Last post I reflected on why I share and a couple of the items on the list refer to a type of altruistic nature
|
Help Others
This is unconditional for me…but it does depend on time availability
I co-facilitate the vendor CoP we use at work…I spend some of my time helping others…I do this for free…I’ve experienced many things with the product so for me helping people on the forums is the right thing to do…the by-product of this behaviour is you become known as a subject matter expert whether you like it or not
|
|
Messenger
Noise comes across my radar…the glass half-full is that what was once noise is a new topic I now like to read… a little noise is good…but it also means that when I come across posts about iPad I send them to my friend Gerry…I unconditionally send people links cause I know it’s what they like…I guess this is gifting
|
This sort of thing happens all the time…
For example the other day I saw a YouTube interview with Stowe Boyd at the Defrag Conference. Stowe talked about "Social Cognition" which is something he is currently researching, I happened to read a blog post later that morning on this topic and tweeted it to Stowe. Why not, it felt the normal thing to do.
Stowe and I don’t know each other, but I respect his thinking as a thought leader. He provides so much insight for me that the respectful thing to do is send a link his way if something comes across my radar. But it wasn’t even about respect, it’s the simple fact that I came across something that I know is helpful for someone else, so I shared it. Not all people practice this, but technology like Twitter emerges new behaviours where this type of interaction and gifting is normal…it brings out this random act of kindness, so much so that the only thing random about it might be the person, but the act becomes the norm.
Organisations talk a lot about needing to collaborate more, but I think networking sharing is overlooked.
The example above is illustrative of this. Another example is someone asking you for help. This is a bit more deep than the example above as it’s more time intensive. The example above is simply sending a link, a quick gesture…whereas someone asking for help takes more time, and there are also trust and reciprocation factors.
Both these examples have always happened offline…we tell people about stuff we know they like or that helps them…we also do this in email…when it comes to online networks we even do this with people we don’t even know that well…the medium is the message…twitter’s design creates the conditions for us to behave this way…you aren’t told, it’s something you innately do…the phone or email would seem too awkward or weird for this type of communication, but on Twitter it’s the norm.
And the second example of asking for help is what makes organisations tick…this is how real work gets done. I take my time to help others, and they do the same for me. My current place of work is really good at this as our culture is to help whoever comes our way…so sometimes it’s not based on reciprocation or trust, it’s just about being helpful. Of course time is a factor, but the intention is intact. In the online world we mimic this behaviour and it’s amplified.
Service economy
Bertrand Duperrin calls this a "service" economy. Yes collaboration is a good place to be, but this often refers to working together; an equal, if not more transformative goal is a connected organisation where people are servicing each others needs, a truly people-centric organisation that doesn’t necessarily revolve around a joint activity. As I mentioned we already behave this way offline…it’s the informal organisation.
|
Because service is a person-to-person commitment rather than a goal-to-people one, it engages employees more, make the whole organization more responsive and make them less reluctant about caring about issues that are not directly theirs.
Collaboration is something one do with someone else to achieve something. Service is quite different.
Service is not something one does WITH another but something one does FOR another. The final purpose is, of course, to achieve something, but the immediate purpose is to help someone. And that changes everything.
Fostering stronger relationships within the organization has few impact on collaboration because collaboration often commits people to a goal and not to other people. In a collaboration context, people don’t feel they help one another but rather that they’re on the same boat rowing to reach an island they don’t care about.
In a service context, one is directly committed to help the other solve his problem and, then, relationships are more easily leveraged.
|
NOTE: This is subject to organisational design aspects such as the burden of being an expert, time spare to help others, recognised/appraised in helping others in their tasks, and how resourceful you are at sourcing people and information for your task.
The more you have a history of interaction with people, the more you are happy to help or share with them in the future. Most people would keep on driving if they saw a car broken down on the side of the road, but they are more likely to stop and help if that’s the person they spoke to at the bus stop the other day where they talked about their children. Once you have history and rapport, and made a connection and identified on a personal level, you will more likely help and look out for each other.
