I always welcome workshops like this – people who come in to the business world from music, or theater, or improv, or sculpture, or meditation, or sport, or whatever – who ask those of us immersed in the theory and practice of organizations and leadership, to re-consider our tightly-held beliefs (one of which is that beliefs about leadership in business are more real than beliefs about leadership in the arts etc, but let’s let that pass).

Dominic’s workshop balanced demonstration – he’s a mean classical and jazz pianist (and as someone who can’t read a note of music I’m sure Dominic will be touched to hear me say that) – with lots of discussion and a good amount of practical application (we got to create a piece of music – most of it, to be fair, in the end, erm, ‘experimental’ in nature).

During one of the discussions, an interesting topic arose. Dominic had suggested that one of the dynamics that exists in a classical orchestra is that, when it’s all working as it should, the musicians are striving to please the maestro, the conductor.

I know people are listening to a speaker when the energy in a room shifts quickly, and it certainly did when Dominic said this. Hands went up. Someone had a question. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be concentrating on pleasing our boss?” they asked.

I knew what they meant. Its part of the development of our relationships with bosses in our culture. Back when I was a boy, the weekly adventures of Reggie Perrin in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin showed me that one the inevitabilities of corporate life, apparently, was that I wouldn’t get anywhere without pleasing the boss. Reggie had to do as he was told by the increasingly crazy CJ, undergoing all manner of humiliation (including sitting in the ever-farting leather chair that CJ made visitors to his office sit in) if in turn he was to get what he, Reggie, wanted (which was, largely, a sane life outside of work).

Over the last twenty years of organizational development, there has been an understandable backlash against the sort of creepy relationship that Perrin satirized. Gone are the behaviors of the toadying, obsequious Yes Men. In (maybe) are the behaviors of telling the truth to the boss, of using the boss as a coach and colleague etc etc.

So hearing Dominic brush off and re-present the old concept of ‘pleasing the leader’ made people stop in their tracks. What sort of throw-back is an orchestra, we thought, compared with our own modern, progressive ways?

But something that Dominic has said just before this interaction shifted my understanding of what he was talking about.

He’d said that the job of the conductor is to set and hold a vision for the piece of music being played. To understand the music deeply and to describe – through rehearsal and through the conducting – a vision for that music. So profound is that embodiment of the vision, said Dominic, that you believe, as one of the orchestra members, that the conductor has literally been on the phone to Mozart (or insert name of other dead composer), getting first hand from that composer their own instructions about how to perform it.

That’s some lineage. That’s some responsibility. That’s some commitment.

So pleasing the conductor is pleasing Mozart. No, beyond that. It is pleasing the genius of some of the best music in the world.

No, beyond that.

Is pleasing that part of me – the violinist, or the oboe player, or the trumpeteer (that’s not the word!) – who ever got the idea to pick up an instrument when I was a child and to work on through all those Saturday mornings of squeeking and squarking and a thousand missed notes because that part of me had been moved, profoundly, by music and I wanted to live my life like someone who cared to share something of value in the world.

So that’s why I’d want to please my boss. Because they stood for something I was deeply connected to. The joy of creating great marketing, or an efficient supply chain, or a powerfully win-win relationship with our customers. Or the power of purpose – making a difference. That’s what I’m pleasing, that’s what I’m nurturing, that’s what I’m serving. I’m not here to please the personality, the form, of the boss. He or she is as probably as crazy as CJ, or as I am. Nothing worth pleasing there. No, I’m looking for what the boss is connected to, is a stand for.

And if I’m a boss, I’d better be clear on that.

The opposite of overload, the cure for being overwhelmed, the solution to too much busyness, is not more effective time management. It is clarity of purpose.

Imagine waking up in the morning. Maybe the snooze alarm has gone off once already and you are in that wonderful state between sleep and waking.

Imagine that your consciousness begins to voice itself in you with questions…

“Today…who do I want to be in the world, how can I show up as that more powerfully, how can I be a contribution in my society, am I willing to declare in my words, and demonstrate through my actions, what I believe I am here for?”

