as one of his many examples the often-cited 1998 study of daycare centres in Israel, which showed that imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children resulted in parents showing up late twice as often. Even worse, this increase in late arrivals persisted even after the fine had been removed:

Placing a price on lateness, as if putting it up for sale, seems to have undermined the parents’ sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers, leading them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase.

He acknowledges that if the fine had been sufficiently high, the parents would no doubt have behaved differently. But what might we gain by designing our policies based on a more holistic vision of what motivates people, choosing judiciously when to appeal more to their oughts instead of their wants?

What’s one incentive-based policy or rule, whether in your family, community or organisation, that you might tweak to bring out the best in others?