You may know someone who has the powerpoint skill set to help you with a tip, but you don’t ask as you don’t know them ie. you don’t feel comfortable asking someone for help who you don’t know. You happen to mention it to your friend and they say "yeah I know her…we spoke in the elevator…she rides 20km into work everyday…I’ll introduce you"
If you create conditions for people to build rapport, have dialogue, then this positively affects performance and collaboration. In other words rather than trying to get people to share and collaborate, focus on making a fertile soil for relationships to grow. A natural one is the smokers hang out, another is the coffee room, the work gym, lunch time sports activities, weekend work activities. The more we purposely design for this both online and offline, the more collaboration and sharing will happen by itself, and this cascades into improved performance.
I’m not talking about an agenda based activity like team building, rather I’m talking about creating conditions for people to build social relationships and get to know each other, because when you do this you form a deeper connection of care and respect. When this happens people are more prone to look out for each other and work better together as they now have a history and may have identified with each other at some level.
This is what friendships are about, but I’m not saying for everyone to be friends, but to generate some of these qualities. Relationship may be a strong word, but when we at least share experiences we build a bond akin to a relationship. The theme of this post is knowing each other as "people" not just co-workers…when we are connected on a personal level we have more care, empathy and respect, and become more engaged and perform better.
Gil Yehuda shares his insights on conditions for informal social relationship building:
|
Smokers developed an informal employee social network. They spent nearly an hour a day chatting with other smokers in other groups about all sorts of shared interests. Eric was pretty junior, but he hung out with some of the more senior managers too - those who smoked, that is. Eric knew about people and initiatives that we never heard of. He was our eyes and ears, and was invaluable to the team.
…a colleague of mine in the health-care industry found that the most important element to preventing a particular type of accidental death in a hospital setting is tied directly to how effectively the floor-staff has gelled. The better they are as a team, the higher the likelihood that someone will notice and correct a common procedural mistake that one of their co-nurses made. The hospitals who commissioned this study are now trying to figure out how to get their floor staff to feel like a team. Who would have thought that a weekly pizza lunch and a bulletin board with family pictures could save lives?
|
In Gil’s example not only is it about a "service" workplace of sharing and asking, but it’s also about awareness…knowing who knows what. And the hospital example is priceless, the more chance for social interaction and rapport building, the more people look out for each other like the organisation is one big team or family.
Social relationships are the building blocks for organisational health
Larry Irons also posts about the importance of social relationships..he points to a quote about poor team performance:
|
Michael Schell, CEO for RW3, noted in Chief Learning Officer magazine that, of the teams studied, “Half of these teams never meet in person…They don’t get time to create any kind of rapport, which is very important when you’re working across cultures.”
|
Larry mentions that it’s not enough to talk about the importance of collaboration and performance…even if management are onto the positive impact of building social relationships, it’s still not enough having manager led meetings and training, instead we need to design for social encounters in a more natural and informal way, a way that doesn’t have an agenda.
|
Members of distributed teams perform more effectively when they understand one another as people as well as employees.
|
Larry’s other post hones in on the benefit of people who identity with one another, and how they are more sensitive to other perspectives and situations other than their own, and proactively do things for each other, which as it turns out is a positive trait for well performing teams (more about this further down):
|
Collaboration means getting to know that other employees possess expertise on this or that topic, but also developing comfort with one another by sharing significant symbols relating to self, family, friends, and social activities, thereby understanding one another as people.
People who identify with one another are more likely to share information proactively, without waiting for others to ask for it, because they understand how their own work relates to that of other people and see the flow of work from multiple points of view, spanning silos. Too many social computing experts view collaboration from within a command and control prism, assuming people collaborate because coordination and communication are part of their job description.
Effective collaboration really requires proactively sharing information with those it affects, not simply reacting to information requests. It means anticipating the future impact of actions you take on the responsibilities of other employees or business partners, or the needs of customers. People really don’t do this well unless they see other employees, and customers, as people too. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons that social networks increase in importance as collaboration decreases as a face to face activity.
|
Now we are getting even deeper, not only does building social relationships lead to better collaboration, altruistic sharing, expertise finding…but it makes for better cooperation. Being more aware via new online social tools helps immensely with ambient awareness; but the social caring dimension relates to whether you will take action with what you have become aware of. The more we care about each other the more we will watch out for each other…this type of care and networking is what bridges silos, and ultimately organisational effectiveness.