(I suggest these questions would be an amazing way to start the day because these are the biggest questions in our lives. So why not ask them today?)

Then, on this fictitious morning, your mind wakes up more. Out of the depths of slumber and into the bright, light world of action. “So what am I going to DO today?” But because it is the best of you speaking – from higher up your Ladder of Consciousness – it’s not the usual ‘Oh no, what’s got to get done?’ talk, that draining talk of how busy you are before you’re even out of bed. This voice is bigger than that. The conversation is bigger than that: “How can I help the people I meet today, what needs need to be satisfied? How could the world (or the business, or the family, or my health – whatever the focus is) be improved by how I serve?” That’s the next level of questioning. “How can I be of service today?”

Only then, later, when you power up the laptop and open the organizer software, is it time to manage time. But the context has already shifted, because you chose to speak from a different place. Now, having become present again to purpose, you can ask yourself from a place of power and authenticity:

“How shall I spend my time today? GIVEN THE TRUTH OF MY DECLARED PURPOSE, what, today, will I do, moment by moment, that is in alignment with that purpose, and in what spirit will I do it?”

And what will you choose not to do, because it is not in alignment with who you intend to be?

And if you are faced today with actions you agreed to carry out because you felt – yesterday – that you ‘had to’, then what agreements will you make today, what conversations will you have today, so that tomorrow is less encumbered by those things?

One more powerful YES today, one more committed NO today, will always move us into our true purpose.

So that’s one way to wake up in the morning, one way to live a life. To do a job. To be a leader.

The alternative is to try and get lots of stuff done, lots of actions taken, in the hope that eventually that amounts to something, in the hope that eventually, at that place called Later, you’ll be given time off – because you pleased enough other people with your ability to Get Stuff Done – and you’ll be able to live a life on purpose then. Later.

When I lose my purpose over a long period of time, when my life gets divorced from its direction and velocity, stuff turns up to fill the void. There’s always the stuff of Busy. But other things happen to me, too, as a consequence. When I lose my purpose, I get tired more easily, not simply because there’s a lot of things to get done, but because many of those things have lost their purpose too. How do I know what impact this Action Point is going to have? Why am I doing this To Do? What’s the use of this? Doesn’t matter, just get it done.

And that’s draining.

The other thing that happens is that I find myself more easily able to resent, judge, condemn or generally be upset with the people who I believe to be the cause of the actions I am taking. So I get more problems.

So now I need to go on a course on how to manage difficult people as well as a course to manage difficult time (time’s problem is that there isn’t enough of it, you see).

A purposeful person doesn’t necessarily do less – isn’t necessarily less “busy” (although they’d probably strike that word from their vocabulary, seeing the concept in all its true victim-nature) – but their relationships to their actions would be transformed. “I am doing this because I choose to…I am doing this because it contributes … I am doing this because it helps me be Who I Am more fully.”

A purposeful person doesn’t necessarily have fewer difficult conversations, doesn’t have fewer challenging situations. It’s just that the conversation allows the service, the situation is a landscape (however the landscape looks or feels) in which the contribution happens.

Purpose is made.

You are not born with it, it does not descend on you from a cloud. You make your purpose. It’s created, and then it creates you. And if you don’t create it, everything else creates you. You in that place of stress and conflict and too many things to do for the time available. Some people tell me that’s “the Real World”, but I think that’s created too.

So, you make your purpose – you think it and then you speak it into being.

And it can be as huge as a Life Purpose, or a You as a Leader purpose, or it can be a collective Team purpose, or it can be Unswerving Commitment to a Strategy purpose, or it can be You as Parent purpose – it all works the same in taking you up the Ladder.

And purpose erases busy.

But Bauman challenges us well: to construct a life …

“forgetful of death, life lived as meaningful and worth-living, life alive with purpose instead of being crushed and incapacitated by purposelessness, is a formidable human achievement.”

