Being Meta-stable

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?

If I had to put my finger on when I started waking up to the complexity and nuance of international affairs, it would probably be around the time that I cut this cartoon out from The Age in the midst of the “War on Terror”. The quote is taken from The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s journalistic and first-hand account of the Soviet labour camps where he was imprisoned for 8 years, despite being a decorated World War II commander, for having privately criticised Joseph Stalin.

This plastic-covered newspaper cutting has travelled around the world with me ever since, intended as a constant visual reminder but often left forgotten in a drawer or a box. The widespread demonstrations this past week though compelled me to drag it out again, to take the time to read it, to allow the words to sink in.

Solzhenitsyn’s profound insight born of his suffering and intense self-reflection was that each of us carries both good and evil within us. Both self-interest and altruism. Both openness and protectiveness.

This take on what it means to be human is being increasingly backed up by research in social psychology. But it begs the question: what to do with this information?

Václav Havel, another exceptional dissident turned statesman and one of the great moral leaders in our recent history, wrote in his essay Politics, Morality and Civility while serving as president of Czechoslovakia (and just before he was reelected as president of the Czech Republic):

I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence. […] Goodwill longs to be recognized and cultivated. For it to develop and have an impact it must hear that the world does not ridicule it.

In other words, just as we can change our behaviour by choosing to appeal to the goodwill within ourselves, so can we change how someone else, or even a whole society, behaves by what we choose to appeal to in them, be it their positive intent, their solidarity, their decency. As Havel writes:

If there is to be any chance at all of success, there is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly and tolerantly.

He goes on to dispel any criticisms of being a utopian thinker:

Evil will remain with us, no one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans. And man will not stop destroying the world. […] Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all. […] It is an eternal, never-ending struggle [that] takes place inside everyone. It is what makes a person a person, and life, life.

But he affirms resolutely the meaning in the direction in which he has oriented his life’s work:

I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work toward the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.

What are you choosing to appeal to in others?

If in doubt, give the benefit of the doubt.

This used to be one of my mottos, deliberately voiced in my introductory 1-on-1s with any new colleague, be it team member, peer or manager (yes, I was working in a traditional hierarchical structure).

I’ve decided it’s time to update it to something a little punchier:

Assume Positive Intent.

It’s a phrase that’s been floating around for a while but I was reminded of it recently while listening to the irreverent and ever-insightful Michael Bungay Stanier.

I initially put it into my mental category of tools that help to transform my indignation into curiosity. But I’ve come to also see it as a powerful tool to bring out the best in others. It’s a form of what social psychologists call the Pygmalion Effect: when an expectation in our mind changes how the person we’re interacting with behaves, turning our belief into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In other words, we change others by how we choose to show up. If we approach every interaction as if the other person has positive intent, we may inadvertently nudge them towards that side of the spectrum, simply through the words that we end up using, the tone of our voice and subtle visual cues.

Who in your life might benefit most today from your assumption of their positive intent?

With all the talk about vaccines, I thought it was about time that I revise my superficial understanding of how they actually work (this wonderful 5-minute animation from TED-Ed did the trick).

It’s counterintuitive, which might contribute to why there are still so many people who refuse them. I certainly remember saying to my dad as he prepared to give me one of my childhood vaccines: “Whaaat? You’re injecting the virus into me?”. But as we’ve learned from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s seminal work, our intuitions frequently lead us astray.

In the 1960s in the aftermath of the Korean War, American social psychologist William McGuire was researching how to increase resistance to persuasion. Just as biological resistance to disease works by exposing people to a weakened form of a virus, he suggested that psychological resistance to persuasion might also work by exposing people to a weakened form of an “idea-virus”. Once again, it’s counterintuitive. But he confirmed his inoculation theory experimentally and it has been supported by research since, particularly in public health interventions such as reducing smoking among teenagers.

More recently, social psychologists such as Sander van der Linden and his collaborators have been working on applying inoculation theory to… fake news. As an excellent BBC write-up of their research says:

[They] call the approach ‘pre-bunking’. Instead of waiting for false information to spread and then laboriously fact-checking and debunking it, researchers go for a pre-emptive strike that has the potential to shield your brain.

In other words, if you’re forewarned that politically motivated groups might try to mislead you on a topic like, say, the origin of the coronavirus, you’re more likely to engage critical thinking and actually evaluate the fake news that you inevitably bump into.

Van der Linden and his team wanted to find a way to scale up the impact of their research. They came up with the idea of developing Bad News, a short online game in which you role-play a “master of disinformation”, amassing Twitter followers in your ambition to become a fake news tycoon. Their research based on an early prototype – with Dutch high school students on the controversial topic of the European refugee crisis – gave promising results, and the game is now available in 12 languages as well as in a kid-safe version (in English only).

So… are you ready to be inoculated?