In other words (from an MIT lab report):
|
…social support in the form of cohesion (how much time do the people you talk to spend with each other) was strongly positively associated with productivity.”
|
Larry points to another example at the Bank of America
|
Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers’ e-mailed instructions.”
One simple intervention is to give workers more opportunities to socialize in groups. Currently we are implementing a strategy at a call center for a national bank chain where we are changing the break structure of the employees. Previously each employee on a team of around 20 people had a separate 15 minute break in order to reduce the need to shift call loads to other teams, although in practice this issue is not terribly important. This makes it very difficult for cohesive relationships to develop, since groups of friends will by design have limited opportunities for shared interactions.
To create more of these opportunities we changed the break structure of two of the four teams that we had studied previously so that all of the employees on a team are given a break at the exact same time.
The patterns of social interaction changed dramatically after the intervention, and Bank of America reported productivity gains worth about $15 million a year.
|
Lastly Larry informs us of how Zappos value the importance of social experience by designing random questions about people in the workplace:
|
…we’ve begun tracking employee relationships. When employees log in to their computers, we ask them to look at a picture of a random employee and then ask them how well they know that person - the options include “say hi in the halls,” “hang out outside of work,” and “we’re going to be longtime friends.” We’re starting to keep track of the number and strength of cross-departmental relationships - and we’re planning a class on the topic. My hope is that we can have more employees who plan to be close friends.
The key fact behind the Zappos example is that using social networking as part of business design is a way of cultivating shared experience among employees rather than a mere means to an end, or goal, alone.
|
This post has been about the importance of social experience and relationships in business performance and the ways we can design conditions for social interactions ie how do we capitalise on the idea of the water cooler. Natural ones are the coffee room, smokers section, self organised lunch sports activities, and others are more designed like communal break times, and random online network questions.
But what seems important is that rather than just formal team building exercises we simply need more opportunities for people to get to know each other in places and times where there is no agenda…harnessing those natural and informal social settings. This is when we get to know each other, we talk about our families, etc. and identify with each other, and look out for each other…this is what makes a team and workplace effective.
Coming full circle on this post Larry provides a good conclusion:
|
……shared experience, not just shared information, is fundamental to the social networks underlying collaboration and community…comfort with one another is needed to develop a shared experience where trust increases the likelihood that needed information is shared, or that the need itself is anticipated.
|
Phatic communication
Just when you (and I) thought this post was finished…a correlation sparked with the notion of phatic conversation:
|
…data that pass between friends on Facebook and Twitter…as when someone tells me they’re doing their nails, or I tell them I’m entertaining my cat.
Who on earth cares? What kind of communication is this? Can it be that we are using the internet to issue trivial facts about ourselves? Facts? The "fact" that I am entertaining the cat is so staggeringly unimportant it fails to interest even the cat.
But there is another, anthropological, point of view. Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.
|
The author talks about phatic communication as a reminder that they exist:
|
This is not nothing. Facebook sustains social knowledge and networks that begin in conferences and then fade almost immediately until a couple of months later we have a hard time attaching a face to that business card still banging around in our briefcase. A "newsflash" about my cat helps keep the network node called Grant McCracken from blinking out.
|
Danah Boyd also chimes in:
|
Conversation is also more than the explicit back and forth between individuals asking questions and directly referencing one another. It’s about the more subtle back and forth that allow us to keep our connections going. It’s about the phatic communication and the gestures, the little updates and the awareness of what’s happening in space. We take the implicit nature of this for granted in physical environments yet, online, we have to perform each and every aspect of our interactions. What comes out may look valueless, but, often, it’s embedded in this broader ecology of social connectivity. What’s so wrong about that?
|
Tweeting about what you cooked for dinner may seem useless from an outside snapshot. But how often does this start some chatter, and before you know it you are talking about research topics. Offline we small talk all the time, it’s what we do, we chat in the coffee room about the weekend or what our cat did and all of a sudden we are talking about our work budget.