“The culture made me do it”

‘Dan, I leave workshops like this so inspired and full of energy and with the best of intentions to living a better life. And for a few weeks, even sometimes for a few months, the uplift I received from being at the workshop sustains. But gradually over time it begins to subside, and I get distracted from my intentions by everyday things, and I lose the inspiration, and things eventually return to normal. And then I begin to question. Is it me? Is there something wrong with me? Or I doubt the workshop. Maybe it was not as good as I seemed to think it was at the time. Perhaps if it was a better workshop, they’d have done more to help me now. Maybe if it was truly any good, it should be sustaining me still. And so I look for the next workshop, the next teacher, hoping it will be better next time. So Dan, here’s my question: is there something wrong with me? Or is there something wrong with the workshops?’

I liked the answer he gave: ‘That the inspiration falls away is a sign that you are only human. That you are something more than only human is why you seek the next access to inspiration’.

The quandry of Dan Millman’s participant is felt also by many people who attend business workshops as part of their work. Some would struggle to accept Millman’s assertion that they have an innate inner drive for human and spiritual development that causes them to attend learning events. Many participants I meet seem so laissez faire about their personal freedom and power that are keen to convince me that they only came because their boss told them to. Nevertheless business people spend a significant amount of their work time in workshops of various types. And quite rightly they expect a return on that investment, not just during the event, but after.

Let’s look at the best of these experiences. They have a great time, learn loads, get inspired to set some amazing goals and make some powerful commitments. And often they are genuinely committed to change (not always but often). And then they get back to their life beyond the workshop and gradually the day-to-day creeps back in. The real world. The back-to-normal. The business-as-usual.

Is there anything that can be done about this? We’d worry less about the experience maybe if we brought to mind the first half of Millman’s answer. Everything fades, all falls. Let this substantial…

So we have to accept that part of life. Do we have the same buzz now as we did on the day we married our partner? No. Do we feel the same things now as we did when we first held our first born child. No.

So perhaps we should expect the high we experience on a great course to fade. It is entirely natural, inevitable even.

But that the buzz I felt on the day I married Keri is not present now – except in the form of some very powerful sense-memories – does not mean that nothing is there. Everything fades, all falls, it is true, but only to be replaced by something else. It is not the same, but that does not mean that anything has been lost, or that anything went wrong. The day to day did not spoil our marriage; it’s where we live it. The day to day is the testing ground for commitments we made – just like those made at the end of a business workshop. This ‘day to day’ is not an excuse for avoiding them.

The nitrous oxide failed to have an impact on the health of his lungs, but Davy did notice, during one experiment, that a toothache he was suffering from subsided whilst he was under the effects of the gas. So he wrote a short article for his scientific peers suggesting that nitrous oxide might be useful to people undergoing surgery.

Now here’s the thing.

In 1799 there was no word for ‘anesthesia’. They were not saying that word yet, had not invented it yet, because they were not thinking it. The thoughts ‘pain-free’ and ‘surgery’ had not been linked together yet. What was being thought was something that now appears quite startling – shocking? crazy? – that pain in surgery was a good thing. Pain, in the thinking of the day, had benefits for both surgeon – the screaming encouraged them to cut fast and accurately – and for the patient – post-surgery pain, writes Holmes “was proof that the body was fighting back and healing itself.”

It took another 40 years before science expanded its thinking to move the thought ‘pain-free surgery’ out of the realms of mockery, through possibility, into normal, everyday practice.

I tell my clients that work and suffering need not be linked. I hope they don’t take 40 years to believe me.

Here’s the idea.

That you never hold another meeting in your company – internally or externally-focused – without keeping three minutes of silence at the start of it. Three minutes. Not two. Or one. Three.”

My client said nothing. Silence.

I said “Let me break that down for you.

