Says Lynn Franco, The Conference Board’s Director of Consumer Research: “There has been a consistent downward trend in job satisfaction [over those 22 years], through both economic boom and bust cycles and despite improvements in the work environment, such as increased vacation days and reduced workplace hazards…This is troubling for overall employee engagement and ultimately employee productivity.”

Just think: all those leadership development programs, all those cultural change initiatives, all that surveying of the corporate climate, all that employee engagement work, all that communication up, down and sideways. And still the trend downwards…

One of the sub-sets of this general disillusionment with work which The Conference Board measures is to do with interest in work – down 18.9 percentage points, apparently, since 1987. The default way of thinking about this is that somehow my employer has to provide me with interesting work and ensure that I keep being interested. In this way, apparently, I’ll be happy and productive.

But like so much of the default thinking about life at work, this misunderstands that the accountability for being interested lies with me.

The word interest derives from Latin: inter esse – literally, to be between.

If I am interested in my work, that interest arises between me and the work, in my relationship with the work. Like my marriage, or any relationship that I am in, it is up to me how I see it. It is up to me how I find it. It is up to me what I bring to it.

The common way of thinking – the big excuse given most often when we think lazily and simplistically about so critical a thing in our life as work – is that there are some jobs which are in and of themselves boring (I’m assuming that to be the opposite of interesting). But this is no more true than saying that there are some hobbies which are boring, when this is patently untrue: every hobby is of interest to someone, or else it would not be a hobby. So too every piece of work can be found to be, can be created by us as, interesting. Probably all work has elements that we find discomforting (I personally don’t enjoy spreadsheets but that’s about confidence, not interest), but even then we have a choice: either we can step back and complain or we can learn patience and equanimity when it comes to learning from those parts of any life which are less than stellar but just as real and rich in potential learning.

And if we are really uninterested – disinterested? – in our work, then surely the question is not How ought my company make the task less dull? but Why am I applying my energy to this work? Or What am I doing with my life that I would choose to spend my time like this?

Now these, I propose, are interesting questions…

FROM MAKING A LIVING TO MAKING A LIFE

At school, studying Physics, I learnt that work is defined as the application of effort or energy to an object. Unless we choose to stay in bed all day, forever, then we will all be applying effort, and that is work (happening inside or outside our ‘workplace’).

This for me is the irreducible inevitability of our work. And this is not the same as saying that it is inevitable that we have to, are forced to, work for the money we need. Because we aren’t. Most of the people reading this blog choose to go to the desk, the cubicle, the factory, wherever we do our work. I have recently been in Mumbai, and I saw that the beggars on the street, doing no work as we would conceive it, and apparently unable, like us, to choose the cubicle, nevertheless exhibit a great range of creative choices in how they beg.

So this is another apparent inevitability: within the reality that we are doomed to apply effort, we will (not just can) always choose how we do that. And part of that choosing involves how we choose to think, what we choose to focus on, what we choose to make powerful in that thinking.

I have been thinking about, writing about and, as a consultant, working on work for nearly twenty years. And what I have noticed about those who either complain about their work, or tell us that we are destined to suffer at work, is that they are doing one of two things (or sometimes both):

1. they are ignoring their own pleasure in work. Alain himself does not say that he resents his work – his applied effort – in philosophy, or does it under the compulsion of others or circumstance. All the evidence – the excellence of the writing, the success in book sales,  the seeking of a popular and pragmatic acceptance of philosophy in the world, the opening of a School – suggests that he is finding some form of satisfaction in his work and wants to explore wider and deeper expressions of it. Why is that different from anyone else? Why should Alain be a Chosen One? (That’s another widely accepted myth, that only some blessed people are in a position to enjoy work). Furthermore – and he is not alone in this – he uses beautifully crafted words, chosen with real care, to express his suggestion that others might be trapped or tricked in their own work, or delusional in their attempts to find a better way. Why can that same care over every application of effort, in this case the tools of writing, not be a similar source of satisfaction in any craft, or employment, no matter how seemingly banal. I am writing this in Johannesburg on the eve of Mandela Day, on which the world will celebrate a man who was literally trapped, and nevertheless refused to be bowed. This refusal, I believe, is more powerful in any of our lives than describing and justifying ourselves as imprisoned.