Why don’t we jump into talking about the budget? It’s just the way we are…we first cultivate a comfortable space…we don’t like being ordered like a command on a computer…it doesn’t feel good, instead we co-create a little scaffolding before we dive in. Have you not experienced a scenario when two people see each other for the first time in the day and one of them straight off the bat asks a work related question, which conjures a sarcastic response like, "…and good morning to you to, yes I did have a good weekend…"
When a client comes to your work you don’t just start digging into work, you talk about their travel over, and hope that rolls into other small talk that builds a good connection and some rhythm…the small talk helps the quality of the agenda.
But the small talk is not intentional or a secret agenda, it’s just how we naturally are…we do it to build rapport…it’s "social grooming".
Kevin Jones talks about small talk leading to serendipity:
|
Welcome to microblogging at your business. It is the conversation starter that leads to greater things. If you only jump into the heavy topics you miss the serendipitous interactions that pay big dividends. Encourage the small talk - For by small and simple things are great things brought to pass.
|
Looks like this post is gonna go on for a little longer…
Touch, conversation and happiness
In the end social interaction (not necessarily related to an end goal like collaborating on a task, but in general) is simply a human need…the Romanian orphans are indicative of that…without attachment and touch they wither away.
Rob Paterson has more:
|
At the heart of all primate development and social health is the act of grooming or touch. Harlow’s experiments on monkeys show that given the choice between food or touch, baby primates will choose touch. Babies that have not been touched develop poorly
|
Stowe Boyd posted on some research on "touch" and how it may relate to better performance in basketball teams:
|
“We used to think that touch only served to intensify communicated emotions,” Dr. Hertenstein said. Now it turns out to be “a much more differentiated signaling system than we had imagined.”
Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent.
…good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams
|
Patrick Lambe has also posted about the importance of touch in maintaining relationships of trust and relates it to KM:
|
Coelho opened his keynote by saying “we only do business with people we like” and this is why any serious agreement needs eye contact - that interesting precursor and reinforcer of touch…“This human contact, regardless of whether you sell 100 million copies, where you don’t have eye contact, so it becomes an abstraction, this [human contact] is basic, and this is the blessing of the internet.”
So I’m convinced that touch - and regular touch - is an essential element in growing and expressing trust and assurance. In the multi-initiative field of KM, where we are messing with the way people have organized their work and their information and knowledge flows, with their relationships and sharing patterns, in this field trust and assurance - it seems to me - are critical.
So why don’t we talk about touch, when we talk about change management and KM communications? And why do organisations insist on believing they can completely remove face to face meetings - basic human contact - from their virtual teams and communities of practice once they have put collaboration infrastructure in place?
|
Back to Rob Paterson’s post; he reviews an article about how screen based baby learning video’s like "Baby Einstein" are not a replacement for real social interaction, in fact relying on them may delay language development:
|
"Babies require face-to-face interaction to learn," says Dr. Vic Strasburger, professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. "They don’t get that interaction from watching TV or videos. In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development." Previous studies have shown, for example, that babies learn faster and better from a native speaker of a language when they are interacting with that speaker instead of watching the same speaker talk on a video screen. "Even watching a live person speak to you via television is not the same thing as having that person in front of you," says Christakis.
|
Conversation like touch has said to have a similar effect in boosting performance as we are sensitive to other people’s perspectives…the theory of mind (which is something Larry Irons pointed out earlier in this post):
|
They found that engaging in brief (10 minute) conversations in which participants were simply instructed to get to know another person resulted in boosts to their subsequent performance on an array of common cognitive tasks. But when participants engaged in conversations that had a competitive edge, their performance on cognitive tasks showed no improvement.
“We believe that performance boosts come about because some social interactions induce people to try to read others’ minds and take their perspectives on things,” Ybarra said. “And we also find that when we structure even competitive interactions to have an element of taking the other person’s perspective, or trying to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, there is a boost in executive functioning as a result.”
|
This also cascades into happiness. The more we connect and share meaning and experience the happier we are…perhaps happiness is a by-product:
|
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed that when two people enter into a deep discussion, they create shared meaning of the world, strengthening their connections and bonds and interdependence, making them happy.