The first minute is to settle down, to settle in to the conversations you are about to have in your meeting. Currently you arrive in your meetings with all the baggage of the day with you, all that stuff, all that stress. All the actions you already need to take after this meeting has finished before it has even started. When in fact all you have is this current meeting, this current conversation about to emerge, and all the possibilities it might create. So the first minute is for you to get present. To slow down. To be here. To show up. In all ways.

The second meeting is to use that feeling of being present to focus on you. How can you bring the best of yourself to this meeting? Who do you need to be – not later, not in the future, but now – to serve the agenda of this meeting and have it be the best it can be. So the second minute is for you to clarify how you want to contribute.

Then there’s the third minute. The third minute is for you to shift your attention to the other people who have given up their time to be here with you to create something together. Their minds may be full of having to be at the meeting to and ought-ing to be at the meeting, but the fact of the matter is that if they really didn’t want to be here, they’d have found a way to not be. Just like you. And nevertheless here you all are. All that capacity and contribution ready to be unleashed. These people who will – despite what you think of as your own private agenda – help you to make it happen. Without whose help nothing will happen. So the third minute is to acknowledge and appreciate – silently but with intention – your colleagues. Your company.

And when that third minute is complete, then you’ll be ready to begin your meeting.”

So that’s what I said.

And my client said “…

I love Columbo movies and I love Sherlock Holmes stories. I have all of those in text, all of them as audiobooks and most of them on DVD played by a brilliant actor called Jeremy Brett.

What is it about detective movies I love so much? Much as I enjoy watching the ingenious lengths the villains will go to to convince themselves that they are carrying off ‘the perfect crime’ (clearly villains never watch detective movies), more than anything I love that Columbo and Holmes consistently display a human quality I admire deeply. They never give up.

They never give up.

No matter how complex the crime, no matter how smart or vicious or crazy the criminal is, they keep on going. They are professionals who have decided that certain things always work for them. They know that if they stay curious enough, that will solve the mystery. They know that if they keep asking questions – always the questions! – eventually they’ll uncover the insight that will lead to capturing the criminal. They know that they have a thing called the Mind, and that the right use of it will always bring results. Columbo may have to smoke one more cigar, Holmes might be faced with one of his ‘three-pipe problems’, but there is never a doubt that the right use of their mental faculties – curiosity, reasoning, creative imagination, logic – will prevail.

My friend’s nephew has just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. Awestruck at his age and at the experiences he’d no doubt accumulated (most of which he did not intend sharing and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear), I asked him ‘What helped you the most out there?’. He said ‘I do what they train us to do.’

For some people I meet, however, they can’t be trained enough to give them the confidence they need to fight their battles. They’d never admit it in that way of course because one of things I notice about people who tell me about ‘The Real World’ is how convinced they sound when they describe it. Sounding convincing is part of the game. Like  saying ‘Let’s stop talking and take some action!’, the phrase ‘You don’t live in The Real World’ is something that will always make us sound cool in a business meeting. If that is what matters to us.

What they say is this:

There’s this place called Here where we are right now and there’s this other place Not Here right now. And that place is called The Real World. The Real World is a lot bigger, hairier and scarier than where we are now, and what we are thinking, saying and doing right here will not work back there.

There’s three things I am always intrigued about here, three things advocates of The Real World seem to forget:

1. Everywhere we are is the real world. At one moment I am in a packed commuter train, at another moment I am hugging my children, at another I am negotiating a new business deal with a stressed out client, at another I am sitting in a hot tub looking out over the mountains, at another I am simply walking down the street. One moment my friend’s nephew is on the battlefield with a gun in his hand, another he is telling me about what works for him when he is on the battlefield with a gun in his hand. Are any of these worlds not real? Are any of them ‘more real’ than others? I hope not. Our lives occur to us moment by moment.
2. Our lives are created. Each of those moments shows up for us as a sum of two factors – (a) a set of data – there’s an volcano in Iceland erupting, there’s a business deal happening – and (b) what we bring to those moments: what curiosity, what imagination, what reasoning. Our lived experience is always a function of both. And if, as they do for Columbo and Holmes, certain things are known to work for us, then we have to trust that exactly those skills or qualities will work in every moment.
3. Our words matter. One of the ways we create our lives is through the language we choose to use. In this way, we are what we edit. If I asked you the question “Tell, me, what’s your company like to work at?”, I’m sure you could find the evidence that demonstrates it to be the greatest company in the world (if you wanted to). But that wouldn’t be ‘the truth’: it would be a story – “an edited account of reality”. The next of your colleagues I asked could edit the same available data to assure me that it is in fact the worst company in the world and moments away from self-destruction. For both of you to make your claim, you’d need to highlight certain facts, edit others out of the equation, and deliver your argument with conviction. This is what we do. This is how we live. And the point is that the words we choose to use to describe our situation don’t just impact others. They impact us. We are the audiences for our own stories about the world and our place in it. It’s a bit’s like telling my friend’s nephew that the fighting techniques he has been taught don’t really work on the battlefield. It’d be like saying to him ‘Don’t you realize how terrifying and violent a real battlefield is, soldier; we could never arm you against that. Now, off you go!’

The battlefield will not be more real than here, it will be different. Our moments all have different qualities. But the principles we learn in any one place will apply also in that different sphere. Trust the training, trust yourself. That’s a message I’d like to give others in my work, and I’d like to give myself. There are no guarantees in life, but there is always a willingness we can create inside ourselves to keep going. To never give up.

Now, light a third pipe, Holmes, and think about that…

So here’s the restaurant and here’s me and they are separate, distinct. That’s why I can have an opinion about it. IT.

But our lives in our organizations are not like that. Our organizations and we are not separate, distinct. The idea that we might be able to give our feedback on an experience which is ours to judge and theirs to fix is simply a trick of the mind. An illusion. An escape from our culpability.

We are involved. We contribute. By what we think, say and do and what we fail to think say and do, we help make the very thing we then crave to distance from ourselves and offer our opinion on.

The good question is not: ‘what do you think?’ It is ‘what did you do to help make it like you think it is?’ And then another: ‘what would you be willing to do, or stop doing, which would have it be different?’

A good – and humbling – place to start such an inquiry would be to try and describe your work to an alien. And in the absence of an available alien, try a 6 year old child. If my son Lexxi can’t quite see the need in the world for an Organizational Development consultant, it might be healthy for me to look more closely at the assumptions I’m making about my work’s importance.

It’s a dialogue we all face from time to time. Is my work critical or worthless? Does it really help someone, somewhere, at some time? Or would no-one really notice if I didn’t turn up tomorrow? Does my work claim to be important or special – perhaps by hiding behind a set of models, theories or languages – when in fact there’s a hollowness at the heart of it? Or the opposite – does my work appear at face value banal and ordainary, when in fact it is making a difference in someone’s world?

From one perspective, perhaps, all of our activities can be made to be a nonsense. Developing the technology for the next generation of mobile phones might at one moment be celebrated as a high expression of human innovation, at the next moment a ridiculous waste of our human talent.

Finding ever more creative ways to advertise face cream as a key to deep personal happiness could be deemed a crazy affair, meaningful only to fellow marketeers, unless yours was a face that was one of your own keys to self-esteem and presence in the world.

But the skills required to do these things – creating ideas, generating energy around a message, building engagement, momentum, implementation are the source of meaning and power in our work.

And the personal development we experience whenever we try to do these things better and better – the development of patience, for example, persistence, influencing or listening skills – can never be a waste of our time and energy.

So it seems we have a choice. The value we claim is our own to declare.

So make your ‘job’ as amazing as possible and use that to drive you to be better and better.

Or make it as empty as possible – face up to its emptiness if that what it has become for you – and use that to drive you out of it and onto something different.

But don’t be half-assed about it, to use a technical term. A life of resigned ‘quiet desperation’ (Henry David Thoreau) serves no-one at all. Least of all you.