Self-help books and spiritual traditions are awash with the encouragement to practise gratitude or to ‘count our blessings’ – every night before sleep or at least once a week for those who attend their place of worship. Such habits have traditionally been about the stuff of finding happiness or peacefulness but I am now sensing that this practice has an important part to play in the cultures we are creating at work.
In reading Sheldrake’s latest book ‘Science and Spiritual Practices’ - I am struck by what he has to say about the rise of technology, and the consequent de-personalisation of many of our day to day activities. We know this has a direct impact on the work cultures we are creating but I hadn’t before fully appreciated exactly why this is the case. Sheldrake explains that when we lose the opportunity to express gratitude to another human being the resulting impact is a somewhat insidious descent into the culture of entitlement with all its unattractive characteristics.
Sheldrake gives the example of the food scanner replacing the person behind the till in our supermarkets. Even when we get used to understanding how these replacements work (which is a feat in its own right), they leave us without the opportunity for a human exchange. This isn’t rocket science of course but what I value about Sheldrake’s insight is the explanation of what happens instead. He explains that we become harder-wired to a sense of entitlement: for example, “I have paid good money for this so I have a legally enforceable right to expect good quality products and services… and will complain if they are not what I expect.” Increasingly, there is a sense of feeling more and more remote from all those in the supply chain who have created the product.
I recall my early years as a young management consultant in BT as it grappled with the challenge of surviving in a newly competitive and increasingly automated industry. We were paying many consultants a lot of money to help us shift our ever deepening ‘entitlement’ culture. It ate away at motivation and productivity like nothing else. I am not proposing that there are simple answers to the complexity of eradicating entitlement – it is of course rooted in a myriad of factors but Sheldrake is clear that “de-personalisation chokes off gratitude” and a sense of entitlement fills the gap.
For leaders, it is important to check their desire of efficiency for ‘progress’ with a need to safeguard the productive cultures where people have a chance to express their humanity. This ‘check’ point is no different to the insight brought to us from Trist and Bamforth in their pioneering work in the 60s on Socio-Technical systems. When we change the technical system, we need to pay attention to what also needs changing in the social system.
Incidentally the full chapter around the science of gratitude is fascinating and reveals that the greater the gratitude, the greater the sense of flow and the greater our desire to give. All areas of significant interest to the leaders of our organisations…all it takes is an attitude of counting our blessings – daily. Not rocket science.