“It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.
But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.
“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”
|
When we are connected and happy we are more engaged in what we do:
|
There is plenty of research out there supporting the value of having close friends at work. Higher satisfaction, stronger engagement. Intuitively it makes sense: if you like the people you work with everyday, you’ll be happier and more involved.
If friendships can drive engagement, then visualizing a companies social network should tell you a thing or two about the health of an organization.
|
Happiness in networks breeds more happiness…
Groups, Proximity and Grooming
Rob Paterson has blogged about this area of cognition and behaviour especially in relation to infant development:
|
At our deepest level, we are primates. We are intensely social. We feel best in groups. We love to be touched. In fact, when given the choice primate babies will take touch over food.
One of the huge breakthroughs for humans is that by developing speech we learned to groom at a distance and hence could expand the size of the social group
The ideal human groupings are seen in all military organizations.
•8 the core group
•15 the ideal team
•30-50 the normal tribe or platoon size
•150 - the maximum that can self organize
These are called Magic Numbers and they are the social scaling that is hardwired into humans
If you ignore these natural laws for human organization, then you have to impose a structure. Hence the modern bureaucratic workplace and hence helplessness and dysfunction
|
This reminds me of the cultural engineers post on the social organism outgrowing the social network, and how proximity reduces group altruism ie. a manager is so distant and out of touch with the frontline they are unaware how a change will have bad affect on a group of people. This lack of grooming is what is failing organisations as people are not connected or sensitive to others due to distance and the number of people they can pay attention to.
In the post linked above Rob concurs with this:
|
Primate individual and group health depends on the giving and the receipt of “Attention”. Much of this attention has to be physical. Especially for the young. This is a very “expensive” activity as it means that neither the groomer or the groomed could do anything else while grooming. Our breakthrough that has driven our own explosive development as a species has to have found a more efficient way of grooming. Instead of using our hands, we used our vocalization ability. Noises became language. Humans could work at some distance from each other and pay attention by how and what they said to each other.
|
Further to grooming at a distance using language; organisations can now connect with online social networks…hopefully this is a start to fill in the grooming gap, and supplement the hierarchy dysfunction. If we are not grooming to the extent small groups do, the alternative is that we can at least be ambiently aware, which is a more fitting approach when you are connected to more people than you can pay attention to.
Oxytocin, Cortisol and wired to share the load
Robert then posts about the brain science of neglecting relationships in relation to the Cortisol hormone:
|
…if you have a workplace where you neglect the needs for real relationship you will get an unhealthy and acting out workforce
The connection between neglect and abuse and a primate’s ability to thrive or cope is the hormone called Cortisol. Neglect and abuse, drive the production of Cortisol.
High Cortisol levels are at the foundation of the behavioral and health problems of the modern age. What drives them is that we have dropped the ball on the reality that for humans, legitimate relationships are the holy grail for a good life and a healthy society.
|
Back to Stowe Boyd’s post on touch he points to off-setting Cortisol with Oxytocin production via touch:
|
If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”
|
The Stowe relates this back to the organisation in that humans build relationships as a coping mechanism to share the load in solving problems:
|
Touching leads to trust, which leads to a sense of shared commitment. We have evolved these social bonding tools because it leads to better group performance: we operate better collectively when trust and shared commitment exists.
“We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”
|
Fast Company have an article on trust and digital oxytocin:
|
…nations with a high level of trust (Norway, Sweden, the United States) have higher income levels and more stable governments than those that don’t. Their citizenry possess higher levels of “social capital,” which depends on positive interactions between people, on a level of trust created by low crime, better education, and greater economic development. He concluded that trust was the variable that showed whether a society was working well, and when it did, the economy would take off on its own.