1. the second thing the work-deniers do is choose to select some ways of thinking, some objects of focus, above others, and then declare their selections as The Truth. Many commentators will not see the topic of work in any other context other than a political or historical one. It is easy then to talk of ‘the worker’ as an impersonal object of Capitalism, or the Bourgeoisie, and thence go into areas of ‘exploitation’. And from that objective, distanced, analytical thinking it is easy to demonstrate that even the person who is finding enjoyment in their work can be seen to be simply unconscious of how trapped or abused they really are. But this is only one way of perceiving our lives. I prefer to think from the inside out. You might tell me I am a naive pawn of the Capitalist system, but even if you could prove that to be true, it is not useful to me, in my own absolutely not impersonal, not objective life, to think that way. And that’s a distinction that matters: there is a difference in my life between what may be ‘true’ or ‘real’ or ‘fact’, and what I can use to shape how I live. What matters most to me is the control I have over what I think, say and do, and what that produces. If I am not happy with what I am producing, then I can rail all I want against the system, but unless I can change my thinking, saying and doing – and influence others with those choices – then nothing is going to change (we are back to Mandela here). And that is itself a choice. The other thing I have noticed about many people unhappy in the work they do is how apparently protective they are of their misery. They seem to argue for their imprisonment.

The opposite of seeing the difficulty inherent in work is not, as is sometimes implied, to take on a fantasy that work can be a Nirvana of joy, fun and satisfaction. Work can never be that, because it is a part of life, and subject to the same conditions. The philosophical stance – I understand – encourages us to see that the difficulties of life cannot be avoided, and that wisdom or growth (I may be getting the terms wrong) results necessarily from first accepting and then learning from the challenges. So too I believe that a healthy way to approach our work is to find a way or form in which to express our best efforts, whatever it is we do for a living. And then to see the sources of discomfort – which will be always with us whether we are working in a cubicle or working in a vocation to help the poor in Mumbai – as themselves sources of insight about ourselves (and not as proof of an unjust world). And any workplace is full of those opportunities. In this way, we can stop complaining about our boss, and start exploring our own issues with power, authority, dependence and influence. We can stop complaining about our company’s business practices in the market, and start developing our own personal integrity and honesty and choice over what we are part of.

A measure of how much I believe these things is I hope expressed in what I say to my three children about work. I cannot accept that I will be doing my best for them if I tell them that, whatever they do, there’ll be, in the end, a world out there exploiting and imprisoning them, and laughing at their attempts to be free and powerful.

I went on with my opening spiel, and after a little while a delegate put up his hand. From the look on his face, something, clearly, had been worrying him.

“Errrm, David, can I just take you back to your opening statement. All change is good, you said. Can you explain that, please?”

Whereby he implied, I think, that all change is not good, that some of it is good and some of it bad. It’s a common way of thinking. I wrote about it years ago in Smart Things to Know About Change (huge in China, by the way :O) ). We like the changes we like, and don’t like the others. And as our preferences reflect our judgments on the world, therefore there is good and bad change.

But here’s what I think, and here’s what I feel. First what I feel, because we neglect our feelings too often in these matters.

I just feel that all change is good. There. And when I feel like that, I feel aligned with something as powerful and true as life. The force that grows your nails grows mine too. Change is the energy that brings about the great, expansive, unfolding of life. From our limited perspectives – inside our organisations, inside our lives – it is sometimes (often?) difficult to see what is coming down the line. We make a change in the job we do: who knows what possibilities are going to unfold from that? We don’t make a change in the job we do: who knows what possibilities are going to unfold from that decision? We introduce an initiative into our companies, and who knows…Sometimes these changes seem to be working, and sometimes not. But the one thing we can be sure of, change is still unfolding, and whether it’s good, it’ll change, or whether it’s bad, it’ll change. It never stops. And that’s got to be good for two reasons:

(i)    because we get this never-ending opportunity to learn from our experiences, always another chance to apply what we learnt from the past and try something different (or the same with more vigour) in the future. This is never the end.

(ii)    because we get the opportunity to surf the waves of change. I used to think that there was such a thing as a master of change, someone who, far from being broken by change, could shape destiny to his or her will. But everything changes, and so did that thinking about change. Now I believe that we jump on the board and feel the forces beneath us and ride the waves as best we can – and by how we move and use our strength and flexibility and courage and balance we get to guide the board in certain directions above others – but most of all we are enjoying the journey, and the not-knowing and the not-having-to-know of where this never-ending journey is taking us. Change as exhilaration rather than change as pain. And YES, even in organisations can that be possible.

Now what I think about change is this: the idea that there is good and bad change is an error of thinking. I think it’s a result of too shallow or narrow a perspective. To pin a change down in a moment of time and say this is wrong demonstrates that we could do with moving up – to look at the same change from a much higher perspective – and moving forward – to look at it from a moment further out in time. This change we worry so much right now, well, on our death bed…As my Mum always says “Ah, we’ll look back and laugh!”