“One day, a company might be better off asking not what its margins are, but what its trust factor is,” says Brian Singh, founder of Zinc Research, a social media and marketing research firm in Calgary, Alberta. Singh has begun framing the formation of connections via social networking as a form of “digital oxytocin.” The idea is that if businesses wish to thrive in our interconnected world, where consumers’ opinions spread at the speed of light, they must act as a trusted friend: create quality products, market them honestly, emphasize customer care.
|
This post has been about how creating conditions for sharing social experience where people can understand and learn about each other as regular people, improves the happiness of workers, and trust and engagement lead to better performance. The big question is does this cross over into the online world where we also connect and have relationships…here trust and engagement is also linked to better performance for the individual and organsiation. The Fast Company article goes on to point out that the brain may not sense the difference between offline or online connection in parts of the experience:
|
…the release of oxytocin I experienced while tweeting reduced my stress hormones. If that’s the case, says Zak, social networking might reduce cardiovascular risks, like heart attack and stroke, associated with lack of social support. But there’s even more to our findings. “Your brain interpreted tweeting as if you were directly interacting with people you cared about or had empathy for,” Zak says. “E-connection is processed in the brain like an in-person connection.”
…our findings are potentially “huge” - despite the fact that they depend entirely on an unscientific control group of exactly one. If I’m representative (a big if, as we both readily acknowledge), then social networking may increase a person’s oxytocin levels, thereby heightening feelings of trust, empathy, and generosity. Why does this matter to businesses? Well, consider that Facebook has more than 400 million users. And consider that a healthy number of those folks are basically addicted to social media. A recent study asked 200 University of Maryland students to give up media for a day, including laptops, MP3 players, smartphones, and TVs. Many of the students suffered withdrawal symptoms, as if they had gone cold turkey giving up drugs. The most painful part, they said, was “losing their personal connections. In their world, going without media meant going without their friends and family.”
|
The Limbic brain
Getting deeper into brain science Rob reviews a book on love which examines the main operating systems of the brain which explains how the mammalian section of the brain is what helps us get through life as relationships are core to our existence, and that we pay too much attention to the rational brain:
|
Why are we collectively so unhappy? Unhappy at home and at work? Have we put our rational brain too high on the pedestal? If we understand our Mammalian or Limbic Brain better might we have a better time? Why are relationships so important to us?…How important is having the right relationships to our happiness and to our health?
Their thesis is that we have 3 brains. The reptilian brain which controls the core life functions like the heart beating and our breathing. The limbic brain which is a mammalian construct not found in lower animals which controls our emotional life. Its main job is to keep us connected to those who matter the most too us which is essential for mammals. And then the neo cortex which humans have the most of which deals with things like speech and reason.
Today we give no credence to the limbic brain. We have put the rational or neo cortex brain up on a pedestal. We value IQ, our education system is rationally based. But really we get things done and we get through life as mammals on how well we connect or not with others. Our EQ is as important as our IQ. Maybe more so. Their insight is to look at the power of the mammalian brain to inform us about what is going on, to govern our health and to enable us to work effectively with others.
So what is this limbic mammal brain all about anyway? The big idea is that the limbic brain is our relationship brain designed to enable mammals which have live birth and which need the tribe to protect the mother to form the attachments that are essential for the success of these large investments in the other - the other baby, the mate and the tribe.
Reptiles do need need relationships because on the whole they do not raise helpless young. Most but not all reptiles abandon their offspring and most do not have mates or packs/tribes. Having no need of relationships, they are more than cold blooded they are cold emotionally.
It seems that the limbic brain needs to be in active relationship with others to be happy. Mammals are "open" systems. We cannot exist without referencing with others…The boss who imposes his will is not dancing. The result failure to grow and learn, stress, depression and illness. I wonder if we have been entirely captured by the Rational Brain as represented by the corporate world of relationships which are not be definition interactive but power driven down?
Our corporate world is a machine world with machine relationships. No amount of wellness or flex programming will change this unless the core work is to change the machine relationships to human/mammalian/tribal relationships.
|
Putting this another way is to say that we are not existential cowboys; instead social connection is part of the human operating system:
|
Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others…violates our design specifications. The effects on health are warning signs, similar to the “Check Engine” light that comes on in today’s cars with their comptuerised sensors. But social connection is not just a lubricant that like motor oil, prevents overheating and wear. Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating and organising system itself.
|
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