Which brings me to the idea that taking too narrow and localised a look at a change is also dangerous, since it might encourage us to panic, and thereby constrict our range of creative options and ideas (which is why when a change is deemed to be ‘not going well’ in a company, it’s the time we usually see the most defensive and offensive behaviours). Might we be better bringing my Mum’s future laughter into this present, challenging moment now? [Relax. Breathe...Now, what shall we do next...]

But I’d better stop now. There’s danger afoot. All change is good, maybe. But all change is fun?

Now there’s a thought…

All Change is Good: just turn it around?

My talk: Working Towards a Brilliant Life.

Photos to come, and, in the meantime, here’s the flyer – eastlake-brilliant-life-invitation – with what my bio looks like in Welsh…

Monday morning: a workshop that starts by asking this marketing leadership team: what’s the thing you most need to develop that will create a step-change in the work of this team? Their answer: influencing. Creating more effective relationships with their internal and external business partners so that they get the buy-in, engagement, permission, resources – and all those other variants of Yes – which allow their ideas to come into reality.

I’m taken aback by how strongly the team feels about those it has to influence, and mostly those feelings are not positive ones. The default stance seems to be that others are wrong or bad to behave as they do, and that is what makes them difficult to influence. Which sort of explains, I guess, why people think they are going to have to have difficult, fierce and risky conversations to move things forward…

So the first intervention is to change how they look at these ‘problem people’ (Wayne Dyer: change how you look at something, and what you look at changes). To stop making them wrong, to stop making them intractable. To see that the behaviour of these people is perfectly right, natural and justified – from their perspective.

In the theatre, this transaction is taken down a few levels, to a place where the money becomes the merest of details. Of course, we can’t pay the actors and the stage crew if we don’t get a paying audience. But there’s something more substantial at risk. Without an audience to witness us, there is no performance. Without the observer, the character does not come into being.

Our customers do not just pay for us, they validate our existence.

You should see what happens when grown adults learn to play again. When judgement is let go of, and is replaced by ‘what about?’ and ‘what if?’ and ‘let’s try it, see what happens’.

On one level, the project was a teambuilding one. Richard Jacobs of Yes asked me to help him out with a client who wanted to explore their corporate values, and in so doing, develop the work-related skills of collaboration and innovation. No big news there. Companies come together on off-sites every week of the year with such intentions. They could have abseiled down a cliff together, or built a raft out of twigs and lemon peel and sailed across a river. But Richard persuaded them that they could just as well generate some healthy anxiety by coming together on Day 1, knowing that 28 hours later, by the end of Day 2, they would be performing – having devised it, written it and (for those who did not want to ‘act’) learnt the complementary skills of stage management, lighting design and so on – a complete one hour play for a specially invited audience of friends and family. And all this in a real theatre, the Unicorn.

On another, personal, level, this has been a journey for me. I came into the business world from theatre, and, here I am, about to take a sabbatical from business, apparently coming full circle. Back to the stage. Back to the magical place.

When I was writing How to Make Work Fun! I went to the States to talk with a man who had written a similar book over there. It transpired that as well as being a ‘fun consultant’ CW Metcalf also had begun in the theatre (and along the way played Bozo the clown in Happy Days – a character I cannot recall but who almost certainly was the spitting image of Crusty the Clown from The Simpsons). Anyhow, CW told me that he thought all business people should have some experience working in the theatre, for two reasons:

(i) that, without any exhortation or theory or coaching to be that way, theatre is inherently a team activity. The guy on stage doing a soliloquy from Hamlet knows that he is no more important or necessary than the guy hidden away in the darkness at the back of the theatre with his hand on the lighting controls.

(ii) that there is nothing in business that – despite its bluster and macho will-power and long-hours-work-hard-get-the-job-done effort – is akin to the extraordinary energy or spirit that kicks in in the final days before curtain up, and transforms a rag bag of doubting actors and suddenly new props and gaffer-taped scenery into The Performance.

This energy is known and has passed into the collective consciousness as the cliché It Will Be All Right On The Night, but I assure you, the phrase doesn’t do the experience justice. And as I stand here in the darkness of the wings at the Unicorn Theatre, I am remembering its power. It is like being held, and lifted…

It may even be ‘true’ that your company faces these problems, but even if it’s true, it’s not especially helpful or empowering to talk about them in this way. On the contrary, it probably results in us both being agreed that there’s an awful lot of intractable problems in your company, and dismayed that we’ll ever be able to do anything about them.

The work therefore becomes exploring what is left unsaid, what is being edited out. And that’s where the potential comes alive again.

So a good question to ask is: “Tell me – what’s working around here?”